Poverty or stupidity? - by Peaceee 🌸

Are we poor or just plain stupid? Are Nigerians really so poor that we have to scoop cooking oil from the roadside? 😭 I genuinely couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this news. I was bewildered. Yes, bewildered! WTH?! What do you mean a truck carrying groundnut oil overturned on a busy Lagos road, and people rushed to the scene to scoop up the oil from the road and drainages?!! When are we going to start thinking more carefully? When are we going to stop allowing poverty to cloud our judgement? When are we going to stop thinking only about what we can gain in the moment and start considering the consequences of our actions? Because let's be honest, not everyone who scooped that oil was necessarily going to consume it personally. Some might have intended to sell it. And if contaminated oil finds its way into shops and markets, do you understand the potential consequences? How easily could it end up in someone's kitchen without them knowing where it came from? Good Lord! 😭 You see, things like this make me wonder how much we consider the risks involved in our actions. Imagine consuming contaminated oil and developing a health problem. Beyond the fact that you could have avoided the risk in the first place, do we even have enough confidence in our healthcare system to feel comfortable taking such a gamble with our health? Now, let's not even go that far. Let's return to the scene of the incident. What happens when people see an opportunity like this? Everybody rushes towards it. People push, crowd around one another and scramble to collect as much as they can. What if someone falls? What if people topple over one another? What if someone hits their head or breaks an arm or leg in the process? Chai, God! 🫩 And here's another thing: groundnut oil is combustible under the right conditions. If an ignition source had set the spilled oil alight, the consequences could have been serious, especially with people gathered around the scene. I genuinely don't understand why anyone would willingly put themselves in that kind of danger over cooking oil. I understand that things are hard in this country. I understand that poverty can push people into making desperate decisions. But at what point do we acknowledge that some decisions are simply not worth the risk? Because being poor shouldn't mean we have to abandon common sense. And an opportunity isn't automatically a good one just because something is free. Perhaps the bigger problem is that, sometimes, the desire to gain something immediately makes us forget to consider what we stand to lose. May God deliver us. 🤧I couldn't find the image that provoked this thought in me (it showed people inside a drainage by this road packing the oil) so I just had to use the one I saw onlineBut please, tell me. Are we witnessing the effects of extreme poverty, a failure to think about the consequences of our actions, or a combination of both?

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