By Dr. Chuks Osuji, OON
As many of my readers would testify, it has been my writing habit that whenever I have an interesting and challenging question from any of my readers, I like to share it with the reading public. Because according to Howard Ritz, “a knowledge shared is a knowledge distributed to the global audience.” Here is one such intriguing question from one of my admirers. Analyst see if you can attempt to analyze this question by trying to answer it for my benefit and benefit of members of the wider public particularly the Imo population: “who should be seen as a more decent person in the society: a politician or a prostitute?” in fact, when I received this in my mail, I did not jump into answering it. No, it took me a lot of reflections and thought. Because the inquirer must have been concerned over the behaviour of some politicians in the State via their reckless jumping from one political party to another or even to others. In fact, many people in this State nay Nigeria must have been concerned with the frequency and the rapidity with which our politicians jettison their parties for another.
First, the inquirer must have given this behavioral pattern a lot of thought before coming to compare politicians with prostitutes. Indeed this must have given him sleepless nights because he is a caring citizen.
But what is more interesting was how he chose to compare a politician with a prostitute. Certainly, this was not just accidental thought.
First of all, who is a prostitute? Properly defined, a prostitute is one with a modern decent name called, “commercial sex worker.” In fact, I first heard of this terminology in 1989 when as the then Director of MAMSER we organized the first National Seminar on HIV & AIDS at Nike Lake Hotel Enugu. To that seminar, HIV educators came from all over Nigeria. They included the then Minister of HEALTH Dr. Ramson Kuti, WHO and UNICEF representatives, commissioners for Health and Social Service from many states and indeed few representatives from the English Speaking countries of Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Gambia.
During one of the paper presentations, one HIV AIDS educator from Calabar brought along with her a young lady in her early thirties. The presenter introduced the lady, who was standing by her side on the podium, as “A Commercial Sex Worker” who does her business in Calabar. To the astonishment of the audience, the lady moved forward to tell her story how she operated her business as a commercial sex worker including how she had to force customers to use a condom, otherwise, she would “not service them.” The entire hall was dead silent as she did some demonstrations. The essence was to educate the people that “it is safer to do any business with a commercial sex worker with a condom and dangerous without a condom”.
As she narrated her conditions for her customers, she showed no iota of shame, she was not shy nor did her eyes blink. No, not at all. In fact, I recalled that the next day the then Frank Olize 9 pm news shocked the nation with this seeming episode on Nigerian Authority.
Therefore, a prostitute is a lady or woman who “markets sex to men for income.” Today, for many years, sex workers have formed associations in most of the East African countries and some of them pay taxes from their income.
On the other hand, a politician is one who engages in politics trying to support his party to capture power at any level: L.G.A, State or National Levels with the view of ruling the constituency for which he contested the election. functionally, politicians could be classified into three main categories: professional politicians, regular politicians and of course causal politicians. For more detailed definition and functions of these categories, see “Political Public Relations,” by yours truly.
According to one Nigerian journalist, “a politician is always a politician. He is ready to spring up a surprise at any time unexpectedly.” In fact, among professional politicians, there are those who do not change party colours at any given time. They are tenacious, reliable, focused and supportive of their chosen political party. Year after year they are still in that their chosen political party, come rain come sunshine.
On the other hand, there are many of them both professional and causal politicians who have come to make a constant change of political identity their prime stance. They stir crisis in their party, they pull out with so many adherents, and they enter a new party. More often they just go there to add a virus to that party in order to destabilize it. With heavy financial fortress, they hijack its structure and catapult themselves to the top from where they begin to call the shots. In the process, many would desert the group leaving behind a distorted political party.
Before the next round of elections, they would begin another round of upward or downward mobility to see what party they would pitch their tent in order to get nominations of their choice.
Perhaps this is the type of politician that my inquirer has in his mind which forced him to ask the question between prostitute and politicians, as to who is a more decent person in the society.
For example, if we look inside Imo state and what happened between last year during nomination primaries and the end of elections this year. Without difficulty, we could see that over 70 persons contested for the Governorship seat- the highest in living memory in any part of Africa. What a shame!. Of those who contested for the Governorship, with the exception of the PDP candidate, most others have changed political parties at least twice, thrice or even more. May be these are those my inquirer has in mind when he wrote.
But in response to his inquiry, I told him that there is no way he could compare a politician to a prostitute. A politician engages in the struggle to capture power. But the prostitute engages in an immoral business of marketing her body for income. However, I ameliorated my answer by telling him, one Igbo proverb which says, “If a man dresses like rat he will be pursued by a cat.” This explains the unusual comparism more vividly. I may be wrong. Do we blame the enquiry?
