Glorified Road

      I  am not asking how it is, for I have been part of the system for years. From my youth, if a five-year-old kid is rated as a youth till I left my parents to live with a Reverend gentleman, it always had been getting up early to fetch water, then it will be farm time. That school is on break for students to rest waiting on a resuming date, is not for village students and pupils. Once it's farming time, you are automatically on the farming list. So everyday life of Mr. Mike Igwe, his four kids and his wife are not different from the rest of others in that village. During the rainy season, they wake up early to go to the farm two villages away from theirs where they got land to cultivate all manners of farm products from yam, to cocoyams, vegetables of all manners, corn, cassava, etc.

Each trip to the farm which is always about 45 minutes or an hour by foot through the only footpath route that the farm can be access is never a journey he enjoys but who has the choice? living in the village of Umuaku of the '70s. Infact, there is only a motor-wide that passed through Umuaku in the 70s and it was the one that cut the town into two almost equal parts colonial masters paved and tarred to access interior communities in late '40s. Villages in each community almost don't have a tricycle part, let alone a motorable one. Mike went to the city and stayed there for a few years before his money ran out and business went kaput and he relocated back to the village. Each trip to the farm always brings a sigh to his lips. He always wishes that the part is motorable to half the suffering he sees each farming season. 

The last time he attended town meeting, he had tabled the same thing to the king and all those in attendance there, they were eyeing him as if he came from another planet. Not as if he doesn't understand that those guys are all suffering from poverty like him and that is the reason they were all eyeing him like an alien but twenty years' contribution by each village will do something no matter  how unlevel or potholes it might be. It would be far better than the suffering he witnesses each farming season. Nothing like a road, no matter what it is. The suffering he witnesses he has come to see that even people have suffered to the extent that they don't know they are suffering anymore. Is it not one yellow man that said that "if you want progress, build road" he knows what he was saying. You buy yams, join it to the one from your barns then use your head to carry it all from the market and your house to the farms. Cultivate them, weed them, fine poles to guide what needed guiding in it then, repeat the same task of carrying it back to your house again to the barn. 

Nothing like tricycles and motorable roads. Why does the king and his cabinet not know yet that even the economic state of the town and  its people are as they were due to no roads that lead to the farms? What if there were to be dual road like the ones mike sees in the city while there for few years in each villages, even those in the city who depends on things from the villages will save at least 50% of what they spend on food each month let alone those in the villages that don't buy a lot of things from the market. What if there were to be wide enough roads for the farmers to hire tractors and use them for the work they now do manually? What do they think the prices of eatables will be in this part of the country? What if the government were to even know what their function to the masses were and start electrification of the villages so that storing certain perishables is made possible? What do you think will be the prices of certain goods and economic status of the farmers and the state that is now merely self-sufficient?

To think that the work put in, to think that sweat invested and returns from all those suffering don't equate at all is what makes Mr. Mike shake his head in wonder about the leaders and their myopic leadership. He was at it from his youth, still at it at his age and from the way his kids have joined the race, the normal as he calls it is really not encouraging for he knew by the way the leaders are going about their leaderships in almost all the interior communities, his children childrens will be carrying yams and farm products on their heads and still at the crude implements he uses today. He shakes his head in the hopelessness of the whole situation. 

Governments don't exist for the people, if you don't as a community organize yourself and go to work helping yourself, you will stay as you were in fifty years time. His wife had taken out all the pans and hoes ready while he was still reminiscing. His wife has been watching him as he stares far off and knows that he isn't there with her. She had been talking to him without any sign of him hearing her. She went and touched him.

 "Why do you always forget yourself?" 

" forget myself, how?"

" This seems to be getting worse each day. I want to know if we will stay long there for me to bring matches and yams to roast there or will we come back early to eat in the house?"

"If we leave now, we might be through before 12:00"

"So, no need for food, right?"

He was already moving toward the zinc gate that leads out of the compound hauling his machete and hoe with him. He was at his 'What if' lamentation and reflections again when the wife and three kids joined him. The wife has devised how to pull him out of whatever it is that hooked him without mercy for months now as the wife saw it. She used to intentionally start a discussion on any current issue in the village and so far, it has worked like magic. But this time, he beat her to the punch. He was the one that started the discussion she was trying to initiate. 

  " Do you think it is our destiny?"

 "What is our destiny?"

" I mean the Igbo man destiny to be suffering the way we do each farming season ?"

"suffering how?"

" I mean, going to this farm so early each season for three or four months and repeating it each year?"

"Where do you want to go each season?"

He eyed the wife for a little longer and continued walking. She is one of them, he concluded in his mind. She has suffered since birth that she doesn't know she is suffering. What they are embarking on now she rates as part of adult existence. He had intentionally at times tried to take her into the city to disorient her villageness. Hers are too thick. She works like a man at times. 

" I mean, why wouldn't we have it a little easier, paving roads that motors can ply will reduce the suffering of this our one hour trek each morning and another back home in the afternoon. I can't ride bicycle and carry four of you"

" Are you sure the people will enter anything like that? That radio you bought only talks about road accidents. We don't have them here. Far better"

He sighed loudly and eyed the woman again. She can cook, and work like a horse, which Mr Mike knew of to be addictions to suffering. What you do from birth and where you rotate each morning from toddler to adult is always hard to do away with. He was lost again inside him. This time,  it's how to organize the village youths and how to source the implements to widen the route from the farm to the colonial road like they call the tarred road. Then from there to the farm. 

Two days later, it's organizing a little short meeting with a few youth leaders and selling them the idea. They had always respected him as someone with insight as to how things were supposed to be done. It's evident that the youths saw nothing advantageous in what he suggested but they are following him as a man with knowledge of what he does. That faith is enough to propel him along. He went to the two other villages bordering the farms and suggested the same. The initiative has always been what he knew the people lacked. Start, and manage to do any good thing and thousands will fall behind you. For three months, they were at it like mad. Another half a month and they eked out something that can accommodate a bus. Some elders were contributing palm wine, garden eggs and peppered peanut butters. The route leads all the way. The main road and market are two minutes walk from there. 

After two months of using those places to market and as routes to home by some living near that side, about three other villages started their own any-how routes to the farming areas near them. Any contribution anyone can make, is welcomed. In five months, the route was almost connected to the major road again by those three villages and things like barrows and tricycles started finding their way back from city markets to the Umuaku community.

It's any-how route and the king, being impressed by what the town is experiencing, decided that the two major markets in Umuaku needed bus and truck parks, and the economy was truly improving. Just imagine that. What if those routes were to be something better other than the glorified foot parts they are at the moment, how would things be? have been?