An eruption of unrest rarely comes out of nowhere, and this one had been building for years. The spark that finally set things off looked sudden, but the ground beneath it had been cracking long before. Shortages and eroding living standards wore people down season after season. Promises that things would improve kept arriving and kept expiring unfulfilled. Many households survived on remittances and improvisation rather than on regular wages. By the time the breaking point arrived, the anger in the streets carried the weight of every grievance piled up along the way. Read that way, the outbreak matters less as a single event than as the delayed result of a slow squeeze. What looked spontaneous was, in reality, a long fuse finally reaching its end.