Petrol price as slow poison

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd of Minneapolis repeatedly pleaded for reprieve. “I can’t breathe,” he groaned while police officer, Derek Chauvin, smashed his knee on Floyd’s neck and back. A bystander saw what was happening and exclaimed “let him breathe.” No. The officer was killing Floyd slowly. For every plea for breath, Derek Chauvin pressed harder the back of George Floyd’s neck. The law enforcer kept his knee there – one minute, two minutes, three minutes….ten minutes. Then there was quiet. The bell tolled for Floyd. And then the war – Black Lives Matter. This government’s economic policies feel like Derek Chauvin‘s knees on George Floyd’s neck. The more we plead for life, the harder the pressure from their knees.

Northern Nigerian politician and Borno South Senator, Ali Ndume, rushed out a warning to President Bola Tinubu last Friday. He said he was in Maiduguri and was alarmed by what he saw and at what was coming. He said so many eerie stuff in that short note: He asked the president to do something about the hardship in the country, before it is too late. He said that around the president are wicked advisers “who don’t mean well for the people of this country.” He said they “give him wrong advice.” He begged that Nigerians “can’t afford the things that are being pushed on them every day by enemies of (the) state.” He was afraid to name the enemies.

Before this government came into our lives last year, petrol sold for less than N200. Last week, I bought a litre for N1,200. Friends and foes of the president are now united in misery. Someone said the president is talk-and-do. They cynically said the man contested to be “pressdent.” Now that he has become what he wanted to become, shouldn’t he do what he said he would do? The ‘pressdent’ is pressing and denting. Loafers around power, and government defenders used to personify W.B. Yeats’ “the worst”. They used to be loud and “full of passionate intensity.” Now, they sound silent, they talk and write sober. What I meet in petrol stations is what they meet there. They plead for life too, but the knee is there, going down harder.

Petrol must be very expensive for our economy to be healthy. That is what the government says. It is the elixir as prescribed by the powers behind the throne. Shouldn’t they know that whatever is worth being called medicine could be poison as well? ‘Pharmakon’ is the Greek word for medicine; it is also the Greek word for poison. Medicine is Oògùn in Yoruba. Poison is also Oògùn in Yoruba when it is encased with appropriate parts of speech. A similar expression in Hebrew is ‘sam’, the use and meaning of which hint us of the very thin line between what cures and what kills. Another dividing line between what kills and what cures is how a drug is taken. That which is for external use only, what is it doing in our mouth? Haruna Ishola, deeply witted, foremost Yoruba musician, in an album said his enemies were in trouble because they drank what they were asked to bathe with. “Má dà wá l’órí rú Oluwa (May God not inflict us with madness)”.

Implicated in our case is the IMF. One official mission of the IMF is to discourage “policies that would harm prosperity.” Whose prosperity? Why has no sick nation ever been cured of poverty by that Fund’s prescriptions? Or do we take it that the problem lies with the patient and not with the physician? What this government force-feeds us with is a drug we took before. Almost forty years ago, the prescription was labeled Structural Adjustment Programme. It didn’t work for our health; it deformed our country and stunted its growth. Those who professed it that time are in our control room today, testing anew the old drugs. Now, we all can’t breathe.

The Nigerian vase of survival is broken and every one declares their innocence. The president’s wife was in Ile Ife last week where she posted a disclaimer: my husband is not the cause of this hardship. She didn’t name who caused the hardship. Ndume blamed not the president, but his nameless bad advisers for the poisonous prescriptions. “The tempter and the tempted, who sins most?” Shakespeare asks in ‘Measure for Measure’. But it does not look like the president is being misled by any tempter. He knows what he is doing. He tells us to calm down as he hammers out tooth after tooth. A giant using his strength like a giant, the man does his thing spraying pain as anesthesia. The closest persons to him impress it on us that he is a physician committed to healing the nation and its sick people. His party vowed last Friday that the pain in town notwithstanding, their man wouldn’t change the drug dosage regimen. So, whose knee is suffocating us?

The president and his clan are the only ones who see life at the end of today’s tunnel of pain. For us, their victims, the way the regime injects petrol price increments, almost monthly, into our lives makes it look like Doctor Death. They are very professional about it. They know what dose to drop and when to drop it. Professional poisoners do what they do. They remind one of France’s ‘L’affaire des Poisons’ (Affair of the Poisons) and the case that triggered it.

Almost two centuries ago, Dr James Johnstone was a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Professor of Materia Medica and Therapeutics at the Queen’s College, Birmingham, United Kingdom. On October 5, 1847, Johnstone delivered a lecture at the college on what he themed ‘The Accumulative Action of Medicines, with Some Remarks on Slow Poison’. Midway into the lecture, the professor told the story of Marie-Madeleine-Marguérite d’Aubray, marquise de Brinvilliers, a French noblewoman who was found guilty of several murders, and was executed in Paris in 1676.

Jonestone told the woman’s story to illustrate the lethality of slow poison. Several authors, playwrights and filmmakers have used her life to teach the consequences of wickedness. The ‘Marquise of Darkness’, a 2010 TV movie, is one. I use it here as a metaphor for the fatal effects of killer policies, greed and wickedness, and how populist palliatives can kill.

The woman in the story was wealthy but she wanted more. She was the kind who would be queen, yet invest in money ritual. She wanted everything around her to be hers only. Madame Marie wanted all of her rich father’s wealth for herself but she had two brothers and a sister whose claim to the wealth was as strong as hers. It was a difficult wish but where there is a will there must always be a way. She romanced a man called Sainte-Croix. Apparently an expert at preparing lethal substances, Sainte-Croix designed a scheme for Madame that would help her take out her ‘rivals’ one by one. Dr. Jonestone said the woman’s father was the first to go. He “was without hesitation sacrificed…The first dose of poison was given to him in soup. The man suffered so much pain after it…and in the space of a few days he expired.”

Madame Marie’s father was dead but her two brothers and a sister still lived to share the wealth with her. Those ones must die too. She agreed with her accomplice that what would kill her siblings must not look like what killed her dad. The murderous resolution was that “to avoid suspicion, it was necessary to employ a poison less rapid in its action than that which had killed the father.” They procured their substance but, first, they must test its efficacy. The wicked did not use animals for their experiments. They used human beings. And who? Poor patients in a public hospital.

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Madame Marie had a reputation for piety, charity and philanthropy. She had repeatedly been to that hospital before with wine and medicine “to relieve the distressed.” Now, she went there with biscuits and fruits and other food items. The hungry, poor, and sick ate her food with much relish and thanks. A month later, Madame went to check on her patients. Their conditions had worsened; they suffered now a disease they did not have before. No one suspected Marie and her pan of palliatives. Doctors told her that “the disease was unknown, and defied their utmost skill.” Madame left. Two weeks later, she was back to check the result again. The story teller said “some of the patients were dead, others still lingered in hopeless agony – animated skeletons, whose only signs of life were the voice, sight, and breath.”

So, it happened that all who took Madame’s palliatives died within two months. Every expert inquiry as to what killed them drew blank. “Encouraged by this success,” Johnstone continues the story, Madame “commenced operations upon her brothers and sister. The sister escaped by leaving Paris, but one of the brothers expired in two months, and the other about five months after they had been subject to the influence of poison….”

Nigeria has become a nation of “animated skeletons.” The land is poisoned. Ndume spoke about “enemies of the state” advising the president. Who are they or can’t we ask who they are? Are we victims of some experiments by those governing our president? The way petrol price daily moves up the spiral staircase feels like Madame Marie’s poison. And just like her palliatives – the biscuits and fruits she graciously gave the needy at that Paris hospital – the kindness of the wicked here kills in devastating installments.

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Yet, it doesn’t look like we’ve seen enough. The sad are many but they are past weeping. Shouldn’t there be an end to human suffering? Cornelius Lucey in his ‘The Mystery of Suffering’ (1931:401) writes about life, its constitution and how it handles pain and suffering. He says life sets “limits of time and of degree to the endurance of suffering” so much so that “when pain reaches a certain intensity, nature comes to the rescue. Self-consciousness is suspended, the patient faints off, and the pain ceases to be felt…” The passage you just read euphemises death. Mass suffering, administered in unremitting doses, kills massively.

Yet, in Nigeria, those who daily bake loaves of pain preach endurance. They say we will thank and worship them after this tenure. How many will be alive by the time these times are over? Is it not there in the Christian Bible that only the living strike up the tunes as “fiddles and mandolins.”? The dead don’t bite, yes. They also don’t praise. We beg those who minister pain to please read their Bible; Isaiah 38: 18-20: “The dead don’t thank you, and choirs don’t sing praises from the morgue. Those buried six feet under don’t witness to your faithful ways. It’s the living—live men, live women—who thank you, just as I’m doing right now…”

How many will be around when this government leaves power? Already the country is being emptied, one by one by starvation; en masse by emigration. Japa is no longer a southern Nigerian solution to destitution; resilient northern Nigerian middle class members are bailing out too. That is how forests lose their verdure and cities get abandoned. Look inside the houses around you; the buildings are either empty nests of lonely aged persons or or they are completely abandoned sepulchers.

Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886 – 1918) wrote ‘The House with Nobody In It’ – a poem about emptiness, about lost glory, about abandonment, about aborted promise. The poet looks at a poor old farmhouse. It hurts to gaze at this house with its crumbling roof and falling shutters. It hurts to think that this house has seen golden years when it sheltered life and hugged man and wife and echoed a baby’s laugh. It hurts to look at the poor old house and feel the pulse of its broken heart. It stands empty, it looks idle. It is stupid.

This poet talks to himself. He says this empty house needs somebody to weed the compound and cleanse the kitchen and the rooms upstairs and downstairs; it deserves some persons of courage and knowledge who would kill the snakes in the crevices, and the scorpions in the cracks. But nobody cares about the dirt and death stalking the stairs. The house needs people in its life. Even if they are ghosts, humming the right tunes. A country is a house.

The Nigerian house is damp and dank. Its hearth needs embers of care. Who will light the wood? The one holding the matches is holidaying somewhere on the moon, transiting from the infirmary of King George IV to the sanatorium of Napoleon Bonaparte. While he does that, this big house is left alone to drift in cold, mournful loneliness, broken hearted. Nigeria should not be that house. Or is it that house? I ask because it hasn’t been this dreary for it all its life. There was a fleeting past of warmth and hope.

It is in some records that this country showed some promise before the terrible crash of less than ten years ago. A World Bank study revealed that between 2003 and 2013, “the size of the middle class in Nigeria increased from 13 per cent to 19 percent while poverty reduced from 45 percent to 33 per cent.” But, by mid-2015, the bank had started asking where the Nigerian middle class was. “Nigeria, where is your bourgeoisie?”, it asked in a blog article in May 2015. Where growth grew yesterday, decay thrives there today. And, that is not the end of the horror. The worst is that those in charge are insisting that what is killing us will eventually give us life. Poison is remedy. Government by oxymoron.

We hope the president will listen to his friend, Ndume, and release us from his chokehold. If he is the thoughtful person they say he is, he will do the right thing on time and give life back to our country. If he refuses to do so, that day will still come when we will inhale and exhale like Philonise Floyd did after a guilty verdict on his brother’s killer. Survivors of this moment will chant: “Today, we are able to breathe again.” That day will come.

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