By Ochereome Nnanna
GOSPEL preacher, Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, once said something about poverty which opened my eyes wider on the subject. I started seeing the subject in a different light thereafter. Being one of the Christian evangelists who preach prosperity and the reality of miracles, Oyakhilome enjoined his adherents and viewers never to link themselves with poverty.

He accused those who say: “We, the poor masses” of ignorance of that claim because if they knew the implication of being poor, or the capacity of poor people to perpetrate evil they would never associate themselves with poverty.

If you ask me, I would say that poverty is of two varieties: poverty of the pocket, and poverty of the mind. Poverty of the pocket afflicts those who are unable to pay the bills for their barest necessities of life, such as food, shelter, education, health and what have you. In well organised countries, this level of poverty is reduced to the barest minimum because the system has solved the basic needs of society.

But in a country like Nigeria , where the poor are left “between themselves and God” as Comrade Adams Oshiomhole once put it in an interview with me, the poor have no cushion, no soft landing. And like the proverbial crayfish, the poor man finds himself “bending”, tending towards wickedness or corruption or both.

Poverty of the mind refers to the poverty that afflicts people who are ill-equipped morally or spiritually. Poverty, mind you, arises from lack of adequate armament or equipment to deal with challenges of life. People who are said to “have no shame” fall into this category.

There are people who will shrink from committing an act because it is “taboo”, “unheard of”, and “will bring shame on my family”, even though a lot of material gain stands to be made. You have to have the moral and spiritual fibre and equipment to fall into this category. A person can be poor in the pocket but spiritually and morally well-equipped to “run away from the devil”, or more appropriately, “make the devil flee”.

But there are people who, in spite of all the wealth they are already swimming in, will not hesitate, even for one moment, to commit heinous acts for material gains such as money or power or both. The only impulse that drives them is greed for more power and money. A former fire-eating Speaker of the House of Representatives of Northern extraction once described a top pro-third term senator, also of Northern extraction as “a brilliant academic with a poor mind”. If you ask me, no insult cab be severer than this.

Poverty of the pocket and of the mind, whether as separate afflictions or in combined efficacy, appears to be spreading across the land. Some stories we have read in the media of recent ought to get us worried about the abysmal level of poverty this nation has sunk into. Let us refer to a few of them.

When a group of armed robbers invaded a night bus coming from the East to Lagos one fateful night last year, they committed an act that could only have been driven by poverty of the pocket and mind combined. They ordered all those who had no money on them to come down and lay flat on the express road. Under gunpoint, they ordered the driver of the bus to run over them again and again. Poverty had driven these demons to acts of unbelievable wickedness.

The other day we read about a middle aged man who repeatedly had carnal knowledge of his own 12-year old daughter and put her in the family way! When the police arrested him he admitted committing the act, adding that he would like the child to be born!

The latest news that led me into this unusual topic was the story of the man the police found with 53 dead babies. On television, he alleged that he was awarded a contract to remove the abandoned bodies to Atan Cemetery for burial. But because of the heavy bribes he had to pay those in charge of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) he could no longer pay the charges of the cemetery. He then decided to bury them in the bush! He was on his way to the said bush when he was caught.

Can you imagine morgue attendants demanding gratification before allowing abandoned corpses to be removed? Can you even imagine a “contractor” being retained for a job that is usually carried out by a specialised public health agency? We were not told if this “contractor” was licenced. Clearly, he was not.

That was why he engaged in unregulated and unlawful disposal of corpses “in the bush”, a parcel of land obviously not owned by him nor approved for such ends. And how were you sure he was going to bury them without tampering with their body parts, as a contractor out for maximum profit, since we hear that there are those who buy body parts for fetish ends? In saner climes, this scandal would claim the jobs of the helmsmen at LUTH because someone neglected to do his or her job properly.

Poverty is killing Nigerians. It is responsible for the inability of persons put in duty posts to concentrate and do their jobs. Most Nigerians, especially those of the working class, particularly in government employment, are looking for other things they can do to make ends meet to enable them fuel their generators, pay the exorbitant fees that private schools charge their children, as well as take care of those needs that government or the state should normally do.

It was failure of leadership and governance that led to the rising incidence of poverty in this land. Who will bell the cat? When will he start?