A man in Nigeria has been jailed for storing human faeces outside his home. A public health scandal, you say? I say it is a metaphor for the collapse of civic virtue.
The Victorians understood this: a man’s home is his castle, but his front step is a public trust. In Lagos, as in Rome before the fall, the stench of decay rises not just from the streets but from a rotting social contract. The courts’ intervention is welcome, but it is a bandage on a gangrenous wound.
The real question is not why one man stored faeces, but why a society tolerates the erosion of basic norms. We have traded communal responsibility for individual liberty, and now we reap the harvest. The man is jailed; the system remains on probation.
Read on, if you can stand the smell.
