Issue #6 — Autophagy, the inescapable end of Gluttony II
This is the concluding part of the article that started two days ago. This was published at my blogspot account in 2012.
This gluttonous quest for wealth has encapsulated the minds of all, from the woman selling pancake at a street corner to leaders of countries and corporations. Was it not said that Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, the late leader of Democratic Republic of Congo, was richer than his country though a vast majority of the people were abject poor? Was it not also said that General Sani Abacha hoarded such quantum of wealth, stashed away in Swiss banks, that had he not mysteriously died but had lived to realise his wealth his children’s children’s children would have come to meet this wealth? And are we not currently grappling with such an issue in Ghana? It is this red-eye quest for wealth that makes the palm oil seller add artificial colour to her palm oil and the honey seller add melted foam to her honey. Even fried yams must be profusely yellow to attract attention and expiry dates of goods are forged and sold to consumers. Today, a ripe tomato is only red in its rind and green inside. None of these sellers have ever thought of accelerating the death of their customers. To them it is smartness, not murderousness, and smartness is business.
More than ninety-percent of our problems as a country have roots in this egoistic cum gluttonous mentality. The politician sworn to serve is eager to scam. He prefers to use the dusty, pot-holed, death-trap they refer to as road and keep to himself the contractual sum. And where he does construct the road, the few that are, the costs are inflated, kickbacks taken, bribes demanded to such an extent that the only way the contractor would make profit is to do a shoddy work and pay the supervising engineer to look the other way. Soon the rains would come, the potholes would develop, accidents would occur and the very people the road was made to serve would die. Alternatively, the school would not be built, the child would continue to sit under trees, and without text books, would fail his exams. Since survival is a basic instinct he would be attracted by the wealth and the city’s glitterati, he would migrate, he would look for job and finding none would turn, first, to picking pockets but would grow into robbery, with arms. It is not fallacious when development economists say that when the gap between the rich and the poor widens, crime is the ultimate outcome. A country where people are dichotomously classified as either rich or poor is a doomed country that would gradually developed into chaos.
Globally, this ‘wealth-mentality’ has created a situation where a 2006 study by the World Institute for Development Economist on The World Distribution of Household Wealth shows that the richest one percent of adults own 40 percent of global assets (the richest 10% own 85%); where corporations would create the problems and sell the solutions; where people would outwit investors and octogenarian pensioners out of their life-savings in a billion-dollar Ponzi-Madoff scheme to finance their insatiable wealth-lust. It is this ignominious trend that has characterised the present practice of capitalism (a topic for another time) giving us pockets of extremely rich individuals, who can lobby to meter and surcharge the methane and Carbon (IV) Oxide we and our farm animals produce on the altar of climate change, and oceans of famished people. It is this unsustainable trend that led Bill Gate to talk about moral capitalism. But would it work?
This get-rich-at-all-cost mentality has intravenously seeped into every corpuscle of our being making the exception the norm so that woe betides the honest and faithful politician who work selflessly and leave office ‘penniless’; penniless not in terms of that which would take him through life and sustain him but that which made it impossible to put up mansions at plush neighbourhoods in the city; woe unto such an ignorant fool, for his would be the kingdom of insults rained on him by the people, from the people to his family. Questions of his sanity would forever be asked. In fact, he would forever be known as ‘that poor stupid politician’. Because as a politician the people expect him to be rich; in other words, they expect to be defrauded of their common resources.
It is this attitude of wealth without work that makes someone looks into the eyes another person and still butchers him or her; it is that which makes young energetic boys sleep in coffins for days. It is this that makes people harvest the limbs of albinos so that being an albino is itself a risk to survival.
In an interconnected world, where directly or indirectly we bear the brunt of our actions, this gluttonous search for wealth has resulted in autophagy and it would define our Armageddon.
