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04.09.2012 Feature Article

FLAUNTING PERSONAL PARADISE WITHIN LION’s DENS

FLAUNTING PERSONAL PARADISE WITHIN LIONs DENS
04.09.2012 LISTEN

Creed and selfishness are creating vandals whose mental state is not how to make their own money but how to “chop” yours and kidnap us for ransom. Opportunistic swindlers have spread even within families victimizing their own. Since desperadoes seeking milk and honey cannot get their hands on oppressors that dehumanize them, they take their anger out on the innocent folks. Those struggling to make ends meet become victims.

The amount of young educated Africans competing with those normally seen as poorly brought up and disadvantaged forced into crimes are becoming alarming. Many go into violent crimes, prostitutions and more than ever into white collar crimes. These young people are not waiting for God's rewards in heaven, they want it right now. They watch their leaders convert multimillions dollars in Nigeria and Arabia into personal paradise.

Our children, desperate enough to risk their lives crossing the desert or die slowly of hunger at home, have nothing to lose by dying fast of bullets if caught as armed robbers or ashamed to be prostitutes anywhere in any country. Nobody would have ever wished these on the children of Africa but our politicians. We are buried in aggrandizement.

Would you live modestly in a rich country or extravagantly in a poor country? Please do not try to split hair by saying it depends on what living modestly means. Most African countries were paradise compared to today; when little money bought a great deal like a four bedroom house, a Volkswagen or a Peugeot and good schools. The poor people then, admired relatively wealthy ones hoping to sweat and work hard to become one.

Young Africans having their own families and children are tired of hearing when their individual countries were flowing with gold, diamond, milk and honey. They want that paradise right now, not later. All they see is world's widest income disparities as our filthy rich carve niches for themselves surrounded by hungry and angry lions waiting to devour them. But each time they venture out or back inside, securities worship them.

Incomes will always vary according to efforts. Given the choice of living modestly above everyone else with some varieties in size, taste and style because of housing prices; or live in humongous hilltop houses conspicuously. Some folks would rather flaunt looted fortune. Our preference of modest life in countries where it takes a village to raise our children with progressive tax is gone. Some relish the large income disparities.

Stephen Fajemirokun was a businessman that preached capitalism before redistribution of wealth. Countries have to create wealth first before you can help others. Little did he realize then that Nigeria would make so much money from oil and that income would not be redistributed to either infrastructure or the people. Africans are oppressing one another than Nkrumah, Zik, Awo, Aminu Kano, Nyerere or Albert Luthuli ever imagined.

One of the prominent politicians voiced the naked truth, that Nigeria capital City Abuja was designed for the wealthy. Most of the houses with boys' quarters cannot even accommodate all the house-helps needed for one house. So there are shantytowns all around the City of Abuja where the not so rich and the poor that worship the City live.

Uhm! Sounds like Eko Atlantic in progress.
Well, it takes formidable army of dare devils to penetrate their formidable armored palaces. They are the ones living in scattered isolated paradise, sometimes inside an estate or big compound surrounded by barbwires, iron gates and windows regardless of fire hazard inside their homes. They would rather die of fire inside their fortified mansions than from angry neighbors looking for crumbs falling from their leftovers.

Thinks about the cost of such houses, cars, security, boreholes water, generators and diesel, there must be a less expensive way to keep their enclave free from envies. There are Africans that are not so rich but with better tastes. To get a break, many Nigerians sometimes venture across the border to Benin Republic, Togo and Ghana to establish a new house for their families and send children to school where money still has value.

Africans have been to continents where professional people, artisans and laborers live in the same neighborhood even in capitalist countries like Canada. In those cases, many Africans love it because they enjoy the same amenities as those people above their income level. There are also apartments, detached, semi and town housing the very poor enjoy with the wealthy and some very wealthy living in the pent houses.

What is being described here is called mixed income neighborhood or mix housing for the poor, working class, middle class and the wealthy. These types of neighborhoods are made possible because of devoted efforts by the government, private sector and some housing activists. Before anything is built, like Eko Atlantic, there is consensus on how to accommodate every class in the communities without jeopardizing the safety of the rich

Our taste and appetite for materials and services that we cannot produce has grown exponentially out of reach. The young rightly or wrongly follow the footsteps of those before them demanding what they never worked for. If leaders before them are getting away with it, their expectation is not surprising. Unfortunately, it has spread to nuclear and extended families where there is no more trust within. We are all exposed.

Old decent neighborhoods have turned into slums. Nigerians are forced to improvise most of the time since they refuse to leave their only home and their only Country to the whims and caprices between all these vagabonds. There are modest areas and houses serviced by ethnic militia, neighborhood watch, after resignation to “NEPA” PHC for those not so rich. But instead of lynching their leaders that steal them blind in broad daylight, some poor people are lynched for stealing food and petty materials.

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