Chapter 19: Chapter 19

CHAPTER 16

It was such a large and insightful lecture, but Teju noticed that despite the detailed and vivid account of the oil boom and the downward trend of agriculture, the old man had not mentioned the efforts of the military to restore agriculture back to its former state, but which proved to be fruitless. He had read somewhere that two nationwide food campaigns were launched by the military at that time, called National Accelerated Food Production Programme in 1972 and the Operation Feed the Nation campaigns which commenced in 1976. The Land Use Decree of 1978 was also a praiseworthy effort to improve the agricultural sector, but all these measures failed drastically due to a foot-dragging implementation.

Teju imagined Agriculture as a monarch ousted in a bloody and pitiless coup, and taking flight into safety, masqueraded as a common man. All the efforts of Agriculture to get back with a counter-coup proved abortive; but his emissaries brought words to him from the country, telling him the nation has strangely plunged into a remarkable famine under the tyranny of Petroleum. And he envisioned Agriculture making a Triumphant Entry into the nation. However, he was riding on a white unicorn rather than an ass. He was swinging a flaming sword and having heads roll before him, rather than waving the hand and having palm fronds strewn before him.

In his mind's eye, he could see Agriculture sitting with splendour on the throne in his lime-coloured royal regalia. He was being crowned king with a gold crown, decked with bright-coloured garlands, and embossed with expensive beads, trinkets, and rings. He visualised that the country which was earlier covered up in black turned into a green meadow with plenty of food for its citizens. Yes, Teju saw the nation becoming the Canaan it once was, a land filled with milk and honey. However, it was frustrating that they were only the product of his thoughts and imaginations, perhaps a mere castle in Spain.

Lately, he had refrained from thinking about the woes which had plagued the nation. The woes of the country, if taken seriously, could sap one’s desire to be merry. But the old man’s words, as odd as they sounded, had plunged him with a deep thrust into a solicitous mood. He was a Senior Marketing Manager of an internationally reputable advertising firm, and he wondered what he could have done if he had woken up one day rather as the Senior Marketing Manager of a Commercial Farm to the foul-tasting famine in the country. He could not allow tears to escape his heavy eyes. He was a man, and the common citizens in whom he had taken pity had wept for long, and now they had no more tears to shed.

The old man also might have shed tears in all the seven years of bitter and prejudiced denial, and now the fountain of his tears had dried up. There was a saying that when one slave sees another slave cast into a low-dug grave, he should know that when it was time, he would be disposed of the same way, but Teju feared it might be worse. Teju wondered if a worse version of the fate that befell the old man could befall him probably after twenty to twenty-five years in service of a private-owned company, or what if he got fired along the way. He shivered at the thought as a frigid sensation played through his spine. The old man walked him down the garden where there was a running tap under a tangerine tree. He opened the tap and started to wash off the soil from the hoe. Teju had earlier offered to help but he had declined, saying mordantly, that gardening was not an office job.

“You know,” the old man began “I used to have a very close friend. He was a maverick. He had a dream of starting a radical movement and running for the presidency. Though, most times we disagree on different lines of thoughts and actions, there was one thing he had said that I agree strongly with even till today. ‘Just imagine’ he had said ‘if one of the universities in the country that occupied almost an innumerable hectares of land was converted into massive farmland. And the thousands of students admitted yearly are rather given a plot of land each to farm for four or five years- with supervision and guidance- in exchange for a degree; we would have enough to eat and to export in this country’. Of course, I agree with him, because what is the use of so many universities in the country when they cannot avert an economic crisis that would make feeding- the most basic need- almost improbable. They owe their lecturers, and the careers of so many lecturers are jeopardising with a lot of strikes, and not to talk of the effect it has on the students themselves. Only if wishes were realities, my friend would have done what he wished to do, but he was crushed under the weight of political plunderers who were more than pleased with the status quo” the old man said

“What happened to him?” Teju asked, curious

“Well, he was failed, unsupported and mocked several times. He decided to migrate to Europe en route the Sahara desert even with his poor health- he was asthmatic- and he died along the way” the old man replied, cavernousgrief wielding his voice.

Teju had grounds to believe that the old man -before he started to tend a garden- had spent most of his time grieving for his country and for himself after his retirement. He had probably started to maintain a garden in the hope that one day, he would have the chance to drag one of the ‘responsible’ men in the government to his garden, and tell him in simple and blunt language that one of the solutions to the problems of the country was the soil itself, not only what was beneath the soil, not only what destroys the soil. Though the old man’s ideas and statements were exaggerated and were underlined with caustic acerbity, Teju suddenly felt like doing something revolutionary. Like the old man’s close friend, he wanted to start his own radical movement, join or start a political party and run for the presidency. He wanted to make a change, not because he was truly concerned, but because he felt personally threatened for his family, and then for his unborn children.