"For as long as our people are held hostage by controllable socio-economic forces, we cannot afford to be indifferent to the ravages of poverty in all its dimensions and ramifications"
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Hostage is the tell: a word that turns economics into captivity, and policy into rescue. Babangida’s line is engineered to make poverty feel less like an unfortunate statistic and more like an urgent security threat. By framing socio-economic forces as “controllable,” he slips in a crucial promise: deprivation isn’t fate, it’s management. Someone can turn the dials. Someone has been choosing not to.
That’s the subtextual pivot. “We cannot afford to be indifferent” sounds like moral awakening, but it also reads as political insulation. Indifference becomes the enemy, not the architects of the system. The sentence distributes responsibility across “we” and “our people,” a rhetorically inclusive gesture that softens the question of who, exactly, benefits from those controllable forces. It’s a classic statesman’s move: speak in the language of collective duty while keeping culpability diffuse.
Context matters. Babangida is inseparable from Nigeria’s era of military governance and the economic upheavals of the 1980s and early 1990s, when structural adjustment, austerity, and corruption accusations shaped everyday life. In that setting, “poverty in all its dimensions and ramifications” functions like bureaucratic thunder: expansive enough to acknowledge suffering, elastic enough to avoid naming specific policies, actors, or institutions.
The line works because it fuses compassion with command-and-control logic. Poverty is cast as both moral crisis and governable problem, implying that legitimacy flows to the leaders who claim the tools to “control” the forces. It’s empathy with a leash: an appeal to conscience that quietly reasserts the state’s authority as the only plausible liberator.
That’s the subtextual pivot. “We cannot afford to be indifferent” sounds like moral awakening, but it also reads as political insulation. Indifference becomes the enemy, not the architects of the system. The sentence distributes responsibility across “we” and “our people,” a rhetorically inclusive gesture that softens the question of who, exactly, benefits from those controllable forces. It’s a classic statesman’s move: speak in the language of collective duty while keeping culpability diffuse.
Context matters. Babangida is inseparable from Nigeria’s era of military governance and the economic upheavals of the 1980s and early 1990s, when structural adjustment, austerity, and corruption accusations shaped everyday life. In that setting, “poverty in all its dimensions and ramifications” functions like bureaucratic thunder: expansive enough to acknowledge suffering, elastic enough to avoid naming specific policies, actors, or institutions.
The line works because it fuses compassion with command-and-control logic. Poverty is cast as both moral crisis and governable problem, implying that legitimacy flows to the leaders who claim the tools to “control” the forces. It’s empathy with a leash: an appeal to conscience that quietly reasserts the state’s authority as the only plausible liberator.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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