The Egyptians have not failed to fascinate me. Since the days of Joseph the dreamer who was sold into slavery by his envious brothers up to October, 1977 when I visited the land of Pharaoh on official sporting engagement, Egypt had been a place to be. However, because of the limited time I had (a week or so), I could not explore the City of Cairo (the largest City in Africa with a population of 12m) to the fullest.
Through Joseph, Egypt saved the world from hunger because it values lives. Joseph’s story is a very familiar one being told and retold until the present day. Through a dream, Joseph foresaw that his parents and brothers would bow before him. That was the revelation that landed him in servitude. His brothers even wanted to kill him and, by implication, his dream.
Joseph was an upright, disciplined and morally sound young man. Those values landed him in prison but it was a journey towards the actualisation of his dream. Joseph had refused to bed the wife of Potiphar, the commander of the army of Egypt, who tried to seduce him. The woman could not accommodate the rejection. So, she framed Joseph up and that earned him a ticket to the dungeon.
One morning, the king of Egypt or Pharaoh, woke up with some disturbing dreams. The king saw himself by the riverside. He beheld seven well-fatted cows feeding in a meadow. Suddenly, seven lean-fleshed cows looking like those infested with rinderpest emerged and consumed the fat cows and remained lean. The king had another dream in the same night in which he sighted seven ears of corn that looked robust. Then, seven other lean ears of corn manifested, devoured the obese ears of corn and remained unchanged.
Pharaoh was deeply troubled. At the crack of dawn, he summoned all the magicians and wise men in his kingdom to his palace and rendered the bizarre imaginings to them. But none of them was able to interpret the dreams. However, Pharaoh’s butler who had had an encounter with Joseph in the prison told the king about him. He was instantly rushed to the palace and after hearing the dreams, he gave the interpretations: The seven fat cows and seven robust ears of corn represented a period of seven years of abundance, while their devouring by the skinny cows and lean ears of corn symbolised seven years of famine that would follow. So, Joseph advised Pharaoh to store foodstuffs during the plenteous years that his people would fall back on during the eventual scarcity. The king saw wisdom in Joseph’s interpretation and appointed him as his deputy to take charge of the economy of the land.
Pharaoh’s bizarre dreams soon came to pass. And while other nations wallowed in scarcity, Egypt weltered in profusion for the period that the food crisis lasted. Joseph’s brothers also heard about the food glut in Egypt. They came to have a feel and eventually worshipped Joseph in fulfillment of his (ambitious) dream.
Modern-day Nigeria and the Biblical Egypt had two things in common when we hit crude oil in commercial quantity at Oloibiri, located in Bayelsa in the early 50s. Gradually, more discoveries were made and by the 70s, the nation wallowed in superabundance. But rather than store the enormous wealth in the manner that Joseph amassed foodstuffs in the season of plenty, our successive rulers and their ilk, so clueless and insensitive to the plight of the masses, squandered the riches through the instrumentality of corruption and barefaced theft. Today, we are paying for not making hay while the sun shone!
What actually prompted this recall about Egypt was the resignation of the Minister of Transportation, Mr. Hisham Arafat, simply because of a train disaster that claimed the lives of 25 passengers, while scores were injured on Wednesday, February 27, 2019.
According to reports, a rail car crashed into a barrier at Cairo’s main train station at high speed causing its fuel tank to explode and triggering a huge fire. The explosion and the fire reportedly blasted through the people on the platform in the busy Ramses Station in downtown Cairo. A surveillance video showed the moment the rail car barreled past men and women walking by and momentarily translating them to victims racing in different directions with fire all over them.
It was not immediately clear if the rail car had a driver at the time of the crash or it was just a runaway machine on a mission to destroy innocent lives. One Ashraf Montaz, a general railway inspector, told The Associated Press that it “takes time for a rail car to gather speed, so there is a chance that someone set it on full speed before leaving.” He insisted that the accident signaled negligence from the driver and supervisor.
The Egyptian Prime Minister, Mustafa Madbouli, accepted Mr. Arafat’s resignation. When the news of the rail disaster hit the airwaves, I felt really sad about it. But what shocked me most was the resignation of the transportation minister who was not directly responsible for the tragedy. All the same, he took responsibility for the disaster. But not in this country! What raced to my mind was the tragedy that took place during the recruitment exercise conducted by the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) on March 14, 2014 at various centres across the country. The exercise that took place at the National Stadium, Abuja claimed 16 lives, while several others were seriously injured. The advertisement attracted over 6.5m job-seekers in all the 36 states including the Federal Capital Territory to various recruitment centres when the NIS had only 5,000 vacancies. It fleeced the hapless job hunters who had no means of livelihood of N1,000 each, running into cool billions of naira. That was the ultimate goal.
The minister of interior whose ministry oversaw the NIS and was alleged to have floated a recruitment consultant that handled the exercise sat pretty in his office as if nothing happened. Calls by disgusted Nigerians for his sack or resignation sounded in his ears like a melodious song from the throat of the singing machine, 2face Idibia, who happens to be his kinsfolk. Right now, the man is rewarded with a senatorial seat in the 9th Senate.
Before the recruitment tragedy, planes were coming down like birds’ droppings in this country during the immediate past administration and no ministers deemed it fit to quit for failing in their responsibilities. If you dared to call for their heads for such reasons, their kinsfolk would carry placards to counter such calls, accusing those asking for their heads of tribalism, etc.
May God help us.
