The Nation Newspaper

Category: Friday

  • Freedom from reason

    Freedom from reason

    Segun Gbadegesin

     

    I TAKE my topic today from my late professor, Marcus G. Singer. It was the title of his review of an ethics book, Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963), by R. M. Hare. In the book, Hare had argued that “one of the most important constituents of our freedom, as moral agents, is the freedom to form our own opinions about moral questions, even if that involves changing our language.”

    Moral philosophers have been at logger heads regarding the status of moral questions and moral judgments. Are they statements of facts? Are they prescriptive statements? Do they make any sense? Are they deductions of reason? Hare thought that there “can be no logical deduction of moral judgments from statements of fact.” From “You just killed an innocent person” we cannot deduce “That’s bad of you” or “that’s wrong of you.” Or from “Mask wearing saves lives” we cannot deduce “Everyone ought to wear masks.”

    The import of that position is that “we are free to form our own moral opinions” and, unlike opinions about facts, our moral opinions do not have to agree with the moral opinions formed by others. The fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west is established. But that is not the case with moral statements.

    In his review, Marcus Singer thought Hare’s position was strictly not a reconciliation of freedom and reason, but rather, a quest for freedom from reason. In other words, what Hare did was to set us free from the directive of reason. But it is a dangerous move because we are rational beings, and without the guidance of reason, humanity is bound to self-destruct.

    Philosophy, in general, has not always been seen as relevant to real life. But at its inception in Greek and Ancient Egyptian systems, moral philosophy aimed at the good life with a focus on how to live well. In the late 19th to early 20th century, however, this uniqueness of moral philosophy was questioned by philosophers who insisted that any attempt to make moral statements or give moral judgments was nonsensical. Philosophy must be about analysis of concepts and not about normative claims. This debasement of normative moral philosophy in the name of conceptual analysis is, for Singer, an abandonment of reason.

    There is a sense in which academic controversies in general, and philosophical controversies in particular are mirrors of society. There is no better evidence for this observation than what is going on around the world in the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic, and Singer’s coinage of the phrase “freedom from reason” aptly captures the current predicament of humanity. While we can certainly find ample evidences of our collective abandonment of reason in every corner of the world, there is no better place to look now than in the most advanced, richest, and most intellectually endowed of all 21st century societies, the US of A.

    But, you may ask, what is wrong about getting relief from the dictate of reason? Why do we need the guidance of reason and who or what makes reason master over us? While these may appear as ridiculous, if not rebellious, questions, they are legitimate. Indeed, philosophers have not been shy to raise them, and quite a bunch, including the Scottish philosopher David Hume, have ridiculed the impotence of reason in the presence of passion. Yet the vast majority stick to the property of rationality that defines our humanity and insist that, as such, reason must sanction our conduct.

    It is hard to dispute the significance of following reason. Strictly, this means having sound reasons in support of our actions, and where we encounter a reason better than ours, we shouldn’t hesitate to abandon ours in favor of the better one. We should not let our emotion and passion, which could be subjective, dictate our conduct. This is especially true and important where our conduct have consequences for our wellbeing and the welfare of others. Thus, even when I crave with passion the taste of red wine, I should not indulge in excessive drinking if I also have to drive. Even if there is no law against drinking and driving, reason dictates that I should avoid it. It is this dictate of reason that the law codifies.

    The United States of America is the iconic land of the free and the home of the brave. It is therefore not unexpected that freedom would be honored, respected, and protected. Leave free or die. In particular, the liberal conception of freedom as absence of constraint is the reigning conception of freedom in the West, the United States included. Therefore, any constraint, legal, regulatory, or moral, is considered an obstacle to be avoided, or if impossible to avoid, merely tolerated without total acceptance.

    In other words, what reason dictates and is codified in laws, regulations, and morals, freedom may at best tolerate or, at worst reject.

    It is now common knowledge that the United States accounts for the most cases of coronavirus infection in the entire world. As of this week, there are more than 5 million cases and more than 160,000 deaths. It is extraordinary, given that here is one of the most advanced nations technologically, educationally, and politically. The U.S. has led the world in the number of Nobel Laureates in every sphere of learning. So, why has it also led in these negative statistics?

    There are two approaches to understanding the debacle that has been the lot of the US in this pandemic situation. One, which only a few would find controversial, is the governance philosophy that has predominated in the nation since 2016. This philosophy downplayed the severity of the pandemic, dismissed it as a hoax; insisted that it was going to disappear, and contradicted the experts at every point. With a laser focus on his reelection, the president was publicly reluctant about a lockdown, even if temporary, that can slow down the economy. Yet, the experience of other industrialized nations has demonstrated that the most effective approach was what the president of the United States was hesitant to adopt. Consider New Zealand.

    As it has turned out, the US economy has suffered severely. Millions have lost their jobs; the country is in the worst recession since the Great Depression; and there is no end in sight.

    But there is a second approach to understanding the US predicament, and it has to do with the obsession with freedom. Face mask wearing and social distancing are proven preventives against the spread of the virus. But thousands of Americans have continuously and perilously shunned the recommendation of public health experts about mask wearing. And these people have been supported and applauded by some local and state leaders in some states and counties controlled by the president’s party as well as by the president himself.

    A Florida Sheriff banned the wearing of masks for all deputies and visitors. His reason? Masks make it difficult to identify people, and with “anti-police sentiment”, “someone might enter the sheriff’s office with nefarious purpose and be unidentifiable with a mask”. Does this make sense? Another Florida city-council passed a mandatory mask ordinance. It was vetoed by the mayor because “his constituents don’t want a mask ordinance.” It is the most vivid, if dangerous, illustration of the exercise of freedom from reason.

    Widespread testing and contact tracing are the other two tested approaches to combating the virus. But the President has argued ad infinitum that more testing means more cases, and less tests mean less cases as if it is testing that causes people to get infected. He has therefore asked for less testing, publicly demanding that his team must “slow down the testing.” But the President and his aides get tested frequently. So does whoever has a physical appointment with him. However, some animals are less equal than others, and the unfortunate ones get sick and, not too infrequently, die. That was the lot of a prominent leader who attended the Oklahoma rally, shunned mask wearing, caught the virus, and passed on.

    In the land of freedom, exercising the freedom from reason has dire national and personal consequences.

     

     

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  • NWOHA: Eclipse of a comet

    NWOHA: Eclipse of a comet

    By Femi Abass

    Breaking news are invariably the causes of throbs in the media waves. They hardly come without carrying with them some disturbingly touching effects. Sometimes such effects may be positive and comforting but most times they are negative, discomforting and heart breaking.

    Wednesday, July 29, 2020, was another day of throbbing news that fortuitously ravaged the global media waves with a reverberating effect that broke the hearts of many Nigerian Muslim brothers and sisters.

    The mission of that breaking news was to report the saddening sudden death of the Director of Administration of Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), Mallam Yusuf Chinodezie Nwoha who died in a road accident in Okene, Kogi State, on his way to Imo State for the celebration of Eidul Adha festival.

    The jitters that accompanied that news alone were like missiles of thunderbolt which often hit to kill.

    That was the fortuitous situation that came to forcefully remind us of a philosophical statement with which Nigeria’s first President, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, succinctly opened the introduction to his autobiography entitled ‘My Odyssey’ which was published in 1970. The statement went thus:

    “Man comes into the world and while he lives, he embarks upon a series of activities absorbing experience which enables him to formulate a philosophy of life and to chart his causes of action. But then, he dies. Nevertheless, his biography remains a guide to those of the living who may need guidance, either as a warning on the vanity of human wishes or as encouragement or both”.

    Preamble

    When the great sage popularly known as ‘ZIK of AFRICA’ was writing that philosophical analysis of human life he hardly had the thought of any serious Igbo Muslim in mind. But incidentally, just nine years after the publication of that book, a young Igbo man by name Clifford Chinodezie Nwoha, from today’s Imo State, got an unusual divine guidance that prompted him to change his faith and to adopt a new name, Yusuf, as a reflection of the beaming light of Islam that brightly illuminated his way in life within the darkness of his cultural environment.

    Thus, like Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer ever in history, who fortuitously embraced Islam in Kenturkey, United States, in 1961, Yusuf became a rightly guided Muslim in 1979 at Bayero University where he embarked on an intellectual journey in search of a spiritual identity. And, also, like Muhammad Ali, Yusuf Nwoha held on tenaciously, not only to the guiding light of Islam but also to the unbreakable universal cord of Islamic brotherhood until he left the shores of the earth 48 hours before the Eidul Adha of 1441 AH (year 2020) lat week.

    Igbo Muslims

    One major fact that most Muslims do not seem to know about Igbo Muslims is their utmost readiness to be well informed about Islam, an intellectual trait that has made them the most Islamically educated tribal group of Muslims. They are though conspicuously overwhelmed by the gross disadvantage of minority within their tribal environment; they have, nevertheless, succeeded in turning that disadvantage into a formidable advantage. Without them, Islam would have remained alien to the Southeast. Today, an average Igbo man or woman does not embrace Islam except on the template of knowledge with which he/she can confirm the required spiritual conviction.

    Meanwhile, like most Muslim brothers and sisters from the Eastern region, Mallam Yusuf Nwoha effectively exemplified that impeccable trait. Alhamdu Lillah!

    REACTIONS

    Following the reverberating effect of the breaking news that revealed brother Yusuf Nwoha’s demise, a torrent of lamentations started to fall like a heavy rain across tribes, regions and nations. He was like an autumn comet that was eclipsed by a densely thick cloud. Some spectacular excerpts from those lamentations are quoted here for brothers and sisters who may care to read them for posterity sake. They are as follows:

    NSCIA

    After a long period of unspeakable devastation arising from Nwoha’s demise, the Secretary General of NSCIA, Prof Ishaq Olanrewaju Oloyede reluctantly spoke. Here is what he was able to mutter on behalf of the Council:

    “When it comes to talking about this transient life only Allah knows what is next for every soul from minute to minute. As human beings, our track is abstract. And, that track is our destiny which is inscribed on an invisible slate.

    Who could have foreseen or guessed that 48 hours before Eidul Adha, last week, Mallam Yusuf Chinodezie Nwoha would be no more alive?

    He was a gentleman to the core, a true Muslim for that matter. He was quite intelligent, cool-headed, deeply calculative and thorough in thought and in actions.

    His assumption of office as Director of Administration of NSCIA was not just a glittering hope but also a stabilising factor for the council. But now, that factor has become in an unforeseeable forlorn. It was his dignified personality that encouraged the council to nominate him to the National Hajj Commission (NAHCON) as a Commissioner to represent NSCIA on that Board. The exit of Mallam Nwoha is not, in anyway, minor.

    While praying for the repose of his distinguished soul in eternal bliss and seeking Allah’s mercy to make Al-Jannah Firdaws his final abode, the NSCIA also seeks Allah’s mercy for his family’s divine fortitude with which to bear the loss.

    Prof Ishaq Olanrewaju Oloyede,

    NSCIA Secretary General

    NAHCON

    As soon as the hint of the road accident that claimed Mallam Yusuf Nwoha’s life came with confirmation, the Chairman/CEO of the National Hajj Commission (NAHCON), Alhaji Zikrullah Kunle Hassan rose like a commander on a battle arena and promptly partnered with NSCIA’s Secretary General, Prof Ishaq Oloyede in arranging the next line of action. They jointly sent a delegation of two staffs each from NSCIA and NAHCON with enough amount of money to settle the cost of ambulance, mortuary and conveyance of the corpse from Kogi State where the accident occurred to Imo, the home State of the deceased. And, like Prof Oloyede, Alhaji Hassan quietly but reluctantly expressed his feeling about Nwoha’s demise as follows on behalf of NAHCON:

    “As decreed by the creator of the universe, “every soul shall taste of death….With this reality and total submission to the will of the Most High. I, the Chairman, the Board members, management and the entire staff of NAHCON received the shocking news of the fatal accident that claimed the life of one of our own, Mallam Yusuf Chinodezie Nwoha.

    Until his death, Mallam Nwoha was a NAHCON Board member representing the NSCIA. Within the short life of this Board, the deceased made meaningful suggestions on improving Hajj participation from Nigeria’s South-East region, his birth place.

    Mallam Nwoha’s short spell in the commission conjures up an image of a focused and dedicated operative ever willing to break new grounds for the development of his set goal. His demise has left a void far more profound than can be imagined.

    May I  also use this solemn period to remind us all how transcient life is with the hope that we may utilise the time we have in impacting positively on advancement of mankind.

    May the Infinite Lord have mercy on Mallam Yusuf Nwoha’s kind soul and console his family on this insuperable loss.

    NAHCON Chairman/CEO Alhaji Zikrullah Hassan

    JAIZ BANK

    Being a bank for both NSCIA and NAHCON, with which Mallam Nwoha was quite familiar while alive,  the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Charity and Development Foundation of that Bank, Dr Abdullahi Shuaib, became so passionately disturbed that he chose to express his personal feeling about the sad event in writing as follows:

    “….My relationship with Mallam Yusuf Nwoha started over a decade ago when I served as Private Confidential Secretary (pro bono) to the late Dr Abdul-Lateef Adegbite, the former Secretary-General of the NSCIA at several meetings under the auspices of NSCIA.

    I met the late Mallam Yusuf when the late Dr Adegbite had a parley with some of the leaders of the Igbo Communities in the Southeast. Mallam Yusuf was very quiet and humble at the parley. He talked only when the need became necessary for him to elucidate a point. He was also very intelligent and eloquent”.

    According to Dr. Shuaib, “Mallam Nwoha was a grassroots Igbo Muslim leader who had the interest of his people, both Muslims and non-Muslims at heart. He was detribalised and respected both the young and the elderly so much so that he earned the respect and love of the Igbo communities, especially in Owerri, Imo State. What made Nwoha stand out vertically among his contemporaries was that Mallam Yusuf was a principled person in his dealings with people of different walks of life as he had zero tolerance for injustice”….

    “Alhaji Nwoha was well accepted by the Imolites on both sides of religious divide because of his exemplary character.” Which made him “a rare gem….”

    Dr. Abdullah Shuaib

    CEO, Jaiz Charity and Development Foundation

    KUNLE SANNI

    What a season of death, what a season of sadness.

    Alhaj Yusuf Nwoha has also left us. Yusuf was unequivocally one of the best among us. He accepted Islam in 1979 and acquired the necessary knowledge of Islam with the speed of sound. He was educated at Bayero University Kano. We, in NACOMYO, employed  him as Director  of our Islamic  Propagation Center In Owerri financed by the then Baba Adinni  of Yorubaland, Alhaj  MKO Abiola, before he was employed by INEC where he retired  as Deputy Director sometime last year. Due to his dynamism and honesty  he was  employed  as the Director  of  Administration  of NSCIA. We spoke on Monday, July 27, 2020 without knowing that we were I was discussing with him for the last time. Yusuf was one of the most dedicated brothers from theSoutheast. He was dynamic and humble to a fault.  Oh Allah! You know why you are taking away the best among  us but we seek  your mercy, halt this trend, forgive Yusuf and admit him to Al-Jannat  Firdaws. Make his family steadfast on the part of Islam.

    Kunle Sanni

    Chairman, Oyo State Muslim Community

    MSSN

    We appreciate Allah for the life of our brother, Alhaji Yusuf Nwoha. We testify that he lived a meaningful life and served well in the path of da’awah. He was one of the brothers who usually facilitate MSSN activities in Southeast region of the country where Muslims are in the minority. His commitment to the religion of Islaam despite the non-conducive nature of the area lend credence to his commitment to virtue that he believed in.

    May Allah reward him with Al Jannah and grant his family and the Ummah the fortitude to bear this serious loss.

    Taofeeq Yekinni, MSSN National Amir

    NACOMYO

    The late Nwoha was a reliable gentleman and strong Islamic devotee who can be trusted with responsibility. Brother Yusuf was quiet thorough, organised, trustworthy and a dependable Islamic worker.

    He was quiet, yet a goal getter whose noble conduct qualified him for nomination to represent the NSCIA on NAHCON’s Board.

    We pray Allah to forgive his shortcomings and grant him divine mercy that his soul can be reposed in eternal bliss.

    Kamaldeen Akintunder

    Former National Amir of NACOMYO 

    MMPN

    Words cannot express the depth of our grief but as Muslims we have no choice other than to submit to Allah’s will. We take solace in the good life Brother Yusuf led. We testify that he was a Muslim who lived a life of service to Allah and to humanity.

    May Allah accept his contributions as sadakatun jarriyyah. May Allah reserve for him a noble place in Al-Jannah Firdaus.

    Hajiya Fatima

    National Amirah, FOMWAN

    MMPN

    The news of the sudden death of our dear Brother and media-friendly administrator,  Malam Yusuf Nwoha on Wednesday July 29, 2020 came to us as a rude shock.

    The death of Malam Nwoha is a reminder to all of us that death is certain and we should prepare for it at any time.

    Events culminated to his death when he had an accident in Okene on his way to his home town Owerri for Eid- Adha celebration with his family was quite unfortunate.

    It is disheartening that the Ummah lost Yusuf Nwoha when his services are needed most, especially at the NSCIA, where he was the Director of Administration

    We are, however, consoled that he died as a Martyr and pray to Allah to grant his immediate family, the NSCIA and the entire Muslim Ummah the fortitude to bear this irreplaceable loss and grant him Al-Janah Fridaws. Aamin.

    Abdur-Rahman Balogun (ARAB) 

    National President, Muslim Media Practitioners of Nigeria (MMPN)

  • Parakoyi’s glorious exit

    Parakoyi’s glorious exit

    By Segun Gbadegesin

    “How have the mighty fallen and the weapons of war have perished!”

    I was away from this page in the month of July for an overdue rest and much needed bodywork. A few days after my last column in June, the Grim Reaper struck with a vengeance, taking away a number of prominent personalities from us. Among them was Sir (Chief) Bode Akindele (CBA), Parakoyi of Ibadanland, Knight of John Wesley, Baba Ijo of Methodist Cathedral, Agbeni, Ibadan; founder of Modandola Group (Nigeria), Fairgate Group (Europe), and a global business icon. His gallant exit is an occasion for the celebration of his life and unique business model.

    Born in 1933, by age 10, while still in elementary school, CBA had developed his business sense, following in the footsteps of his mother, a successful business woman of her era. He started by saving part of his pocket money and diverting it to the business of buying and selling coconut candies to his peers. According to the elders, omo ti yio je Asamu, lati kekere lo ti n jenu samusamu. Morning shows the day. This was one element of the CBA model: Start early, start small. I once discussed with him my plan on starting a business after retirement. He laughed it off and warned against investing my retirement benefits in a venture that will fail. “Stay in your lane; it’s too late to venture into business”, he said with the finality of an expert.

    A second aspect of his business model was “godliness.” We cynically mock the combination of godliness and business. The goal of business is profit maximization, which entails charging exorbitantly and disproportionately to cost. Surely, this cannot be godly. Yet, a businessman whose focus is godly business has ample resources for guidance. “You must not act deceptively or lie to one another” is God’s injunction in Leviticus 19:11. In verse 13 of the same chapter, we read that “the wages of a hired hand must not remain with you until morning.” Luke 10:7 declares that “laborers deserve their pay.” Above all, the Golden Rule is as applicable to the business world as to the non-business world. CBA knew that he had to be in tune with his God, and he made God’s instructions his guidelines in business and industry. Thus, his autobiography is appropriately titled “I Did it God’s Way.”

    A third element of CBA’s business model is what has become known in recent times as corporate social responsibility. However, prior the recent popularisation of this concept, CBA had been in the lead in taking responsibility for the less privileged among us. For, as a child of God, he has internalized the teaching of his Master in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goat in Matthew 25:31-46. Here, Jesus taught that when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick and the prisoner, and take in the stranger, we do it for him. And if we don’t, it is counted against us, and the consequence is eternal condemnation.

    Without fanfare, Bode Akindele Foundation (BAF) undertook numerous charity projects for the benefit of educational institutions, church organisations, and non-profit organisations that cater for the less privileged and the least advantaged. A good number of them offered testimonials with hearts of gratitude in the events that celebrated his life last week.

    A final aspect of CBA’s business model that I would like to identify is neutrality in partisan politics and an aversion to partisanship. CBA knew that it was never in the interest of business to mix it with partisan politics. Indeed, it appears that it was not just the mixture of business and partisan politics that he was averse to. He was wary of partisan political competition, period. I recall that a well-intentioned effort was made to attract me to electoral contests early in this republic. The respected political leaders involved had approached Chief Akindele so he can talk to me about it. However, before he even talked to me, he had counseled against the idea. And when he talked to me, he told me that he had told them that he did not support the idea. He gave them the reasons which he also gave me. I agreed with him.

    Note here that the emphasis is on partisan politics. For politics, in its generic sense is inescapable, even for a godly business. After all, political decisions impact business in spectacular ways. Indeed, one of the political decisions of the military administration in the early 1970s was the indigenisation decree, which promoted indigenous businesses. And with Nigeria’s pariah status in the 90s, indigenous businesses suffered tremendous hardship. Therefore, businesses naturally have an interest in policies coming out of governmental decisions. And they can have influence on such decisions if they are not seen as partisans. This was Chief Akindele’s model of business-government relationship.

    Furthermore, CBA was also a democrat to the core. Not many Nigerians were aware of Chief Akindele’s contributions to pro-democracy struggles against the military after the annulment of the 1993 presidential elections. He didn’t make any noise about it, but he supported wholeheartedly with his resources. Indeed, he was a great benefactor of Egbe Isokan Yoruba in Washington, DC.

    Of course, good intentions did not always turn out well in the realm of politics. That was the case with his willingness to patriotically answer the call to invest in the privatisation program of the government in the early years of the Fourth Republic. The efforts of his group to buy NITEL were frustrated, and it was not a good experience. In January 2009, mid-way between his 75th and 76th birthday, CBA reflected on that experience with a public thanksgiving in which he gave testimony to the faithfulness of God for seeing him through that dark hour.

    “How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!” This was the reaction of young David to the tragic death, in battle, of King Saul and his son, Jonathan. The Philistines had killed Jonathan and wounded his father. Saul, not wanting the Philistines to have the pleasure of killing him, requested his armor bearer to do it instead. When he refused, Saul fell on his sword and died. The armor bearer followed suit.

    An Amalekite man, wanting to take credit, ran to David to give him the “good news” falsely claiming that he had killed Saul at Saul’s request. David was devastated. He tore his clothes in mourning for Saul and Jonathan. He turned to the young Amalekite and asked: “How is it that you were not afraid to lift your hand to destroy the Lord’s anointed?” Though Saul had pursued David with untiring efforts to kill him, David saw Saul as God’s anointed, and he ordered the Amalekite killed for “confessing” to killing Saul.

    David paid glowing tributes to Saul and Jonathan. They were warriors of national and international repute. “Jonathan’s bow never retreated. Saul’s swords never returned unstained.” Now, the mighty have fallen. The weapons of war have perished. As a man of war himself, this was David’s sorrow.

    We are aware of the exploits of Chief Bode Akindele in global business and industry. He was not awarded the title of Parakoyi for nothing. Traditionally, Parakoyi is the Chief of commerce in Yorubaland. He carried that title around the world with diligence, dignity and integrity. In his tribute last week, General Oluwole Rotimi recalled that his own brother had withdrawn from working with CBA because, according to him, CBA was like “a slave driver.” Well, the truth is that CBA drove himself like a slave. That was his work ethic: Eniti ko le se bi alaaru lona Ijebu ko le se bi Adegboro loja Oba.

    As David himself demonstrated with his victories, the weapons of war did not perish with Saul and Jonathan. Let us pray that with Parakoyi’s transition to glory, diligence, dignity, and integrity, the tested weapons of godly business, have not been interned with him.

    You earned your rest, Baba. However, Oku olomo kii sun. You must watch over your loved ones as they stay in the path of diligence, dignity, and integrity. Adieu!

     

     

  • A festival in despair

    A festival in despair

    FEMI ABBAS

     

    Monologue 

    Today, Friday, July 31, 2020, is Eidul Adha day of year 1441 AH throughout the world. This Eid is a festival of joy

    and festivities in Islam which confirms the religious ancestry of Prophet Ibrahim’s faith.

    It is the anticlimax of the last pillar of Islam called Hajj. Eidul Adha was first observed by Prophet Muhammad (SAW) in Makkah shortly after he was divinely ordained as a Messenger of Allah.

     

    Preamble

    Were it possible for the dead to wake up from their graves at will, Prophet Yusuf (Joseph), the great son of Prophet Ya’qub (Jacob), would have resurrected in Nigeria at the request   of millions of hungry   Nigerians. And, his mission would have been the interpretation of a dream similar to that of a Pharaoh of some millennia ago, which saved Egypt of yore from the scourge of a looming famine.

    But alas! The absence of a Yusuf on the surface of the earth today has rendered the possibility of such a dream in this country   hopeless. Despite unlimited human and material resources with which    this so called ‘Giant of Africa’, is endowed, most of her citizens continue to grapple helplessly with a jaundiced economy like a centipede crawling sorrowfully into a brook of uncertainty through the path of ashes.

    When will this perennial debacle come to an end for a people who are eagerly waiting to hand over the baton of the present to the generations of the future?

     

    No Festivities

    While Muslims, all over the world, are supposed to be celebrating ‘Eidul Adha’ with joy in festivities overwhelming majority of Nigerian Muslims are celebrating this festival with a combination of hunger, fear and despair.

    At the instance of unbridled   avarice and aggrandizement of a few privileged Nigerians who are in government, the ingredients of festivity for majority of Muslims have been banished in this country. Thus, many Muslims are celebrating today’s  ‘Eidul Adha’ in despair as usual.

    This iron period in which consistent promise of eliminating corruption, rampancy of banditry and terrorism on the one hand and the scourge of hunger, starvation and abject poverty on the other, seems to be a coded omen in which a pleasant dream of the past is ending up in a painful nightmare. That is an indicator of indefinite despair.

     

    Nostalgia

    Generally, today, there is nostalgia in the land, not only for the days of oil boom when life was relatively comfortable for all and sundry, but also for the era of abundant farm products when the thought of feeding without hardship was taken for granted by most citizens.

    Nigerian Muslims and non-Muslims alike are, today, yearning for the return of those days when wives could confidently ask their husbands for festival gifts and children could demand for new dresses, shoes and wrist watches from their parents.

    Those were the days when festival seasons were really festive and the graph of marriage carried some indices of value. Those were the days of friendliness among neighbours, sincere wishes among colleagues, mutual confidence among spouses as well as general peace and tranquility in the society.

    Now, those days are gone. And they seem to have gone forever.

     

    A Couplet of Warning

    Today, we have found ourselves in a situation against which we had long been warned in a couplet rendered by an Arab poet quoting two disciples of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) i. e. Ubayyi Bn Ka’b and Abdullah Bn Mas’ud. The Couplet goes thus:

    “This is the period in human life against which we had been warned through the admonitions of Ubayyi Bn Ka’ab and Abdullah Bn Mas’ud; it is in this period, as had been foretold, that a rejection of truth in its totality would become manifest while falsehood, corruption and betrayal of trust would be held aloft; should this period linger beyond now with its woes and tribulations, the world may soon assume a situation where people will neither rejoice over the birth of  new babies nor grieve over the demise of close relatives”.

     

    Probing Questions

    As Nigeria is fast becoming a dramatic entity mysteriously shrouded in coded parables it may take an unprecedented revolution to dislodge some Nigerian economic vampires who are fund of subjecting the citizenry to that situation.

    Ordinarily, in normal circumstances, a forward-looking country would have encouraged her citizenry to ask some probing questions thus: Who are we? Where are we coming from? And where are we going from here? Those are some of the probing   questions which all rational human beings should ask themselves constantly.

    But such questions have been rendered irrelevant in Nigeria because the circumstances of life in this country have changed the priorities of ordinary citizens. The only question now in vogue, which virtually everybody in government seems to be asking tacitly is this: ‘what personal benefit will I derive from this office?

    That very question is the real drama that permanently engages the attention of Nigerian civil servants, politicians, legislators, the law enforcement agents and judicial officers, days and nights in their quest for wealth through fraudulent means. It is the question that robes Nigerian Police in a garment of open shamelessness with a banished conscience.

    It is the question that crowns money as a demigod which forbids human feeling. It is the question that fosters greed and fetters Nigeria to the stake of endemic corruption. It is the question that presents mirage to Nigerians as the only valuable substance worthy of pursuit.

     

    Reality

    What can we say of a man who fixes his eyes on the sun but does not see it? Instead, he sees a chorus of flaming seraphim announcing a paroxysm of despair. That is the parable of the country called Nigeria.

    Like the Israelis of Moses’ time, Nigerians have become gypsies wandering aimlessly and wallowing in abject poverty in the midst of abundance. What else do we expect from Allah beyond the invaluable bounties with which He has blessed us?

    Nigeria is not lacking in forest and arable savannah. She is rich in rivers, mineral resources and mountains all of which are great sources of wealth for people who are seeking reasonable comfort and are not self-deceptive. What this country lacks is a class of responsible and patriotic leaders who can sincerely highlight its priorities according to the yearnings of the ordinary people.

    That food has now become a threat to Nigerians is an irony emanating from naivety engendered by massive corruption entrenched on her soil especially since 1999 when the current democracy first beamed a ray of hope on the people but which turned into despair.

     

    Cost of governance

    In Nigeria today, the cost of running the government alone is enough to render the country bankrupt. The retinue of federal ministers and a galaxy of Presidential and gubernatorial Advisers as well as the unlimited allowances for the legislators are major causes of poverty in the country.

    Even America with her huge economic resources, large population and financial wherewithal does not live in such reckless opulence.

    Why must we have separate ministers or Commissioners for agriculture and water resources? Where are the federal and State government’ farms to justify this? Why must we retain an obnoxious immunity clause in our constitution for certain political demagogues to facilitate monumental corruption?

    Besides, what informs the idea of the so-called constituency allowances running into billions of naira for our legislators without anything to show for it at a time when innocent women and children are crying for food and dying of hunger? No one would have thought, in 1999, that artificial hunger could be added to the abysmal level of poverty in Nigeria despite the unprecedented rise in price of oil in the international market at that time. The ubiquity of beggars and lunatics in our cities and towns nowadays is a confirmation of this assertion.

     

    Style of Governance

    Governance in Nigeria has become an artful trick adopted by a vicious cabal to bamboozle the populace into blind submission.

    Now, despite the undeniable fact that Nigeria has become a country without roads, without electricity, without functional rail transportation system, without jobs for majority of the able-bodied citizens and even without food on our tables, we are still being cajoled into believing that Nigeria, a country without coins, has a frontline role to play in the global economy. Isn’t that a deliberate and audacious deception? No country in history has ever been known to have achieved economic vibrancy by magic. Nigeria cannot be an exception.

    A fire brigade approach to food crisis in a country like Nigeria is a shameful reaction to an avoidable melancholy.

     

    Egyptian Experience

    Yusuf (Joseph), the son of Ya’qub (Jacob), did not know that he could have any solution to a fundamental problem of a country other than his own. Neither did his brothers who sold him into slavery know that he could find solution to a major problem in another land.

    But the accident of history never ceases to play itself out. Without Yusuf, only Allah knows what the history of Egypt would have been today. And without a Pharaoh’s dream of drought, the story of Yusuf would have been totally different from what we came to know of it.

    If Egypt had any major plight when Yusuf was in prison in that country, it was Pharaoh’s dream. It turned out that Yusuf’s imprisonment in Egypt was a blessing, not only for Egypt but also for Yusuf and his family. What could have been a historical repetition of that episode here in Nigeria, turned out to be a regrettable forlorn. The rest is left to history.

    No learn Lesson

    Today, Nigeria is not afflicted by drought or famine.

    She is not engaged in a war. Yet, Nigerian government has not learnt any lesson from any of the above named countries simply because there is oil in large deposit. Now, the general fear in the land is that of hunger even in times of festivals.

    How Nigeria arrived at such a deadly scourge is irrelevant for now. What is relevant is how to get out of it. Like Egypt of yore, Nigeria will need a Yusuf to unravel the mystery surrounding the dream that brought this scourge about.

     

    Irony

    It is ironic that people who live by the river bank can’t get water to drink when those living in the desert can find a reliable oasis to combat any drought. Given all the resources with which we are endowed, Nigerians should have no business with poverty let alone food crisis.

     

    Effect of Capitalism

    Capitalism which was once an economic ideology propelling mercantilism has moved a step forward, especially in Nigeria where official theft has become a profession. Capitalism is now a religion through which its adherents worship money. To such adherents, accountability is a mere riddle which only the poor may wish to unravel.

    It is only in the interest of those in government, especially, those in the executive and legislative arms, who are most active in sharing public funds, to let the national wealth spread across board legitimately if only to avoid the current Nigerian elite situation where every house has become a prison in which the occupants are voluntarily jailed.

    To ignore the rule of law and shun justice in a land blessed with milk and honey is to cultivate trouble with insecurity in all its ramifications. “Allah will not change the situation of a community until the people in such a community change their evil attitude”. Eid Mubarak!

  • Parable of death 3

    Parable of death 3

    Femi Abbas

    Human life is a journey from the unknown to the unknown. No one knows whence he emanated or whither he is bound. But the invisible vehicle that conveys all human souls to the same destination is only one even if the embarkation and disembarkation ports of the conveyed passengers are different.

    That permanent destination is the final abode of every human soul which no Jupiter can change.

    As contemporaries, we may be friends and associates for years only if we are alive. We may also be adversaries or even enemies for decades only when we are still alive. But the schedule of our life span and that of our death record are available only in the unseen diary of Allah. We are all from Him and to Him we shall all return.

     

    Occurrence

    Just last Monday, one of us, brother Abdul Wahab Bolaji, a very creditably conscientious personality with a dual identity of exemplary simplicity and contentment, departed this ephemeral world last Monday, July 20, 2020. He left the shores of life through a London Hospital without bidding anyone bye for now. He had been on a sick bed for some time in a London Hospital where he finally beathed his last. With his exit, a model falcon can be said to have flown away forever leaving all the falconers around him behind. We shall miss him for quite some time if we remain alive. But the good deeds he engaged in while alive will never forget him.

    On the same day of his demise, but at a different hour, another notable Islamic activist and gentleman of rare disposition who retired as a Radiologist,  at the University Teaching Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Professor Sulaiman B. Lagundoye vacated his space of activism permanently and proceeded to the world beyond.

    And, again, on the same day, a prominent Nigeria Statesman, administrator and professional, Mallam Ismail Isa Funtua’s demise was announced through the media. He was said to have died of cardiac arrest. The three Muslim brothers died on the same day, Monday, July 20, 2020, at different places and were buried, on Tuesday, in different graves and at different locations but all in the mega belly of the same mother earth. That is life for you with occurrences that confirm the seal of destiny on the slate of human life. It is, however, gladdening that as Muslims, the corpses of the three personalities were neither kept in any morgue nor tossed around for any glamorous ceremonial event in the name of culture. That is an indication of Islamic understanding. We pray the Almighty Allah to repose their souls in eternal bliss and grant their families and associates the needed fortitude with which to surge ahead positively in life. Amin!

     

    Genesis of Death in Human Life

    Historians never agreed on when and where the first human couple, Adam and Hawau (Eve), died. Some of them claimed that they died and were buried somewhere in India but they had no evidence to back up their assertion. Some others believed that they (Adam and Hawau) lived and died in the Gulf area of the Middle East. According to the latter’s account, which Muslims tend to believe, Adam and Hawau met at a place near Makkah called Arafah which later became the global venue for the general assembly at which Muslim Pilgrims converge every year for Hajj. The above relayed account suggested that after the extradition of the first human couple   from the supposed Paradise in which they temporarily lived, they found their hypothetical asylum in the axis of Makkah and in Jeddah where a valley called Makkah subsisted.

    The duo, Adam and Hawau, were said to have left Paradise separately only to meet later at Arafah (which means recognition) after a long period of wondering. Their sojourn in that region of the world   shows that the Middle East was the first place of human settlement on earth. The existence of an ancient rectangular house called Ka’bah is a testimony to this assertion. Ka’abah is the very first house ever erected on earth but nobody, except Allah, knows its builders.

     

    The Jeddah Connection

    Our ancestral mother,  Hawau, was believed to have died and interned in Jeddah, which is why the place was named Jeddah an Arabic word meaning Grandmother.

     

    The first Human Death 

    Neither Adam nor his wife (Hawau) knew anything called death until one of their first two sons killed the other.  The two sons: Habil (Abel) and Qabil Cain) had clashed over the choice of a wife. The tussle led to the killing of Habil by Qabil. But the focus here is neither on the cause of their clash nor the killing of one by the other. Rather, it is on the lesson which Allah wanted to teach humanity through that episode.

     

    Accidental School

    Shortly after killing his brother, Qabil fell into a dilemma over what to do with the corpse. He was not worried as much by his conscience over that seeming crime as to what would become of the corpse. But while thinking on what to do, two birds of the Roller family appeared before him and started fighting each other. In no time, one killed the other.  The strange scene attracted the attention of Qabil like a tragic drama. He watched the incident with full attention as the killer bird used its legs to dig a grave-like hole and pushed the corpse of its vanquished rival into it and covered it up. From that wonderful scene, Qabil got the idea of what to do with the corpse of his own brother as he imitated the bird by burying him in the same way. It was an accidental school in which he learnt a lesson that gave him his experience in life.

     

    The Lesson Learnt

    The first lesson learnt from that strange scene was that this human being, created from the earth, would eventually return to the earth.

    But what Qabil did not know at that time, was that the two birds, which became his teachers in that accidental school, were Angels. And the lesson he learnt from their experience was not just about death and burial alone but also about when and where to bury  human   corpses. If Allah had wanted such action to be glamorously shrouded in ceremony and fanfare the killer bird would have demonstrated it in its displayed drama. Thus, Qabil did not move the corpse of Habil to any other place for burial because his bird teacher did not do that. Like the killer bird, he also buried his brother at the very spot where the latter’s death occurred. That was a way of saying telling mankind that human corpses should not be turned into ‘Tokunbo’ commodities on earth.

     

    When Death Strikes

    In Islam, death is supposed to be the determinant of where the corpse of the demised person should be buried. Death takes life at a particular time and in a particular place according to its own natural schedule of duty. It gives no hint of the exact time and place to strike. And, after striking, it does not participate in the transfer of a corpse across any major distance. That is why the body of any demised person starts to decompose just hours after it becomes lifeless. To confirm this, the Quran chapter 31: 24 says: “No soul knows what it will do tomorrow. No soul knows where it will die and be buried”.

     

    Comment

    In Islam, death, like birth has no propensity for any display of aristocracy. And, ascribing one to it is an evidence of   ignorance and primitivism. Islam abhors extravagancy in whatever form and it admonishes against it. That is why the great religion does not take kindly to commercial exhibition of coffins and ostentatious funerals. These are actually prohibited in Islam. Coffins can be used to convey corpses from the place of death or from mortuary to the cemetery but such coffins must not be ornamentally decorated. Neither must the Muslim corpses be extravagantly shrouded for burial. That is to avoid any sign of aristocracy in death.

    The idea of keeping the corpse of a Muslim in a morgue for a long time after death, to allow for ostentatious funeral and extravagant spending is a sheer act of prodigality based on ignorance. It must be known that neither the expensive shroud nor the ornamented coffin with which the corpse is buried adds any benefit  to the soul of the deceased. It is sheer wastage, which has no use even for the relatives of the deceased. That idea, which is rampant, especially in some parts of Nigeria today, is hardly different from cremation done by the Buddhists of China and the Hindus of India. They are merely a product of ignorance and vain-glory.

     

    Blind Imitation

    As usual, Nigerians do not copy anything negative without trying to surpass the original. Fraud and narcotics as well as terrorism and banditry are some examples. The fashion now in vogue in Nigeria is for any public official or private moneybag to travel abroad for medical treatment at the slightest feeling of an ailment. It is as if Nigerian money is prohibited from being used to provide befitting hospitals here in Nigeria. The concept of travelling abroad for medical treatment is one of status symbol tacitly designed to separate the rich from the poor since an exclusive hospital for the rich will sound illogical in a country peopled overwhelmingly by paupers. Even when some of those sick travelers will be treated abroad by Nigerian doctors, they do not see anything wrong in spending their ill-gotten money abroad to the detriment of their home countrymen and women. The designers of that concept   seem to enjoy being flown back home lifeless if only to display aristocracy in death. Thus, your death is not considered newsworthy unless your corpse is flown back into the country via Muritala Muhammad airport in Lagos or Nnamdi Azikiwe airport in Abuja, just for public display of affluence. Ironically, no lesson is learnt in the fact that even Murtala Muhammad and Nnamdi Azikwe died and were buried here in Nigeria.

     

    Leveler of Mankind     

    Death is a leveler of mankind. It does not distinguish between the rich and the poor.

    We shall all die willy-nilly and we shall all be buried in the mega womb of the same mother earth where the skeletal bones of masters and servants as well as those of sworn enemies will struggle together for space.  Incidentally, the mother earth, which harbours the earthly inexhaustible womb is so caring that it accompanies man day and night, in life and in death. It is evident that she surpasses biological mothers in playing her role in the life of man. From a chip of her natural being, man is said to have been created. Allah tells us in the Qur’an that “From her (the earth) ‘We’ created you and into her (belly) ‘We’ shall return you”.

    In playing the role of a mother, the earth carries man on her back while the latter remains alive. And, in death, she incubates him in her belly in readiness for the resurrection that will see him through the inevitable Day of Judgment. In that process, there is a similarity between the duties of a primary mother (the earth) and that of a secondary mother otherwise known as biological mother especially in respect of conception and delivery.

    But while the biological mother cares for man only when she and man are alive, the mother earth cares for him both in life and in death. Unlike the mortal nature of the biological mother, the life span of the mother earth is indefinite.

     

    Age of the Earth

    Some scientists have given us different ages of the earth using all sorts of technological instruments. But the only authentic statement on that can come from the Almighty Allah who created the earth. If scientists have the means of telling us the age of the earth, do they also have the means of determining her life span? The earth is not just a carrier of unlimited weight; she is also a scale of unlimited measure. She weighs the load on her head as well as the one in her belly and balances them up for natural equanimity.

    Without the earth, mountains and oceans would have no habitat to call their own and the long term fossils which turn into what we call minerals would have had nowhere to hibernate. Before all these and millions of other unidentified matters came into existence, the earth had been. And when all of them might have vanished into permanent oblivion, according to their scheduled time, the earth will continue to be until natural termination time comes.

    We know that man was created from the earth. We know that the earth accommodates all living and non-living things on and in her. What we do not know is the source of the earth in creation. From what was the earth created?

     

    Divine Induction

    As a way of luring us to correct reasoning, Allah has severally called the attention of man to the nature of certain creatures like the mountains, the valleys, the oceans and the seas, the minerals and the human and animal fossils buried in the earth as well as the varieties of plants and insects which dot the earth like a galaxy of stars on the Milky Way. He has also challenged man to observe the very nature of the wonderful carpet called the earth.

     

     No Difference

    The earth in America or China or Australia is not different from that of Nigeria or Saudi Arabia or Italy. And no earth is superior to another except with Allah’s conferment of sacredness.

    Were the aristocrats privileged to calve out a separate portion of the earth for themselves, they would have restricted the masses to a disadvantaged area of the earth. That is the intention behind the competition for spaces in the various spheres of the orbit. But the thinking of man is different from the planning of Allah. Celebration of funerals so flamboyantly as often exhibited in Nigeria is nothing more than celebration of vanity which fetches the celebrator no profit. In Islam, it is ordained to care for the dead in spirit and in action. But such should not be at the expense of the living. Doing so is a glaring evidence of ignorance which no civilized people would ever want to pursue. May Allah guide us aright while we are alive that we may have no cause to regret our sojourn on earth after our death. Amin!

  • Letter to Nigerian Youths 3

    Letter to Nigerian Youths 3

    Femi Abbas

     

    “We cannot always build the future for our youths but we can build our youths for the future”. – Franklin D. Roosevelt (a onetime American President)

     

     Monologue

    The above quoted reasoning is   fitting only to to a serene society where institutions are built to nurture their managers and not one in which some dubious elements are fraudulently groomed to fracture institutions to the detriment of serenity in the name of managers.

     

    Preamble

    The writing of this letter to Nigerian youths of today is warranted, not by the current calamitous situation of insecurity and hunger into which today’s Nigerian youths have fortuitously found themselves but also by the seeming thorny path to the future which is lying dangerously ahead of them and threatening any certainty of their passage to the same future.

    This letter is, technically, a response to a Yoruba axiomatic adage that compares the reaction of an elderly person with that of a young person in a situation of downfall. The adage goes thus:

    “When a kid slips and falls down, he looks forward to see if someone is around to lift him up. But when an adult slips and falls down, he looks backwards to see the cause of his fall”.

    That is an adage that clearly shows the distinction between potentiality and experience.  Youths who symbolize potentiality are supposed to be the heirs to men who personify experience.

    And, the only way they can demonstrate their readiness to become their hairs is for them to prepare to convert the invaluable legacy of the elderly citizens into a worthy heritage for themselves.

    Until those youths have attained the maturity that is capable of qualifying them for the status of the elderly, they must not aspire to hijack leadership from the elderly in their own interest.

    Doing so will amount to jumping the queue of life which is a euphemism for erecting an insuperable huddle on their way to the top.

     

    Contents of the Letter

    Below are the contents of the letter: 

    Dear Nigerian youths,

    This historic letter being addressed to you through this medium (The Message) today is not coming to you by accident but by design.

    Nigerians of our own age (about 70) never had to be so addressed during their youthful time.

    Let it be known to you that besides life, sound health and freedom, no Allah’s bounties for man is as treasure-able as youthfulness.

     

    Definition of Youth

    The definition of youth varies from place to place and from culture to culture. But generally, youthfulness spans from teenage or puberty through adolescence to the age of reasoning (at about 40).

    That is the second stage of human life after teenage or adolescence.

    You must have noticed that all Prophets of Allah, except Isa (Jesus) were designated as Messengers and Prophets at the age of 40.

    That is a confirmation that the juiciest segment of human life is what people call youth. And whoever is blessed with valuable youthfulness is surely blessed with positive hope and sustainable life.

     

    Spur of Ambition

    It will be well with you to note that youthfulness is the spur of ambition and propeller of risk taking. It is the period of determination and resolution.

    It is the period that sparks off the feeling of attraction between male and female genders and elicits the sense of associations across the   boundaries of societal stratifications.

    All efforts in human life that yield results at old age must have been made at youthful age. To an average youth, anywhere in the world, the sky is never the limit.

    There are still many firmaments beyond the sky. Youthfulness is the stage at which hard work becomes manifest. It is the stage of planning.

    It is the stage of vision and mission. It is the stage of planting today’s seed that will germinate and grow into gargantuan trees which will yield edible fruits tomorrow.

    That is why the youths of any nation are seen by foresighted observers as the future bone marrow of such a nation and the beacons of the future.

    Incidentally, it is the youths that invariably constitute majority of the existing human beings at any given time in any given nation.

     

    Experience

    In the years past, when life had meaning and culture had value, youths were seen as the pride of the nation. They were the natural arrows fixed to the parental bows which were often shot by parents through the iron gate of life.

    This was the case in Nigeria before and during the colonial era. And, after the country’s independence, the youths constituted the glory and hope of their parents as well as that of the nation.

    Their role in the family encouraged the bearing of as many children as possible. In that case, the males among those children partnered with their fathers in tilling the farmlands, in tendering the plants, and in harvesting the crops while the females among them joined their mothers in making their families comfortable to enable those families thrive gloriously in dignity.

    In short, the youths of those days were, unconsciously, the live wire of their parents and by extension, that of the nation to which they belonged.

     

    Family Wealth

    When a father was said to be rich in those days, it was not because of the money or property he possessed but because of the many children (male and female) that he was blessed with to serve as the needed workforce and economic security for the family.

    Interestingly, a father’s pride, in those days, was not just the number of children he was privileged to bear but also, the volume and quality of contribution that those children made to enhance his wealth.

    Besides, the youths of those days were not just helpers of their parents on the farms or in their trades; they also assisted them in training the younger ones among their siblings.

    In short, they were the invaluable assets for those parents as different from today’s situation in which the youths are permanent liabilities to their parents.

    Yet, the esteem which the youths of those days accorded their parents in utterances and actions, even in the absence of their parents was nonesuch.

    The general tradition in those days was such that boys were handled by their fathers in terms of discipline and sense of responsibility while girls were mostly handled by their mothers in terms of matrimonial training and values of societal decency.

    Thus, in the process of bringing up their children decently, no responsible mother ever dared uttering a word while any child was being subjected to discipline by the father.

    In a nutshell, the upbringing of a child was the main key to societal serenity as the discipline imbibed by the youths of those days was a foremost heritage from their parents.

     

    Genesis of Change

    The current trend of rampant societal indecency and criminal tendencies began in January 1966 when some uncultured youths in Nigerian military uniform who had a blind ambition to become leaders without any training, threw the value of experience to the winds and killed the then leaders of the   country in a military coup d’état that was evidently tribal and religious.

    By that calamitous act, the youths of that time fortuitously plunged Nigeria, their home land, into a precipitate civil war that turned the country’s hope into an unqualifiable   despair.

    It was the aftermath of that precipitate civil war that eroded the highly valued cultural heritage which would have paved the way for Nigeria’s greatness as Africa’s foremost nation.

     

    Dangerous Side Effect

    For 13 years after the first coup that enabled the vagabonds in military uniforms to  forcefully  hijack power from Nigeria’s legitimate rulers, the use of brutal whim, in place of cultural discipline and inheritable experience, became the order of the day.

    And, when a brief civilian interlude came in 1979 for only four years and three months, those vagabonds perched on the governance of the country once again like hungry vultures feeding on the carcass of democratic corpses to their fill.

    Through that unbridled usurpation of power, the so-called Nigerian military government only succeeded in weaning themselves from the ladle of integrity as they irredeemably destroyed whatever was to retain their nomenclature as embodiment of discipline in Nigerian history.

     

    Outcome

    Here we are today, looking desperately like starved hawks swinging restlessly in like a pendulum of no certainty. And, while Nigerian youths are blaming the elders for their multifaceted woes, virtually everybody has forgotten the real cause of the perennial calamity. The cry everywhere now is about the effect of that calamity on the nation and not its cause.

    Unfortunately, without looking back to reassess the cause, no corrective regime, civilian or military, can easily rise to get a clue to how Nigeria can rise firmly again on her feet.

    And, connotatively, looking back on this situation means initiating a  genuine reorientation for the new generations of Nigeria as a  possible means of rediscovering the country’s lost compass.

    Banking on a gun-based potential ability to govern a nation that requires experience, as the eaglet Nigerian military boys did in 1966, could never have brought any meaningful result.

    And now, the reality has manifestly confirmed that assertion in a hardly reversible way. In a country like Nigeria that needs all hands to be on deck, both potentiality and experience have roles to play. But neither can take the place of the other.

     

    The difference

    You, the youths of today, are quite different from those of yesteryears in many ways and the differences are very clear. The youths of the past were very hardworking, highly dedicated, unswervingly patriotic and resolvedly forward-looking.

    They started their training from home by serving their parents diligently and by caring for those parents physically and psychologically in various circumstances of life.

    They sought their parents’ advice and learned from the latter’s experiences. It was that home training that propelled them to become national or regional leaders in their time as they built their hope on hard work, contentment and destiny.

    On the contrary, you, the youths of today, are very lazy, very slothful, incurably time wasting and orientation ally lackadaisical in your attitude to life even as you are served by your parents from infancy almost to old age.

    Yet you despise those parents and treat them with disdain like nonentities in your erroneous belief that, as new school, that you often call yourselves, you are more exposed and more knowledgeable than them.

    You believe, thoughtlessly and parochially, that those parents had come into the world to work on your behalves and that you are only in this world to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

    The youths of the past were patient, contented and full of respect for the elders. They were humble, obedient, always eager to acquire knowledge and gain experience as they often queued up to learn from the elders.

    On the other hand, you, the youths of today, are very inpatient, very pompous  and very greedily ambitious even as you see yourselves as masters of knowledge when, in actual fact, you are slaves of ignorance.

    Unlike the youths of the past, you, the youths of today, are mostly empty-headed, implacably arrogant, highly materialistic and hastily avaricious.

    You always want to start your lives from the peak of your parents’ achievements without asking about what those parents had gone through before reaching the peak.

    That is why some of you joined politics and immediately contested for the office of the President in your visionless concept of ‘Not Too Young To Rule’ which some of your fathers who had stolen public funds tried to encourage vaingloriously to pave your ways through the political nightmare that you call a dream.

    You, the youths of today, spend money lavishly without working for it and without asking questions about its source. And, when such abominable ‘booty’ comes your way you never think of bearing any responsibility either in your homes or in the society.

    You are generally characterized by all the conducts that were classified as shame in the past. To you shame has its price and going by your myopic perception, it only takes money to pay that price.

    That is why you worship money, day in and day out as your ultimate god. And as long as you can pay that price by all means in whatever currency, you are important in your own estimation.

    Thus, shame, as far as you are concerned, is a vital aspect of culture which has no negative effect on your lifestyle. As a matter of fact you have taken shame for both pride and prestige.

    If a few youths of the past were ever described as a bunch of societal problems, due to their misdemeanor, majority of you, the youths of today, are the real cogs in the national wheel of progress in today’s Nigeria.

    To you, life has no meaning except it is heavily coded in money. From all indications, there is no better definition for shame than your conduct.

     

    Life Span

    Your slogan that “long life is irrelevant in the absence of money” is a testimony to the above assertion. That life span in Nigeria today has dropped so drastically is due to your disappointing lifestyle which often creates hypertension for your parents and leads to their early deaths.

    Few parents talk of heirs nowadays because those of you who are supposed to be their heirs have long thrown away the toga of worthy heirs.

    In the past, mothers were not known for staying with their daughters in the latter’s matrimonial homes while leaving their husbands behind without care.

    This strange but new trend that has almost become a part of Nigerian cultural norm arose because the incompetence of today’s urban women, even after many years of training, is questionable.

    Thus, despite the ubiquity of young men and women, there is scarcity of husbands and wives just as there is a dearth of fathers and mothers.

    Virtually everything that matters to you, today’s youths, is devoid of our known core values. By your measure, the value of life can be found only in the volume of naira accessible to you.

     

    Causes of Generational Change

    Whenever there is cause to review the generational trend with the intention of righting the wrong, you, the youths of today are often quick in pointing accusing fingers mischievously at the generations before yours by saying they caused the prevailing debacle.

    But while pinching the back of the elders you often forget that sooner or later you too may become elders whose back will be pinched by the youths who will succeed your own generation.

    You have forgotten that most of the scientific discoveries and technological advancement of your age which lured you into roguery were not available for the past youths.

    There were no such things as hard drugs, cybercrimes, armed robbery, kidnapping, sophisticated pen fraud through manipulation of figures and forgery of signatures.

    There were no cases of rape, child trafficking, audacious prostitution and day light murder with impunity as are rampant among you today.

     

    Professional Crimes

    To you, the youths of today, all the above mentioned crimes are either professions or callings in which you actively engage with strong desire for perfection.

    Thus, you do not believe in the existence of any demarcation between decency and indecency, an indication that ‘family name’ which was highly valued in the past has no meaning to you today.

    Unlike most youths of the past, you were sent to school but your goal was mere certificate that would legitimize your anticipated fraudulent meal ticket rather than useful education and beneficial knowledge.

    And, now, what you acquire in the schools that you are attending, which you call certificate, in the name of education is hardly worth the paper on which those certificates are printed.

    For most of the years you now spend in higher institutions, your preoccupation is either cultism or other frivolous activities that have no bearing with education.

    That is why most of you turn out to be unemployable University or Polytechnic graduates after leaving those institutions.

    A few of you who might have secured public employments by whatever means, have been discovered to be sheer misfits on those jobs as your competence remains questionable.

     

    Implications

    The implications of all these are many. While most of you are not quite useful to the present time you are also not hopeful about the future.

    There is hardly any major crime in Nigeria today that is not principally committed by you, the youths of today, all in the quest for money.

    It seems that the only language you understand either orally or in writing is money and only those who can speak or write the language of money can command your respect.

    Many centuries before our time, an Arab poet intuitively came up with a sonnet which fits perfectly into today’s Nigerian situation.

    He said: “Here is the era against which we had been warned through the admonitions of Ubayy Bn Ka’ab and that of Abdullah Bn Mas’ud; an era in which truth would be totally rejected while falsehood and transgression would be kept aloft; Should this era further linger without any change, there will neither be any sorrowful mood at a funeral nor any joyful feeling on the birth of a new baby”.

    Now, which of the situations narrated in the above quoted poem is not applicable to Nigeria’s youths today? What impact does religion have on the society again?

    We used to know of motor spare parts. Today, spare parts are no more those of motor but of human beings. And the most active merchants of this queer business are you the youths of today (male and female, clerics and laity).

    When we talk of illegal oil bunkering, it is the business of the youths. When we talk of kidnapping, it is the business of today’s youths. When we talk of suicide bombing and terrorism, it is the business of today’s youths.

    And, all these are for money and nothing else. Where is Nigeria going from here?

     

    Conclusion

    The aim of this expository article is not to malign or denigrate the youths of today. All the children of this columnist are today’s youths who do not constitute a separate island. But preaching is like a mud pond surrounded by men and women in immaculate regalia.

    No one of them will be spared if the mud is splashed. As a onetime youth and now a father qualified to be called an elder, it is not expected of my type to start throwing stones while residing in a glass house.

    But truth, like rain, knows no boundary and recognizes no personality. It cruises on like a surging train without minding whose ox is gored.

    To rekindle Nigeria’s old hope or create a new one for the future, the youths of today must return to the established values of yesterday.

    It was through those values that the tranquility of the world was solidly upheld. On the other hand, it was through a deviation from it that the world became as restive as it is today.

    If tranquility must return as wished by many, you the youths of today, must change your loins. And that is the only atonement that the world requires to return to global equanimity. GOD BLESS NIGERIA!

  • Business made in prison

    Business made in prison

    Femi Abbas

    History is resplendent with lessons for people whose steps in life are in tandem with Allah’s guidance. It is also the same for the ignorant ones who see this ephemeral life as their ultimate destination.

    There is no life’s odyssey without a divine guidance which often comes either in form of admonition or in form of warning. Heeding or shunning such guidance is, however, a matter of choice. And the consequences of such a choice may eventually become an indelible heritage of the concerned people.

     

    Today’s World

    We live in a world, today, that is quite different from that of the centuries ago when the Glorious Qur’an was revealed to Prophet Muhammad (SAW).

    But surprisingly, nothing in the contemporary world has run counter to the foretold occurrences in that sacred Book or even to happenings prophesied by the last Messenger of Allah.

     

    Business Transactions

    Business transactions in the time of the Prophet might not involve technology or sophisticated transportation and communication as we have today, but the norms which guided businesses today have not shown any significant difference from those of the olden days. Not even the introduction of mundane ideologies like capitalism, socialism, and communism has altered those norms. That is a further confirmation   of Islam as the most genuine religion and the Glorious Qur’an as the most authentic Message of Allah to mankind.

     

    Today’s Youths

    Incidentally, today’s youths do not see any virtue in working hard for acquisition of wealth. What matters most to them is to get money by all means at the cheapest cost and squander such money lavishly on frivolous materials. And, that is the main cause of the rampancy of crimes in the land.

     

    Economic ideology

    An unlettered personality like Prophet Muhammad (SAW) did not need to   formulate any mundane economic theory or to invent an inconsequential economic ideology to administer a great Islamic government. He was not just a political leader but also an economic expert, a great law giver and an army general of impeccable status.

    Without necessarily going into details of how he managed the economy of the Islamic state which he established and ruled from the scratch, it is obvious that even his ascension to ‘Sidratul Muntahah’ (apex of all heights) through seven planets, an adventure that paved the way for modern man’s exploration of the space, is of immense economic value to the contemporary world which no sensible critic can logically dispute. Although some ignorant people see the Qur’an as a mere religious Book, the economic value of that Book has remained unquantifiable and, it will remain so forever. The rapid spread of Islamic banking in the Western world today is a clear evidence of that fact. In Islam, economic discipline which is natural takes precedence  over economic ideology which is artificial and unrealistic.

     

    The Qur’anic Economic Value

    Being the most read book in the world, the Qur’an has been translated into hundreds of languages making it possible for millions of people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to be employed at various stages of the world’s economy. For instance, the writing of the Qur’an, its recitation, its proof-reading, its printing, its marketing, its teaching, its translation, its interpretation, its sale and even its criticism by unbelievers are all sources of economic survival for millions of people in the world irrespective of their religions. The global engagement in research on that Glorious Book by various scholars and intellectuals, either for acknowledgement of facts or for mere blind criticism, is an attestation to the above assertion. There was no book like the Qur’an before its revelation and there will never be a book like it till the world will come to an end. The unrelenting hostility to Islam and the contents of the Qur’an in certain corners of the world is largely due to blatant ignorance about that divine religion. But that cannot continue forever.

     

    Islam as Employer of Labour

    If only one quarter of a billion people is gainfully employed in working on the Qur’an alone, today’s world economy would have been remarkably upheld by the religion of Islam. Yet, apart from the Qur’an, millions of people are engaged in various businesses relating to Hadith (Prophetic Tradition), Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence), Tarikh (Islamic History), Tawhid (Faith in the oneness of Allah) and Thaqafah (Islamic Culture) among others. All such specialized learning forums which emanated from the Qur’an itself were advanced to compliment the sacred Book of Allah.

    Even, for hundreds of years that the Orientalists were busy criticizing Islam through their satanic publications, it was undeniable that those destroyers were benefiting from the economic legacy of the divine religion through the sale of their evil publications.

     

    Orientalists’ Atrocities

    Today, even as the same Orientalists are busy reversing themselves on what they had maliciously published about Islam in the past centuries, they are still benefiting economically from that reversal.

    However, despite the vast economic advantages provided by Islam, some unscrupulous Muslims including Nigerians still engage in illegal businesses that contravene the tenets of that divine religion. Some of such Muslims are among the thousands of Nigerians who are now languishing in various prisons around the world. Some others are even sentenced to death, by various means, as punishment for their crimes. Incidentally, some of such people often commit their atrocities under the cover of Islam.

     

    Personal Experience

    This reminds yours sincerely of a fortuitous encounter with one of those fraudulent elements, as far back as 1981, which keeps my heart quivering even today. I had once relayed the episode of that ugly encounter in this column some years ago through an article with the same title. Recalling it here today is a way of getting young Nigerians to share in that experience either as an admonition or as a warning on the vanity of human wishes.

     

    Illicit act

    Akram (not real name), a Nigerian youth of less than 30 years of age, did not see anything like poultry in his dream when he was going into Saudi Arabian prison as a convict in 1981. His only prayer was for Allah to influence the minds of the Saudi Authorities to have mercy on him and grant him amnesty after two or three years in prison. His prison term at that time was 15 years. He earned the sentence through drug trafficking engendered by blind ambition to be quickly rich by all means.

    Akram was such a quiet, easy-going young man that he could not be related to the crime that landed him in a Saudi prison. He graduated from the Islamic University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia where he read Sharia’ah. I first met him in 1978 when I went for a first degree at King’s University in that country. His University was in Madinah while mine was in Jeddah. He left Saudi Arabia after graduating in 1980 and decided to settle down in his home country after a one year compulsory national service to the nation. In his plan, Akram did not want to work for anybody. His ambition was to be a big merchant of automobile and electronics. However, since there was no ready-made capital with which to start off such a business, he decided to take a short cut, typical of what is termed ‘Nigerian factor’ and he found Saudi Arabia, the country that funded his University education with a very rich scholarship, as most suitable for such a dirty business. Thus, he embarked on his first illicit ‘business trip’ to the country of his Alma Mata in 1981.

     

    Meeting Point

    It was on my way back to school from a summer holiday of the same year that I met him at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos. After embracing and exchanging pleasantries, we decided to sit together in the aircraft (of the then Nigerian Airways) in order to have a chat on the good old days and our expected future. Thus, from Lagos to Jeddah (a journey of five and a half hours), we really chatted to our fill. It was as if we had not spent one hour when we arrived at King Abdul Aziz Airport in Jeddah after five and a half hours.

     

    Youthful Exuberance

    As bachelors, we discussed various issues ranging from marriage, bearing of children to monogamy and polygamy as well as family structure. We gossiped on the political trend in our country as championed by the then ruling party, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). We compared Nigeria’s pace of development with that of Saudi Arabia and concluded that our government had neither any focus nor any plan, a situation which made Nigerian youths abroad feel like orphans.

     

    Further Ruminations

    In the course of our discussions, we also talked about world peace, the then cold war between the Western Capitalist World championed, by the United States and the Eastern Socialist Block championed by the now defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and the future of Islam in Africa and the Middle East. We analysed the Middle East crises and the role of the two opposing world powers in those crises. We also veered into Nigeria’s micro economy by discussing the role of small and middle scale businesses in our country compared to those of other countries with similar status like Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Singapore, India, Pakistan and Egypt.

     

    Reading the Future

    Without gazing through any crystal ball, we concluded that with no middle class in place, our country might have no hope except through an accidental miracle. We also reviewed the use to which Nigerian oil was put vis-a-vis that of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Libya and Algeria. On this, we concluded that oil in Nigeria was a blessing from Allah which the country’s ruling class turned into a curse. But we were not experienced enough to suggest tangible solution.

    Thus, in that long conversation which touched virtually all issues affecting the corporate life of Nigeria and her citizens, we agreed on some and disagreed on some. However, we were satisfied to have delivered our minds of their pregnancies if only to broaden our horizon.

     

    Point of Departure

    On arrival at the King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah, my friend quickly dashed into the toilet and requested me to help push his baggage towards the security desk for checking. He promised to join me shortly on the long queue for immigration procedure. It was almost my turn for security check before an instinct gingered me into consciousness. For more than 30 minutes after he went into the toilet and   entrusted his baggage to me, Akram did not resurface. When it was about my turn for luggage checking, something just told me to abandon his baggage I did. My own baggage was checked and I went out of the arrival hall to wait for him at the taxi terminal. After about one hour of waiting and Akram did not surface, I decided to proceed to my hostel where he was to pass the night in my room as we had earlier agreed.

     

    The Shocking News

    While still expecting him in my hostel, the electronic waves throbbed with breaking news. The Saudi Television reported the arrest of a Nigerian who smuggled drugs into the Holy Land. His name was ‘Akram’. That was at 9pm Saudi local time. We had arrived in Jeddah at about 9.00am that day. About one hour after the breaking news, my friend was brought to the glare of the nation through the electronic tube and paraded on the Saudi national television as the suspected culprit in the illicit drug trafficking. That was one of the most frightening moments of my life. Akram wanted to be rich by all means and I was to pay the cost of his richness.

     

    Imaginary Lamentations

    What would have happened if I had not heeded the warning of my instinct? Who could have believed me if I had been caught with Akram’s baggage? Akram, an introvert, handsome young man was such a seeming gentleman in appearance and in disposition. Relating him to such a criminal venture would have oirdinarily generated a fierce argument among onlookers if the incident had occurred in Nigeria and he was paraded as a drug trafficker on a television dtation. If I had been caught with Akram’s baggage, what explanation I could have given to exonerate myself? That was a question that ran through me like milk through water for quite some years thereafter and changed my mind about sentimental friendship with people, no matter how innocent they might look.

    It was that incident that forced me to decide never to assist anybody again in carrying his or her baggage while on a journey.

     

    Court Trial

    After about three months of court trial, Akram was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He was lucky that drug trafficking at that time in Saudi Arabia had not attracted death as punishment. If it were now, the punishment would have been death sentence by beheading. I was also lucky that at that time the Saudi immigration authorities had not adopted the use of secret camera (CCTV) to monitor passengers.

     

    The Saudi Prison System

    For 15 years  (1981-1996) after the narrated episode, that landed him in prison, Akram remained behind the bars languishing in Saudi Arabian prison as an inmate among criminals as he anxiiously expected to be let off the hook one day. But one good thing about Saudi Arabia as a country or any other Islamic country for that matter is the concept of reformation which imprisonment entails. In those countries, inprisonment was not just a punishment for crimes but also a means of preparing inmates for a better post-prison life and re-orientated for better world outlook.

    Besides, prisoners are paid a specific amount of money daily for their labour in prison. And that gives them hope of reintegration into the society after leaving the prison. Such money is kept in a special bank account opened for them. The total amount is paid to each inmate after his or her prison term.

    Thus, when Akram left the prison in 1996, the post-prison money paid to him by Saudi government became the capital with which to establish a business of his own.

    Thus, when he was finally deported to Nigeria and permanently banned from reentering Saudi Arabia Arabia it was not without his prison emolument. It was with that emolument that he a poultry business. And, within a couple of years thereafter, he became a big poultry farmer but whether or not he learnt any lesson from that incident is another matter.

     

    Qur’anic admonition

    Most of the young men and women of today do not seem to believe in crawling before walking. To them, what matters most in their lives is how to quickly get money to spend and not how such money is made. The slogan of this era, among those youths, is the Machiavelian principle of power grabbing: “The end justifies the means”. That is the main cause of the high rate of crimes witnessed ubiquitously in Nigeria today and the entailed short life span for those youths.

     

    Qur’anic Guidance

    In Qur’an, Chapter 43, Verse 32 quoted above, Allah had warned Muslims against desperate accumulation of wealth over 1,400 years ago even when desperate quest for wealth was unfashionable. However, the refusal by today’s youths to heed that warning and the aggressive greed of the privileged elders in power constitute the main cause of rampant banditry and insurrections around in the country.

    In Islam, desperation for accumulation of wealth is prohibited because it encourages a focus on the end result rather than the means and its entailed immorality. In the past decades, Nigeria had sunk so deep into the valley of corruption that no one cared to ask about the source of any wealth even as corruption became the taproot of Nigeria’s tree of existence. Now, with parents, teachers, professionals and even legislators getting so desperate to become rich what type of can be said to be waiting for Nigera?

     

    Parochial Wealth Estimation

    Desperation is not what fetched Nigeria the enormous oil wealth of today.

     

    Effect of Desperation

    If desperation ever had any role to play in accumulating wealth, perhaps Nigeria would have long become a country in penury. This is because people who were more desperate in this same country and had lived and died some centuries back would have discovered this oil wealth and they would have exhausted it long before our own generation. But in consonance with the above quoted Qur’anic verse, Allah deliberately preserved it (oil) for our own generation for a reason best known to Him. Yes, oil may be Nigeria’s principal   source of wealth today, it is surely not the last source of wealth in this country.

    There are other sources of wealth preserved for the future generations which no desperate ‘awks’ in this generation can discover.

     

    Epilogue

    Those who see oil as Nigeria’s ultimate wealth and want to own its control or die over its possession should engage in a rethink. You can only have the privilege of presiding over the wealth of a nation for a while and not for all times. The experience of some past regimes in Nigeria should serve as a sufficient lesson. And those in government today should also note this very well. The privilege of the past did not extend to the present and that of the present will surely not extend to the future. Every era is a transit. And every transit has a time limit. Contentment is the only wealth of inestimable value in human life. God bless the readers of this column.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Memo to Politicians 2

    Memo to Politicians 2

    By Femi Abbas

    “Let there become of you a nation that shall call for righteousness, enjoin justice and forbid evil. Such are men that will surely triumph”.

    Q. 3: 104.

    Dear Nigerian Legislators,

    This is the third time in 21 years (1999-2020) that an open memo of this type is coming to you individually and collectively from this column.

    The first was in 2008 barely nine years after the commencement of Nigeria’s 4th republic in less than 40 years of independence.

    Although the contents of the first two memos were hardly different, the need to write this memo again is informed by the fact that a genuine preacher must never be tired of repeating his counsels and admonitions even where and when the addressees choose to be deaf and dumb as in the case of most of you.

    Functions of Conscience

    Conscience, according to Sheikh Uthman Dan Fodio, “is an open wound which only the truth can heal”. But one can talk of healing a wounded conscience only where it has not become cancerous.

    Prophet Muhammad (SAW) once gave the precise definition of hypocrisy in one Hadith. He said: hypocrites

    are known by three signs, when they talk they lie, when they promise they renege and when they are trusted they betray”.

    Most of you (Nigerian politicians) so much typify that definition that one would wonder if he had Nigerian politicians in mind when he was expressing that axiomatic Hadith.

    In Retrospect

    You will recall that when, as politicians, you started nursing the ambition to become legislators, whether at the federal or state level, your first public announcement was that you wanted ‘to serve your people’.

    And, based on that announcement, people rallied round you and embraced you as their servants in the understanding that whoever volunteered to serve in public office must have agreed to be servants of the people.

    First Covenant

    That announcement was your first political covenant with the people you claim to want to serve.

    But that covenant was not just between you and the people in your constituency alone as you might have wrongly assumed, it also involved Allah’s hand as supreme the witness because your voluntary announcement to serve in whatever capacity was done in the name of Allah or whatever God you pretend to be serving.

    And, in that case Allah will surely hold you accountable for making such a promise. It does not matter whether you were genuinely elected or characteristically rigged into office as usual.

    Two Fundamental Issues

    In Islam, two issues are exceptionally fundamental, both of which are not treated lightly by Allah. These are sacredness of life and justice.

    It is a great iniquity for any human being to engage in murder and injustice under any guise.

    Thus, anybody who kills fellow human beings extra-judicially under any guise, religion or politics or economy, is nothing but an agent of Satan who should also be treated in the like manner when caught with evidence.

    In Islam, killing a fellow human being deliberately is such a grievous sacrilege that should not occur without application of commensurate punishment.

    Besides recalcitrance to Allah through idol worshipping, nothing draws the wrath of Allah as fast as these two crimes which Satan may continue to ask you to ignore at your own peril.

    How honourable are you?

    Of the four estates of the realm in democratic governance, none is as fundamental as legislature. In any democratic dispensation, there can be no government without legislature.

    Thus, whenever you are addressed as honourable legislator, please, refuse to be flattered. There is nothing peculiarly honourable in voluntarily choosing to serve people by joining others to legislate for them and to get heavily paid for doing so.

    If you are a legislator today, it is neither because you are intellectually smarter or wiser than those for whom you are legislating.

    Rare Opportunity

    What makes certain politicians legislators is sheer expediency arising from queer inadequacies sadly foisted on us by our so-called political system which gives room for audacious gerrymandering.

    If such opportunity comes your way illegally, let it not be mistaken for good luck. It may rather be a calamity waiting to strike at the appropriate time in future.

    And, when it strikes, no one except Allah can tell the extent of its effect. At least you can see how the consequences of the heartless annulment of June 12, 1993 Presidential election have become an implacable spectre chasing the ghost of Nigeria as a country, even after two and a half decades of licking her wound with agony.

    Lack of Conscience

    Due to lack of conscience, most of you, politicians, may not have noticed, but you need to be hinted that shortly after you took oath of office as Ministers, Commissioners or Legislators, the people noticed that you started subverting the covenant which you voluntarily reached with them.

    That covenant was to serve the people who paved your ways into those political offices. You promised passionately that you would serve them and anybody who volunteers to serve is nothing but a servant.

    But no sooner had you been sworn into office than you started calling yourselves masters or leaders. That is why most of you often find it difficult to bend a little backwards and report to the people in your constituencies on how you are serving them.

    Your deviation from your promise is a confirmation of the definition of hyporites as given by Prophet Muhammad (SAW) as quoted above.

    Morality and Reality

    Against cultural morality and constitutional reality of the moment, you, as politicians, have turned the privilege of participating in governing the country or your State into your personal right which you are using to intimidate the poor masses and ride roughshod over them.

    When you occasionally pretend to interact with those masses, it is only for the purpose of preparing their minds for the next election in which you hope to be returned, possibly, unopposed.

    And for this reason, you cunningly pay them some pittances while making another fake promise to improve their well-being during your second or third tenure in office.

    Constituencies foe What?

    Some Legislators among you politicians have spent about 20 years in those legislative houses. Yet, there is no sign at all in your immediate constituencies that anybody is representing the people therein to the benefit of the constituencies.

    You are contented with their milling around you for the pittances that you randomly dish out to them even as you assume that they are satisfied with such pittances.

    Budget Padding

    And now, Nigeria is held to a standstill because the Legislators among you must pad the annual budget presented to them by the executive to their own favour so that the largess generated by the executive arm may be jointly shared in the spirit of ‘rub my back and I will rub yours’.

    As parents, you will want your children to grow up as responsible men and women, yet, most of you have nothing in you that can serve as good examples for those children.

    Which aspect of your conducts do you expect your children to imitate since none is worthy of emulation? If you did not know, those children, like the majority of Nigerian citizens believe that you Nigerian politicians are the real causes of the multifarious problems confronting Nigeria today. And, your political attitudes seem to confirm that assertion.

    Law of Existence

    Covenant with Allah is the most fundamental law of existence. It is not one sided. As man has responsibilities to bear so does Allah have obligations to fulfill.

    It is from the covenant with Allah that all other covenants in the life of man, including those of marriage, family rites, trust and confidentiality, are derived. That covenant is what others call oath.

    Oath of office

    In Islam, oath, whether private or public, does not necessarily require Muslims to carry the Qur’an in one’s hand as ignorantly done in Nigeria particularly at this time when oath of office has become a meaningless symbol of assumption of office.

    No oath is ever made without Allah being a witness to it. Besides, He (Allah) has assigned two Angels to every human being as secret monitors.

    The names of those Angels are Raqib and ‘Atid. The duty of these Angels is to record all utterances and secret actions of each person to whom they are assigned.

    The one records good deeds, the other records evil deeds. Their recordings are both in video and in audio forms.

    This is a fact contained in Q. 50: 16 where Allah states that: “We surely created man and ‘We’ know the promptings of his mind and are closer to him than his jugular vein.

    We assign two guardians to watch him, one on his right (called Raqib) and another on his left (called ‘Atid). No utterance from him/her (the watched person) or action shall escape the records of these vigilant secret mionitors….”

    It is from the functions of these invisible police that researchers came about the idea of video, audio and other technological devices used for espionage today.

    Blind Trust

    With this scenario, you can see the damages some of you (politicians) are causing to the present and future generations of this country in a bid to display your illegally acquired loot through corruption.

    By interpretation, the problem of corruption engendered by gross indiscipline and lack of functional conscience in Nigeria today is not with the youths as often alleged.

    It is rather more with the parents, some of whom are in the executive, the judiciary and   the legislative  arms of government.

    If certain Nigerian youths are found enmeshed in corruption, they are only proving not to be bastards. It is their inheritance from their parents.

    Nigeria remains a country without electricity today, even after 60 years of independence, because the priorities of those of you in government are permanently at variance with the country’s national priorities.

    For instance, one would have thought that rather than fighting corruption the way Obasanjo presumably started it in year 2000, what a focused and sincere government should have done was to initiate a re-orientation revolution to enable all Nigerians know why corruption is evil.

    And if such a reorientation had been backed up with mass employment, it would have been a preventive rather than a curative measure.

    Naira Denominations

    The Murtala Muhammad and Buhari/Idiagbon regimes experimented  ulteration of naira denominations and Nigeria was briefly better for it.

    Fighting corruption haphazardly as Obasanjo did during his agonizing eight year tenure was like starting the building of a house from the roof.

    Nigeria only wasted those eight years chasing shadow in the name of fighting corruption while the monster kept feeding fat on the blood of poor Nigerians using as the term ‘BLIND TRUST’ served as its cloak.

    It was the same Obasanjo as a politician, that introduced series of big denominations  of naira and technically eliminated coins to pave way for rampant political thefts and astronomical inflation as well as spiral deflation of Nigerian currency that virtually ruined the economy.

    Archive of Naira Denominations

    It can vividly be remembered that by the time the 4th republic commenced in 1999, the highest denomination of Nigerian currency was N50 which was popularly called ‘Better Life’.

    It was Obasanjo, shortly after he assumed office as President, that   introduced  N100 on December 1, 1999, with the portrait of Chief Obafemi Awolowo; N200 on November 1,   200, with the portrait of Sir Ahmadu Bello; N500 on April 4, 2001; and N1000 on October 12, 2005, with the portraits of Alhaji Aliyu  Mai Bornu and Dr. Clement Isong (the two earlierst indigenous Governors of the Central Bank of Nigeria).

    But for suspicious media speculation at that time, the portrait on N1000 would have been quite different. Your guess is as good as mine.

    Ironically, after all those naira denominations had turned Nigeria upside down economically and the doors of armed robbery had been widely opened and other heinous crimes had become the order of the day that Obasanjo considered it right to change the then existing coins into polymer notes of N1 and 50 kobo while he completely faced out other coins in May 2007, the very month he was leaving office following the failure of ‘Third Term’ saga.

    Thus, with the redesigning of other existing naira denominations, it can be con concluded that all the Nigerian naira denominations in circulation today are an evidence of Obasanjo’s governing era in Nigeria.

    Rare Opportunity

    Legislating is a rare opportunity to serve one’s nation meritoriously. But some of you (Legislators) seem to have turned that opportunity into one of self-enrichment as well as that of securing the future of your own children at the expense of the lives of millions of other children.

    All these are done at the expense of the wretched people around you whose role in democracy has been relegated to voting once in four years.

    You have forgotten that wealth is Allah’s endowment which cannot be inherited except by Allah’s will. Who inherited the expansive wealth and kingdom of King Solomon? Have you not seen some money bags of yester years wallowing in abject penury today? When will you learn your lesson?

    My dear ‘Honourable Ministers,  Legislators and judges, search your conscience and fear God. Remember that some people had ruled this country in the past.

    Among them were those who usurped the roles of the executive, the legislative and the judicial arms together, in the name of military rule, made possible by coup d’état. Where are they today?

    The Limit of Governance

    Governance, like elasticity, has its limit. Four years may look endless, but for the wise, it is not more than a flash of lightening which only a fool may want to rely upon to walk his way through the darkness of the night.

    Service to Humanity

    Honourable legislators, let it be kept permanently in your hearts that the only thing which keeps people alive in history even long after their demise is service to humanity.

    Prophets Isa (Jesus), and Muhammad (SAW), had neither bank accounts nor estates to bequeath to anybody. Their heritage, after their demise, has become much more than any material wealth for the entire world today.

    That heritage is service to humanity. What is your own planned heritage if only for posterity? That is a big question which only people with conscience and common sense can answer.

    Remember that you are in a ship already voyaging on the high sea towards the shore. At the shore are the customs officers waiting to check the contents of your cargo.

    Be always at alert. Remember that if you cultivate friendship with Satan he will favour your wish. But if he grants you one favour, he will take ten from you in return.

    Be Muslims by name, conduct and mannerism. As public officers, whatever you do as Muslims will affect the image of Islam in one way or the other.

    I hope you will return home as Muslims that you claim to be and not as renegades. Remember all this and adjust now that you may be able to raise your head aloft when others will be losing theirs.

    Assalam Alyakum!

  • In search of a ‘Yusuf’

    In search of a ‘Yusuf’

    By Femi Abbas

    Monolouge

    This article is not new. It was first written and published in this column 11 years ago (2009). Yet, the situation that warranted its writing and publication at that time persistently remains an implacable spectre threatening to devour the lives of ordinary Nigerian citizens, days and nights even as the deceptively proclaimed democracy in 1999 has now become a mockery of itself. Thus, a repeat of the publication of this article here today is at the request of readers who still remember its contents and find a potent psychological respite in it.

     

    THIS world is a dramatic entity mysteriously coded in heterogeneous   parables. Every living thing therein sees that entity and relates to it according to its own nature of existence. It takes history to decode it only after the actors in the drama might have left the stage.

    Who are we? Where are we coming from? And, for where are we heading from here? These are some of the questions which all rational human beings, anywhere in the world, should ask themselves from time to time. Those questions are an indication of planned progress that can be pursued through positive actions.

    But, ironically, in Nigeria, such questions have been rendered irrelevant because the circumstances of life imposed on this retrogressive country have changed the priorities of her citizens. The only question now in vogue, which every privileged person seems to concentrate upon is this: ‘what will I get for myself in this appointment?

    That very question is the real drama that has permanently engaged the attention of overwhelming majority of Nigerian elites since the commencement of the country’s   fourth republic. It is the question that crowns corruption as the despotic king that now rules Nigeria with impunity. It is the question that fosters greed and impunity beyond imagination even as it fetters conscience to the stake of Satan. It is the question that presents mirage to Nigerian youths of today as the only substance that is worthy of pursuit.

    Hmmm! We live in a material world where immaterial   substances are taken or rather mistaken for value.

     

    No Answer

    Incidentally, however, no effort has ever been made to answer that all-time question even if to confirm the aberration in sticking to the ephemerality of this world. If any such answer had been found and applied, it   would have drastically reduced the current rate of crimes in Nigeria to the barest minimum.

     

    Hope or Despair?

    What can we say of a man who fixes his eyes on the sun but does not see it? Instead, he sees a chorus of flaming seraphim announcing a paroxysm of despair. That is the parable of the country called Nigeria. Like the Israelis of Moses’ time, Nigerians have become like Egyptian gypsies of yore wandering aimlessly without a definite destination and wallowing in abject poverty in the midst of abundance.

     

    The Wasted Abundance

    What else do we expect from Allah beyond the invaluable bounties with which He has blessed us?

    What is Nigeria not blessed with? We have land in abundance, not in terms of size alone but also in terms of agrarian soil and rich vegetation. At least over 77 million hectares of land was said to be arable in Nigeria over a decade ago. Out of this, only about 34 million hectares was reportedly being cultivated for various agricultural activities, including animal husbandry, at the time of writing this article in 2009. Today, this has dwindled to less than 17 million hectares as vicious insecurity is now virtually in control.

     

    Bountiful Blessings

    We are blessed with excellent weather that maintains our good health as well as torrential rainfalls that water our plants from the sky and greeneries   with which we graze our animals to satisfaction. We are endowed with a variety of nourishing food crops that are enough to feed us from generations to generations without importing any edible substance from anywhere. And, our population is large enough to form the needed market for the sales and consumption of our sundry products.

     

    Qur’anic Attestation

    The Qur’an vividly attests to the above assertion in chapter 80, verses….. Thus:

    “Let man reflect on the food he eats; how ‘We’ pour down the rain in torrents and cleave the earth asunder; how ‘We’ bring forth the corn, the grapes, the fresh vegetables, the olive, the palm products, the thickets, the fruit-trees and the green pastures for you and for your cattle to

    Delight in…”

     

    Any Denial?

    Allah’s blessings on us are regular and incessant. No sensible individuals or government can deny them.

    In addition to the aforementioned divine blessings, we also have energetic and dedicated work force that is married to the farm land in Nigeria despite all odds. We also have intellectual brains that are capable of engaging in research work in all fields of human endeavours days and nights to ensure the growth and development of our country.

    Nigeria is not lacking in forest and savannah. She is rich in rivers, mountains and minerals, all of which are great resources for people who are seriously seeking reasonable comfort and are not self-deceptive.

     

    Dearth of Leadership

    If Nigerians have consistently suffered from anything, it is a dearth of responsible leadership that should ordinarily care about our foremost heritage which is agriculture. That scarcity of food, or even outright famine, is now a major threat to Nigerians can only be blamed on naivety on the part of the ruling class, especially in the disastrous first 16 years of the so-called fourth republic, (1999 to 2015), when the rain of dollars was falling torrentially from the sky of oil.

    That misfortune started when the first shot at the Presidency in 1999 was entrusted to a parochial ‘prisoner’ who had completely lost contact with the actual reality of the modern life.

    On his assumption of office in that year, some equally parochial but die hard, fanatical Nigerian optimists, saw him as a reincarnate of the Biblical Yusuf (Joseph) of the Egypt of yore who could rescue Nigeria from an impending economic scourge.

    But no sooner had he assumed office as President than those blind optimists realized that the man they classified as the modern day ‘Yusuf’ coming from the prison to transform the dream of Nigeria into reality was actually a ‘Mathew’ without any intuition.

    As a farmer that he claimed to be, before his incarceration, this man had been expected to act like Chairman Mao of China who started the revolution of his country with agricultural self-sufficiency. But, far from acting like Mao, this parochial ‘Mathew’ eventually confirmed that no man can give what he does not possess. Thus, with his crude style of governance, he proved that he was never tutored in any decency that could fetch any expected good governance. Those who imposed him on Nigeria have since openly confessed their calamitous error while expressing a belated regret even as they are now liking their bleeding fingers with internal agony. Today, Nigeria is worse than what she was two decades ago.

     

    Compounded Tragedy

    The Governors of that time did not, also help the matter. Rather than focusing on agriculture which was the natural occupational endowment of their subjects, most of those political gold diggers preferred to depend on oil boom largess coming to them from the federal government through the so-called revenue allocation. To them, such a quicker way of getting money illegally into their personal pockets was more beneficial than investing in agriculture which could only yield results perhaps years after they might have left office. The only exception at that time was Lagos State where a foresighted erstwhile Senator held sway as Governor.

     

    Cost of Governance

    In Nigeria, the cost of running government alone is enough to render the   country bankrupt. What was the federal government doing with about 40 federal ministers and scores of Presidential Senior Special Advisers as well a retinue of Special Assistants when even America, with her huge economic resources, including technological wherewithal, had only about a dozen ministers?

    Besides, what informs the idea of immunity and the so-called security vote for Governors and, even, constituency allowances, running into billions of naira, for legislators, at the federal and state levels, especially at a time when innocent citizens were crying for food?

     

    Evidence of Hunger

    No one could ever think, about two decades ago, that artificial hunger could be added to the abysmal level of poverty in the land despite the unprecedented rise in the price of oil in the international market during those wasted years. However, the lotus eaters in government, at that time, fraudulently turned governance into an artful trick which they adopted to bamboozle the populace into blind submission. The propaganda in the 1980s, spearheaded by a government agency called Mass Mobilization for Self Reliance, Social Justice and Economic Recovery (MAMSER), established by a self-styled military President, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, and headed by Professor Jerry Gana, was almost hypnotizing. That Agency’s slogan of “Food and Shelter for All in the Year 2000” rented the air with wide, deafening reverberation. But in the end, nothing came out of it. Rather, some new multi-millionaires suddenly emerged from the smart project. That slogan was to later change, in the 1990s, to: “Vision 2010” with loud media propaganda under the blunt dictatorship of a dark goggled Military General.

     

     Vision 2020

    And, when year 2010 was   approaching under the draconian Presidency of the mentioned visionless ‘Mathew’, the slogan changed again to: ‘Vision 2020, a year in which Nigerian government deceptively claimed to have envisioned making the country one of the 20 most buoyant economies in the world. Now, here we are in year 2020. Where are the indications of the acclaimed visions?  Now, the two deceptive visions and their initiators have naturally and fizzled out into perpetual oblivion.

     

    Game of Deception

    It takes two to tangle. If the deceptive leaders of those years could pretend not to know that a game of deception was in place, why was the deceived populace also pretending to play along? It takes a visionless populace to beget a deceptive government as the case has always been in Nigeria. No country in history is ever known to have achieved economic vibrancy by magic and Nigeria could not have been an exception. But that was the portion of a self-glorified country that calls herself ‘the giant of Africa’. And, today, what is the result of that self-deception?

     

    From FAO’s Report

    In a report of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) some years ago, about 300 Nigerians were said to be dying of hunger daily. Only God knows what that figure might have risen to become now. That was the legacy of the past rulers which became the heritage of today’s government. Yet, ironically, the same layers of the foundation of destroyed economy in the past years are the most vocal critics of the county’s economy today. What a shame?

     

    Yar’Adua’s Tenure

    By some actions taken during his tenure, President Musa Yar’Adua of the blessed memory remains highly commendable for showing the example of governance with human face and human heart. He did not only admit that the election that put him in office was faulty, he also promised to correct that error even as he regulated the importation of food items and suspended tariffs on importation of essential food items to the relief of all and sundry. President Yar’Adua also released grains from the national silos to check inflation and pumped N400 billion into the economy for the purpose of creating about 10 million jobs then. And, besides reducing the pomp price of fuel, he also granted unconditional amnesty to the then South-South agitators and thereby opened way for negotiation with them in the interest of peace and harmony.

    Although, such measures were far from being adequate for a country which was aspiring to become one of the 20 biggest economies in 2020, the move was generally seen as a good beginning of a hopeful future

    However, as soon as Yar’Adua died, a change of gear was applied as all progressive steps which he initiated were suspended and the national treasury was thrown open for audacious thieves to scoop upon with impunity.

     

    The Jonathan Years

    Now, it is evident that no miracle could have yielded any success based on a ramshackle foundation laid down for Nigerian economy by a visionless ‘Mathew’ (from the prison) who, as President, could hardly reason beyond the siege mentality of the prison yard from where he had emerged. If Goodluck Jonathan who succeeded Yar’Adua as President had been well tutored in good governance, he would have known that the vessel which took this country’s ‘Napoleon’ to proverbial ‘Waterloo’ was incapable of conveying her to the Cape of Good Hope. But the accident of history must never cease to play itself out especially in a situation where a hidden agenda is given a premium focus. But one indelible fact must never be forgotten.  Without a historic ‘Yusuf’ in Egypt of yore, only Allah knows what the history of Egypt would have been today. And, without a Pharaoh’s dream of drought, the role of ‘Yusuf’ in averting  famine in Egypt would not have become recurrent decimal in global history.

     

    Egypt of the 1970s

    Yours sincerely was a student in Egypt in the 1970s when the hostility between that country and Israel was fierce. Egypt was then an ally of the now defunct Union of Soviets Socialist Republics (USSR), while Israel was a satellite of the United States by proxy. Not only did Egypt suffer isolation from NATO member countries but even the Soviet Union which was supposed to be the main ally of Egypt was not forthcoming with any meaningful assistance beyond the supply of light and medium range weapons. Thus, the Egyptian government had to buckle up firmly in order to fend for its people at that critical time.

    Realizing the importance of food supply especially in a war situation, Egypt mobilized all her agricultural resources around the River Nile and forgot about any food importation. The result was tremendous as Egypt grew to become a food exporter rather than an importer that it had been for years.

     

    Uganda for Instance

    Less than three decades ago, Uganda, a sub-Sahara African country, found herself in the position of ancient Egypt. A colossal drought broke out in that country killing thousands of people and virtually wiping out the entire cattle business in the country. No Pharaoh had any dreamed premonition and no ‘Yusuf’ was in a prison to translate any dream into a solution.

    What the Ugandan government did to find a solution was to reset the country’s agricultural focus. Rather than concentrating on tilling the already sapped land and rearing the cattle, which drought had eroded, a new focus was brought to bear. Uganda took to commercial ‘bee farming’ as a relieving alternative. The seriousness which the government of that country attached to the new focus was such that within a short time, Uganda became a leading country in the production and exportation of honey and other bee products to Europe and the United States.

     

    Nigeria’s Situation Today

    Today, Nigeria is not afflicted by drought or famine. Neither is she engaged in any uncontrollable war. Yet, the fear in vogue is hunger compounded by insecurity. How this country arrived at such a deadly scourge is irrelevant for now. What is relevant is how to get out of it. Like Egypt of yore, Nigeria badly needed a ‘Yusuf’ in 2015, to unravel the mystery surrounding the dream that brought this scourge about. With the emergence of Muhammadu Thus, with Buhari as President with military background,  that ‘Yusuf’ seemed to be here. But five years in office, so far, the difference is yet to be felt or seen. However,

    it is in the interest of those in government, especially the legislators who are most active in sharing public funds, to let the national wealth spread across board legitimately if only to avoid the current situation in Nigerian cities where virtually every house has become a prison in which the occupants are self-jailed voluntarily. To ignore the rule of law and shun justice in a land blessed with milk and honey is to cultivate trouble with insecurity in all its ramifications.

     

    Epilogue

    Where people are well educated and conscious of their rights; where they perceive wealth as a divine privilege and not an exclusive right of any group; where they see themselves as qualified but denied their legitimate entitlements; nobody can consign them to ignominy indefinitely. They will react in no uncertain terms. That is what obtains now in the country which has given an unprecedented rise to insurgency and banditry to the amazement of all and sundry. These must not be allowed to further continue. Let Nigeria grow from a country into a nation that we may all be proud to be her citizens. “….God does not change the situation of a community until such a community is ready for change (its misdemeanour)”…. Q. 13:11

  • Egbe Omo Yoruba and the memory of June 12

    Egbe Omo Yoruba and the memory of June 12

    Segun Gbadegesin

     

    EGBE Omo Yoruba North America (Egbe) is the leading organization in North America for the social, cultural, and economic interests of the Yoruba. Recently, the leadership of the organization commemorated the 27th anniversary of the Nigerian Presidential election of June 12, 1993, which was adjudged the freest and fairest in the history of elections in Nigeria. Won by Chief M. K. O. Abiola, the Ibrahim Babangida military regime annulled the election, the first such blatant act of injustice in the history of the country.

    As one of the organizations that celebrated the fairness of the elections and the victory of Chief Abiola, Egbe stood firm against the annulment, committing its human and material resources to fighting it alongside many partners including NALICON, UDFN, NADECO Abroad, and others. For the reason of its deep involvement in the struggle for the validation of Abiola’s mandate, Egbe and June 12 became like Siamese twins. It was not unusual in those days for mockers to introduce our members as Mister or Madam June 12.

    Egbe wore such mockery as a badge of honor. And for 27 years, the National Executive Council and members have held events commemorating the struggle for the validation of that election, which ended unfortunately in July 1998 with the death of Chief Abiola. Thus, on Friday June 12, 2020, under the leadership of Dr. Odimayo Akindutire, Egbe invited its founding members far and near, and Yoruba leaders from other regions to a Zoom conference in celebration of the day and for reflections on the struggle and its aftermath. Appropriately titled “June 12, A Mirror of Our Polity: How Far We Have Come and Where are We Going?” its objective was to discuss lessons learnt from the struggle and its outcome in light of the politics of the 4th Republic.

    Given my own investment of time and resources in that struggle, my subsequent observation of events after the death of Chief Abiola, and my personal disappointment with the political wilderness in which the country found herself post-1999, my preference was to attend the conference and just listen. Unfortunately for me, President Akindutire insisted that I must not only speak but also keynote the session. I thank him for the honor.

    My short keynote focused on the theme of justice and injustice. I observed that the Yoruba have always been in the forefront of the struggle for justice because they are strongly averse to injustice. I argued that the reason that the Yoruba people so intensely engaged in the struggle against the annulment of the June 12 1993 election was not because the winner of that election was a Yoruba. I observed that if Alhaji Tofa had won that election and the military had annulled it, the Yoruba would have been no less enraged.

    Should anyone seriously doubt this simple submission, let them ask themselves some pointed questions: Who led the fight for the adoption of the practice of federalism in a diverse nation-state such as Nigeria? Who led the struggle for the creation of states so that minorities may have equal representation? Which nationality first accepted the creation of a region for the minority group in its population? From the colonial times to the present 4th Republic, as a collective, the strength that the Yoruba bring to Nigerian political and social life is serving as the gadfly for justice. This was what galvanised mainstream Yoruba political structure to dig in on behalf of democracy and justice with regard to the June 12, 1993 election and its annulment.

    Egbe Omo Yoruba got involved in the struggle because, as I put it to the conference, we are true sons and daughters of our parents and true descendants of our ancestors. We cannot but fight injustice wherever it occurs. Now, the annulment of a free and fair election was an injustice and a gross abuse of power by the Babangida military regime. But many civilians across the nation, including some Yoruba aided and abetted the injustice. Many others refused to lift a finger for reasons best known to them. We cannot now complain about those individuals and groups. We thank God for the grace we had to be on the right side of history. It is up to them to learn from their past mistake of commission and omission.

    My second point of emphasis to the conference was to remind our people that appreciation and gratitude are important elements of the practice of justice. This is why our elders compare an unappreciated good deed to a case of armed robbery which denies its victim his or her possessions. Unfortunately, those who should know better the contributions that many people, including foreigners, made to the struggle, have shirked a very important responsibility. It took twenty years for the federal government to recognise Chief M. K. O. Abiola who paid the supreme sacrifice which made it possible for the 4th republic to last this long. Even the first beneficiary of his sacrifice didn’t consider it fitting to honor him. How sad and petty!

    Beside Chief Abiola and his wife, Kudirat, many individuals lost their lives along the way. More than 200 souls were lost to the military clampdown on protesters in Lagos. Now that June 12 has been recognized as Democracy Day, we need a monument to all those who fought and died struggling for its recognition. Hopefully, President Buhari will find the courage to conclude what he started so well.

    On my part, whenever and wherever I have the opportunity, I will always say the names of those whose courage never dimmed, whose forthrightness was never in doubt, as they fought side by side with us. Though no longer with us, their legacy continues to make us proud. Among those Yoruba heroes were Chief Abiola himself, Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, Baba Adekunle Ajasin, Baba Abraham Adesanya, Pa Onasanya, Chief Bola Ige, Alhaji Ganiyu Dawodu, Chief Wumi Adegbonmire, Baba Olanihun Ajayi, Dr. Tai Solarin, Dr. Ola Oni, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, Baba Omojola, Dr. Fredrick Fasehun, Professor Olikoye Ransome Kuti, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Dr. Beko Ransome Kuti, Dr. Wahab Dosunmu and many others. In Egbe Omo Yoruba, those who are gone home now included Ezekiel Ayotunde, Titus Folayan, Paul Olatoye, Adekunle Sobajo, Tokunbo Marcarthy, Professor Layiwola Abegunrin, Olaseni Ajao, Kehinde Lijadu, and Dr. Nurudeen Olowopopo. Chief Anthony Enahoro was the mighty oak that served as an umbrella for all of us. My advice to the Egbe was to strive always to keep alive the memories of these heroes of our struggle.

    Of course, pertinent questions remain. What was the long-term outcome of the struggle? Did we achieve our goals and objectives? In view of where our politics is now, can we truly answer this question in the affirmative? Indeed, President Akindutire insisted on knowing if we had any regrets given what turned out to be the status quo outcome.

    My answer to this burning question of course was that personally I have no regrets and I don’t think that the Egbe should regret its involvement. As previously observed, if we didn’t get involved, we would have denied our heritage. Could we have done anything more in the wake of the return to civil rule? We were not willing to get involved in the new world of partisan politics. But we did expect our partners to be guided by the principles and ideals that we all fought for, including the need to establish a true federal structure and to institutionalize electoral integrity. Unfortunately, they found themselves outwitted by the military transition.

    What next? Egbe Omo Yoruba is fully aware that our people are not satisfied with the state of affairs. They are unhappy that restructuring is still far from the front burner of national discourse. They are unhappy about electoral malpractice. And they are frustrated with the pace of progress on the economy and infrastructural development. As long as there are lice on our national outfit, we will have blood-stained fingers. But whatever it takes, Egbe must keep fighting for justice and fairness, the enduring value of our forebears.

     

    Note: This columnist will be on vacation in July.