It’s about an ancient and deadly disease that has wasted more life than any weapon ever devised by man. There is no intention to scare but it could be the most unreported pandemic in human history. From biblical Egypt to the 18th century Ireland, the mass rippers still dwell amongst men. From the four corners of the globe, its harvest continues to grow. Yet men, ignores the greatest emergency of our time. Perhaps, because it doesn’t sound sexy like the HIV/AIDS or the hype to capture media audience like the ever mutating Flu (fish, bird and swine) It could simply be because that it’s the lot of the unfortunate ones. The weak specie giving way for the stronger one. It is the basic natural law of survival.
See, it is the disease of the poor, sick and defenceless. Those innumerable miserable masses that invade our earth space by the mere fact of their existence. They fill our street with their disease riddled bodies. Plagued bodies so nasty we drop alms with our eyes half shut. Yet the threat is real for mankind. There are millions of sufferers all over the globe. The symptoms are real and visible. It is still the phantom Scourge of child in mother’s presence. But you see it on the ribs of the children in Ethiopia, Sudan and Chad, et al. I see the symptoms in the midnight cries of Africa’s ‘witch’ children in Calabar as they go to bed hungry. I see it on the dirt clothes of kids in the inner cities of Western Europe, children blessed with coke-head parents. You see it on the caked black feet trudging on the baking Libyan sand dune. Yes, on the co-dare devil economic refugee crossing the Mediterranean Sea on over boarded rickety boat. I see it on the dirty little fingers combing the rotten dumps of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for nothing more than a scrap. I see the symptoms on hundreds of youths on the death rows of Cambodian, Laos and Burma for drug peddling. I see it on the ten year old neck of that little boy in Gambia making his daily 12 kilometre walk to the stream with a keg of 20 litres of water dangling on his sweaty head. You see it on the desperation of the sex worker in Amsterdam and frustration of a father in Nigeria’s Niger Delta judging between paying for his son’s school fees and treating his own terminal illness.
You see it in the teary eyes of mothers in Eastern Europe as the winter approaches, the same fears shared by mothers in slums of West Africa as the rain invades the peace of their homes while the children sleep at night. Yes, I see it in the helplessness of the mother in Bangladesh as her kids go to bed hungry, night after night.
Perhaps, you may know the cure for this mass killer and troubler of earth’s children. Did you see it in millions spent on fireworks and Hollywood celebrities just to open a hotel in Dubai? Amebo! Did you see the cure in Billions spent by third world countries like Nigeria on space satellites while thousands of her children and pregnant women die every day on something as flimsy as a mosquito bite? Traitor! Did you see the cure in the million dollar foreign hotel bills of a certain West African life president while ninety percent of his citizens live below one dollar a day? Ungrateful citizens!
But could it be that this cure is locked away in the inner vaults of Switzerland and off shore havens of this world? Who dare lock the cures for cancer, Aids or Flu? Where is the outrage of a moral world?
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Moonman Azubuike writes from London.
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