By Josef Omorotionmwan
THE wind of change is blowing everywhere. In Edo State, one major industry, the obituary, is currently undergoing some transformation. It is growing both in form and in content. At the beginning of each dance session, the Master of Ceremony (MC) is now required to announce that people should not place money on the celebrant’s head. Instead, people are now required to do their spraying into improvised offering bags.

It is a mere coincidence that this is coming on the heels of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s campaign against the abuse of Naira notes. We hear that the spraying requirement has some spiritual connotations. The story is told of how some evil men have introduced their crafts into the celebrant’s family through spraying money on his head.

Contrary to expectation, though, as soon as the dance begins, the celebrant no longer cares where the money is placed. Recently, one celebrant came out to announce that those who wanted to spray him should put the money anywhere, even in his mouth. To him what mattered was the total collection, not where the money was placed.

It is also most bewildering what people do for votes. There is the new trend of casting the rice stone. It is a most dehumanising act of stoning people with quarter bags of rice in the name of Christmas gift. Even where the rice-throwing event is slated for a few days before Christmas, its intensive promo on radio and television begins as early as October.

On the appointed day for each Local Government, people normally trek long distances to the Local Government Headquarters, say from Otobaye in the eastern flank of Uhunmwode Local Government Area to Ehor, an awkward journey of more than 60 kilometres that cut across four Wards. At Ehor, they would wait for hours under the scotching sun.

At last, the campaign truck of the aspirant arrives with a few mini-packs of the Taiwan rice. The aspirant finally emerges and he announces, “Una rice man don come o. Na me de make sure say una poor people chop rice for Christmas.”  The assault begins when he starts throwing the mini-packs of rice into the surging crowd, sometimes directed at the people’s heads.

As the stampede to catch the mini-packs ensues in the first direction, he throws more into different directions. What invariably follows is absolute chaos and casualties everywhere with broken heads, broken hands, broken legs and bruised bodies.

From place to place, the event smacks off sadism. The more the casualties, the greater the joy of the aspirant. What further aggravates the situation is that at the end of the day, most people return without getting anything. It soon dawns on them that they have lost out at all ends: They have been brutalised in the pursuit of rice; they did not get rice; and they have lost the entire day, when they could have gone to their farms.

What flow from there are complaints galore: One disappointed villager cried out recently, “This man no know say na poor we poor; we no de craze. See how the bag of rice come land for my head and another person come grabam, run away. Let him wait make we come vote for am.”

Yet, another co-aspirant complained aloud, “Will somebody point this man to order? It is only in this party that this nonsense can take place. Why did he not try it in his former party that he ran away from? This man is killing our party and killing our people.

All these people that he is sending to the hospitals with his useless rice are our party men. He is performing all this rubbish and no one is talking.” This man’s outcry was easily dismissed as the desperate cry of a drowning man. After all, he is also an aspirant, a co-competitor in the world of votes.

The rice-throwing attitude represents basically the same conservative impulse that the power equation be kept the way it is. There must be the master-servant relationship. Their thinking is that if you empower the poor, then, the pool of men from where to recruit party thugs would be greatly diminished. And if you bring your poverty rice bags, no one will be available to be stoned with them.

At the same time, there will be nobody to be used for the perpetuation of crime and criminality. So, the poor must remain impoverished. That explains why they will be busy distributing their poverty rice at a time when they should be busy propounding their views on how to have a good society.

Meanwhile, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) is campaigning constructively and quietly empowering its members by exposing them to the latest techniques of farming for rice and other commodities and giving them interest-free loans to establish their own farms.

Put differently, the losses of the conservatives are the gains of the progressives. While the progressives develop their farms, on festive occasions, they receive stress-free bags of rice under the most decent and humane circumstances.

Good enough, Nigerians are becoming increasingly aware of their rights. Poverty is not an act of God. It is society-induced. A political party that encourages its aspirant to stone citizens with bags of rice at pre-nomination campaigns will also look the other way if its candidate turns the campaign arena to a battlefield. Neither will such a party be bothered about the precarious unemployment situation in the country.

A rice-throwing party can only realise its mistakes too late. Hence it will continue to play catch-up and catch up, it never will!