Boreholes and High Fences: Monuments to Our Societal Failure & Dysfunction, By Wale Alonge

The debate on this COYN platform regarding the data on the distribution and proliferation of boreholes in our country is emblematic of—and a testament to—our systemic failures and retrogression. I remember vividly growing up in Ilesa, right opposite the iconic St. Margaret Girls Grammar School, with their beautiful girls dressed in perfectly ironed pinafores. I still wondered how they did that because most homes did not have electricity. We used pressing irons powered by charcoal. Yet even back then, there was a functioning pipe-borne public water tap where people came to fetch water. We all lined up orderly, taking our turn. Like most houses, we had a deep well that we used as a supplement. That well, by the way, is still there—and it has never run dry in a house built in 1954.

Installing public water infrastructure is far more cost-efficient and hygienically safer for delivering potable water to the community. Most boreholes in our residences are underutilized and stand as monuments to government and societal failure.

Sadly, we as citizens have accepted this anomaly as the norm. We provide virtually every service—from water to electricity, and sometimes even roads—as private services to our communities, rather than as the shared public goods they should be.

I have often wondered why, instead of constructing community perimeter fences, everyone builds their individual high fences—sometimes with electrified barbed wire—around their beautiful homes, creating not only a physical but also a psychological and social barrier that separates us from one another. Yes, insecurity is a concern, but it runs far deeper than the physical. It encompasses social and psychological insecurity. Even in well-secured gated communities, we still construct huge fences with electrocuting barbed wire. Yet, paradoxically, we are now more insecure than at any time in our lives.

Growing up, we played with neighborhood kids, learning and honing our social and communication skills. Today, we raise our children and grandchildren in isolated bubbles, detached from the real world and denied the real lessons of life—the resilience and toughness learned from interacting with people of different cultural, social, linguistic, and economic backgrounds. Growing up, I picked up the Urhobo language from my pretend “wife,” Dele Grace Odafiorere, with whom I have lost contact for over sixty years, yet the memories of our childhood games remain eternal and form an intricate part of my life. We all have our Dele Grace Odafioreres.

Those were truly great old days, filled with real joy. Though we didn’t have much, we had everything. The kind of virulent and visceral hatred we now harbor for one another, and for people of other ethnicities, was alien to us. Yoruba, Igbo, Urhobo, Igala, Hausa, and Ebira (Igbira) kids played together in a symphony of love, brotherhood, and sisterhood.

Take away the gadgets that enslave and isolate us give me back those days of exhilarating joy and love.