Beware of the scum behind hustling

BY OYUNGA PALA

Emmanuel Juma, that droning drawl of a voice behind NTV’s politicalsatire show Bull’s Eye, introduced me to MOHAs, the Movement of Hustlers and Sufferers. 

I rolled my eyes at first glance. MOHAs talking heads had several issues to protest about but their main beef was the job experience requirement that employers insist on. I could empathise with them on that point solely. For anyone fresh out of school, experience is like some bogeyman that stands in the way of earning a secure employment.

Hustling, historically, has been about breaking from tradition and upsetting the status quo in search of new and unexplored opportunity for profit. But what’s in a name you ask?

In the 1980s, Hustler was the title of a famous porn magazine published by the super sleazy Larry Flynt.

Sleazey

Hustler was considered a lot trashier than the tasteful erotica that graced the up market Playboy pages run by equally sleazy, Hugh Hefner, the original dirty old man.

Playboy passed off as an intellectual read with substance, but the main lure was the artistically photographed nude centerfold.

Hustler on the other hand, made no attempt at standards and bared it all.

The word hustler would evolve to find association with pimps who were glorified by blaxploitation movies that became trendy with the proliferation of videocassette recorders. In movies like Shaft, I encountered pimps and drug dealers who refined the smooth hustle into an art form that seduced audiences.

By the late 1990s, hustle had graduated to struggling to earn living because no one could survive with one job during the Nyayo era. As a college student, my side hustle was as a part time gym instructor and newspaper contributor. It produced barely enough to cover my basic needs with little spare change to afford my own drinks on the weekend.

For many of my ilk, the side hustle ended up becoming the main gig. At the heart of the hustle was the ethic of hard work, and eventually the experience of unemployment despite valid papers strengthening our resolve to succeed.

The consequence of not knowing the right people kept us on the sidelines hustling until it became a more lucrative fixture through patience and resolve.

During those formative years, suffering was something we learnt to endure with a smile on our faces. Our struggles for survival were captured aptly in a popular song by Nigerian Afrobeat maestro Fela Kuti that had this memorable line, “Every dey, my people, shuffering and shmilling, inside dey bus forty nine sitting, ninety nine standing… shuffering and shmiling”.

Everyone was suffering and smiling because suffering then was the shared African condition caused by systemic oppression.

The difference was no one overrated their suffering because no matter how deprived our present conditions, they were people doing far worse that we could ever imagine.

The glorification and entitlement sentiments behind hustling and suffering that seem to rule the airwaves lately stem from a political class that legitimised the ‘our turn to eat’ narrative. The Jubilee government needs to tone down the rhetoric and bluntly tell the country’s young and restless that there are no shortcuts to success.

But they probably won’t be listening because showy hustlers’ are hyped daily while good ol’ pride in earning an honest living is dismissed as failure and suffering.