This is not a book review but a book announcement. Povertycracy: The Syndicate by US based Agbenu Ochoga is not exactly an oven hot text. It is already on Amazon.
And those who are on that reading route must have been savouring it the way wine connoisseurs go about it.
In terms of self-understanding, the text prefers being reckoned with as “a satirical anatomy of managed vulnerability”. But it is such a rhetorical blow on neoliberalism induced poverty that it deserves publicity in circles beyond Amazon, especially circles where NEPA is a signifier for neoliberal darkness rather than just another acronym.
It is a healing text, combining content and context in a hilarious delivery. Agbenu Ochoga delivers well aimed potshots on neoliberalism from summoning poverty in the opening pages to a mock interview to listen to atrocious confessions. It goes on down to the last of the 142 page text. It is the work of a radically rebellious but organised mind.
An author with Agbenu Ochoga’s imaginative fertility behind that book should not be in the US but back home in Nigeria to be part of the rescue army of thinkers and activists for a country declared by its collective of Catholic bishops to be bleeding. What about that?
