Look at the picture, and ask yourself - "is this man?", "are we in slave-trade era or in an era of modernity?"
These are technical crews of the German construction company Julius Berger in Lagos - Nigeria being transported to work. The location of this crime - (yes I call it criminal) is of no essence to me, as it wouldn't be any less despicable if it occurred anywhere else in the world. The point is that these workers have been robbed off their humanity in
exchange for food on their table. These wokers cannot request for better working
condition, because in a country with 70% unemployed, they consider themselves
lucky to have a job. They are driven to a pathetic job each morning in a
pathetic car, dying to live in a pathetic world. In UK and Europe, this type of
car cannot be allowed to transport cows, goats, cattle, or livestock of any
sort. If it does, the animal would no longer be deemed edible. But here we are,
humans, stacked in a cage like zoo animals – conveyed to work and back in such
squalid conditions. Between a European cow and an African man, which is more
dignified? Now, tell me that Julius Berger uses such cages to transport workers
anywhere else in the world, certainly not!
Meanwhile, if you stop that cage-bus
and inform the workers that these conditions of work are unacceptable, they’ll
sneer at you, scold you, tell you how it took them months, some even years to
find the job, and since you have no job for them, why should they take your advice
to protest and risk a sack by their slave-master employer? And then you’ll just
shake your head, walk away, tails between your legs, like the biblical prophet
who was rejected by his people.
Of course, you have no new job to give them,
and it is difficult if not absolutely impossible to teach a hungry man about
his rights when his mind is tightly glued to his next meal. And then the slave-master
economy continues, unabated, embedded, structurally entrenched in a system that
was corrupted from the start, and strengthened with greed, recklessness and
more greed.
Julius Berger, one of the corporate oligarchs operating in
Nigeria find neither shame nor repulsion in the squalid conditions it
transports it’s technical crews for work, of course, they know that the ‘caged-animals’
would never quit. And they will never quit, precisely because they are like an
egg cornered by stones – each direction they roll, they get broken. None of the
choices are good, none at all, you are only left to choose which of the choices
are least worse in nature.
This is essentially the same reason why Pilipino women
continue to go to Saudi Arabia to work as housemaids despite uncountable
stories of other women who report to being treated as slaves, owed salaries,
and in some cases raped by their male employers over there. These women,
despite well documented dangers, continue to queue up at the trafficking line,
for a chance to be a housemaid under such difficult and unenviable conditions.
Certainly, reports that 45 housemaids in the country are on the death row
awaiting execution are not enough to deter them. You cannot tell them not to
go, they will spit at you. But you can’t blame them, some have children to feed
back home, so idleness is hardly an option, none of the choices are good.
On the 24th of April, a sweatshop building collapsed
in Bangladesh – killing 1,127 people. Investigations uncovered that the
building did not have the capacity to take the three more decks that were added
to it. In essence, corporate greed had risked the lives of people in the vein
of seeking more profit. Also suffice it to say that workers in the factory earn
only a paltry sum of $40 for a whole month.* Again, if you tell them to quit
the sweatshop, they will swear at you, for daring to ask them to leave the only
source of livelihood they know for some idealistic rights that won’t put food
on the table. Of course, you can’t blame them, none of the choices are good,
and the promise of food on the table came to offer only sweat, death and
sorrow.
It does seem that our inclination to reach out and do whatever
brings in the money is in some way, preventing us from imagining a better world
for ourselves or for generations to come. People will do anything for a meal,
to attain wealth, to buy happiness. The lie that happiness is in itself a
buy-able commodity has driven humans into a frightening and irrational chase of riches, playing straight into the hands of modern slave-masters (corporate
dictator and plutocrats), oiling their greed and dying from their depression
pills. It happens to the uneducated maid in Saudi Arabia as well as the
educated construction (Julius Berger) worker in Lagos who actually has a degree
in Law. It happens to us all, because we think none of the choices are good,
and that a better world is not imaginable. It is convenient to live this way,
to bury one’s head in sand and stir in a river of illusion, but we can never
escape the fact that there are consequences. When we bury head in sand, and
accept to work under every despicable circumstance for a meal ticket, we are
dying to live, and not living at all.
*References
