RE-LEARNING SOCIAL INJUSTICE (JUSTICE)

Social Justice is a word I first picked from public space. Typically used by a lot of public commentators in the media within our clime. Most of them just assume the listening public understands the meaning. So they often hardly define or explain the word. You could look it up for various dictionaries definition.

I will do more to simplify its explanation by basic illustration. Particularly to explain it as; INJUSTICE so that we see more need for functional Justice in every sane society, to ensure law and order, peace and productive progress.

Clearly, we can’t get a perfect society in present human world: Imperfect Human Justice in mind here now. However, we would destroy ourselves, our civilization and our society/societies where injustice reign supreme.

Now, a very glaring illustration of Social Injustice to us around here is UNDESERVED WEALTH.

Illicit Wealth obtained by deliberately depriving others from a Common Wealth (A Wealth Everyone is Expected to Share From).

Typical is public funds meant to pay salaries and allowances, provide and maintain essential social amenities like roads, water supply, electricity, hospitals and education. When due to weak or dysfunctional and compromised public resource management systems and processes; a rising number of such people illicitly appropriate public resources to own self, at the expense of the public needs: such ones become materially wealthy with filthy lucre and the public becomes more impoverished because from their little productive earnings, a chunk of it will be expended to offset the extra cost of public service that would have been provided for from the Common Societal Wealth. This situation puts such ones in UNDESERVED POVERTY. Just like the former was UNDESERVED WEALTH.

Therein lies the POVERTY CYCLE which is very prevalent in our societies today and a big bane to productive and real progress in our continent in particular. (That partly explains why we have an increasing number and large mass of economically poor people around the African Continent).

A completely uneducated person (societally discouraged and deprived) for example, has a very high probability of being economically poor and remains stuck in it.

Where quality services cant be gotten in our public schools, hospitals and other public services institutions, those that desire such quality services for own self (good education and healthcare in particular) resort to using almost all own income to meet their personal need. The society failed to provide and meet these needs, as much as possible (thanks, mainly to individuals who be come wealthy by depriving others), THE PUBLIC GETS MORE AND MORE IMPOVERISHED. Individual income used to augment the failure of the society would have been used for more productive economic investments, which would have bolstered the collective economy of that society.

This is just one livid example of Social Injustice. Others abound with focus on ineffective and inefficient Rule of Law, RoL Institutions (Police, Courts, Prisons and others), particularly where peoples rights are trampled upon or violated by others. The seeming weak one/s left to live with the injustice or resort to self help or crude/cruel retributive justice options more often laced with violence or extreme violence as witnessed severally in our immediate and larger societies today. The society is left to wastefully expend own resources to manage such violent and extreme violent situations, at the expense of more societal development needs.

I highlight all these because we all need to deliberately raise more Transition People to breakaway from the seeming societally accepted norms of accepting our social injustice. "After all, there is nothing I can do about it." Who Says? Be a Transition Person also. Breakaway from the norm. Become wealthy for instance, not by evil depriving others. (Read up more about Transition People).

We also need to teach and inculcate in our youngsters and Generation Next, formally in schools and informally in our homes; the values of Social Justice above Social Injustice.

WE ALL GET THE SOCIETY WE ALL DELIBERATELY WORK FOR TO ATTAIN OR NOT; replete with justice or injustice and its attendant consequences, products and by-products.

It's in our Collective Hands.

Oluwajuwonlo George

Social Commentator/Security Expert