People and Power

A fellow citizen acquaintance of mine was complaining the other day about the high cost of DSTV and HiTV. More specifically, he was complaining about how much money he would have to spend to watch the English Premier League (only Heaven knows how much money we collectively waste on the EPL; if only we invested a fraction of that on our own clubs and sporting structures).

Anyway, this acquaintance half-jokingly said that if he was a candidate for the presidency, one of his campaign promises would be to get the EPL, La Liga, UEFA Champions League, Serie A, Bundesliga and UEFA Confederation Cup to Nigerians at affordable prices.

I thought about it, and came to the depressing conclusion that a candidate who ran on such a platform would stand a strong chance of winning a surprisingly large share of the vote .... if not winning accommodations at Aso Rock outright.

I am not yabbing us Nigerians.

I am commenting on human beings in general, on people everywhere.

All over the world, democratic and pseudo-democratic politicians win more votes promising comfortable, pleasurable, substantively meaningless short-term rubbish ... and lose votes if they offer real, practical, applicable solutions to serious systemic problems.

Dictators and autocrats know this too; health care, education and transportation infrastructure can be rubbish, but holidays, festivals and carnivals will always rock. In Africa, countries that are begging for food aid will nevertheless find the resources to host major sporting tournaments, building (at great expense) for the event the sort of infrastructure their real economies desperately need but will never get.

To be honest, even the richest country in Africa is guilty of this. South Africa in the next few years (if it hasn't happened already) will outgrow Apartheid-era infrastructure that was originally designed to service 10% of the population only. One can't help but wonder if the billions of dollars spent hosting several events in the last 17 years (of which the 2010 World Cup was the biggest), might not have been better spent updating and expanding infrastructure. The promoters of these sort of big events always say that there are economic benefits to be accrued from hosting .... but the reality is the organizing bodies (e.g. IOC, FIFA, IRB, ICC, etc) reap profits without costs, while the host nations reap costs without profits.

Don't get me wrong. I am quite happy South Africa hosted the event. I am not sure why they felt the need to build so many new stadia, when they already had enough World-Cup-level stadia to have hosted the event long before they decided to apply for the hosting privilege. And as I have said above, this sort of thinking is not strictly "African".

One thing I have never understood about the United States is how cities that are struggling with debts and poor social services nevertheless decided to build multi-billion dollar stadia and then hand over ownership entirely and for free (!) to professional sports franchises that could afford to build their own stadium. They do not sell it or allowing the team to use municipal property on contract. No, they give it away like a Christmas or Sallah gift; it is now the property of the franchise which gains a massive new asset on its balance sheet without paying a kobo for it. I lived in Washington DC at a time when the city was closing down hospitals that catered to the poor because of budget difficulties, and when the city's public schools were acknowledged to be abysmal, yet the city was talking about using its money to build a stadium for a baseball team. It didn't make sense.

The strange thing is we the people then complain profusely because our governments fail to deliver those substantively more important things that have a more substantively more significant effect on our substantive quality of living.

It is a paradox.