by Isqil Najim

“…he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.”.. It is easy to win  over the poor by all means, give to them, a miserly commission of hope, and kingly wages of prolonged suffering! 

The poor are terrific bestsellers any day, they are superb advertising materials.. whether you are running political campaign or you are selling junks in the hope of making billions out of the suffering of millions… the poor are always the way to go.. You will provide jobs, you will make their life better in one week or 100 days and you would give their children education to Harvard level if they can give you their power…their only realistic possession. And to get this power from them, you would coin all the beautiful slogans in the world and craft masterpiece propaganda to appeal to their sentiments and immediate need. Even if you have failed them before, hope is a luxury the poor cannot afford to lose. It is what keep them alive or else, they would have eat up one another in desperation.

Like the proverbial elephant who wanted to be king among men.. ‘Erin karele o wa joba.. Erin wen wen, erin wen wen..’ the tortoise continued to throw Akara oloyin (honey bean cake) to distract him from the big ditch ahead… The Elephant continued to dance to the song of tricky tortoise; Hoping to become king among men and to realize his true potential that has long been subdued in the jungle… and then, gbam gbam gbam..!!! The elephant fell into  ditch specially prepared for his doom and the tortoise, the chief trickster left him to the hands of wicked men to be beaten and used as concoction to elongate the lifespan of an ailing and depressed king.

Like that doomed elephant, the poor and the less privileged have been pawned by the powerful and the elites.. for many years… their plights and travails has been used in raising the fame and fortune of the powerful to elongate their authority and to entrench their power in the system. The ailing “king” represented by the politicians and other leaders craving power while the tortoise represented by the elites and campaigners and advertisers and other leaders of thought who all work to ensure the ailing king continue to stay in power and blindfold the “elephant” represented by the masses, the less privileged who more often than not, end up as the sacrificial morsels for the greatness of the other two tricksters…

Always and forever ready to consume hope and lofty promises in place of humble meal of hard work and reality, the masses and the poor (elephant), walk and dance blindly with their elites (the tortoise) who are only using them for a purpose, they land in the ditch prepared for them…

After the powerful have gotten what they wanted, the poor would go back to their old life of grumbling and eating from the crumbs of the privileged ones.. nothing would change except for those who are ready to walk their socks up and stop feasting on hope and promises.. those who are ready to swim in the shark infested water and survive rather than empowering a bunch of aggressive and tricky intellectuals rogues with speed boats to move luxuriously on the sea while they are left on the shore of abjectivity, penury, war, crisis, inflation, unemployment and hopelessness and wait till another four more years before they can have a chance to see their “saviors” again. All coming to them in humility to repeat the audacious elephantine deceit and sure enough, they would get away with it!

While I am at that, I can’t but echo one of my favourite sayings of Niccolo Machiavelli “…he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.”.. It is easy to win  over the poor by all means, give to them, a miserly commission of hope, and kingly wages of prolonged suffering!

Nigerians… I send to you beautiful poems of one of my immortal philosophers and poets, Rabindranath Tagore:

“Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

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– Isqil Najim tweets from @isqilnajim

 

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