The word has three meanings. It is the name the peddlers of the craft call scrap metals of any type that are useless to the owner and meant for disposal. It ranges from household utensils, electronics, replaced car and generator spare parts, air-conditioners, disused fridges and freezers or borehole pumps. Secondly, it is the name the buyers of such scraps are called. gates. The buyers, mostly from a particular section of Nigeria, move around with square barrows with two tyres calling out “iron condemn” while hitting a piece of iron against their barrows to attract the attention of residents. They tell residents that they are looking for iron-condemn to buy. Lastly, if you accost them and ask them what work they do, they gladly tell you it is iron-condemn. So, the word is at once a merchandise, a profession as well as the practitioners!
The iron-condemn plays a very useful role in the areas where they operate. Many middle class and poorer neighbourhoods would be cluttered today by scrap metals if not for these scavengers. They do not only evacuate such scraps, they also pay for them. Many gatemen and house-helps make a tidy sum from such sales. By channeling such metals to agents of metal smelting factories, they also provide cheap raw materials to such companies. But the actions of the bad eggs among them cause havoc where they operate, posing security and safety risks. Apart from stealing household items and manhole covers and drain grills, they damage expensive rail infrastructure.
The very daring ones even remove rail tracks, their steel sleepers and locknuts from sections of rail lines thereby causing derailment that puts hundreds of lives in danger. The iron-condemn and their collaborating buyers as well as the final smelting factories who know what these items are and yet buy and smelt them, deserve the most severe of penalties. Those involved in this evil value-chain should be easy to track, arrest and prosecute. The legislature ought to review the law to make the sanction commensurate with the offence.
What is the relationship between lootocrats and iron-condemn? Indeed, who are the lootocrats? They are those who go into public office and become millionaires and billionaires overnight. Looting of the people’s commonwealth is their own directive principle of state policy! Lootocrats and criminal iron-condemn are two sides of the same evil coin. Some procure substandard equipment and medications in order to get humongous kickbacks. Meanwhile, patients die or get ineffective treatment that makes the remainder of their lives a miserable grind. Others construct substandard roads that, within a couple of years, become death traps for the commuters they were meant to serve. A huge part of the budget is cornered.
What of those who have been fingered by the EFCC to have stolen billions of naira out of their state’s resources while children have no chairs to seat on in their leaking classrooms? Many of those children abandon schools and end up as touts, bandits, kidnappers. They make society less secure for everyone except those they cannot reach while airborne or are guarded with the people’s guns. Pensioners gnash their teeth and some die while awaiting their pensions that will never come. Meanwhile, the lootocrat buys a private jet to fly around, buys a primary election and goes back to the Abuja senatorial playground where the chess pieces are ghana-must-go bags. They go there, aye and nay and approve loan requests.
Please tell me the difference between a criminal iron-condemn and a lootocrat. They look the same to me. One wears well-cut suits or a well-starched babanriga; the other, a torn shirt with multi-coloured stitches in several places. But the evil deeds of both causes tears, pain and death. The lootocrat kills and purperises people today while stealing their tomorrow as well as he carefully plants his offspring in all the sumptuous tables left in order to ensure the perpetuation of his lootocratic legacy.
What lootocrats do not know, and may not correlate, is that those stolen millions, those unexecuted projects, that bad road that kill and maim breadwinners and cause deaths from burning fuel tankers, are consequences of his condemn-iron behaviours. The gun-wielding bandits and forest-based kidnap kingpins are those children he refused to train, whose school budget he drained. So are the many, who, as condemn-iron professionals, cause road crashes and derailed train accidents that kill many by the a hole covers and drain grills they steal. Because you refused to educate them, they misnamed condemned iron (scrap metal) as iron-condemn, just like the bridge-head area at Onitsha, which is now called head-bridge.
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