JUNGLE COUNTRY: “FOOLS DIE FOR WANT OF WISDOM” The forest of evidence of Nigeria’s jungle nature is always expanding. It blooms with the nuisance of mushrooms and blossoms with endless additions of sickening misbehaviors and misadventures. Haphazardness underlies it all. The “leadership” sector’s quotient of indolence combines with its propensity for confusion and flawed planning, or lack of planning, to sustain a continuous outpouring of serial futilities, sometimes with disastrous consequences. When a government department invites hundreds of thousands of despondent applicants to scramble for 4, 500 job vacancies – which might or might not exist, given the Nigerian proclivity to deception with exploitative intent – it illustrates that haphazard aspect of social organization that is uniquely Nigerian. Worsening the barbarism is the idiocy of gathering such humongous crowds in stadiums, evidently without any discernible plan for crowd control. However, stadiums are designed for sport and circuses and musical concerts, even religious events, but certainly not for job interviews. So, the Nigerian Immigration Service’s odious poverty of intellect in simultaneously locating its job interviews in stadiums across the country – to make matters worse, on a single day – typifies the axiom that foolishness begets foolishness. It was foolish to conceive of such potentially rowdy, uncontrollable, scenes at such misplaced venues: pictures of job applicants massed up in stadium seats like football enthusiasts watching a Chelsea/Man. United match offend with their abhorrence. It was abundantly foolish of the interviewers not to anticipate such horrendous scenes and their fatal outcomes. Large crowds of people collectively driven by desperation and equal competitive spirit are easily susceptible to disorder. Those who died in Abuja, Benin, Minna and Port Harcourt – and the scores who were injured – are the tragic reminder of the government’s lack of foresight. Its parlous organizational acumen has again been dramatized and its ignorance downloaded to the Internet, to the disgust of a world audience. The next time the Goodluck Jonathan regime explodes into one of its noisy bravados about “transforming” Nigeria, its attention should be drawn to Peter Tosh’s proverbial truism: “fools die for want of wisdom.”
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 04:12:07 +0000
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