Win-Win Lose—Kole Omotoso

Many are called (to form the market base!) but few are chosen (to feed their greed from the market transactions!!) There is no such thing in life as a win-win situation. If someone must gain someone must win. Political philosophy and social humanism through the ages have attempted to cater to the needs, especially the most basic needs, of the greatest number of human beings. Sometimes it translates as the greatest needs of the greatest number. The apostles of Jesus Christ and many Christians after them attempted to live in communities completely self-dependent and completely equal in their contribution to the community as well as their needs from the community. Other faiths have examples of this practice. But numbers were always going to mess up such arrangements. Thereafter, two opposing trends of human existence have fought the battle for human satisfaction during human lives, one encouraged by humanist trends and the other by the reality of human/animal pattern of dog eating dog. Socialism and Capitalism. Communism into Socialism preaches the practice of giving to all human beings according to their need while taking from them according to their abilities and capabilities. Capitalism insists that greed is good and the buyer/payer had better watch out or else he or she ends up as the many called to service the greed of the few!

kole.jpg

Having grown up in a culture that says the world is a market place or mall at the close of which we go home to heaven through death, I have always wondered at the skewed rules of this market. While we are in the market place we participate as sellers or buyers and, depending on our circumstances, we could also fulfil our part as the article being sold or bought! Seller or Buyer or Article of Exchange. You might wish to ask for the role of history, culture and memory in all this but that is also taken care of in another set of understandings but we are talking here of who gets what at what cost and for what purpose.

All of this has come to me as a result of taking a look at the briefing material prepared for the visit of the president of the African National Congress to the suburbs of poor whites around Pretoria. That piece of material mentions a letter from some government department asking providers for these poor whites to become demographically representative or else face closure through being deprived of funds. If poverty is a matter of black and white, how did we come to this type of definition? At what point did we decide that the many called would be one colour and the few called would be another colour? After all, all humans at one time or another have been sellers and buyers and even the articles of exchange. In a polity less concerned with office holding and more committed to doing the work of their offices, the matter of politicians visiting the poor of any colour would evince a different type of press coverage than was the case after Jacob Zuma visited poor whites in Pretoria.

What then is the cause of poverty? Is poverty a matter of luck or the result of the world order (the poor ye shall always have with you kind of syndrome)? There are people around the world who have to work three or even four jobs in order to make ends meet. Who keeps these ends from meeting, pulling the strings apart? Employers? God? The Ancestors? Colonialists? Imperialists? Rich people who wish to keep others poor so that they can be the only rich ones? Poor people who want to have company? Which brings to mind Toni Morrison’s statement to the effect that’ some people are not free unless other people’ (preferably of a different colour, class, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation) ‘are enslaved.’

Most human efforts to end poverty, or at least minimise its effects, have been at the level of changing the world order that seems to cast the greatest number of humanity into deprivation. Employers who underpay can be penalised for their crime unless the employer is the government. Like the Chinese government that underpays Chinese workers and exports to all the world. This is no better than when colonial governments used their colonial subjects as unpaid or poorly paid labourers. There is nothing that one can do about so-called acts of God such as floods, draughts, hurricanes, volcanoes. The Ancestors can never impose poverty on their offspring knowing, from their time in the market place, that any disadvantage makes participation in the activities of the mall more difficult. Colonialists and imperialists are specialists in creating poverty in the empire at large to feed the imperial metropolis.

If we know so much about the causes of poverty why has humanity never been able to eradicate it? By the nature of humans life would be dull without the competition of the market place. But what is wrong with a dull life? Must life seek thrills to live? Why can’t we just go to the market, sell what is needed, not what thrills but what fills and return home? There is the story of a woman, a bukateria owner in Ikeja in Lagos years ago. Youngsters who had just finished their secondary education and were waiting for their results or had just been given employment came to her buka to feed. They would demand so much starch, so much protein and so much this and that and she would decide that the meat they were asking for was too expensive for their pocket and would substitute what she thought they could and should afford. She would chide them and wonder if they were going to finish all they earn in Lagos, in Lagos and not take something home to their parents! What a wonderful example of ethical selling! Is it still possible to find such ethics in sales in Nigeria or anywhere in the world today? What a sad world indeed!!

Kole Omotoso is the author of Just Before Dawn.