Touting For a Living?

From very humble background and origins, touting has graduated/translated from being an undignified occupation for the lowly unemployed folks to the attractive, juicy, lucrative and even executive dimension it has attained especially in some jobs/trades in contemporary Nigerian society.

A tout is someone who praises something/someone in order to persuade people that they are important or worth a lot for patronage like ticket touts, insurance touts, political touts loading/passenger touts, etc. Therefore touting is the art of introducing/selling goods or services to people passing on the streets or visiting a place. They buy tickets for concerts, sports, games, matches, airplanes, taxis/buses/coaches, hotels etc and sell them at exorbitant prices and smile home daily with the profits made. Touting is carried out everywhere especially at markets/shops, motor parks/stations, air/seaports, court premises, (by lawyers), churches (touts distribute tracts/pamphlet at the vicinity of some big churches to attract members/converts to their churches/or progammes.

At schools/higher institutions touts/or expo exponents operate confidently giving fake/or real questions to students and offering to write projects/exams for weak/lazy students, procuring fake admissions for students, even fake NYSC call up letters for graduating students/graduates. Others include touting for real estate agents/landlords.

Recently, especially since the return of party politics, political touts executively called Personal Assistants (PA's) have been having a field-day dancing appearances around big/popular politicians just to persuade voters to appreciate their candidates. Touting as mentioned above is mostly carried out by energetic young men and women, boys and girls some qualified like lawyers and majority largely not qualified and unemployed who eke out a living via touting. Why then is touting attractive? Touting is attractive for it requires little or no training (except in specialized fields like law), all that is needed is to declare interesting a particular job/trade and just get apprenticed to the senior or pay a token with some money or some bottles of beer and other alcoholics.

Touting provides gainful employment for a living to those who would otherwise have remained unemployed. Touting affords practitioners good money and wealth in the case of PA's to politicians who are really living big with massionettes, flashy cars and fat bank accounts. It affords them cheap popularity for it enables them to interact with personalities and crème-de-la-crème that patronize them like those touting for politicians, posh hotels and hospitality outfits.

Except in the motor parks, touts are almost always neat and well dressed for they got to look good and attractive to roundly convince their clients that they have what it takes. Just as touting is attractive, it also has its otherness/disadvantages. Touts and touting are nuisances to contend with because they pollute, debase and defile the environment they operate with gratuitous violence and impunity, e.g. in the motor parks touts haggle, to have quarrel, fight, maim and even kill in their quest to outdo each other and gain undue advantage/favor.

This is so particularly in their foolhardy attempt to catch more passengers and in the parks as stated above in order to acquire enough energy and boldness for the job they consume large doses of cannabis/Indian hemp, cigarettes, alcohol, especially native gin alias kai kai/ufofop stuffed with roots/leaves/herbs called “mix me”.

Touting corrupts our youths who would have been useful elsewhere for they regard it is a cheap way of making money. No wonder young graduates now shamelessly apply to politicians and money bags to be recruited as executive touts called P.As. Touting also discourages hard work, also encourages idleness and laziness for it makes youths detest skill acquisition and paid employment in the civil/public service or companies because of low remuneration. Touting especially in the motor parks makes our youths who unfortunately are into this business to showcase a good deal of immoral behaviour who in some cases act as agents to conmen at the end of their business during the day, hence most touts in some jobs become unctuous in their desperate efforts to get what they want.

Touting sends wrong signals to the youths who abandon their legitimate trades and academic activities because they want to make it as touts who now act as role models to them especially political touts.

Does touting have a future, yes and very futuristic so long as society and our colonial system of education have no promising future for the youths; so long as there is unemployment; so long as society is straitjacketed by corruption, so long as pecuniary politics as crudely practiced now prevails and so long as there is crazy quest for quick money/fame, touting for a living will continually be an in-thing for our vulnerable teeming youths.