A Story I Wish I Didn’t Have To Tell

Azubuike Ishiekwene

For three weeks, I have been trying to wrap my mind around it. Moaning is our creed. When two or three are gathered together, moaning completes the party. If it gets worse at election time, you can understand. It’s the only time once in four years we can get the ears of politicians and hope our voices count.
When you read in advertisements or see on billboards the things that politicians claim they have done, for which they insist they deserve election or re-election, you wonder if they’re referring to the same country in which misery has become the daily companion of millions of hard-working families.
Lying politicians don’t give a damn. They worsen our misery by playing politics with it. But they don’t care because they think we’re either too stupid to remember or too impotent to confront them.
On this particular morning about three weeks ago, it was the claim by President Goodluck Jonathan – that he had created over two and a half million jobs in the last four years – that got the conversation going. “Where did he create the jobs?” one of those in my company asked.
And then she told the story of a family I know so well for whom the elegant story of Jonathan’s job creation can only be matched by the puzzle of a Greek movie.
The Adodos (not real name), a family of five, including three boys between ages 16 and 12, are what you may call the average middle-class family. Citizen Adodo, a university graduate, was doing well as the manager of a stockbroking firm. His wife was a trader, bringing in stuff from China. Then the stock bubble burst around 2008 and Adodo lost his job.
At 41, he knew it wasn’t going to be easy finding another job, but he tried all the same. After trying and failing for three years, he started a yoghurt factory with his own savings and half a million naira loan from a finance house.
The business was picking up but he soon discovered that, apart from problems with dodgy staff, defaulting wholesalers were also tying down his capital and shrinking his margin dangerously.
As if that was not bad enough, the costs of generating his own electricity and replenishing raw material stock have gone up nearly three times in the last 18 months, leaving his business on the ropes.
His wife’s business did not fare better, either. In spite of all the nice things finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has been saying about the Nigerian Customs and the seaports, wharf rats continue to give Mrs Adodo a raw deal, extorting bribes sometimes over 50 percent of the value of her goods. Her trading business, which supports her family, has now been brought to its knees by a combination of corrupt port officials and a catastrophic exchange rate.
What does it mean when the modest income of hardworking Mum, Dad, or both, can no longer take the family home? Or when Mum and Dad know they cannot ask a neighbour or relation for help because those they may think of asking may, themselves, be in desperate need of help?
It means trouble coming home with its own chair.
Who cares? It’s either you believe Jonathan’s success story or you spare a thought for the Adodos and millions of families around the country like them living a nightmarish existence. To be fair, I’ve heard stories about beneficiaries of YouWin and such government programmes introduced to give a head start to small businesses. But show me one winner and I’ll show you millions of losers denied a fair shake.
Adodo’s landlord, for his part, couldn’t care less about Jonathan’s life-size campaign posters. About nine months ago, he sold his house and turned in all the tenants – including the Adodos – to a new shark, who asked everyone to quit, except if they were ready to pay new rent for two years.
The Adodos have since quit; not to a new, rented house, but to three different destinations. Mum and Dad are living separately, squatting with friends, while the three children were split among good Samaritans.
As nature never fails to leave a witness in every dark cloud, the Adodos got their own silver lining. In the midst of all their troubles, Adodo Jnr obtained seven credit passes, including four A’s, in his school certificate examination. This was at a time when fewer than 30 percent of those who took the school certificate examination passed.
But the joy of his success is fading. Adodo Jnr’s parents are begging him to shelve his results for now because they cannot afford to pay his fees. His younger brother had been forced to repeat primary six, not because he failed but because his parents cannot afford the cost of a private secondary school. Where would the money come from when the family cannot even afford a roof over its head?
When Jonathan asks for votes and his spin doctors tell us he deserves it because of how well he performed in his first term, I think of the Adodos and millions like them with even more heart-wrenching stories. I can’t get my head around them – families on the verge of destitution, shattered by the hard times, and hopelessness for breadwinners and children as well.
Yet somehow, in the shaft of the grim and uncertain days that lie ahead for the young Adodos, our connected world may bring them face-to-face with the story of another young boy, Vidal Chastanet.
Vidal is the 12-year-old boy saved from the streets of Brooklyn, New York, by a documentarian, Brandon Stanton. Just by the simple act of recording and sharing on social media the story of how Vidal became a street kid, Brandon changed his life.
The story caught on with the White House, brought Vidal face-to-face with President Barack Obama and raised enough money to open the doors of Harvard University to the young boy and to many others from his school who may never have dared to dream.
For the Adodos, young and old, it’s a different story. With the children’s education already in jeopardy and their parents running from pillar to post, the last few years under Jonathan have been a nightmare. Should they ever read the Vidal story, it will never cease to amaze them how unkind this world can sometimes be.
Yet it is not incomprehension or cruelty that is at the heart of the two stories; it is incompetent leadership determined to continue.