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This profound piece by Arundhati Roy casts the pandemic as a portal that illuminates how we live now and offers a possible way to something better. It also chimes with thoughts I've been having about a book I wrote years ago on Nigeria #thread 
https://on.ft.com/34iKOF6 (1/12)
https://on.ft.com/34iKOF6 (1/12)
In A Swamp Full of Dollars, published in 2009, I looked at how the fossil fuel-focused economy in Africa's most populous country was also a revealing window into the Western way of life. https://amzn.to/3bWvMXV (2/12)
My main focus was the dark story of the countryâs oil and foreign complicity in its misuse, but I also explored the fundamental fragility of many things some of the worldâs comfortably-off take for granted. (3/12)
The sudden lockdown-era appreciation for societyâs reliance on people in low-paid and mostly unsung jobs is welcome - but the fact that this is often presented as revelatory is revealing. (4/12)
A striking quality of my times in Lagos in the early to mid-2000s was the constant awareness my utter dependence I had on a vast network of people who made my daily life function. (5/12)
They ranged from suppliers of generator fuel and water, to the young man who arrived each morning doused in sweat, armed with a copy of the Financial Times secured from the overnight flight from London. (6/12)
The people who supported me also confronted me daily with the basic insecurity of life for a big majority of Nigerians, short of money for medical treatment, school fees or needy older relatives living far from the city. (7/12)
I tried to summarise this vast network of mutual reliance and need in the extract here. (8/12)
An even more fundamental lesson I drew from Nigeria was that the oil-fuelled international capitalism stretching from the Niger Delta to the corporate boardrooms of Europe was unsustainable, because of its indifference to injustice, inequality and environmental collapse. (9/12)
As I wrote in this second extract, the abuses of power and exploitation I saw in Nigeria were âmore open, more blatant and, in a strange way, more honestâ than the more prettified versions on which Western societies have long been built. (10/12)
(11/13)
The present international crisis has been coming for a long time, even if the pandemic itself was an unpredictable proximate cause. The banking meltdown of 2008 caused great suffering for many, yet in retrospect what is surprising is not how much it altered but how little.(12/13)
In the years since I wrote my book, both Nigeria and the wider world have in some senses changed much â but the spirit of these core observations appears to me as true as ever. Now is surely the time to act on them. (13/13)
