Poverty Destroys Dignity

By

Bala Muhammad

balamuhammad@hotmail.com

May you never be embarrassed! About ten years ago, when I was working at the BBC World Service in London, a story broke that a Nigerian had been ‘arrested for stealing toilet tissue paper’. Not one or two or three rolls of tissue paper, but half of a whole year’s supply for the toilets of a particular Local Council in South London.

The story was that this Nigerian had the really unenviable position of Public Toilets Supervisor (you may add the prefix ‘Royal’) of that Local Council. Part of his schedule included stocking all the area’s public toilets with an adequate supply of tissue paper and other toilet accessories, and many were they. He stocked the toilets all right, but he also stocked a sizeable room in his home with all the tissue paper he could siphon in his cutting-corner Royal position. For example, if he had to daily supply ten rolls of tissue paper for Royal Toilet One, he would supply only five and take home the other five. Tissue paper, we all know, happens to be the most important accessory in such toilets (as Whites don’t use water to clean up, (tsarki) but would a gallon to flush down, to quote late Shaikh Deedat).

Now, because that particular Nigerian was so ‘wealthy’ in tissue paper, he started a ‘paper recycling business’. No, not the green-friendly ‘recycling’ we all know, which helps the environment, but he started selling tissue paper on the cheap, telling all who wanted to buy that he was an agent of a particular recycling company. To make it stick, it was said, he would unwrap the original foil of the Royal Paper, and rewrap it in a new foil he had creatively invented. It was alleged that other members of the rogue’s family, and some ‘employees’, worked in that Royal Tissue Paper Recycling Company.

And so he continued to be in the recycling business for God knows how long. Then one day, as the Hausa would say, ‘he reached a thousand’ (dubu ta cika). Someone, perhaps a Good Samaritan, perhaps a business associate with a partnership gone awry, or perhaps an undercover cop, blew the Royal Supervisor’s scam wide open. The news made headlines in the media. He was arrested and charged to court. But the crux of the matter was in his defence Plea Bargain (they also have it there): that there was (is) so much poverty in Nigeria that he had to expropriate public tissue paper so he could use the extra money to support family members living in abject poverty here at home! It didn’t cut ice: he went to jail.

The embarrassment I mentioned at the beginning of this essay would now come to pass. We Nigerians at the BBC were much used to having to explain the follies of our country and its people to our colleagues from the 41 other language services at the World Service. Over time, we have had to explain corruption; NEPA; 419; dying-in-custody; tazarce; burgling a moving airplane; you name them, we have been asked about them. But it was not everyday that one would have to explain a level of poverty so high to justify stealing tissue paper.

We knew, without telling, that many of our colleagues would rush to the Hausa Service next morning to ask that inevitable question: is Nigeria that bad (as many had once asked when my country upped the monthly minimum wage to the equivalent of $30)? It was part of my misfortune that I was on duty the very next day, so my problem was about how to get into Bush House without being accosted by tissue-interrogators. That would be apparently difficult in a building of ten floors and thousands of employees. So they all came, some giggling, some nastying, some plain pestering: Nigeria/tissue paper; tissue paper/Nigeria; Nigeria/tissue paper…ad really nauseam, as if there was no other topic in the world but tissue paper.

But the greatest indignity I personally suffered was to be upbraided by none other than the poorest of the poor: for the most insistent of the tissue-paper interrogators were from the Somali (yes, Somali) and the Kinyarwanda Services (broadcasting to Somalia and Burundi/Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region respectively). We shared the same first floor with them, and they would just open our door and ask ‘any tissue paper for sale’. I wanted to punch one in the mouth, but BBC rules said the punishment for physical assault is physical dismissal. So I took sick leave next day.

Kai! May the Lord save one from embarrassment caused by someone’s poverty! That day, many of us Nigerians hid our heads in something not pride. Poverty really destroyed dignity. Especially ‘poverty of the mind’, epitomised by the Royal Supervisor.

In India, we all read daily, it is real ‘poverty of the pocket’, which is worse than abject. There, organ sale is rife. For what else but absolute penury would make a family offer for sale the kidney of one of its members? In the Indian state of Maharashtra, called by some as World Poverty Headquarters, many farmers have this year committed suicide, as they have been doing for centuries, because of indebtedness to the landed capitalist class (perish them capitalists and them socialists, like Soludo’s zeros).

In 1997, during the global financial crashes, I read a story that brought tears to my eyes of a Russian mother who told a journalist that, because they were so poor, her two school-age children had only one pair of felt boots between them (one cannot comprehend the value of boots unless one knows how cold Russia could be in winter – sometimes as low as minus forty degrees centigrade). The mother had stated that one of her children would wear the boots first, and then she would escort the child to school, only to take back the boots so the other child could also wear them to school. Meanwhile, the first child would be warming his bare feet in the heated school class. The return journey after school would be in the same pattern.

Or the story of a friend who may further epitomise ‘poverty of the mind’ in addition to Royal. This friend (much like those who called yours sincerely ‘tomato-face’ on Sallah Day), never allows any ‘opportunity’ to pass him by. As he believes that I, his friend, have ‘arrived’, whenever he visits me he takes undue advantage. For example, if tea is served, he would use up the whole tin of Peak Milk. What he would do was to first ask for a mug, rather than a cup; then he would pour and pour the milk till the tin was empty, i.e. bottom up; only then would he pour in a little bit of hot water and a tea bag; and then some Nescafe; and much Milo; and heaps of sugar. If I asked him what he was drinking, he would say ‘tea, of course’!

When it came to the bread, my friend would butter his loaves on BOTH sides. Now, you and I know that bread is buttered on only one side, and that two slices make a good munch, with the unbuttered sides for packing, handling and delivery. Not my friend. He would apply butter on ALL FOUR SIDES of his two slices, sometimes adding salt to injury (that is, applying jam on top of the butter) and end up with no space to hold and eat. His ‘philosophy’ was always that he would rather soil his fingers than miss out on an opportunity (butter, jam, Peak Milk) he would not see for some time to come. And he would take several rounds of two slices.

Part of the solution to abject poverty lies in ‘giving’, (since one is tired of lamenting ineffective government poverty alleviation methods). Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, has said “Sadaqa (giving to the poor) extinguishes sins as water extinguishes fire. Sadaqa appeases Allah’s anger and averts evil” (as the Hausa say sadaka maganin masifa). When one gives, suffering is reduced in the receiver, and love is added. Giving does not reduce wealth: it in fact increases it by inviting Allah’s blessings onto it. The Prophet also used to say: “Every morning, two angels would make this clarion prayer: O ALLAH! Increase the wealth of the one who gives, and decrease the wealth of the miser.”

In another Hadith, the Prophet tells us about the Ash’aris, a clan in Medina during his time. Whenever their provisions ran low in peacetime or in war, the Ash’aris would gather all their community’s worldly wealth in one place and add it all up and then divide it equally between the number of households in their community. The Prophet said of the Ash’aris: ‘they are of me, and I am of them’. The communists were later in 1917 to steal this exact same idea of 1400 years ago and call it ‘collectivisation’. Only difference was that the Ash’aris did it voluntarily, without prompting or coercion.

The Prophet used to pray to Allah to save him from poverty (faqr) every morning and every evening. So, let us pray! May Allah not allow Royal Supervisor to embarrass you because of his poverty of the mind! May He save you from the visit of the friend of the four sides of bread! In fact, may your shoes not be stolen in the mosque! May He give us all the will to give! May our dignity never be destroyed!