Category: Natural Health

THE curtain falls today on this series, despite temptation last week to stand  it on a third leg next week.  I spent the week trying to persuade some women offended by the last column that  I am not a one- sided judge in the warfare’s between husbands and wives  which engulf  their children and pit  them against fathers. I know there is a flip side in every battle story, that proverbial  other side of the coin. Best on my counseling experiences in marriage and family quarrels, I was only warning young and aging men caught in tug- of love cul de sacs to not let their corpses be  disgraced  when they are  gone from the earth, and their wives and children are well placed  to call them idiots and to literally or otherwise spit on their earthly remains. Preparing early enough for one’s death and funeral has become  the  trend among men who no longer see eye- to eye with their wives and children. There is no doubt that such men maybe architects of their own  calamities, as some women told me last week. There is no doubt, also,  that they are stupid victims.  Both sides of the coin lead us  to wonder if LOVE no longer is the fundamental  of MARRIAGE. Will the walls crack to let in rodents, where LOVE was the fundation of marriage and each person lives and work with the other to fulfil the high task  of helping the other fulfil the purposes of earthly existence?   Unfortunately, men and women have reduced marriage to respectable  featherhood and motherhood. They do not realise child bearing is not the primary purpose of earthly existence. Nor do they understand that  marriage is a golden opportunity given to man by his Creator to  symbiotically release self,  servicing and helping  the spouse in a high, joint tasks of concious development of the inner person that would eventually lead each person homeward upon earthly death.  Today, most marriages are, therefore, no more than loveless and lifeless social contract which easily collapse, tormenting and poisoning the participants and dragging them earthwards. Thus, a gift from On High which was meant to help them are sent homeward after earth life   had become a burden which chains spouses  to the earth because it fills one with hatred  for the other, whereas love, not hatred, is the passport to the longed for Spiritual Home, Paradise, after earthly life.

A  letter I received from one woman  last week which   summarises the emotion of women who telephoned me or spoke with me sàys:

“All I want to ask Sir, is that isn’t this anti– women?Aren’t these generalisations from a patrilineal society like ours?

Though I don’t doubt the existence of stated cases, aren’t there opposite cases of hardworking women who were abandoned by their husbands who maligned their faithfulness, hardworking wives and turned the children against them? I know of a very pathetic case.

I’m pained when the narrative paints the woman alone as the  devil. I know what happened in my own family.

‘’We the children, inspite of all, gave both our parents good care before their departure and also gave them befitting burials…”.

From  the letter, I will proceed to the funeral wishes of  President Charles  de Gaulle, which made a serious impression on me at 20  in 1970 and inspired me at 35 to make a will for a solemn funeral in which there is no wining, dinning, dancing and bitting of drums.

The  Google  report the fellowing excerpt from President Charles De  Gualle Will for his funeral in 1970:

“I want my funeral to be held at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. […]The ceremony is to be organised by my son, my daughter, my son-in-law, and my daughter-in-law, with the assistance of my cabinet, in a manner that is to be extremely simple. I do not want a state funeral. Neither the president, nor the ministers, neither representatives of the National Assembly, nor constitutional bodies. The French Armed Forces alone may participate in their official capacity; however, their participation must be very modest, without music or brass bands or bugle calls”.

We returned from Charles De Gualle,a general in Second World War  French Army, to yet another case which spurred this column.

 

Case 2

The way  I saw the first  case last week is the way I also  see the experiences of an 80-year-old man who was a prominent player in Nigeria’s bank system of the seventies. He lived with his wife in Lagos under managed co-existence  until his six children, in unison,  physically through some of them, bundled him to his upcountry home at the request of their mother, with instruction to never return to Lagos. For years, he asked me for nutritional advice about his skeletal condition.  When he became well acquainted enough for him to be able to discuss with me his emotional disquiet, he opened up. He was wheel chair ridden. The problem was spinal curvature from the waist line  which made a  bow of his back bone. His spinal column tilted about 45 degrees side ways from the waist line.

This gentleman admits infidelity in his hey days of youthful exuberance which his wife refused to forgive. It is unclear to me if it was from this situation  that their ranks so split that  their children turned their backs on him. Whenever they were alone, she would speak to him in a parable he did not understand until he lost all six children, including grown and married men, to his wife. The parable was that they were both in the bush to gather firewood (presumably for cooking fuel back home), but it was in the evening, when they would be set to return home, that either of them would know who gathered more  firewood than the other.

This was a Yoruba parable too deep for him to understand until the family split began to deteriorate. Whenever any of his children came on a visit to them, he or she spent no more than five minutes with him in the sitting room, standing. They could spend hours with their mother in her bedroom. On their way out, they merely bade him bye. He said he was pained because he sent all of them to the university.

Then, one day, the children came home and invited him to a made up special engagement  in their home town. Once the country-home, they informed him he had been relocated from Lagos for good to give their mother deserved peace of mind in old age. He couldn’t find the tears to relieve himself of  agony. On top of his travails, they told him to not will any property to them in the event of his passing.

This was the most troublesome aspect of this man’s emotional suffering. He had discussed it with many friends and the clergy in his home town. He did not see anything he had done all of his life to make him deserve all of these travails from his children, and wondered if he should not beseech the creator to call him away from the earth.

I couldn’t support that venture.We are permitted earthly existence to gather all the experiences we need for our maturation in the course of seeking, discovering and fulfilling the purpose of our earthly appearance and existence generally in His wonderful Creation. In our subconscious state where we existed before we came here, we beseeched Him for the priviledge of full conscious existence. The entire seven universes, unimaginably gigantic as each one is, were created to support our dream. Would forced or premature departure from the earth bring joy to all those beings who helped to bring these world’s about in the Will of our Creator for each of us?.  I couldn’t bring a curse upon myself by inferring that all these creation efforts were a waste in every way. He must learn to weather the storms of his life, calmly learning the lessons they teach him.

In any case, who tells us we live only once? If we glean that from the scriptures, the reference is to Spiritual or Final death, not material death. We are told in the same scriptures that the renegade “generation” of those days would not “pass away” until final judgement prophesies had come to pass. Thus, it is inferable  that, renegade”generation” is still cycling in and out of the earth in repeated re-incarnations. In this regard, do we all know who our siblings, spouses or children or neighbours or work mates are? Reincarnation affords us the opportunity to cast off old debts we may owe one another. Karma, which enables us to do this is, therefore, a great gift in our lives, no matter from how many earth lives away it may have trailed us to the present one.

My friend accepted this explanation. He is to not play the blame game, exonerating himself and blaming his wife and children. They are sowing new seeds which they, too, may reap in the fullness of time, maybe this time around or some earth lives away.He should forgive them and wish them all well.

Regarding his property, which he wanted them to inherit but against which they turned their backs, he could make his church the Administrators. He could still will it to his children as he feels strongly and inwardly advised with a 10-year provisor that the inheritors could be charities he would name, if,after 10 years, his children still maintained their position. He should not stay in the property beyond to wait for the end of this.Whatever we own is not ours, but property held in trust for creation, the provision from which we could take some for our sustenance while we turn the remainder to the needy. It should not hold us down like the biblical Lot’s wife. Additionally, this gentleman was advised to prepare for his funeral, for his children may boycott the body. This may be the most painful aspect of his experiences on the other side if he witnesses the ignominy his memory is subjected to. Who would like to touch his earthly remains from which his children pull away? Who would like to go swimming in a possibly stormy and angry ocean? The answer to that is that he lay out his funeral  in his will and make financial provisions for them. Soon after, the once jubilant and triumphant wife of this man was knocked over by a vehicle in the Lagos traffic and killed. He could not attend her funeral, given the state of family affairs. But, recently,a silver lining began to show up in the dark clouds. One of the children, whose own daughter was about to get married, scheduled the “introduction” and ” engagement” ceremonies to the country home to which they all once banished their father, who, meanwhile, has become vision challenged by glaucoma in both eyes.

Traditional belief in their part of the country blame this condition on some or emotional stress bottled up for long and not released. Is this why some psychiatrists and psychologists say sorrowful persons should cry their hearts out? Whatever it is, we both shouted hallelujah at the news and pray that more of the prodigal children do likewise. Today, there is no time to explain why women seem to have total control over their children and turn them against their fathers. In all the stories I have listened to, women bottle up annoyance in marriage and wait for the children to grow up before they “deal” with their husbands, using the children as weapons. Any man who faces such a challenge should not fold his arms, however young he may be.

It is never too early to prepare ahead for possible days of brimstones. Who is the perfect husband? which man easily permits his parents or siblings to be run over in his own home?

It is said in men’s peppersoup and beer man’s talk joints  that we hear battle voices in marriages when men refuse to be ridden like horses and find amity in those where the heads of men, like their brains, are secure  in the armpits of wives! And the children? They never really forget they were once tenants in the wombs of their mothers or drew sustenance in the most critical days of their lives from a woman’s breasts.

I still haven’t been able to persuade a gentleman to forgive his chilldren. He was educated at Cambridge University and was a top  corporate player in Nigeria before he crashed into rustic life after his wife took their children from him and, with them, migrated to the United States. The men among them are now remorseful, but his ears are stopped against their pleas. I guess they will get him when he passes, when he cannot decide who takes charge of his funeral, if he doesn’t act now. He is an avid reader of this column and will catch me out.

I may escape the wrath of a once successful hospital proprietor in Lagos who went home in retirement. His wife and children abandoned him and settled abroad. Living alone and suffering from the lack of a woman’s care and tending,  he unbelievably stretched out his hands to a woman, who, in the widest imagination of his friends, ought never to have come near his shadow. She  had had  three children for three  men. To keep him company for the rest of his life, she demanded he sells the hospital and give her half of the proceeds. He saw through his tears and threw her out. I know he still has the means to prepare for and to fund his funeral.

Some men, like a former director general in Lagos State civil service, have found that bringing another woman in when one goes doesn’t really solve problems. He lives in one house built on one acre of land in a posh neighbourhood of Lagos. When his wife and children deserted him, and he couldn’t transform his loneliness to solitude, a world in which his life could blossom more beautifully, he literally reached out to the gutters for a new companion. He surrounded her with money and comfort she never dreamt of. He brought three of her siblings in and sent them all to the university. But when the last of them was done with school, his companion and her siblings migrated abroad. Now, he is back to square one.

The lesson we are invited to learn from these stories is that we are all INDIVIDUALS. When men have lost control over women who, in the traditional society were taught to be their property. Innately, women are sensing that they are mightier than men. Indeed, psychically and spiritually, they are the stronger gender. Men are only physically better endowed. Women are “the deciding factors in creation” I learned long ago,and understood that to mean that men only follow their bidding. Therefore, unless a man lives a conscious existence, always open to the strenghtening Rays of Divine Grace and Love, he would bow even before a woman sinking to the depths and dragging everything along. These stories should also teach us that many marriages are false unions. Marriages are made in heaven, we are told. But not many people understand this statement. A marriage is not different from the profession, business or trade or even parenting. They are all meant to serve achievement of one goal…fulfilment of the Purpose of Existence. This presupposes that the partners know why they are there and where they came from and that they are to help each other, against all odds, to achieve this purpose by each one releasing self in the service of the other. But all that many women want are the men to make them wives and mothers, and, thereby, recuse them from the ” old maid” syndrome. When that is done, all else is done and well.

 

Funeral

Arranging for one’s own funeral in Nigeria is still a pathway strewn with stones where there is no trustable support group to lean on. A bank may sound a good idea. But what if it goes bankrupt before one passes? The same goes for insurance companies and funeral homes. What may appear most reliable outside the traditional reliance on one’s own children and siblings is now one’s place of worship, and that is where many men are turning to. Even this option, in my view, has to be the well structured Christian churches and Islamic organisations which will not mess up with the funds and the plans or break up before one’s call over. I cannot recommend a government agency, for your money may be borrowed by the government to pay salary arreas or other debts. I believe we are now understanding why euro Americans have fewer children per family and turn them out into the world of adults at 16 to 18 to fend for themselves while the parents are still young and agile enough to prepare for life in old age…and their funerals. Our world is on the move, and we are following it!

Nowadays, there seems to be nothing strange in a twenty something years old person in Nigeria thinking of his or her death and planning for the internment of his earthly remains. I did so at thirty five. It seemed an akward decision then, fired by spiritual inclinations. But that is not the only reason I consider it now necessary for men to place their hands on the plough very early in life.Vengeance seeking  Women would appear to be getting more brutal with their husbands in the latter years of marriage, when the men would have become old and spent and looking up to children for their upkeep. This would be just about when such women would have obtained from marriage whatever they wanted, notably children. When such children appear to have become formidable forces on their side, such women turn them against their fathers, even  in their death Chambers. In traditional Nigerian life, men see their children as old age security and custodians of their earthly remains. Many men do not win the war waged by their wives in which the children are mighty foot soldiers. They may end up in disgrace when they die and there is no child to honour their memory with a befitting funeral. This is what has led to the trend in which many wise men look far into the future even when they live in the present, planning for old age and their funeral. I know of some children who, recently would inadvertently have made their father a laughing stock among his friends and relations while his body lay in the morgue. But he would appear to have  sensed this coming. For he made all necessary preparations for his funeral and appeared smarter than they were because he planned his funeral without their knowledge with no need for them to spend a Kobo on it or to make personal appearances at the grave side.

In my late twenties,  I had learned some reasons why death should be taken far more seriously than it was, the coffin opened for the last respects to be paid to the lifeless, cold body inside it, the coffin tossed up and down on the way from the church to the cemetery, trumpets blasting everywhere, the departed soon forgotten in a revelry of eating, wining, drumming and dancing only minutes after the coffin is dumped in the grave. Many people are oblivous of what is happening to the person they have just abandoned, stranded and alone! They think only of the cold lifeless body, not of the person who owned it, and who may still be attached to that body. It hardly occurs to anyone that the person thought to have departed  actually still  may be attached to his or her decaying body, unable to be freed from it because of all the distractions going on all around. There are many distractions which may help to imprison a departing soul in his or her decaying body. When mourners cried, the emotion in their agaitated souls may touch the departing souls. Often, the departing soul may be in a state of bewilderment. He or she sees and knows he or she is alive, yet knows that he or she is dead”, from what is going on all around his or her body. If he or she wishes to inform the mourners that he or she is still alive, he or she would have to use the intellect or frontal brain to communicate this message. This attempt will inexorably force the soul to be drawn back into the damaged physical vessel it has been helped to stand out of,  if there had been no complete serverance of body and soul. This is because the intellect through which the souls communicates with the material world resides in the frontal brain of the body. To use it for this communication, the soul has to return to the body. A silver cord connects body and soul as the umbilical cord joins the baby to it’s mother in the womb to make the baby depend on her. Quick and  easy or delayed and difficult severance of soul from body will depend on how readily or of how unwilling the soul is to depart from earthly existence. Emotional mourners in the death chamber may delay this process.So may be thought of mourners which the souls may easily pickup and find emotionally disturbing. Let us consider one or two examples of such disturbances as relations, friends, acquitances of the departing soul etc file past  its discarded body to pay their last respects. Does it occur to anyone that the last respects are not paid to the lifeless body before them but to it’s owner who may still be around in the chamber? What if the man now standing before the body, to pay its last respect, was a trusted family friend, but is now exposed as the Father of two of the soul four children? What if his death is now linked to one of the persons who has just paid glowing tribute to him?

At thirty five, I decided how I wanted my earthly remains interned because, in my late twenties, I  learned about the need to not disturb a passing soul with all of the frivolities which attended funeral ceremonies of that time. At twenty, surprisingly from hindsight, I had been following death and funerals, especially on the obituary pages of The Daily Times, my father’s choice newspaper. I  brought this subject up today in addition to the foregoing, because of the disquiet in many Senior Citizen families I have been privileged to lately listen to. The trend now appears to be that when women have obtained whatever they wanted in a marriage, notably children, they turn their grown up children against their fathers who may end up dying in ripe or unripe old age, as we say, without children to bury their remains. Many departed souls may find this disgraceful in a belief system where children are worked and lived for as old age security and as custodians of one’s earthly remains when the final call comes. In this series, I will summarise a few of the cases which led me to suggest that it is no longer out of place to begin to plan for one’s departure from this Earth just as one plans for old age security or retirement from work.

I do not know why french president Charles de Gaulle wanted only his wife, children and priest at the graveside in one of  the simplest funerals ever in France, when the country wished to reward his illustrious service with the loudest funeral ever. So popular was he as a world war and post world leader of France that, when he passes in 1970 when I was 20, many commentators remarked that France was widowed. President de Gaulle recognised that the armed forces of France will not let him go in peace. They would have wanted to bring out the troops, the tanks and the war planes. He accommodated them halfway. He agreed they could stage processions in his memory only if those processions would be nouseless. I guess now that he knew he may have detached and gone away from his body and, perhaps, from the earthly  viscinity by the time they would do all of that. But, nevertheless, it appealed to me.

Nowadays, many funerals I have heard of which follow the pattern of the living planning his or her funeral were compelled by a distancing of children from their aged parents. Some children who fled from Nigeria’s economy which they thought was lifeless and suffocating arrived overseas only to discover they had in vain tried to flee from their shadows. They soon find it increasingly difficult to re connect with home and became like the MICHAEL in William Wordsworth’s MICHAEL. One of the tragic poems I read for “O” level in 1968. Michael was a pastoral farmer who, with his wife, had an only child, a son named LUKE . Michael was a man of dignity. He stood surety for someone who became dishonourable. So, Michael sent Luke to the city to work and raise money to pay off the debt. Michael’s wife was not a marriage seperatist. She did not turn Like against her husband, Michael. Luke, 18, was lured away from his responsibilities to his parents by scintillating city life. By the time Luke returned home, it was to a lifeless home in which his parents, pulmetted by hunger, had lain on the floor holding hands while they awaited  death, as their skeletons revealed.

In many trending cases in Nigeria, many women turn their children against their fathers for whatever reasons.

CASE ONE

I have a client who just couldn’t get his prostate gland markers down, however hard he tried. Everytime we met, I found his diet was getting more pro-inflammatory despite the counselling rituals. Last week, he opened up, saying “it is a long story”. He was close to death in his marriage by the time he had to flee from home, he said. He had been about eight years away . He said there were many of his friends who had no place to flee from their vengeful and tormenting wives and who were dying in the housing estate where he lived. He tried to return home from hibernation when he learned that his wife, too, had left home. When one of his sons learned of his plans, the young man sought his father out where he was in hiding to warn him never to try it. His other children, too, either did not wish to see him or did not no longer care about him. Here was a man who, in his hey days, was a great electricity generator whizkid who calls a 3,000 kva generator in a”baby generator”. He was educated in Indian universities where he had no fewer than two masters degrees in engineering and had worked in top flight engineering companies abroad. With his wife, he has five children all educated to at least a masters degree level. Today, he hangs out in a single room apartment and eats frequently on the go. He was a typical Yoruba man who saw children as old-age assets of their parents, bore five of them and saw them all through second degree education before his limbs at seventy-something, became too old for work.

When he said one of his sons came to warn him to not return home, I wondered about what could be going on in the head of this young man. Did he not remember how he went to school, to university, and became a man? Did he know how his father made the money to build his house? Would he be happy if his own son chases him away from the house he built, when he is old and spent and has not enough fire to fight back? What kind of mother love is this?  I asked my friend if he offended his wife in anyway such as causing her infidelity pain many women bear in silence until their children grow up and can be set against their father in sweet revenge. This man said no such thing happened in his marriage, that, infact, the tables were turning on the other side. Somehow, the congregation of his church got the impression that he was unfaithful to his wife, and many of them, especially the women, held him in low esteem. So, he left the church or they wanted him out. It was only recently, according to him, that the truth began To be revealed. Some young men made confessions regarding their closeness to his wife, and the pastor upon such revealations, sought him out to personally apologise to him.

I let him go with suggestions that he begin to plan his funeral if he had not begun to do so.

CASE TWO

We reviewed the case of one of the my old acquaintances who passed recently, aged 85. It was after he passed that I learned he had a male child outside wedlock. The story I heard was that he set up his wife in business and she was making such good money that kept her so late out that his dinner was always late. Then, one day, he teased her.

“Madam, if you do not return home before 7pm from next Monday, stay where you are”.

Nothing untoward happened until that Monday evening. On Monday morning, he went to work, believing he was on top of the game. But when he returned home in the evening, he found a near empty home. For as soon as he left, she called in some trucks and moved her property elsewhere. For about three days, they did not worry about her whereabouts  or report her disappearance to the police, until his friends warned him of the implications. What if a disaster occured and his in-laws accused him of being behind it? So, he went to his inlaws. They hadn’t seen her and advised him to look her up in one of her houses.

“One of her houses”? he repeated after the family head. He told me he had no idea his wife had built a house, not to mention houses. So, house after house, he combed the city of Lagos for her until he found her in the third. The die was cast. She was gone for good, one after the other, as children, too, turned away. But one, married, stood by him through thick and thin.

When his daughter found his condition unbearable, she found him a widowed teacher to live with him. But she misbehaved. Another woman came with three children and, also, misbehaved. Their misbehaviour had to do with other men and thieving. Finally, I found him a young man to live with him who took care of him like a son.

Soon, his earth years wore to a serious end, and he passed. His beloved daughter had, like his wife and another daughter, gone ahead. It appeared his funeral was going to drag because his surviving children were not so well financially committed to it. This man may have had a premonition of what may happen to his earthly remains. How reliably could children be trusted to do the needful after he was gone, if they looked not after him when he was with them? I knew Joy when the young man who lived with him called me on the telephone and announced that the place of worship of my friend had invited the children to a meeting and given them a date for the funeral. They were to pay no Kobo. They were to not even print invitation cards or obituary notices. Their father had paid for everything, including his coffin and the grave vault.

I do not know if the feet of these children, like their souls, were not heavier as they walked out of the meeting and the funeral when they walked in. For they had through their conduct broken the cycle of a responsibility children have towards parents who brought them forth and safely saw them through adult life. Their father prevented them from disgracing him, a great lesson for many parents of disappointing children.

There is a lesson or lessons in every human experience. We may all be called humans because we exist in human forms. We are not necessarily human beings. A human being is a balanced human. The starting point for balance is coordination between the frontal and the back brains and easy access of the indwelling concious human spirit with the back brain through which, using radiations of the blood, the spirit controls the intellect or the frontal brain, cerebrum. The human being is, therefore, connected consciously with both the spiritual world and the material world, and brings high spiritual values to the material world.The human being is incapable of hatred not to mention impelling one person to hate another, as we have seen in the cases of enstranged wives causing their children to hate their fathers, for whatever reasons. Now, we have many scenarios in which ugly seeds have been sown and the fruits must ripen for a robust harvest. We learn also that our children are not necessarily our friends although they carry deep within their bodies  seeds of their procreation from us. We do not know from where they have come to us. But we can sense that there is no accident in life and that we need to learn one or more lessons for our maturation from whoever comes to us as husband, wife or children. We need not be aggrieved when the marriage is not a bed of roses. What gives rise to a bed of thorns will be addressed in the second part of this series. Meanwhile, our watchword should be the Yoruba watchword…(T ‘OJU T’IYE L’APARO FI N R’IRAN) ( The sparrow sees with its eyes and its feathers). It is, therefore, not too early at an early age to for one’s death and funeral while the day is still bright, and fit into this saying.

There is one of us eight billion or so humans who, today, is standing on an  historic edge of history, unsuspected  to be set, even at the cost of his life, to bring about an internet revolution in more than two hundred countries. He set out with 1.4 million people in 200 countries as his first disciples, and hopes to recruit about three billion people in two or three years. The internet revolution, hopefully starting  in January 2023, is expected to sweep away many of today’s leading  internet business solution providers, who would become uncompetitive. The revolution will make internet applications cheaper, faster, more efficient, easier to handle, and even reserve about 50 percent of profits in the business for internet customers, sellers and resellers. Now, internet service owners keep all the profits.

This revolutionary standing on an historic edge of history is like such men as Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Alessandro Volta, Thomas Alva, Edison, Nicholas Tesla and other great minds of yore who gave us electricity. I  also liken him to such men as Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz and others who paved the way for our first motor cars. What about brothers Orville,  7, and Wilbur Wright, 11, who fired our imagination, to make the first aeroplane. In 1807, Robert Fulton thought us to do away with canoes and boats when he gave us the first ocean sailing vessel. The likes of Guglielmo Marconi, Reginald Fessendon and Philo Taylor Farnsworth brought  radio and television. Please permit me to squeeze in two more of the  great minds who ballooned our civilisation … Christopher Colombus in 1492 discovered new found land, the Americas, while Ferdinand Magellan, 25,  became the first European to cross the Pacific ocean in 1519.

The revolutionary I say is standing on an historic edge of history in our time, as they all did in theirs, is… Ash Mufareh. On 20 November 2022, he globally launched ONPASSIVE, designed and developed by him to almost immediately from its debut become the world’s biggest internet solutions company that will make our world in 2023 to exist in an internet  eldorado of 2026. What I am saying in effect is that, in terms of quality of service, Volume of work they can do, the ease with which they can be used, speed at which they work,  their reach to clientele, their prices and the multitude of interest to which they appeal, all ONPASSIVE applications will be three years above market value. In simple terms, while the old internet technology would still be tied down to 2022 standards by 2023, the new internet technology brought on 20 November 2022 by ONPASSIVE will lead the world to 2026 standard by 2023. This is what Ash Mufareh means when he says all ONPASSIVE products will be no fewer than three years above current market values. That, again, means ONPASSIVE internet technology will be giving our world in 2023 a 2026 technology whereas what the old technology will be offering in 2023 will be 2022 technology. This means ONPASSIVE will have a three-year head start or superior edge over other internet companies and eclipse them.

Mr  Ash Mufareh says ONPASSIVE is not going to rest on its oars, although it is already the world’s internet leader from its launch. While the arrival of ONPASSIVE will cause disruptions to the old internet businesses based on the old internet technology, ONPASSIVE will continue to build bigger capacity to be far, far ahead of 2026 market values if by the time businesses based on the present technology managed to crawl there, if they can. If I can let a cat out of the bag, what would be your choice as a big business owner holding international conferences from the comfort of your boardroom, if your present facility does not permit more than 50 thousand participants but a new one allows you about one million? That is a tip of the iceberg of the new world ONPASSIVE has unleashed on the old one. Definitely, there will be disruptions to the old ways of life and of doing business everywhere!

O UNIVERSITY      

Nowadays, Nigerian universities,  are NOT the millions of higher education seeking Nigerians, at the higher education market place. Every year, the universities are over crowded with students and many applicants are turned away who turn to Europe and America for succour. Definitely, O university, the first global university ONPASSIVE is helping  to set up, will dismantle that old world. Already,  about 160 reputable universities worldwide have signed up for O-university. The way it would work is that O-university would design high standard curricular in all disciplines of learning and invite competent lecturers and professors to write up acceptable academic  content which O-university students will purchase on the internet and  study alongside their internet lectures. It would not matter if about one million students  world-wide sign up to study chemistry or law under an O University  Professor in, say, London, New York, Paris, Lagos, Zaria, Ibadan or Nsukka.  Through O-connect, a professor would have appointed lecture sessions with his students all over the world. From his lecture room, he and his aids in the interactive sessions would  interface  with his students, whatever their number.  With about 200 nations approving of O-university which will issue degree and other certificates like conventional universities, Nigerian higher education seekers  need no longer be at the mercy of Nigerian universities. Where O-university is even cheaper and not bugged down with staff strikes now and then, students may drain out of old world universities into this new world university. Consequently, the old world universities may find themselves, like present old world European universities, launching marketing drives for student recruitment. Euro American universities no longer heavily depended on government for their funding but, increasingly, on school fees. That is why all over Nigeria we find their  representatives coming  to recruit students! With O university, enrollment pressure on Nigerian universities and their budgets should drastically  reduce. Millions of would-be students, at present locked out of higher education,  would become O University students, work while they learn if they like, and earn degrees recognised world-wide. What can beat that in the Nigerian  higher education sector if not an Ash Mufareh ONPASSIVE internet solutions revolution?

History

I would like to start my introduction of Ash Mufareh and ONPASSIVE, his fighting machine about which you may have received some information from me or from some one else, by explaining what I mean by The Historic Edge of  History. History is no more than the story of a journey. The Historic Edge is no more than that critical point in the story-line of one history where the world we  knew caved in, and another sprang up from its ruins. Britain overturned the agrarian world with the invention of the wheel and plunged our world into THE INDUSTRIAL AGE. The wheel brought more machines, ships, exploration, motor cars, turbines and electricity, the railway and the commercial airplanes with war planes in tow, the atomic bomb, hydrogen bomb, river dams and river dam bombs, expansion in agriculture beyond the reasoning of Rev Thomas Malthus, household utensils, radio and television…and what else? THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, well upon us, was overtaken by the POST INDUSTRIAL AGE. Many onlookers  thought mankind had reached  THE END OF HISTORY. But they were proven wrong by space explorations which terminated dominance of the industrial age to usher in THE INFORMATION AGE. What can anyone do on earth today without the computer and the information-spinning internet? What will anybody be able to do without the internet, if today’s internet speed balloons over by more than 200 percent?

I shudder to think of what will come upon our world from 20 November 2022 when Ash Mufareh, standing on ” an  historic edge of history,” unleashed ONPASSIVE on the information Age to cause such “disruptions” as would spring us all into a much bigger, better, cleaner, faster moving, more efficient, less laborious yet more compassionate world.

I will be selective in my introduction of ASH MUFAREH before I return to ONPASSIVE. He set on his journey to the “historic edge of history” about four and a half years ago. From a marketing and information intelligence (AI) background, he saw many small, intermediate and big businesses rise and rapidly fall because the owners were overwhelmed by management problems. The problems were more than a mountain of information they could not make sense of, let alone rapidly employ and deploy to upscale their businesses. He knew AI could solve this problem for them, if the capacity of AI technology was upscaled. But the problem was that many providers of internet solutions applications appeared content with the huge income they were making and did not think of helping collapsing businesses with investments in newer technologies. Ash Mufareh prepared himself to fill this gap. But this was only a fraction of the challenges he saw holding humanity down from achieving its optimum potentials. He saw want and poverty and misery everywhere. And, as he always said in his training webinars, he did not think everyone of us was on this Earth only to survive childhood mortalities, get higher education, settle into marriages, raise families and go on struggling to survive inclemencies of the social and physical environments. There must be more to life to make man exist, he says. He concluded  that everyone had a mission for being on   Earth but which one or inclemency or the other was bifurcating or obliterating and denying achievement. In the end,  an earth life, a precious gift may end up mangled and wasted.

OBE

Since I had my first Out of Body experience (OBE) at  24  in 1974 when I   went to the university, I had been concerning myself with human existence and the purpose of earth life. Your attitude to life will change if, one day, while deep in sleep and you think you are dreaming, you float out of your body fast asleep in bed, turn round  and observe the mud casing or cloak in which you live on this planet, recognise that you, the being standing outside that body, is neither that body nor made of the materials of this Earth. You may be afraid of these scenarios at first. But it becomes reality for you when it occurs oftener. What about when you are dreaming about something out of your frame of reference and the urge to relieve your bladder interrupts the dream?  Do you not marvel at what may be going on, when you return from the bathroom and fall asleep again, and find that  the dream   continues from exactly where it stopped? Was someone somewhere trying to inform you about something you didn’t know was impeding? Do such events not often happen? Are we through some of them reminded of the missions we have come to the earth for which everyday  bread  and butter pursuits are pushing to the backgrounds in our lives?

OBE reports  say the Universe has  other fears  of existence , populated by beings of different nature, some UPBUILDING, other DESTRUCTIVE ( principalities). Earthly events are modeled over there  and actualise  here by persons who receive them as ideas. Those beings are like broadcasting stations and we are like receiving gadgets. We receive information or directives from the frequency of the broadcasting beings we tune to. That is why people who are always afraid become more fearful, lawless people more lawless and upbuilding people more upbuilding.This is the story of inventors and upbuilders or destroyers.

From 1977 onward, I began to understand these events better with deeper recognitions. Thus, when Ash Mufareh’s ONPASSIVE was introduced to me and I heard him say he had a “call” to “uplift humanity” and that, for him, it was “a do or die mission”, I  to pay more attention to ONPASSIVE.

As a  Christian, I am familiar with “callings”. As our Lord Jesus was descending to the earth on his Salvation Mission, many beings in those higher realms supplicated to come with him. Those   accepted were annointed, prepared and  sent to the earth before His arrival. One of them was His Forerunner, John The Baptist. There were  four wise men although many Christians know of three. The fourth  arrived in Bethlehem after the parents of Baby Jesus had fled with Him to Egypt. The twelve Disciples were waiting for him and easily recognised Him when He called them. Pontius Pilate, also called, did not heed the three warnings of his wife to let Jesus go. The opening of the inner eyes of the Three wise men to behold the Heavenly Host show us there are many activities going on around us which we cannot easily comprehend unless we are “called” to participate in them. Some Bible scholars have said these three wise men failed in their “calling” to protect the Baby Jesus by revealing a prized creation secret to King Herod who, agitated, wasted the lives of many babies. They also say Pilate feared that he may lose his job as Governor of Judea if he did not hand Jesus over. Sending Him to emperor Tiberius in Rome to defend Himself rather than freeing him is believed to be not an action beholding of one called to a mission of security for the Lord.

Thus, when Ash Mufareh repeatedly spoke of attempts to divert him from his mission and resolve to not yield, even at the cost of his life, I pulled a chair always to listen to him.

THE MISSION OF MUFAREH

Someday, the Ash Mufareh story will be written in bigger   forms. From the crumbs I  picked up from diverse literature, I  came to  the fellowing understanding of why he wishes to fight poverty with ONPASSIVE.

When people struggle with poverty everyday of their lives, they have little or no time to think about who they are, where they are from and why they are here. If the earthly world is upside down, it is because humanity is unbalanced in its world view and works of its hands must, therefore, be unbalanced and “upside down”. That is why ONPASSIVE hopes to release, in the second quarter of 2023, two major applications,  ON-JOY and  O-WOMEN. Both are aimed at equipping women, as balanced mothers, to bring up “balanced” children who would become the foundation of a new balanced world.

There is no doubt any more that humanity, diverted from the creation plan for its nutritional sustenance and healing of illnesses, has lapsed into an unimaginable army of dreadful diseases. The physical human body is a wonderful gift or asset from the Almighty Creator for experiencing earth life. If the body is diseased and in pain, the inhabiting soul cannot efficiently and effectively seek the purpose of its existence on earth and fufil it. It is no exaggeration that many people today merely exist but do not live. Living means being alive in the universe, becoming conscious of who one is, of  other creatures,  recognising one’s role in the universe and the purpose of one’s existence on earth, frequently and consciously linking up with one’s helpers and guardians to never fail in one’s calling. One is, therefore, like a soldier on the battle field always receiving instructions and guidance from superior officers. I believe it is in the pursuit of making man healthier in his physical body to attain these objectives that ONPASSIVE will in future release an application that will address human health questions. A doctor who is listed among the first top 10 doctors in his Doctor-to-Doctor home community has been appointed for this job. On top of that, ONPASSIVE will usher in a new set of health-and body friendlier medicines into the global market. Ash Mufareh talks about poverty. He says when mankind spends precious time pursuing and settling bills, they have  little time for thinking about why they  exist. O bless addresses poverty. O my life is for people who wish to write their biographies. O staff is for efficient control of the work force. O tracker is self explanatory from the name. Ditto O Games. O media will in particular help print and electronic media in developing economies grapple with exigencies of media business in the new era of AI economy. There are more applications coming that I do not have  the space to list here. The ones launched on 20 November 2022 are O mail (e mail). My contact there is (olufemikusa@omail.ai), O trim for the shortening links, O net (equivalent of Facebook which already has more than one million subscribers and O connect (equivalent of zoom). All applications can be viewed only through the links of the O founders which ONPASSIVE will release to them hopefully by December. O founders are those 1.4 million persons worldwide who trusted Ash Mufareh and followed him between 2018 and 22 June 2022 when the register of O founders closed.

• My link to the ONPASSIVE ecosystem will be available on request to me at johnolufemikusa@gmail.com, 08034004247 (wasap), johnolufemikusa (Facebook) and olufemikusa@omail.ai

FORTY-EIGHT years ago, I had my first food culture shock. That was at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN). I was a fresh student and a Jonny Just Come (JJC) in Iboland. I could not eat well for about three months. The melon (egusi) soup got stuck in my throat, as did the okra soup, and the aroma of Abakaliki rice almost made me throw up. Back home in the West, we did not eat stock fish the way it was cooked in melon or okra soup in the East. Stock fish was cut and cooked in morsel sizes, which was the size of beef for the adult person or slightly bigger. So, in the West, we ate stock fish as we ate beef. At the UNN Margarette Ekpo Cafeteria, stockfish  was chopped into chips of the block, so that every morsel of “garri” (eba) or fufu or whatever picked something like a magnet pulling up a piece of metal. The melon soup and its broken pieces of stockfish would soon teach me all over to chew my food, and not swallow it, as table manners educators had misinstructed us in High School. At school, we learned from table etiquette that the person who sat beside you at table should not hear the sounds of the movement of your mouth while you ate. It will take dietary life at UNN and nutrition education decades after to take all of that stuff out of my brain. What are teeth in the mouth for? I teach people today they are to use their teeth to micronise food for easy digestion in the stomach and in the intestine. They are also to allow saliva to mix well with complex carbohydrate in the mouth so that ptyalin, an enzyme in saliva, will reduce the complexe carbohydrate or polysaccharides to simpler ones called disaccharides. By this time, the taste of the food should have changed, signalling end of the first stage of digestion, and only then should it be swallowed.  In doing this, how will my neighbour not hear the sound the teeth, the tongue and the saliva are producing in my mouth?

And the okra at UNN? Back home, it was micronised to the size of the white pods of the okra or smaller with the kitchen knife or the electric blender. Today, a kitchen grater does the job well as well. But in those  days at the UNN, I was faced by an okra soup in which the okra had been cut to about four or fewer bits! As for Abakaliki rice, I traded my meal tickets for some other meal and went to town for a meal at a Yoruba food carteen beside the motor park. What a great discovery it was the day I discovered it was owned by the wife of one of my uncles who had left the village for Onitsha about 29 years before I came to Nsukka. Back home in the village, I always heard about an uncle nicknamed Millionaire Pikin. My grandma told me he went to the East and did not return home until during the 1967-70 Biafra war when he suddenly landed with about 18 children from three wives. After the war in 1970, he returned to the East. No one knew where he went. He was out of town in 1974 when I began to frequent this canteen, the owner unknown to me . When he returned and discovered I was a new regular customer, and asked where I came from and narrowed it to his village and compound, he put his hands on his head in lamentation that we should never throw a stone into a market crowd for it may land on the head of one of our relations. That was a great Yoruba proverb against evil doing. Soon, his children began to do my laundry and to bring me home cooking in my hostel room. Not only did his canteen become a dietary safe haven for me, it became as well a hiding place whenever the students union embarked on its Kodlinye Must Go rallies which may end in riots. Professor Kodlinye, the vice chancellor, was a UK-cultured man who, at the end of every budget year, returned unused funds to the government purse from which it had come, rather than hand them to his colleagues to butcher.

Happily, today, I now eat my melon soup the way UNN taught me to eat it. I also cannot eat okra soup without “something “in it. That “something “is not clumps of okra, though. From youth service among the Efiks in calabar, I learned to eat it with periwinkle. And, not too long ago, I enjoy it with what my Akwa Ibom friends call nkoriko. This is a specie of snail which does not grow beyond the young ones of other species before it dies. We found many of its carcases in the backyard garden and began to farm it in cages. You cannot crack the periwinkle with your teeth. A knife would have done that  to let you suck out the tenant in the shell from the other end. But you can crack or crush nkoriko‘s bottom with your teeth and chew the shell for calcium, if you like. Both periwinkle and nkoriko make good dietary sense in okra soup cooked with ogbono (apon in yoruba) these days that Titus fish and beef are too expensive. My only concern is that the intestine of periwinkle and of nkoriko may be eaten along with their meat. I am unhappy anytime I test their poop in my mouth. For I know the faeces of all animals is a waste material which contains bacterial, fungi, etc. My friends from Akwa Ibom and Calabar do not appear to share my concern.

Abakaliki rice

Excuse me, I am not a chef. Blessing Effiong, from Ikot Ekwere Itam in Akwa Ibom State set the stage for this column. She came to spend about two weeks with my household in Lagos. And one of her gifts  for us was Abakaliki  rice. The aroma fills the kitchen and the entire house. We are interchanging Abakaliki rice with local rice we bought from Mr. Sanni Eremosele who brings it to Lagos from Irua, near Auchi. Blessing also brought palm oil. We interchange also with palm oil from Irua. We are educated anew that we eat adulterated food in Lagos. Since the home grown rice revolution began under President Mohammadu Buhari, one of the silent achievements of his administration I dare say, my household has not eaten foreign rice. We are not only patriotic Nigerians, we care for our health as well. As you will find in the following article, white rice, which foreign rice is all about, destroys the lives of many people in Asia, particularly Japan, a little under 200 years ago. Many Africans, especially Nigerians, did not know about this, and, thus, go on instalmentally damaging their health and shortening their lives, whereas the rice grown on their own soil and untempered with can rebuild their health and prolong thier lives.

Acording to Anne Ewbank, writing in Google on February 22, 2018:

In 1877, Japan’s Meiji Emperor watched his aunt, the Princess Kazu, die of a common malady: kakke. If her condition was typical, her legs would have swollen, and her speech slowed. Numbness and paralysis might have come next, along with twitching and vomiting. Death often resulted from heart failure.

The emperor had suffered from this same ailment, on-and-off, his whole life. In response, he poured money into research on the illness. It was a matter of survival: for the emperor, his family, and Japan’s ruling class. While most diseases ravage the poor and vulnerable, kakke afflicted the wealthy and powerful, especially city dwellers. This curious fact gave kakke its other name: Edo wazurai, the affliction of Edo (Edo being the old name for Tokyo). But for centuries, the culprit of kakke went unnoticed: fine, polished, white rice.

Gleaming white rice was a status symbol—it was expensive and laborious to husk, hull, polish, and wash. In Japan, the poor ate brown rice, or other carbohydrates such as sweet potatoes or barley. The rich ate polished white rice, often to the exclusion of other foods.

This was a problem. Removing the outer layers of a grain of rice also removes one vital nutrient: thiamine, or vitamin B-1. Without thiamine, animals and humans develop kakke, now known in English as beriberi. But for too long, the cause of the condition remained unknown.

In his book Beriberi in Modern Japan: The making of a National Disease, Alexander R. Bay describes the efforts of Edo-era doctors to figure out the disease. A common suspect was dampness and damp ground. One doctor administered herbal medicines and a fasting regimen to a samurai, who died within months. Other doctors burned dried mugwort on patients’ bodies to stimulate qi and blood flow.

Some remedies did work—even if they didn’t come from a true understanding of the disease. Katsuki Gyuzan, an early, 18th-century doctor, believed Edo itself was the issue. Samurai, he wrote, would come to Edo and get kakke from the water and soil. Only samurai who went back to their provincial homes—going over the Hakone Pass—would be cured. Those who were seriously ill had to move quickly, “for the worst cases always result in death,” Katsuki cautioned. Since heavily processed white rice was less available outside Edo and in the countryside, this likely was a cure. Similarly, a number of physicians prescribed barley and red beans, which both contain thiamine.

According to Anne Ewbank, writing in Google on February 22 2018:

By 1877, Japan’s beriberi problem was getting really serious. When the princess Kazu died of kakke at 31, it was only a decade after her former husband, Japan’s shogun, had died, almost certainly from the mysterious disease. Machine-milling made polished rice available to the masses, and as the government invested in an army and navy, it fed soldiers with white rice. (White rice, as it happened, was less bulky and lasted longer than brown rice, which could go rancid in warm weather.) Inevitably, soldiers and sailors got beriberi.

No longer was this just a problem for the upper class, or even Japan. In his article British India and the “Beriberi Problem,” 1798–1942, David Arnold writes that by the time the emperor was funding research, beriberi was ravaging South and East Asia, especially “soldiers, sailors, plantation labourers, prisoners, and asylum inmates.”

 Britannica.com

According to the Editors of encylopedia Britannica.com in an article last updated on October 10, 2022 and introduced as Beriberi, nutritional disorder caused by a deficiency of thiamin (vitamin b1) and characterised by impairment of the nerves and heart or Thiamine defficiency, vitamin B1 defficiency as alternative headline, it is reported:

“General symptoms include loss of appetite and overall lassitude, digestive irregularities, and a feeling of numbness and weakness in the limbs and extremities. (The term beriberi is derived from the Sinhalese word meaning “extreme weakness.”) In the form known as dry beriberi, there is a gradual degeneration of the long nerves, first of the legs and then of the arms, with associated atrophy of muscle and loss of reflexes. In wet beriberi, a more acute form, there is edema (overabundance of fluid in the tissues) resulting largely from cardiac failure and poor circulation. In infants breast-fed by mothers who are deficient in thiamin, beriberi may lead to rapidly progressive heart failure.

“The cardiac symptoms, in both infants and adults, generally respond promptly and dramatically to the administration of thiamin. When neurological involvement is present, the response to thiamin is much more gradual; in severe cases, the structural lesions of the nerve cells may be irreversible”.

“Thiamin normally plays an essential role as a coenzyme in the metabolism of carbohydrates; in its absence, pyruvic acid and lactic acid (products of carbohydrate digestion) accumulate in the tissues, where they are believed to be responsible for most of the neurological and cardiac manifestations.

Thiamin occurs widely in food but may be lost in the course of processing, particularly in the milling of grains. In East Asian countries, where polished white rice is a dietary staple, beriberi has been a long-standing problem. The history of the recognition, the cause, and the cure of beriberi is dramatic and is well documented in medical literature. In the 1880s the Japanese navy reported that beriberi had been eradicated among its sailors as a result of adding extra meat, fish, and vegetables to their regular diet. Before that time, almost half of the sailors were likely to develop beriberi, and many died of it. In 1897 Christiaan Eijkman, working in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), found that a beriberi-like disease could be produced in chickens by feeding them a diet of polished rice. British researchers William Fletcher, Henry Fraser, and A.T. Stanton later confirmed that beriberi in humans was also related to the consumption of polished white rice. In 1912, Casimir Funk demonstrated that beriberi-like symptoms induced in pigeons could be cured by feeding them with white rice that was supplemented with a concentrate made from rice polishings. Following this discovery he proposed that this, as well as several other conditions, were due to diets that were deficient in specific factors that he called “vitamines,” later called vitamins.

The prevention of beriberi is accomplished by eating a well-balanced diet, since thiamin is present in most raw and untreated foods. The incidence of beriberi in Asia has markedly decreased because an improved standard of living has allowed a more varied diet and partly because of the gradual popular acceptance of partially dehusked, parboiled, and enriched rice—forms that contain higher concentrations of thiamin. In Western countries, thiamin deficiency is encountered almost solely in cases of chronic alcoholism”.

Port of Maha Chai

According to  Pawinee Doung-ngem, ( Ministry of Public health Thailand), S Kesomsukhom, J Kanlayanaphotpom,  S Wanadurongwan, Sriwatana Songchitsomboon (Mahidol University), writing in the Southeast  Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health:

“In April 2005, The Tahi Bureau of Epidemiology investigated a reported outbreak of beriberi among commercial fishermen in Maha Chai, a port city in the Gulf of Thailand. The objective of this study was to verify the diagnosis of beriberi in affected individuals, describe the possible outbreak, ascertain risk factors, and provide prevention and control measures. We interviewed ill persons and treating doctors, and reviewed medical records to conduct a descriptive study. A probable case was defined as a crewmember of Ship A with one of the following: leg edema scrotal edema or ascites, dyspnea, chest discomfort, chest pain, extremity numbness, or extremity weakness. Confirmed cases were those with clinical criteria and laboratory findings consistent with thiamine deficiency. The outbreak started in early March, 2005 and continued until March 31, 2005. Ship A had 28 crewmembers (four Thai, 24 Myanmar). Overall, there were 15 probable cases (attack rate 53.6%, with three confirmed and 12 probable cases). Only three were tested for Vitamin B1 deficiency. All cases were male, with a median age of 28 years (range 20-45). Fourteen of the 15 cases were Myanmar and one Thai. Due to limited resources, the crew ate only seafood and polished rice for almost two months prior to symptoms. Symptoms included edema (60%), chest discomfort (54%), and dyspnea (27%). Two persons died while on board the ship (case fatality 13%). The total time at sea for Ship A was 18 months, including a five-month delay in docking due to licensing problems”.

Thailand

Thailand must be a wicked country. It knows about the dangers of eating white rice, yet it kept pumping white rice into Nigeria irrespective of the ban on foreign rice. Nigerians must be an ignorance or a stupid people to prefer Thai’s white rice to their own nutrious rice thereby enriching  Thailand, creating jobs in Thailand impoverishing their country, depending on another country to feed them, creating no jobs in their own country and  cursing and fighting their government from trying to save them from food colonisation by another country.

As I forewarned a few weeks ago, politics is swirling over Nigeria and threatening to enrapture us all. Everyday, we hear things that agitate our blood pressure, make us angry or incense us to be uncivil in thoughts, words, and deeds. We have to learn how to let off steam to make our health to not fall apart. Sharing our views on matters we consider contentious and likely to emotionally or psychically hurt us if we bottle them up is one way of doing this. That is what I have done in the following words….

always feel sorry for this man. He is a man of few words, always looking like an introvert but a man with a good sense of humour, as many people close to him always say. Even if I didn’t know him as such, should I not hear from him telling Aisha, his wife, that a woman’s place was in the kitchen and in the other room, and not jostling for space with her husband in the corridors of power where, incidentally, he is the President of Nigeria? The trouble with Buhari is that people who do not always talk often say what they are not to voice at a time they should learn to hold their peace. Lately, he has been on the road again, beating his chest that he has fulfilled all his election campaign promises, conquered all of Nigeria’s major problems and made life better for the ordinary folk. In my view, the President should have kept silent at this time, and allowed Time speak for him. Life in Nigeria  is not as rosy for the ordinary folk as he is saying it is, and he does not have a good information machinery to tell the nation the fault is not all his own, although the buck stops at his desk. The problem is not that of Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Information Minister.

Nigeria has not got a professional information ministry for as along as she has been independent. Ojukwu’s Biafra outs smarted Nigeria in information management. The economy is still fowl smelling and almost suffocating everyone. There is no federal information ministry to educate us that the global economy  is partly responsible for some of the short comings of the Nigerian economy, with slow downs in Britain and in the United States particularly. Now, it will appear there is a Euro-America conspiracy against Nigeria. Europeans and Americans say Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, may come under terrorists assault and have begone to evacuate their nationals from this country. This is not new, though. During COVID-19 pandemic,  the then American President, Donald Trump, predicted that Nigerians would (die like flies). But Nigerians did not (die like flies) rather, Americans died “like flies”.

I suspect that the present Euro-American psychological war on Nigeria may have to do with the massive crude oil theft in Nigeria which have just been exposed. Where was the crude stolen to,if not to Europe and America? The destination nations for Nigeria’s stolen crude oil in Europe and America look the other way while their nationals plundered more than half of  Nigeria’s crude oil. Any attempt by Nigeria to expose the culprit and the culprits nations would definitely invite fire works from abroad. Is this what is going on? Are they telling us that those  Nigerian soldiers who are their collaborators maybe ignited to cover all the tracks in the oil fields through instigation of mayhem in Abuja? If Abuja cracks and quakes, will there be 2023 elections? If there are no 2023 elections, what would happen?

I believe we will all appreciate Buhari more after he leaves office when we realise he is a helpless President. A President is a helpless President when two key tools of governance are not in his hands. The first ismoney. The other is thepower or cohesion+. Many people didn’t know that the military had been infiltrated by Boko Haram, Iswap, insurgents and other terrorists. Buhari had to carefully sought out the bad eggs, motivate the puritants and re-armed them before he could storm the forest and achieve something meaningful. The troops in the forest cannot fight their hearts out when they know some of their kith and kindred are in the oil fields helping themselves to Nigeria’s common patrimony. Removing the dirty hands of these ones from the Apple pie without upsetting the apple carte is not an easy military task for any wrong move may set everywhere ablaze. So, Governance may have been trudging or plodding on too slowly without the rank and file of Nigeria knowing what was really going on.

The military has been infiltrated by Boko Haram, terrorists, bandits and kidnappers. If ASUU wants more money and the oil sector cannot give the president money to give ASUU, what does the president do? If the President would like to crack down on a section of the military said to be stealing about half of Nigeria’s income everyday, is it the police he is going to send after them?. We can say: are Tompolo’s men not doing the job now?. Shouldn’t we know that, before Tompolo can do the job, something must have given way between them and the military thieves?. Why are Tompolo’s men finding the exposures so easy? If this presupposes they knew about them, why did they keep quite until now? Only time will tell what is really going on.

No wise general fight a war on several fronts at the same time. Which general does that and wins the war. There is a war from a foreign invasion which he inherited. There is a war he is fighting with Biafra jingoism. There is a war with banditry. There is a war with kidnapping. There is a war with terrorists.There is a war with religion. President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian,  couldn’t fight El-zakzaky who is backed by Iran to set up an Iran- like Islamic Government throughout Nigeria. President Musa Yar’Adua, a moslem,  avoided him. President Ebele Jonathan, a Christian,  was no match for El-zakzaky. Everyone wanted El-zakzakytoppled. Even moslems in the north didn’t like his brand of Islam. President Buhari, a moslem, went after El-zakzaky and reduced him to rebel. The courts came to El-zakzaky’s rescue, but Buhari refused to let him go. He told the nation, instead, that national security was bigger than the rule of law. Many citizens who once wanted El-zakzaky crucified  turned against Buhari. Such is the lot of a President who govern a people who hate their leaders and do not know what they want.

There is yet another war with oil thieves. Can he probe the assets of military generals?Do many of them not have assets in Dubai, a new haven for riches stolen from Nigeria?  He should salute those soldiers who listen to Buhari’s voice and went to war in the forests while, as reported, several others are buying their way for postings to the oil soaked Niger Delta to secure the vandalised pipelines. When the President knows what has gone wrong with his generals, he is a wise general when he threads softly, as President Buhari is doing. The citizens do not see what he is seeing. Yet if he moves the wrong foot forward and the politry explosives or implodes, they are going to accuse him of ineptitude. So, rather than stoke the fire of criticisms of his administration, President Buhari  should learn to keep silent until the time is ripe, for him to talk, for silence is golden, try to not jeopardise the chances of his party in the 2023 polls, recognise that time is out and wait for posterity to vindicate him.

 

El-Rufai to Obi: Northerners are civilised people

 

Of all the 36 governor’s, it is probably Ezenwo Nyesom Wike of Rivers State who can stand Nasiru El-Rufai in a talk war. In the 2019 general elections, El-Rufai warned foreign observers that anyone among them who meddled with the polls would be sent back home in “body bags”  body bags? That’s where corpses are stored for transportation to whichever destination! so fiercely delivered was the warning that, without much ado, that some of they observers packed bag and baggage and headed home immediately. In that election,  he dared Kaduna State Christians who were accusing him of paying more attention to Moslems  by dropping his Christian deputy Governor  and running on a Moslem-moslem ticket which won. As the APC 2023 election  primaries were knocking at the door, El-Rufai launched an awesome attack on the “God father” of Lagos politics, a valedreference to Bola Ahmed Tinubu which probably explains the all comers race for the ticket. Peter Obi, presidential candidate of Labour party, has just “collected”an El-rufai  tongues lash. El-Rufai was speaking at a Kaduna  APC rally. He said that, when Obi was governor of Anambra State, he  and some APC members went to campaign for party candidates there. Obi “detained”them in their hotels for three days, thereby barring  them from the rallies. “Today”, El-Rufai said “I am Governor of Kaduna State”. The inference was that, this time around,Peter Obi would come to Kaduna  State to campaign for vote. Would El-Rufai be veangeful ? Oh no he said, literally speaking, hitting Obi below the belt: “We northerners are a civilised people”.

To catch the import of that small but weighty  statement, you do not have to be like me, a great goal keeper of my high school mosquito football team

 

Charles Idehor: A weak pro-northern argument!

 

The following is more about Charles Idehor’s recent reaction to Governor Nyesom Wike’s endorsement of APC Governor Babajide Sanwolu’s second tenure bid in Lagos State. Idehor, at different times, a host or presenter and guest analyst on Jordan Radio Station 105.5FM in Abule Egba, Lagos, literally took the station over from Babalola Sage, the young female presenter, to sermonise on why PDP ought to have shown Wike the door. I do not wish to engage in arguments over the right or the wrong party in the PDP/ WIKE battles. All I can see are hurt ego and curnning at play. I am more concerned about Idehor, an analyst, not giving sage breathing space to moderate her own programme on which he was a guest, a behaviour I have observed Ideho to not tolerate in his own shows where he clubbers the guest analysts and the contributors with his own opinions like sermons from the pulpit.

Ideho justified emergence of Atiku Abubakar as PDP presidential candidate on the ground that President Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan, who lost to northerner Mohammadu Buhari in 2019 utilised the southern option and that the PDP was right to consign it’s ticket for 2023 to the north. Idehor probably did not have time to configure what a northerner handing over to a northerner, if Atiku wins in 2023, would do to the north south political configuration of Nigeria. What if Atiku wins 2023 and APC says Tinubu, a southerner, utilised it’s ticket and presents a northern candidate in 2027  to challenge Atiku in a North-North encounter?  If Tinubu wins in 2023, will the PDP agree to shift in 2027 to a southern candidate to engage him in a South south challenge? The better life is not the  mechanical but the spontaneous. Wasn’t it the North Ideho was defending which rejected a Yoruba and Igbo ticket in Obafemi Awolowo and Philip Umeadi? If Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba, and Philip Umeadi, an Igbo, had been president and Vice President of Nigeria at that time, a proposition rejected by the North, which boxed Awolowo’s search outside the North, would Nigerian democracy today be worrying about where political leaders come from? Radio stations around Lagos are being politically tainted in respect of their conversations on public affairs and their purveyors.

LAST LINE: If Ideho sees Wike as destroying PD0P, how did he see Governor Godwin Obaseki in Edo State, who politically defected from former governor Adams Oshiomhole but, nevertheless, removed Oshiomhole, at that time APC chairman, from the party and then migrated with many APC members to the PDP? Wasnt that a damaging blow on party and national democratic psyche?. Like Ideho, I see the possibility of Wike in APC cracking the party. Leopards hardly change their spots. It is in homogenuity we find peace and harmony  and beauty. Wike and the PDP are tendencies which are not homgenous. I like his battles for freedom for the south, though. Many people have forgotten that Lagos State began sales tax for its IGR. Lagos has no land or other resources in other states. Its chief resource is people. Consumption  tax gave financial freedom.The Federal Government pounced on sales tax and gave the money to the northern states. Wike went to court and won a judgement that sales tax is state income. Lagos government, under Sanwolu, sided with Wike in Wike’s legal battle. Wike and  Sanwolu are political relations, even if they are mere cat and mouse friends!

 

ATIKU: Following the tracks of Shehu Shagari

 

WHATEVER anyone may say till kingdom come about what Atiku Abubakar said in the 2003 vote and ethnic power, it is like medicine after death. He has said what he needed to say, and his primary audience has  heard him.Has  anyone heard  of a serious rebuke from the North?. Despite a huge Igbo rooting for him, Peter Obi does not have the guts to say in public what Atiku Abubakar said. Nor does Bola Ahmed Tinubu, despite a widerange  of Omo eni  ko le sedi bebere ki a fi ileke  si idi  omo flomiran  in a Nigeria where Bi omo ko ba se ko lu   bo,ki onikukaluku bo ti e lototo. What Atiku has told everyone is that, if I have a daughter with buxom buttom, I will be stupid to not decorate her buttom with a scintillating  waist bead and, instead decorate the buttom of another person’s daughter. In other words, being a northerner, northerners should vote for him as their son(OMO ENI…)and not for a  southerner  (OMO ELO MI RAN…). Another interpretation is that where children from different mothers cannot be fed and brought up together in harmony, it is better for every woman’s child to feed from his or her mother’s breasts and not from someone elses(TI OMO KO  BA…L’OTOTO).

Rivers State governor Nyeson Wike was powerfully and shamelessly taught this lesson in the PDP Presidential primary election when, in the last seconds, the governor of Sokoto State stepped down for second  runner Atiku Abubakar to edge out first runner Nyeson Wike. Only once have my ears heard  what Atiku Abubakar said about northerners voting for him and for no Southerners.  Although several attempts have been made to pull wool over it, I do not put the statement past a desperate politician. In 1979,  Dr Alex Ekwueme and Vice Presidential running mate to Alhaji Shehu Shagari, Presidential candidate of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), a re-incarnation of which the Peoples Democratic party (PDP) is, stood right behind Shagari  when Shagari said at an open air campaign rally in Sokoto that moslems should not vote for “Infidels”. He was referring to Chief Jerimiah Obafemi Awolowo, Presidential candidate of the Unity Party of Nigeria(UPN) favoured by political bookmakers to win the election, all things being equal. Alex Ekwueme was a Christian, and he swallowed the condemnation of his faith for a pot of political porridge, the price of which was to be the Vice President of The Federal Republic of Nigeria. Shagari won that election in controversial circumstances which haunt Nigerian military and Judiciary till this day. Leopards do not change their spots, we are told. Where was Delta State Governor Ifeanyichukwu Arthur Okowa, a doctor an vice presidential running mate of Atiku Abubakar when Atiku made his ethnic appeal?

So, bread prices are up! Please forgive me if I sound as though I have been living on the moon or on the planet just discovered which is said to be about 40,000 times larger than our earth. Like everyone else, I am still very much an earthman. I am only being cynical that the world has not come to an end simply because the price of bread is getting beyond the reach of many people and, if I am to be honest, I am somewhat secretly happy that many people would cut it off their diet.

That was what I did in 1977 after I bought a book at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka  (UNN) bookshop titled …NINETY DAYS TO A BETTER HEART. It was written by JOHN LOUGHRAN, as a case history of his health as a child, almost lifeless, weak, sick with heart and blood circulation problems , all attributed to white flour bread as a staple food, and, of how, within only 90 days, he got his health back when his mother changed his bread to whole corn, home ground and home baked bread.

From 1977, I sparingly ate white flour bread and switched over to whole wheat bread until about the mid 1980s when I learned wheat had been genetically modified and had become a worse enemy of health than white flour bread.

For white bread lovers, LOUGHRAN tells the story of how wheat becomes white flour and bread, of how nutritionally endowed whole wheat is, and how devitalised and nutritionally poisonous to body and health it becomes by the time “white” bread arrives on the dining table. And, according to him, population studies reveal that people exposed to ” white” flour bread for about 40 years develop cardiovascular (heart and blood vessel) problems such as enlarged heart, heart disease, blocked coronary (heart) arteries, palpitations, heart failure, heart attack, blockages and plague in the arteries, narrowing of the arteries, elevated blood cholesterol levels, venous insufficiency, organ disease, inflammation almost everywhere in the body, rapid aging etc.

Can this be true? I do not know if such studies have been carried out in Nigeria. But a simple rule of the thumb guess suggests that Loughran may be correct. When I was a child, white bread was not eaten by a majority of Nigerians everyday. It was possible it was in the homes of the elite. For families such as the one I grew up in, “white bread”, like “white” rice, was eaten once a week, on Sundays at best. In those days, heart attacks and hypertension and their likes were euro American diseases with no serious foothold in Nigeria. Today, however, these diseases are seen in persons as young as forty something. What has made the tables to turn upside down? One of the reasons is that more people today than before eat white flour foods several times in one day. A standard Nigerian breakfast is (white flour) , bread, margarine, egg, milk , tea and sugar , all foodless foods in several respects. Now, let us see what we miss in the diet when we eat “white” flour bread, but is abundant in whole wheat from which white flour is made

CHROMIUM

Since 1843, a scientific experiment has been going on in the United Kingdom on the observed reduction of minerals such as iron and zinc in wheat inorganically grown in the winter months. Named BROAD BALK, it seeks to determine the effects of artificial fertilizer and organic manure on wheat and its nutritional quality. The studies found nothing wrong with wheat and the soil but with pesticides and attempt to make wheat produce more carbohydrate stock per acre for an increasing population of developing countries. To worsen matters, the food industry could not keep the reduced nutrient values over long periods of time for transportation over the oceans and seas and storage in warehouses before conversion to wheat bread. For the nutrients, reduced as they had become, decayed and despoiled in the wheat. So, the food industry removed the nutrients by refining the wheat into white flour , which could keep for longer periods. The process of refining the wheat caused more nutrient losses. Some of the nutrients lost are CHROMIUM, LECITHIN, VITAMIN E, WHEAT GERM OIL and the B-COMPLEX VITAMINS, among others. Thus, avid bread eaters may become nutritionally deficient in these nutrients. To help them not be, the food industry adds artificial equivalents of these natural substances to white flour in the bakery. But this is an almost useless effort because artificial chemical structures cannot perform the functions of natural substances, nor will they be as readily bio available as the latter. Thus,the bread eater has been short changed in the struggle for money between the bread producer and the bread consumer.

CHROMIUM is a natural product MOTHER NATURE puts in all CARBOHYDRATE FOODS. Its function is to ease the flow of INSULIN from the blood stream into the CELL through the CELL MEMBRANE. Insulin is produced by the PANCREAS. When there is not enough chromium consumed with a carbohydrate meal, insulin may be stuck in the blood stream. Yet, insulin is the hormone that leads blood sugar into the cell where chromium, along with other substances, including coenzymes will burn it in energy “factories” known as MITOCHONDRIA. Let us remember the picture…insulin will literally hold blood sugar by the hand and lead it across the cell membrane into the cell, where insulin, along with other substances will burn it into energy, water and carbon dioxide.

• Insulin cannot cross the cell membrane on its own. So, literally speaking again, it would be held by the hand and ushered in by chromium.

• We are now talking of three friends working together in this business… CHROMIUM/INSULIN and BLOOD SUGAR working together.

• Where the food industry has deprived “white” bread of about 96percent of the chromium which naturally occurs in whole wheat for this purpose, what is the effect on the health of bread eaters?

• INSULIN and BLOOD SUGAR will get stuck in the blood stream. Inside blood vessels, INSULIN will act as a “fertilizer” for the growth of soft muscles of these vessels. Acting thus, the muscles will grow rapidly like mushrooms do in the fields when rain falls upon them. These soft muscles will grow downward, upward and side ways. The soft muscles will grow towards themselves. Doing so, they would NARROW the blood vessels which are now said to be MUSCLE BOUND. Not many people realise that “muscle bound” blood vessels are a cause of HYPERTENSION, which is difficult to manage or cure. How will these muscles be regressed.

¶ This is one of the reasons Alternative Medicine prescribes CHROMIUM in the form of chromium picolinate etc for hypertension as it is also for DIABETES ,to save whatever can still be saved.

• As the costs of importing this plant medicine was getting out of hand, local anti hypertensive whole plants have been offering support to challenged persons.

• The chromium story does not end here. Blood sugar hanging up in the blood stream portends DIABETES, which may cause blindness, damage peripheral nerves, the kidneys  and other vital organs.

• May the excess sugar load not also be converted to CHOLESTEROL, under certain conditions of liver subnormalcy and create cardiovascular problems, including heart problems and strokes. It may. Cholesterol challenged persons face graver insults from statin drugs which may impair heart function. Their saving grace when they turn to Alternative Medicine are food supplements such as lecithin, vitamin E, B-Complex vitamins and chromium, nutrients which were removed from whole wheat in the process of converting it into “white” flour for “white” bread. That is why persons hooked on white flour foods need to know what they are up against and, every month, budget for their nutritional food supplements. The exposure to white flour is terribly widespread today. We consume it not only as “white” flour bread but also PASTA, NOODLES, SHARWAMA, MEAT PIES etc what goes for “white” flour foods goes , also, for FOREIGN RICE which is a carbohydrate load with too little chromium and B-Complex vitamins in it.

Let me digress a little. About 200 years ago, Japanese and other Asian populations suffered from a terrible nerve damaging disease which also destroyed the heart. It made the legs and the hands to swell and become paralysed. It also caused convulsions and ravaged the heart, sometimes killing the patient.The cause was first thought to be germs. It intermittently tormented even the emperor and killed his niece aged 31.

Millions may have died before a doctor discovered that chickens fed remnant food from a prison kitchen suffered from the disease ravaging prison inmates. When a doctor asked inmates to lift their arms and legs, they responded: Beri Beri(I can’t, I can’t). The disease called beri Beri was later known to be caused by “white” rice diet which is deficient in vitamin B1 or thiamine. Countries which suffered beriberi epidemic continue to pump “white” rice into Nigeria and Nigerians of 2022 continue to hate Nigerian rice which has vitamin B1and other nutrients. What a people!

WHEAT GERM OIL

The food industry also damaged “white ” flour by removing wheat germ oil from wheat. There is oil in every living thing as its “essential” component. Crude oil is the oil in trees, plants and leaves which died millions of years ago and are encrusted deep in the earth. There is oil in orange peel and even banana peel. There is oil in the human eye , brain, liver etc. The oil from plants is meant to replenish oil in the human body. That is why mother nature endows WHEAT with WHEAT GERM OIL in its core. But since this oil can go rancid easily if not consumed soon after wheat harvest, the food industry removes it from the plastic “white” flour.

Wheat germ oil is made of such components as VITAMIN E, OCTONASOL, B-COMPLEX vitamins (about 50 percent), OCTOCANOL, B-COMPLEX VITAMINS, such as unsaturated fatty acids such as LINOLEIC ACID and LINOLENIC ACID. Vitamin E is a blood thinner and important food for the muscles, heart, womb, the brain, the eyes, breasts, testes and practically all organs. Wheat germ oil produces energy, and had been demonstrated to reduce blood plasma cholesterol as well as help in the management and cure of fatty liver. The testes need vitamin E to not Shrink or atrophise. How many men consume enough vitamin E in Nigeria? Any wonder that testicular size grows smaller and sooner with age and sperm production reduces when young men are supposed to be in full bloom? When women who are seeking help for the infertility of their spouses ask me if the testes are not meant to be tangible and visible, I guess what they are talking about. When leg or arm muscles are weak, may we not think of vitamin E along with potassium, vitamin B1 (thiamine) and other B complex vitamins. Are these nutrients present in “white” flour bread? We know of many health problems, including cancers, caused by a deficiency of essential fatty acids (EFAs). Yet, mother nature gave them to us free of charge in and plentifully in organically grown natural wheat grains.

OCTOSANOL, a component of wheat germ oil, also found in some plants such as SUGAR CANE, consists of about 57 percent of another substance called POLICOSANOL. While OCTOSANOL has found uses in athletic performance and in diseases such as PARKINSONS, reduce “bad” cholesterol, improve the health of fat cells, it has been tried for “AMYOTROPHIC LATERAL SCLEROSIS”. This is a degenerative condition of the nerve system in which early signs may be twitches and cramping in arms and legs. The disease may degenerate into loss of motion in the limbs and in such other places as the respiratory system, resulting in death, as nerves and muscles are involved. POLICOSONOL is present in foods such as rice bran, green tea leaves, sorghurm grain, sugar cane and wheat bran, among other foods. It has been used in the treatment of leg pains, especially in intermittent claudication (pain in the ankles), to reduce excess cholesterol, improve blood circulation etc.

Thanks to LOUGHRAN. In his book NINETY DAYS TO A BETTER HEART he obliges a sub section he titled…YOU ARE AS OLD AS YOUR VEINS. Aren’t we really? when the food industry deprives us of these nutrients, pass them off as wastes for animal feed and , later, brings them back to our dining tables after it became clear that we are prepared to pay for them, doesn’t this make our veins to age faster?

LECITHIN

Wheat is not done with nutrients for humanity. Although LECITHIN is more abundant in soyabeans, it occurs , also in wheat, to dissolve or emulsify potential fats in wheat in the blood stream. But, like other nutrients, lecithin is taken out in “white flour”, leaving “white” flour consumers prone to high blood cholesterol, fatty liver, heart and circulation problem challenges, including blood clots and plagues, and stroke. Lecithin, combined with Curcumin, makes the latter more effective as an anti-inflammatory. Dilauroyl phosphotidyl choline, one of the components of lecithin, is cited as good for liver health. Choline and inositol, other components, work for brain health. Lecithin is important for cell signalling in immune function, otherwise the body may misrecognise its own parts as it’s enemies and open fire on them, as occurs in immune system disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and Lyme disease.

We can go on and on. I guess you would like to know why, as I loathe “white” bread and white flour foods, I do not eat wheat bread, since all these nutrients are supposed to be intact inside it.

WHOLE WHEAT BREAD

Up till the late 1970s, I turned to wheat bread because of the known hazards of white flour bread. I jettisoned whole wheat bread from the early 1980s because of information that it had been genetically modified for bigger harvests per acre.  Scientists say the GM wheat will help to end the problems of COELIAC DISEASE. This is a digestive condition in which GLUTEN on glutein rich foods damage the small intestine of predisposed persons. Gluten is found in such foods as wheat, barley, rye among others. They say the modification of natural wheat would make it not only resistant to environmental hazards such as diseases and pesticides but would, also, make it yield about four times more per acre. On top of all this, they say, GM wheat would come with a balm of Gilead for coeliac disease sufferers.

But the opponents of GM wheat say what has happened is a part of a Euro American plot to give poor nations political independence with one hand and take it away with another. To take it away, the argument goes, seeds are modified and given to poor nations. This would lure these nations to abandon their natural seeds. GM seeds hardly are able to self-reproduce after two generations. So, the poor nations would continue to depend on the producers of GM seeds for their agricultural needs and feeding, which is loss of Independence in real terms.

Where I have problems with GM wheat is in the way it is reported to damage the digestive system it is said to protect against GLUTEN, a Hallmark of which is COELIAC disease.

Many people eat whole wheat foods without bothering to find out if they are good for them. Some proteins in wheat called gliadins damage the intestine of about 1 in 100 persons causing coeliac disease and even cancer. Scientists are trying genetic modification of wheat to make eating it trouble free. So far, genetic engineering is reported to disable 25 genes which cause the troubles. And with evidence that the disabled genes are rebounding more, a bigger scientific war is being waged on wheat to make it edible at all costs. In other words, man is fighting nature, creating a new genetic structure and code in wheat which must inevitably produce a new structure and code in the human body. As I am well aware that whatever is false must inevitably collapse, I have educated my pallate that ORE ENU, OTA INU (the pallate’s friend is the enemy of the intestine, and that ONA OFUN, ONA ORUN (the gateway to the throat is the gateway to heaven and to hell). These are great words of wisdom in Yoruba culture. May I also add that IFURA L’OOGUN AGBA (caution is the voodoo of the elderly). Thus, if you ask me for my opinion on rising bread prices, I would say: THANK GOODNESS…LET THEM GO BEYOND REACH!

MILLIONS of us NIGERIANS are a wasteful lot. I said this much, though with my tongue in the cheek, in the column of October 6, 2022 titled: NO FOOD WASTE DAY: EAT PLANTAIN, BANANA PEELS!

This was in reference to plantain peel and banana peel which I said were more nutritious than the fruits they cover but which we throw away and animals gratefully eat. How much food waste we cause with this behaviour we may never know. I also mentioned in that column that if a few millions of us would not waste, for example, the seeds in a pawpaw fruit, and we could continually plant them, we would have billions of pawpaw fruits every year that, literally speaking, it may cost two fruits for a Kobo and we would never go hungry. That is why today’s column salutes MRS EVELYN OBIKU, of Cross River State, who does not throw away ideas she picks up in this column. I have been suggesting that we were not created to be ill or to be hungry or to be poor, and that we can grow some food in the flower beds of our homes and in our backyard gardens. Even when we think the grounds have been cemented, I have suggested we can grow all sorts of food crops in cement bags or empty rice sack. The idea is not mine. I picked it up from other people and only passed it on, as I  have likewise  done with the idea of growing medicinal herbs and fruits such as pawpaw (papaya), banana, plantain, water melon, pineapple, nettles, chanka piedra, marigold etc.

Mrs. Obiku sent the following message and photographs of her backyard garden to me in gratitude for the idea she picked from this column, and to motivate other readers to try it out.

Mrs. Obiku said: Good afternoon Mr. Kusa. For the new method of planting crops in bags I’m presently practising it. Let me show you…

 

ANOTHER WASTAGE…

Madam Esther Nmaegbunne Amaku (97 years)

Another area in which we waste ideas is this…when we hear that someone aged over 100 has passed, we only exclaim…WAOH!

Read Also: UNGA elects Korosi of Hungry President of 77th session

We do not try to find out much or anything about their dietary and other lifestyles. Last week, Mr. Mike Amaku, my brother in-law from Awka, announced from his offshore shell location the passing of his mother aged 97 years.

He said: “It’s with gratitude to God Almighty for a life well spent in health, I announce the passing unto glory of my beloved mother, Madam Esther Nmaegbunne Amaku (Okpuo) on October 6, 2022, at the age of 97. Until her demise, Mama was the oldest woman in my place Umuzocha Village, Awka.

Engr Mike Amaku”.

When I read it, I remembered my two uncles, Mr. Alphaeus Taiwo Olunaike (a.k.a Baba Alajo Shomolu), who respectively passed at 95 and 97. Udeme Edet James tells me of her paternal grandmother who died at 103. About 10 years ago, a woman in the housing estate where I lived made history when, at 51, she had her first baby. In the news this week, the record was beaten by a 57-year-old woman who has just contributed triplets to our planet of more than eight billion human inhabitants. What bothers me is that we hardly investigate their lifestyles to learn some lessons from them. Something I am sensing is common to many of them is that they eat fermented foods. Besides, they do not touch white sugar and do not “drag” anything with anyone. Before he passed, Mr. Olubanjo left word with his church that he wanted no funeral oration or eulogies at his funeral rites, that he wanted only his Creator to decide how he spent his gift of an earth life. His wife and his eldest child, a woman, joined him later. Two of his other children had gone before him before they were 25.

One of the young persons I mentor shocked me when he said his mother had 10 children, the second one when she was in the university. This woman became a school principal and carried herself with such candour you would never suspect 10 babies had come out of her. I was not surprised when this young man who told me his mother grew in their Ikoyi home garden in Lagos such things as pawpaw, banana, plantain, coconut etc and even had a fish pond to round it all up.

The upcoming generations are far from the outgoing generations, and they are the losers for it. They hate fermented food and love sugar. Yet, one of the latest nutrition facts now is that fermented cod liver oil is one of the healthiest food supplements for all sorts of diseases.

Once again, I wish to thank Mrs. Evelyn Obiku and Mr. Mike Amaku for inspiring the foregoing thoughts.

Even when they are not hungry or starving, many Nigerians say they are. Food prices are up. Kidnapping and banditry bar farmers from the farm. On health grounds, I cut beef from my diet last year. I can hardly afford Titus, my favourite fish. Snail is out of the question, so I turned to periwinkle and crayfish for protein. I have to grow yam in cement sacks and potato, cocoyam and vegetable in flowerbeds. Nevertheless, I do not subscribe to the talk all over the country that a food dooms day is approaching. This Nigerian pessimism is probably an infection from a world wide talk, which hit its peak last Thursday in the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste   (IDAFLW).

The talk around the world last Thursday was of an impending global food shortage, famine, hunger but maybe not doomsday in many countries, including Nigeria, despite bumper harvests. The bottom line was that 14 per cent of food harvested worldwide was lost between harvest and retail while 17 per cent is wasted at the retail and consumption levels of the food chain. This is not strange to Nigerians. Many of them eat stew and soup made from rotten Peppers and tomatoes. What may have been unknown to many people was that rotten food on the farms, and in trucks heading for retail markets produce a green house gas (GHG) called methane, and that methane is about 74 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide produced by firewood cooking, for example, damaging the environment, causing climate change, drought and flooding.

I AM less perturbed about all this or about the inability of Nigerians to properly store food on the farms, during conveyance to retail markets, in these markets or in homes as IAM about preventing food waste at another level. This level is multilateral. We waste food at open air funeral and wedding feasts or banquets, for example. Besides, we do not partner with nature to continually multiply the natural  food stock that would produce more food than we can eat and still have more left for export. The pawpaw, for example is not deliberately propagated. The average fruit offers us about 100 seeds. We eat the fruits but throw the seeds away. Few of these seeds survive predation and germinate. What may have happened if five million Nigerians deliberately plant and nurture one female pawpaw plant every year for ten years? That may mean fifty million pawpaw plants in one year. If each one produces only  twenty fruits every year, when they are all mature, that could mean 1,000,000,000 pawpaw fruits in ten years. Over the 62 years that Nigeria become an independent nation, that would mean about 6.2 billion pawpaw fruit annually or yearly. How many among us would not have become tired of eating pawpaw? This output can be scaled up several folds. If you doubt it, India alone in 2020 produced about 43 per cent of the world’s pawpaw fruit output.

Read ALso: IMF tackles food, payment crisis globally

This is not where IAM going. My destinations are the peels of plantain and of banana. About 10 years ago, so soon after I discovered the nutritional impact of plantain peel, I found myself beside a woman in a market. She was complaining that the N1,000 bunch of green plantain she purchased the previous week offered her family only one meal. I taught her what I was doing at home to get the best value out of every purchase of plantain I made or harvested from the  flower bed of my home backyard garden.

“Wash every plantain clean in a solution of cider vinegar”, I said, “then grate the fruit together with the peel on a grater and cook with ingredients such as periwinkle, crayfish or other taste enhancers”, but not Monosodium glutamate (MSG). Not only does the peel offer feeling fibre, it comes with other nutritional benefits as well. The unripe plantain is nutritious. But the peel, which we throw away, but goat and pigs enjoy, is even more nutricious than the fruit it covers.

Several studies say the green peel has more antioxidants, minerals, vitamins, enzymes, soluble and insoluble fiber than the fruit. One study on rats gave the researchers hope that the extracts may help erection dysfunction and hormonal problems in humans, as it did on these laboratory guinea pigs. The study reports that plantain peel is a rich source of “polyphenols, carotenoids, alkaloids” etc. So, why throw it away?

I eat it as plantain peel flour (PPF) mixed with unripe plantain flour. Banana peel is believed to offer even more nutritional benefits than plantain peel. It offers vitamin B6, for example, which may improve sleep quality and mood. Tryptophan, another content, is transferable into serotonin, a mood balancer which may help in depression, a rapidly spreading scourge in Nigeria. The fibre supports digestive health while the high vitamin A content is good for vision and other uses.

There are several test tube investigations going on which suggest that unripe banana peel has enough polyphenols, carotenoids and other antioxidants, which can positively confront cancer. In the peel, we found more potassium, magnesium, protein, vitamin B12 than in the fruit.

The potassium content in both plantain peel and banana peel excite me because Dr Max Gerson hold this substance forth as an antidote to tumours and cancers and used it to reverse some cases of terminal cancer. With uterine fibroids ravaging the health of many women and increased dietary consumption of potassium appearing to help, why can banana peel not be eaten with the fruit or diced on foods such as rice or beans or yam or potato porridge rather than letting it end up on land fills or in the stomachs of animals?

I hope the foregoing is an eye opener that we need not be hungry or starve in Nigeria. There are other peels space does not permit mention, such as orange peel. Maybe the future will present another opportunity to examine them.