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Behold, This Cannibal In Our Midst! BY Late June last year, I published an essay in a number of Nigerian newspapers entitled: "The 17 Billion Poison House In Ibadan". The piece was my own way of pouring out my spilling disgust and matching indignation at reports in the media earlier late in April that permission had been granted "a leading cigarette company" called British America Tobacco (BAT) to invest a "whopping $150 million (about 17 billion naira)" in the construction of a tobacco factory on a 26-hectares green field site in Ibadan, "the biggest and most modern" of its kind in Africa, which would offer employment to 1,000 Nigerians.
Expectedly, the article aroused immense interest, and in fact was rewarded with an unimaginably wide circulation. Thanks to All Africa Global Media (allAfrica.com), the article was widely circulated on the Internet in several forms. Then, another internet media outlet, TOBACCO.ORG, adopted it and posted it on their website as one of the prominent and incisive anti-tobacco essays of our time. And through them again, the article became even more accessible to Internet users around the world. Also, in the United Sates, two Houston based newspapers, "USAfrica,The Newspaper" and The Black Business Journal re-published the piece. It was equally on NigeriaCentral.com and USAfricaonline.com.
Again, it was circulated and discussed at several Internet fora. I have also got a letter from an attorney in Houston requesting more information on the activities of this British America Tobacco and their fellow poison producers in Nigeria so he could commence legal action against them in order! to force them and their lethal business out of Nigeria. Since the publication was made, I have been amazed at the panic reaction of this company called British America Tobacco in Nigeria. They immediately mounted an unprecedented image-packaging blitz that surely sent many Nigerian newspaper and magazine publishers smiling to the banks.
I saw this as nothing but a huge, shameless bribe from a smiling, gentle, but ruthless murderer to his victims in order for them to allow him to live among them so he could strike when the victims least expected. Every other day, in almost every Nigerian newspaper, this tobacco giant, BAT, would take several pages of full colour adverts to splash their exasperatingly, hollow and fallacious messages, persuading us to allow them to exist in our neighbourhood, from where they would be poisoning and killing us slowly. I have waited in vain for BAT to tell me that tobacco is no more the resilient, implacable, silent killer, the lethal poison, and the heartless cannibal that seeks accommodation in the m! idst of hapless humanity with the sole intention of effecting their eventual decimation. I wish to commend the deep concern and sensitivity of the Federal Ministry Of Health which has been shouting the warning that TOBACCO SMOKERS ARE LIABLE TO DIE YOUNG.
The implication of this statement is simple: If anyone offers you a cigarette, such a person is only informing you that the best wish he could possibly make to you is that your life be cut short! He is just telling you: May you die young! And that is exactly what BAT and those backing it are wishing Nigerians. And by extension, that is what General Olusegun Obasanjo who celebratingly allowed BAT into Nigerian is wishing Nigerians. Thank God, Lam Adesina, has been voted out. If his successor continues to allow BAT to exist in Ibadan, he will sooner be impeached. Lam Adesina overlooked my warning in my previous essay.
Now it has happened has happened as I told him. BAT has changed tactics and launched what they call "Proudly Nigerian" with which they "celebrate" how Nigeria has achieved an unprecedented feat by inventing the talking drums! And with their famed bottomless pocket, acquired through many blood-stained years of dispatching men and women to their early graves, BAT can still afford to go on seducing and hypnotizing our media into looking away form their deadly presence, while they quietly roll out their poisonous wraps of cigarettes through which they most generously distribute devouring cancer, tuberculosis, sundry terminal lung and heart disease, etc., like a sadistic Father Christmas.
The question is: Is tobacco still the silent, merciless killer that finishes off its victim with amazing exactitude and precision? The answer is obvious, and it is YES! No doubt, among the numerous advertisements of products and services which jostle for spaces on our television screens, radio broadcasts, newspaper pages, billboards, and all other forms of mass information outlet, those of cigarettes seem, in my view, to have attained the scary distinction of being among the most alluring. The pleasant pictures of vivacious achievers smiling home with glittering laurels just because they are hooked to a particular brand of cigarette which are beamed into our homes by the various television channels every other minute are very hard to resist.
The evidence of their pernicious impact could readily be seen in the alarming haste and awful rapidity at which many youths adopt with unparalleled glee these cigarette adverts stars as their most cherished heroes and models. I was a victim too. As a youth, the elegant, gallant, athletic rodeo man whose image marketed the 555 brand of cigarette was my best idea of a handsome, hard-working winner. My friends and I admired him, carried his photographs about, and yearned to smoke 555 in order to grow up and become energetic and vivacious like him.
One wonders how many youths that have been terminally impaired because they went beyond mere fantasies or obsession with their cigarette heroes and became chain-smokers and irredeemable addicts. Managers of tobacco adverts are so adept in this grand art of monumental deception that their victims never suspect any harm until they have willingly placed their heads on the slaughter slab. Plying the way of truth then will demand that we are all told the ultimate, gory destination of all smokers. A very beautiful cigarette advert which at best could be regarded as a perfect equivalent of a very neat and attractively-turned out beckoning HIV-positive lady labours so hard to ensure that the intending victim never gets to suspect that he or she is being lured on to sit on a keg of gun powder or embrace a live cobra until he or she crosses the borderline.
Indeed, only very few are able to look beyond the meretricious pictures and the pernicious pomp of cigarette promotional stunt and see the blood-curdling pictures of piecemeally ruined lungs and other sensitive organs, murky, chimney-like breath tracts and heart region, the looming merciless and spine-chilling fangs of an all devouring cancer, tuberculosis, sundry lung and heart diseases, and their associate unyielding killers. The warm reception given to BAT in Nigeria by both the Federal and Oyo State governments is nothing but criminal, ungodly and anti-people.
I learnt that BAT paid over two billion-naira tax in 2001. This may have seduced and deceived our usually hare-brained rulers into thinking that the monster they are welcoming into our midst has since shed its fangs and lost its capacity to devour. And instead of quietly moving about in Nigeria as his unhealthy occupation should demand, the BAT boss moves with fanfare and ostentation, making indecent noise about how he has been so kind to come in with his "manna" to do Nigeria an immense good. During their well-reported commissioning ceremony in Ibadan the other day, after being showered with gratuitous and obsequious praises by our own government functionaries including out-going Gov. Lam Adesina of Oyo State, the BAT boss crowed: "The multi-million dollar investment will create 1000 direct jobs for Nigerians. In addition, the project will create innumerable indirect employment that would mop up the army of unemployed youths in the country." Am I expected to applaud this too?
Indeed, it is left to the Nigerian people to decide whether they would continue to suffer this conceited fellow as he glories about with in his intentionally and fatally contaminated wares, making silly promises. Let him return to his own country and make such glib statements and see if he would not be stoned. Cigarettes contain dangerous substance that kill, I mean, that murder and slay their hapless victims. The development in the United States on June 7, 2001 where a Los Angeles Superior Court in California slapped an unprecedented $3 Billion in damages on Phillip Morris, another giant Tobacco Company in response to a suit by a tobacco casualty, Richard Boeken, who had developed incurable cancer of the brain and lungs after smoking two packs of Marlboro cigarettes every day for 40 years is quite instructive.
According to the New York Post editorial of June 9, 2001, 56 year old Boeken who began smoking as a teenager in 1957 claimed that "he continued smoking not because it! was addictive, but he believed claims by Tobacco Companies that smoking was safe" He told reporters in a post-trial interview: " I didn’t believe they would lie about the facts that they were putting out on television and radio" That is exactly the point. Tobacco companies are using well concocted lies to lure people into taking their fatally poisoned wraps called cigarettes.
Their billboard adverts present vivacious winners and achievers puffing away, not cancer patients treading the cold, dark, lonely path to a most painful, piecemeal death. And with this, they entrap and lure to early graves unsuspecting youths and undiscerning adults. They are masters of the game of deception, gradually and carefully luring their victims to the slaughter slab. Every society has a responsibility to defend its unwary and the ignorant. Nigeria cannot be an exception. In civilized climes, Tobacco Companies and their owners are being isolated and choked with harsh laws. Now, they have invaded Nigeria with their filthy billions. Tobacco is a killer. So are its manufacturers. Nigerians should rise and resist this cannibal in our midst. Ibadan is not new to tobacco projects and scandals. There was a company called Nigeria Tobacco Company (NTC) in Ibadan.
It became so prominent that it got some emblems to its name: today we still have NTC Road (about the most popular street in Ibadan), NTC Play Ground, etc. But like all things evil and insidious, the choking power of the ill-wish of men of decent will killed the company and its evil business. In shame, they crept away from Ibadan. I do not know whether the company’s vestiges in Kaduna could still be found or has that also met with a much-deserved death? Its premises in Ibadan was auctioned off and the Oyo State government bought everything off. Its Play-Ground has equally been bought off by Churches and instead of the place again being a ground for the manufacture of the agents of death, the gospel of life now issues forth from there.
Now with this grand entry of British American Tobacco, is the Oyo State Government giving a hint that he may soon revitalize the NTC plant and re-commence production of cigarettes? Oyo State people have a right to stand up to their State Governor and demand to know why it has admitted these unrepentant merchants of death into Ibadan. The potential victim of their unhealthy menu might be your son, your daughter, your father, your uncle or your nephew or niece. Once the poison of this tobacco house is allowed to be unleashed, there could be no limits as to its cancerous impact.
Imagine your loved one pinning away on his or her sick bed just because, with his or her money, he or she had patronized a tobacco outfit. The other time, there were reports in some foreign media about how tobacco companies, being confronted with a growing hostile environment at home because of the high costs in human life they have continued to incur for their countries have chosen to seek a fresh haven in Africa. Nigeria was specifically singled out as a prized target. They would invade here with tantalizing promotional blitz and entrap everyone that strays onto their blood-stained path. Of course the validity of the report was sufficiently vindicated when cigarette companies began to exhibit the dubious generosity of sponsoring sporting events, like the English Premier League, on television.
Then Benson and Hedges began their Golden Tones, targeted at "discovering young musicians" from Nigeria. As if there are no young musicians to be discovered in Britain and America? When a ban was clamped on tobacco companies engaging in such ruinous ventures, uninformed commentators began to complain that the only people! that were kind enough to dissipate their energies and resources "discovering" and "promoting" our budding artists were being prevented from doing so, thereby stagnating the growth of the industry. Well, any industry whose growth depends on the conversion of most Nigerians to cigarette-addicts should better die quickly, and never resurrect. We are better off without it.
These naive cheer-leaders of the insidious trade conveniently forget that at such shows, cigarettes are freely distributed and many unwary youths and even adults are lured on and initiated into the cult of smokers. Many have died from the aftermath of such encounters. Should we swallow a bait and have a lethal hook thrust in our throats just because the bait looked so appealingly delicious? So, I have no doubt that the verdict of all sane Nigerians is that General Olusegun Obasanjo and the Oyo State Governor should ask their tobacco friends to leave Nigeria immediately or be forced out by a mass action! They are unwelcome. They are enemies. They are ruiners and killers. We can do without their so-called employment opportunities for 1,000 Nigerians, many of whom would sooner become sick and sickly, and even die because of their constant inhalation of poisonous tobacco fumes. These people are no lovers of Nigeria and Nigerians. They are here to cart away bags of money at the expense of our lives. Nigerians are by this article being urged to institute a series of law suits against General Olusegun Obasanjo, the Governor in Ibadan and the tobacco men.
The company they have set up constitutes a flagrant breach of our right to an unendangered life and existence. We should take a cue from what is happening in Western countries where families whose loved ones were killed by tobacco-caused illnesses have taken the devilish companies to court. Many of them have been made to pay millions of dollars as out of court compensations to the petitioners. And the courts are also awarding sentences against these companies. It is also true that many of the directors of these companies have had to admit in the open, or while in court or at other fora of public inquiry that they are sufficiently aware that their products are very harmful and could shorten people’s lives.
Note that it is a fact that many tobacco company workers abhor their products: yes, they do not smoke. The view that people are merely exercising their free will when they choose to smoke does not hold water. Many people do not know what is good for them and so, sometimes, manifest the predilection to give free rein to the Id which suppresses the higher moderating influences of the Ego in them, according to the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. That is why the organized society as the Super Ego comes in to beat such derailing people back into line and save them from themselves. If this were not so, then, suicide should have been allowed as a perfect expression of one’s free will. If someone kept his bayonet in your custody and then comes to take it back after he has been medically confirmed to be insane, would you respect his free will to use what belongs to him and surrender the bayonet to him?
What are we really saying? What is the point of convergence or departure between the unhindered exercise of one’s freedom and society’s redeeming and/or moderating influence in the event ! of undiscerned danger looming over the individual? It is clear that tobacco is becoming more and more unpopular by the day. Whatever taxes and duties they pay to the government is akin to a man paying you to rape your daughter. We can do without those monies. Let them just go. Ditto for all other tobacco companies. They are unwanted, loathsome and unwelcome. What they manufacture has no single benefit, no redeeming feature. All it does is to kill and ruin. April 2003
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