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It’s not surprising
that Chilean President Sebastían Piñera made sure that he was on hand
to welcome the first of the 33 miners who had been trapped at the San
Jose mine since the 5th of August, back to the world, or that he stayed
at the mine in the remote town of Copiapo which is over 700 km from his
working base in the capital, Santiago, throughout the entire day and a
half that the rescue operation took. The entire episode has been
tremendously positive for the image of Chile and the Chilean people.

Comparisons, though
perhaps odious, are inevitable, nor is it only in Nigeria that the
results are unflattering to the home team.

In Mexico they are
cracking sour jokes along the ‘if-the-miners-had-been-Mexicans’ line
(the tunnel would have come out in the United States of America).

In the United
States of America Barack Obama, with his frequent visits to Louisiana
and tough talk during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill never played a
fraction as well as his Chilean counterpart. Obama’s government was
content to leave the matter for BP to sort out until public opinion
forced a more proactive response. By contrast, even though it sought
and received advice and assistance from all over the world, Piñera’s
government was clearly in charge of the rescue effort from the outset.

Disasters, whether
natural or man-made, are an inevitable fact of our human lives on
mother earth, but government reactions vary. In Hungary for example,
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is fully alive to the toxic effect of
environmental disaster on political careers, is threatening “the
toughest possible consequences” for those responsible for the tide of
toxic red sludge that burst out of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar plant on the
7th of this month.

Here at home, the
disaster of the day has been floods from Sokoto in the north to Ogun
and Lagos in the south. President Goodluck Jonathan has made a point of
turning up in Sokoto along with relief materials for flood victims.
There has been none of that “I don’t need to be here” arrogance with
which former President Olusegun Obasanjo rebuffed displaced Lagosians
during his visit to the site of the Ikeja Cantonment explosions in
January 2002: Jonathan is running for election as President and needs
not only to counter the ‘Ijaw mafia’ tone that keeps leaking out from
those around him, but also to highlight the contrast between himself as
the father of the entire nation and the parochial and sectional
presentation of the ‘Gang of Four’ northern Peoples Democratic Party
candidates: Atiku Abubakar, Ibrahim Babangida, Aliyu Gusau and Bukola
Saraki.

But although it’s
not only in Chile that mining activity carries risks, or in Hungary
that industrial processes have deadly side effects, apparently it’s not
all disasters that a presidential candidate wants to be associated
with. That might explain why it has been left to the United Nations to
raise the alarm about the lead poisoning deaths of over 400 children in
Zamfara State, where alluvial gold mining is taking place in lead
contaminated areas. In that tragedy there is nothing to ‘fly in to’ –
just another mark of the failure of the Nigerian state at the basic,
boring, regulation of potentially dangerous industries.

When ‘rich alhajis’
are reaping while ‘poor mallams’ risk their health to mine the gold,
perhaps making too much noise would risk stepping on political toes in
an area where those running for office need local friends and
supporters. The thread of lax government oversight runs through many of
the recent man-made disasters: the oil industry in the US was obviously
getting away with the sort of grossly negligent attitude towards
compliance with safety standards for which it is famous (and
unsanctioned) in Nigeria, and the same might be said of Chilean mine
owners and Hungarian aluminium producers. But in those countries
governments have been loud in their promises of future stringent
regulation. Here, it may not be clear to informal miners in Zamfara
State that their governments even care that there is a problem!

Like the people of
Nigeria, Chileans have had their time under the military jackboot,
ushered in on their own “9/11” when the democratically elected
government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in by Augusto Pinochet in
a 1973 coup supported by the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency. But
while for us, military dictatorship only set the country back and
hindered our progress in every way, Chile has at least emerged with
something to show for the years of human rights abuse and harsh
measures advocated by Pinochet’s “Chicago Boys”. Despite the resulting
slump in wages and high unemployment, Chile achieved such sustained
economic growth that today it is considered a ‘middle income’ country.
The miners and people of Chile deserve their accolades. It used to be a
standard joke in media circles that the dullest newspaper headline ever
written was: “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.”

Times change. The 2010 version is: “Mine roof collapse in Chile.
None dead.” It’s a headline that brought the whole world to a halt with
tears of joy.