Jill Rees: Welcome Press

I know what it is like to weep bitter tears for my country. Throughout the 1980s my country was run by a rabid right wing solipsist who systematically destroyed every institution which had made ‘British Constitutional Socialism’ almost universally respected as an attempt to build Jerusalem in our green and pleasant land. Finally, when criticised, she snorted, ‘There’s no such thing as society.’ So it was that I read a reader’s letter with empathy, a PhD student at a prestigious university in Benue, telling me he wept for Nigeria.

British Democracy evolved over several centuries following the 16^th century Earls Rebellion for freedom of religion and the fair application of land inheritance. Although ‘gentlemen’ had a say in Parliament, democracy in the sense of the common people having a say was much fought for and much died for.

After the Plague in England, workers were very much in demand, and wages and conditions were excellent. Consequently, political change occurred mainly among the aristocrats and concerned higher constitutional matters. By the early 1880s, the population had grown and wages could be cut to starvation level because workers were obliged to take what they could get. If anyone objected, they would be fired and another hired in his stead. Agriculture and industry was just beginning to develop on a global scale and production had not yet reached levels of major exportation. It was illegal to join together to protest until 1824, when trade unions began to be formed legally.

In 1832, six men joined together in a ‘friendly society’ in Tolpuddle, south west England, to protest against the gradual lowering of wages. The powers that be objected, and they were arrested and exiled. These men became known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and symbolise the rights of the working people to a decent living and a decent lifestyle.

During the next 50 years, conditions for ordinary people in Britain were dire. A novel, ‘The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’, was written about the conditions endured by poverty-struck working men who were unable to make enough money to support themselves and their wives. Throughout this long story, wives die in childbirth, men too sick to work are unable to visit a doctor, children die in hunger and of ordinary childhood diseases they could not afford to treat and cause by defiled living conditions.  The book was not permitted to be published until 1914, when many of the workers the author Robert Tressell wrote about were being slaughtered as ‘cannon fodder’ on the battlefields of Europe.

Throughout the novel Tressell’s hero Frank Owen asks the question, why do so many allow themselves to be so mistreated by the few? He urges working people to stop being ‘philanthropists’ to the rich, working themselves literally to death so that fat cats can make ever increasing profits, and supported by those who could afford the backing to be in potions of power. Until the poor become organised, he thinks, the rich will take what they want.

This is similar to Nigeria today in many ways. Wealth is the main source of power, and to be in government you need to be from a certain background. Meanwhile, low wages, poor housing, paltry health and nutritional resources and limited educational opportunities keep the poor in their place. The poor and powerless complain, they talk about the corruption in power, yet they remain in isolation, and do nothing. They weep.

There are too many young people in Africa. They don’t need to be persuaded by high wages, they don’t need to be educated, and they have no leverage to fight corruption in high places. If an individual complains out loud, they are sacked and replaced.  The state doesn’t need to keep all the babies born alive until they reach working age, more will come.

Never has anyone with power voluntarily yielded it. Nigerians can look at corruption and ask ‘Why, why?’ but the answer is simply ‘Because’. Why don’t the rich and powerful not share their wealth?  Because they don’t have to, nobody makes them.

When I went to Nigeria I too was concerned about all this corruption in high places.  I was soon shocked to understand that it went all the way to the bottom too: to the maid who steals from her Madam, to the security who keeps you waiting until you pay a bit extra, to the worker who won’t do anything extra unless you give him a ‘tip’. How can they complain about corruption, I would ask, and yet do the same?

‘To survive’ said my friend, obviously wondering how I got to be so stupid.

The oppression of the workers continued in the UK in between the wars. In the 1930s poverty was so bad that the famous ‘Jarrow Marchers’ walked from the north to London, picking up thousands of unemployed workers along the road.  The Labour government of the day, along with the Trade Union Movement, ignored the 12,000 workers who came on the Houses of Westminster.

Only after the Second World War, when the whole of Europe was in ruins, did some element of idealism as well as necessity see fit to build the decent society we find in Britain today. In 1945, a newly elected government began to invest in agriculture, in steel and coal industries, in Heath and education for all its citizens, and in child support for poorer families.

The lessons we have learned are these: those in power will not yield it without a fight; the working people have to unite and work together, not to let one individual get fired or bullied in the workplace;  poor and underprivileged people need to get organised; we must never give up however long it takes; dignity and unity are what matters.

The economic crisis is worrying many people worldwide, but for us who have nothing, the worry is much less. In fact, this may be a window of opportunity for us to change some conventional  economic structures. Today’s forward-thinkers are interested in sustainable development and co-operative working.  These obviously lend themselves to small independent projects.

Sustainability means we don’t have to produce an awful lot of stuff. Co-operatives mean we don’t have to have money, because several minor players combine what they have.  The trick is to contain them. In the USA, at the start of the great corn belts, famers worked in co-operatives to share expensive machinery, and this enabled them to harvest huge areas of land, and make profits which could then be put back into the farms, until they were able to become independent.

With sustainability however, there is no real need to ever become independent. In France and Spain, wine and other co-operatives have simply stayed together, enjoying the pool of labour and skills, and content with smaller profits. The increase in standard of living is slow, but this in itself enables the co-operatives to stay ‘beneath the radar’ as it were and out of the state’s eye, with its desire to control everything.

Modern co-operatives include coffee co-ops in South America, and the organic projects in Uganda. Fair Trade, a company which began as a farmer’s co-op to keep profits with the growers instead of the supermarket chains, has developed into an international phenomenon. Organisations and NGOs abound whose job is to help fledgling sustainability projects, like the Green Belt project of Uganda. But how close are Nigerians to being able to use these opportunities?

A commonly held view from the ‘Stupid White Man’ community (apologies to other stupid white men out there) is that Africans are incapable of strategic thinking and unable to plan ahead. This is patently not so: the Nigerian scams are often brilliantly planned and executed.   If, instead of spending their energy scheming plotting and cheating, young people decided to work together to improve their lot, what could not be achieved?

1,309 words

©Jill Rees

04 October 2008

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Tags: co-operative movement, corruption, Leadership, Nigeria, progress, trade unions.

It’s nice to get letters from readers of this column, even when the response is not as positive as it could be. Contrary to what a reader recently accused me of, I don’t say things just to ‘provoke a reaction’, as he felt obliged to write his thoughts to me about the intentions of Archbishop Peter Akinole’s attempts to split the African Church from the Rest of the World over the issue of homosexuality. I thought long and hard about whether I should write about a subject that still upsets many Nigerians. In the end I wrote about it because I thought it was right that Nigerians are aware of this big difference in attitude between Nigeria and the developed world.

In the liberal, secular nations, personal choice issues such as homosexuality and sex before marriage are almost universally accepted. Even if a lifestyle is not approved of by an individual, the right to live according to one’s own conscience is strongly upheld by all.  Nigerians have the right to know that that is how we think in the north.

For us it is part of the whole human rights thing and ‘rights of the individual’ thing. In the UK in particular, laws against discrimination are enforced fairly rigidly, and any kind of attack or slight against a gay person, a physically handicapped person or a person of a different race or religion will be taken seriously both by the police and by employers.  Even children can’t be bossed around by strangers. Sometimes this goes a bit far. The other day I was cycling down the canal path when a little boy accompanied by his mother, also on a bike, wobbled about unsure which side to go past me on. As I went by him i called out ‘It’s best if you pull onto the left hand side’. His mother yelled furiously after me,

‘You mind your own f*&^%$£ business you f*&^%$£ cow!’ which I thought was a bit over the top in the circumstances. It reminded me of teaching in English schools.

I found it quite sad last week when I came back to teach in school here to hear the children swearing at their teacher.

‘We don’t want to learn’ they say. Because their parents have bought them the latest blackberry phone, iPod and Wii computer games, they see no reason to work hard for themselves.

Democratically mature countries seem to have a disrespect for authority. Even more, a distrust of those in authority. When Priests have been led into the courts in droves for child abuse, our Prime Minister has lied in the House of Commons about Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction, and where the banks with our mortgages collapse, how are we to trust them? Gordon Brown at the moment can’t put a foot right. Whenever he speaks in his own defence, his audience just laugh mockingly. Nothing he says will sound credible, because we can’t tell lies from truth now.

So while I can understand the children for not trusting what their teachers say to them, I feel sorry for them. Human society progresses only by each generation being able to assimilate just that little bit more each time, and this is achieved by listening to those who have gone before. If children won’t listen to their teachers, they won’t be able to learn. Of course this is how the governments want it, only the most liberal of nations, maybe Sweden or somewhere, would want its young people to genuinely be able to work out what’s going on.

Nigerians I guess can see how, when something is handed to you on a plate, it can be taken for granted. The positive side to it is that when many children in the UK don’t take advantage of their opportunities, it is more worthwhile for Nigerians to persist in becoming qualified as much as they can, despite the hardships. If Nigerians can rid themselves of the reputation they have in England for dishonesty and scams, they will be recognised for the hard-working people the majority are, and will become a sought after workforce in an under populated Europe, for those Nigerians who want a spell abroad.

While every Nigerian is aware of the importance of education, as yet the government has not managed to ensure even Primary education for every child, and huge investment in public education is still needed. Even then, teachers will have to be better trained, and this is going take a generation at best. The same problem occurs in Nigeria as in the UK, if the government can’t be bothered to fund education properly, how can we trust them?

Nigerians have picked up on the idea that their politicians and business leaders may not be entirely honest in their dealings.  If you want to join with us in distrusting our leaders, why not take up the correlative? The good side of this mainly negative trend? The idea that everyone is equal and has the right to be themselves. We need  unity among ourselves to keep a beady eye on authorities, secular or otherwise to get through this.

864 words

30 September 2008

©Jill Rees

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Tags: Article, corruption, government, Leadership, Nigeria, political, priests, school, secular, trust.