Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
When I arrived the Barber’s shop, there was excitement. Recitations of my past heroic exploits in the realm of journalism and contacts with the high and mighty in government and power filled the air. I had always gone and returned to the folks at the Barber’s shop. They are my people. Among us over the years had grown a fellow feeling, a bond of mutual trust and confidence. In good and bad times, we stand together on the same side of the road of life’s turbulence. Each time duty takes me away, I say to them my farewells like family. We hold hands as they pray their farewells ad later drift into popularity street songs:
Every good thing that goes away
Must return to source
Go and return a part of us
The river never goes away
It returns to its source
The source
Our source and convergence …
My frequent departures and returns are greeted with excitement and anticipation. When duty calls, the pull of informal solidarity must yield to the stronger pull of professional survival or family emergencies. You end up in the Barber’s shop when time allows for the informality of Group think and creative reflection. The anticipation of your return is always there: some new gist must flow. In times of excitement, the Barber’s shop graduates into an emergency beer parlour, a place of free Booze for all !!!
That was always one of my ways of announcing my return after a long absence. I watch them with pleasure as they drain the last drops of the rare cold beer. One of them we fondly call “Alhaji” delights in pointing out to the others that my generosity in providing the rare cans of beer should not make them forget to ask me why I provide the booze but artfully never drink any alcohol! Everyone believes Alhaji is like me, never drinking alcohol out of choice. In this place, no one cares what faith you are.
Then one day, I sauntered into the bathroom to pee. And there was Alhaji struggling to sneak back his small storage can of whiskey into the pocket of his voluminous robe. He smiled at me knowingly. In the silent exchange of smiles of conspiracy between us, volumes of things not sayable had been said between us. What manner of kindness makes a man feed others what he will not eat? We are Nigerians. What you eat does not make me fat!
My return journey to the Barber’s shop always begins with an early morning call to the Ikeja Underbridge. There is one of the headquarters of our unregistered “Free Readers Association”. It is the gathering point of all news vendors in the area. We all as prospective newspaper buyers are allowed the rare privilege of ‘free reading’ to sample the day’s news. This place is unique. It is a parliament without the without the splendor of pompous architecture. It has method, not the foolishness of officialdom. It contains the most avid patriots. They are knowledgeable without much schooling. They are politicians without party card. Professors with neither Chair nor specialized accreditation. We are journalists with global expanse of knowledge. Secret agents of unregistered agencies and free rangers specializing in interminable areas. We know the solutions to all the nation’s problems except that the voters are so foolish they keep voting for the wrong people called politicians. Or they vote and go home, allowing INEC to announce fake results.
They are ready to start another argument any time. Are politicians born, trained or bred? How do great leaders emerge? Why do some nations have the best leaders and the rest of us are left in the hell hole of Armageddon and the fire pits of burning Babylon?
In the last six months, I noticed that our numbers have increased as the cover prices of newspapers have increased. Hardly any of us on an honest income can afford to buy newspapers daily for a whole month. But Something else that is ‘good’ has happened. Most of us are now clutching cheap cell phones. The news comes into our phones, stares us in the face and taunts us all day long. Rumour has it that the old cunning President General from Owu thought it was better to license cell phones, arm every Tom and Dick with a phone. They will recharge the phones, buy accessories, pay subscriptions, set up phone accessory kiosks, transfer money via the phones etc. It will all come to a lot of money swimming around the economy, some of which could have been stolen by officialdom and politicians without the owner noticing. It is more decent tasking a million thieves than allowing a few access into the till of public money. Enter the era of digital robbery! Thieves need to work a bit harder!
Initially, I was troubled by the fear of the coming of digital online news and journalism. Don’t even talk of digital marketing, merchandizing and advertising. The mixture of fake news, false advertising and plain crookedness is the herald of Armageddon! Nigeria without digitalization is one of the most dangerous places in the world. Arm the Nigerian with digital tools and you have the making of hell: cybercrimes, 419, disinformation, weaponized lies dancing as the ‘gospel truth’. God save your people, if there are still some of us left by the time of the Second Coming!
Online instantaneous journalism was going to kill editors as a power bloc. It was going to remove the exclusivity of the media as the fourth estate of the realm and return power where it rightly belongs- to the three estates of the realm, the abode of those who contested and won elections. The coming of Everyman as an editor, commentator, Op-Ed writer and advocate- are some of the liabilities of the digital news era. It marks the coming of the Idiot as Editor, an illiterate who feels entitled to a say in the things that concern everyone else. The new media kills off the circulation agent, the newspaper bulk transporter, the crooks that run the circulation rackets of newspaper houses and even the street vendor. No need to carry piles of wet newspapers in the rain, chasing after motorists that are all wound up in cars with tinted glass windows, sometimes hiding decorated criminals. Let the news go straight to the readers or let the readers tap the touch screen and lo and behold. News is breaking in America. A bad marksman did not aim correctly and merely grazed Mr. Trump’s right ear at that rally. World history was almost fatally altered by that shift of the hand. God saved the idiot king so that America can taste dictatorship and decide on the way forward.
But in spite of this ‘direct entry’ newsfeed by the wonders of technology, our Free Readers Association is alive and well, growing in numbers. The news updates may be spoon-fed into your phone. No technology can create the sense of shared relief, grief or betrayal that initially brought us together as one ‘free-reading community, a people, bound in shared betrayal and unending disappointments. No technology can replace the fellow feeling among us at the Bus Stop under bridge. We are unemployed; we are owing the Landlord many months rent in arrears, we can no longer travel to the village to collect free food from the farms because the bandits have taken over the highways and narrow farm paths and our very brothers who used to wait for handouts from us have found it more enterprising and lucrative to kidnap us for ransom instead of waiting for miserable handouts.
This morning under the Bridge, people are admiring each other’s cell phones. Some are American, Swiss, Japanese. Most are Chinese! Most good things these days are made in China! Then someone brought out some lovely but garish looking ones. Guess where they are made? Vietnam! Someone screamed. An old lady among us sighed as she admired the Vietnamese phone. “These days, every country makes things to sell to others except us!” “ But we make something also! We make Innoson cars and trucks! Yes and Dangote makes petrol to sell at N1000 a litre to people who buy a liter of blood at the General Hospital for N500. We also make trouble. We manufacture Yahoo Yahoo Boys! We make crooks and thieves and put them in charge of government coffers! We place goats in charge of barns of yams. The South Africans are coming with their own cell phones, somebody added from the crowd. I hear their own is intuitive phone-IP-. If I think of you, it dials your number. If you refuse to answer, it knows why. I am owing you N10,000 which is long overdue. If you lie about your location, its own version of Siri will whisper your actual whereabouts to me without calling you a liar! Humanity will destroy itself with technology one of these days!
I quickly scan the front pages, back pages and editorial cartoon pages of major national dailies. Free Readers hace rues. Don’t study the papers. Just scan quickly without showing interest. Someone in the crowd informs us that the then new President – Alhaji General Ibrahim Bukari- only reads the cartoon pages after which he laughs to himself, to those around or laughs at himself while waiting for the verdict of the courts on why his school certificates are still missing many years after he started serving in various governments as a wise man of the land.
Among we ordinary folk, the things that ignite excitement and celebration are not lofty. They are little things that touch the heart. The brief absence of a fellow traveler on the road of ordinary life. The recovery of a friend from unforeseen illness. The return of a loved one from a distant journey.
From the morning parliament of Free Readers, I try to see if much has changed in the neighbourhood. A great deal but more remains the same. Not much to gladden the heart. Government agents have visited the area with bulldozers. They showed up suddenly after many months of notice to demolish shops, buildings, shanties etc. Weeks afterwards, a gale of speculations follow the demolitions. It was Town Planning. It was targeted at one ethnic group who thrive on shop-based retail trade. They keep voting the wrong party, not showing enough gratitude to their ‘hosts’, the owners of the land upon which they trade and make fortunes. Ingratitude is a heinous sin forgotten by God during the final editing of the Ten Commandments.
When I fully settle at my corner of the shop, a hailstorm of new stories is unleashed, competing for prominence. The President has travelled again to some Island, I believe St. Lucia, in search of ‘investors’! The biggest investor on the Island is also the leader who owns a coffee shop at the airport but is also a renowned money changer who helps international thieves and drug lords to hide their loot in off shore havens. Another person adds that the Big Man has just exercised the ‘prerogative of mercy’ by pardoning most big criminals in all prisons in the country. He injected a sense of historical curiosity by adding Herbert Macauley, thus informing most people that one of our favourite nationalists is a state offender. Then followed a cascade of drug lords, husband killers, wife beaters, bandits, confessed train hijackers, Boko Haram funders and repentants etc. This was the first time in recent history that the president of the republic would exercise the prerogative of mercy through an industrial scale state pardon of criminals.
Someone at the corner hinted that the newly released criminals are the ones who will lead the army of infamy during the forthcoming 2027 presidential elections. After all, the president has never asked you people for a seat on the honour roll. He has never applied to be Pope! He knows himself and his people. The tussle for political leadership is not a beauty contest; it is a pageant of ugliness. Nor is it a search for moral beacons. Otherwise, we should have just called upon the Pope to give unto us a leader. The President has done what men of power do. Search the swamp of ingloriousness to swell the ranks of bad men and women, those who understand power and its laws. Those who seek earthly power must patronize the agents of the devil.
By the time I looked through the window, there was a trickle of regular customers coming in. It was time to take my leave from the Shop, having announced my return to the Shop. I reluctantly took my leave, leaving behind me the solidarity and unconditional love of the indomitable people of the shop. I was glad to leave the Shop and return to my real-world duty where I just learnt that the President had taken off to Rome; he had also granted pardon to a gamut of criminals and sundry miscreants, including ambitious soldiers contemned and executed by duly constituted military tribunals many decades ago. More excitingly, nearly every state Governor in the opposition PDP had recently decamped to the ruling APC wagon.
