Petrol is toast and so are you

If you’re still on Fela’s legendary trail of saving under your pillow, inside your cupboard or in the cesspit just to buy a Tokunbo, you have less than ten years to fulfil your dreams. Between 2025 and 2040, nearly every country worth the appellation is banning the manufacture, sale and use of diesel and petrol cars.

Coal, the fuel that fired the industrial age largely sits in the museum of antiquity and petrol and diesel are about to join it. But come on, if we let the so-called developed world scare us, the fright of their new findings would send us en-masse rushing into the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific Ocean. Perhaps, we of the non-developed world need to rally behind Donald Trump. He is the only big league player unfazed about burning the earth rather than cooling it, all others have made commitments to postpone the fire of hell. 

But Trump is a drowning man. Whether he stands or falls anyone using his rain to plant would harvest nothing. Trump may be eyeing his few dollars from burning the earth, but America has not been sleeping, whenever they pick up the race it is certain they would leave us with junkloads of antiquated steel and aluminium and a huge debt for living just to pollute the environment.

 In the past three decades, the developed world has been researching into alternatives to fossil fuel. Now virtually all of them are committed to the ban on fossil fuel-driven vehicles in the next twenty years. That’s bad news for every pipe dreamer either from the Naija-Delta, Biafra or Fani Kayode’s Oduduwa republic. Gentlemen and clowns – oil is toast!

But then, aren’t Africans and the rest of the hoi polloi at the mercy of the developed world? Imagine the anger in me when I read somewhere that okra causes infertility. We have been eating okra before Mungo Park and Ekiti is still leading the world in birthing twins. Nobody has released the research findings into noodles sold to Africans without a single nutritional value except that the packaged sachet is a precursor of appendicitis. None on the foreign drinks favoured by our children that would give them diabetes before they reach the age of thirty and kill most of them before they’re 50 – avoidable deaths that would be attributed to witches and wizards. The peddlers of these foreign poisons have freely advertised their products in schools, and sell them in lethal doses or packages while their home governments are mopping them up. Here, their signposts dot every village luring our children to abandon healthy natural meals for their slow poison. 

Just like junk food, our hearts and lungs have been pumped with the pollutants from petrol and diesel engines. Every exhaust pipe pollutes anything it comes into contact with. Having been exposed to them over the years, our skin tissues have been damaged while breathing them in at every stage has altered our heart, lung and brain functions leading to the incredible rise in all forms of cancer. The residues they leave on our farmlands, have transformed oxygen into poisonous gas, killed crops and trees and led to the phenomenon known as global warming. 

Only last week, scientists warned that the entire Asia might be rendered uninhabitable by the turn of the next two decades. That is why they are taking urgent steps to secure their own future. Africans on the other hand are busy assassinating political opponents to fit despots into perpetuity and plunging their nations into needless wars and civil strife.

The average poor man and his government are not listening to the latest findings. The OPEC cartel that unites us has known about this impending doom for decades but did nothing. A few members have rushed to plan and develop ahead of doomsday. The rest play Father Christmas with their earnings, writing fat checks into budgets that are stolen blind every year and featuring white elephant projects that are abandoned after huge mobilization fees have been collected.

Imagine the amount of pollutants the average man ingests at peak hours of the morning, during afternoon school runs and after the close of day. When was the last time you walked a short distance without your neighbour asking if something has happened to your car? Ask any doctor about the rise in the number of cases of asthma, bronchitis, rhinitis, and other allergies; lung diseases, throat cancer, that our hospitals are not equipped to properly diagnose, manage or cure. But ask why a nation is twice embarrassed within a generation by the inability to treat the ailment of its highest political leaders at home and you hit the political hornet’s nest.

We might just be at the realisation of Pius Adesanmi’s prediction that one day those who are thinking about how to make the world a better place might leave the rest of us here, move en-masse to yonder planet yet return annually to collect rent from the rest of us. 

We could bemoan how we were walking naked, eating fresh fruits and every animal, bird or fish before they came and inducted us into their urban jungles with its whirling monsters that predispose us to sedentary diseases or we could start planning. If we start now, we won’t meet those who have already hit the target, but at least, we may be somewhere by the time the deadline is here. Or we could stop eating okra because we believe that the command – go ye and multiply – was exclusive to us. We could pump money into research and development, encourage inventors and look into climate friendly alternatives to mass transportation. We could play possum with these findings, but at our collective peril – what would it be?