A grinding system called capitalism

Granted it may not happen every other minute but it does happen occasionally. Yes, the ambulance would probably rush in the moment someone made an emergency call but without health insurance, access to the best health care services in the world is a mere tease. If you are a legal resident with a family, you […]

Granted it may not happen every other minute but it does happen occasionally. Yes, the ambulance would probably rush in the moment someone made an emergency call but without health insurance, access to the best health care services in the world is a mere tease. If you are a legal resident with a family, you know that the law is made for women and children. Legal residents shout – all hail the republic of women. If you are used to raising your voice against your wife at home, well, you have about a month to carry on your misogyny. By the time she has acclimatised and read her bill of rights, your shouting days are not only over, except you are a fast learner, you are on a rollercoaster ride to ruin. Under a capitalist society, never pick a quarrel with a woman, you will not win.

But there are more. Capitalism ensures that you are grounded. Yes, you may have more opportunities to get a job and perhaps earn a living, but the system that so takes care of you also ensures that you spend your earnings. There are no free lunches here, so come earned with your cash. Here is another truth about capitalism, in a fair and square contest, the good man always lose. Yes, ask Barack Obama. Only months back, he was the toast of the capitalist system, a living example of how fortune favoured the brave, so how come he is the butt of beer parlour jesters and the rejected at the polls? Well, the answers are uncanny, but they are not hidden. Obama is a good man who inherited a bad system and swore to vacuum it or die trying but he soon discovered that the options are not that clear, there is a middle road; an unwritten rule to the equation.

After the trouncing at the polls last week, Obama knows that if he did not ride the wobbling horse of compromise he would be trekking home in the freezing cold and risking all he ever stood for. So, what is Obama’s sin? Ask right-wing Pentecostal preacher, John Hagee and he would shout it loud – he is a communist. And what is communism, well look for the American definition. America has the latest in technology and its health care system is reputed to be the best, but it is not accessible. In spite of the advance, it is easier for a poor man to die of a headache than it is for a rich man to die of a heart attack. It is the way the system works and Obama’s Medicare Bill sought to change that and that is the new definition of communism.

Obama’s bail-out plan to ailing banks was interpreted as favouring the fat cats, but nobody imagined what would have happened to the American and global economy if the banks had been left to collapse. Who would have suffered most? Of course it’s the poor who is forced to use the banks to meet up with deficit payments on mortgages, loans etc etc. But the capitalist rule is – those who cannot take care of themselves should be left to die. That is the capitalist way of proving the theory of the survival of the species so misanthropically espoused by Charles Darwin.

Yes, there are shouts of businesses closing, but it was not as a result of the bank bail-out. Unemployment had been rising before Obama caught the Luther dream but the invasion of Iraq and the quest to be the global police shrouded the average American from the stark reality. With the technical pull-out, the chickens came home to roost and the pen is just too small to contain them. It is not Obama’s fault.

So, how does that explain my absence from the streets last week? Well, capitalism benumbs the uninitiated. A regime of paperwork means that once you were out of the hotel into a temporary abode, you have entered into living oblivion. Until you are properly grafted into the system, its goodbye to phones and the comfort it brings. When you cross that hurdle and get a phone, you realise that in Nigeria, you are in paradise. Here to have a caller ID shown on your mixed call you must pay extra otherwise all you get is an unnumbered ‘missed call’. Of course, that means that the internet, that vast world that cuts down the barriers between people is off your radar too.

Don’t shout cybercafé because depending on where you reside, you may be barricaded against the cybercafé by the taxi’s metering system designed to fleece your pocket. Waiting for the public transportation may mean freezing to death before you get there. In all these, you begin to miss the primitivity of your nativity to some extent and you are caught between wishing that your country would leapfrog or just purely reform and make outside travel a choice and not a necessity.