Ladies and gentlemen of the oppressed (the Press?), I have just coined a new word or phrase: poor-loot. It’s a word that originated from a WABE (West African Bad English) vomited by one of our youth the other day.
I think the young guy had eaten something, beans or something like that, that gave him some serious stomach upset, making him to pass gas, odious pungent gas, from time to time, the one whose rotten-egg smell makes you spit from time to time like a pregnant woman.
In a bid to make his colleagues stay away from him, he said: “Everybody go away, I wan pollute.” That is to say, “I feel like passing out gas or farting.” My old English teacher taught me that the verb “pollute” is a transitive verb, and must, therefore, always go with an object like “I wan pollute the air/water/room.”
But when somebody who I expect to know better because he also passed through the four walls of a secondary school like I did, years ago, is using “pollute” without an object accompanying it, then you know that something is definitely wrong somewhere. You can blame it all on his discomforting stomach movement or rumble that made him fart from time to time. Probably, that made him to use the word without caring to add object at the end of it, to complete the very sense of it.
“I wan pollute!” Are you saying that you’ve never heard any grammar like that before now? I’ve heard o. My answer to those who usually make such announcement before they do whatever they want to do: if you wan pollute, by all means, you can go ahead and do that but, first all, tell us what or who you want pollute: Air? Water? Room? People? Church People? Shrine People? Native people? Satanic people? Monkeys? Chimpanzees? Gorillas? Lions? Until you do so, please, don’t pollute yet because you never can tell the kind of wahala that can cause.
But after the young man who wanted to pollute had left I began to think of other places where a mad fellow can decide to pollute. And, suddenly, from nowhere the new word we started this article with “poor-loot” come rushing into my mind.
Poor-loot? Poor-loot? Poor-lot, where and when do you think we can use the word? I can’t think of any better situation than what our fellow Nigerians are doing at the IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps scattered across the breath and length of our dear country, Nigeria. If you hear what some or many of those who are charged with the duty of distributing clothes and foodstuffs donated by our government and international donor agencies are doing to these poor ones, you will surely weep for our dear native country.
Despite their pitiable situation, I hear that some of the fellows who are employed to distribute needed items to them end up stealing them – spoons, kitchen knives, blankets, mattresses, bags of rice, beans and other foodstuffs and selling them off and making a lot of money for themselves while leaving the poor people poorer. What else do we call wicked acts like that but poor-loot?
So, in many of our IDP, you find many of our so-called care providers serving themselves and stealing what was meant for the poor people. That’s poor-looting. And many people are involved in what has turned out to be a big racket – security men, contractors, distributors, etc. My plea; please, don’t poor-loot our camps. Don’t prey on those young girls. Don’t take undue advantage of their plight. Don’t sexually prey on them.
Again, if you steal what is meant for all of us and make us poorer than we originally were in the Last Level, you are also poor-looting us. Any public officer that loots the funds that is meant to pay our salaries, allowances while leaving his own untouched and coming regularly, with nothing out of it touched by anybody – chief financial officer, etc, is also guilty of poor-looting. So? Let’s stop poor-looting our nation. Actually, that’s the message our Presido was trying to pass across to our people in Dubai early this week. So, whether you call him Baba Go-Slow or Baba-Go Fast is immaterial. The question is: between Baba Go Slow and Baba Poor-Looter who would you choose? Who do you think will help get the thing due to us eventually across to us? If you ask me, the one that goes slowly is better than one that goes fast but poor-loots. So, when our Presido said: “I may be ‘Baba go slow’ but I didn’t loot,” you should understand.
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