About six weeks away from its market debut, ONPASSIVE has created a marriage between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and medicine which, it says, would give doctors more income, reduce their work load, improve their efficiency and make patients pay less for medical services.

Dr Kianor Shah, rated by the Doctor to Doctor community as one of the topmost 100 doctors worldwide, will drive the revolutionary plans of this company to make AI demolish old ideas in the practice of medicine and set up brand new models in their places.

The ONPASSIVE plan for a new age medicine and Dr Kianor Shah were introduced to 1.4 million  O founders of the company at a September 19, 2022 global webinar of the company which featured Mr Ash Mufareh its founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

The O founders are first line or first generation customers of the company.

Mr Ash Mufareh promised last week to address Nigerian O founders sometime this month as the company moves towards global products launch next month.

Mr. Mufareh and other speakers at the September 11 webinar said the practice of medicine was corrupt, sluggish, inefficient compared with what it could be, needlessly expensive and too often meddled with by middle man agents which included insurance companies and government departments.

The rot in medicine includes the BIG PHARMA, many people say. These are the giant multinational pharmaceutical companies. They design the curricular of medical schools. That is, they decide the medicine that medical students will learn and their teachers and professors will teach. The BIG PHARMA also decides, which drugs to produce for different diseases. They force these drugs down the throats of doctors, even when the drugs have dangerous side effects. One such drug is the chemotherapy drug. Doctors know that the survival rate in chemotherapy is low. But do they have a choice? The BIG PHARMA controls their bosses who compile the essential drug list of their hospitals or the national pharmacopeia. We witnessed this recently in the global response to COVID-19.No allowance was given to traditional medicine or to nutrition. In fact, many medical schools hardly teach nutrition and many doctors know next to nothing about nutrition.

Dr Ray Strand confessed to this in his book ” “What Your Doctor Does Not Know About Nutrition May Be Killing You”(A link to a review of this book will be provided on request). Dr Strand’s wife, Elizabeth, was dying. She had no energy to brush her teeth. Dr Strand exhausted the drugs BIG PHARMA offered him. In the end, he condescended to using food supplements a friend of his wife brought to her. And, lo and behold, she was cured!

Dr Strand began to study nutritional medicine on his own, and the knowledge of it he acquired formed the basis for his book.

BIG PHARMA holds medicine down in several ways, it is said. They set up medical conferences and sponsor leading doctors to them, to either present professional papers on their work and to report clinical breakthroughs with their drugs. Even when a patient may do better on some form of medicine, many doctors prefer to be faithful to the essential drug list of their hospitals and to BIG PHARMA.

The food and drug authorities in many countries are also seen as clog in the wheel of medicine. The appointment of its members are not without powerful influences in the pharmaceutical drug industry. Then, there are government departments, taxation on the business of medicine, and insurance claims to consider.

Demolishing this traditional model and setting up a new model may not be an easy task. But Mr Mufareh believes, as in everything else, that it is possible. Maybe what gives him confidence is Shah, the doctor who would drive the revolution. For he is a doctor eminently qualified for the task.

Google describes Shah as follows: “Dr. Kianor Shah is a practising Dentist and an Entrepreneur from Southern California. As a travelling healthcare provider, Dr. Shah has practised in more than 300 offices. As a businessman, Dr. Shah has built numerous co-brand, private label, and Peer-to-Peer partnerships in the Healthcare Industry.’’

Dr. Shah completed his undergraduate studies at Western Illinois University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in 2000. He graduated in 2006 with a Doctorate in Dental Medicine from Southern Illinois University. He went on to complete an MBA at Brandman University in International Business in 2016. His participation as a Fellow of the International Congress of Oral Implantologists, Fellow of the California Implant Institute, and Fellow of the International Academy of Dental-Facial Esthetics has culminated in his Mastership and Diplomate status of the International Congress of Oral Implantologists. Shah has been in various roles as a founder, owner, Chairperson, CEO, President, Managing Director, Partner, Associate, and Consultant for various domestic and international related business matters.

Read Also: Doctors, brain drain and the state of health care

In addition to his expertise practising General Dentistry,  Shah practises Prosthodontics, Periodontics, Endodontics, Pedodontics, Orthodontics, and Oral Surgery. Dr. Shah reads, writes, and speaks English, German, and the Farsi languages. Says Dr. Shah, “A dentist is a lifetime professional commitment. Part artist, part architect, part entrepreneur, part physicist, part surgeon, part businessman, part therapist, and part community friend.”

Dr. Shah enjoys world travel, public speaking, studying and researching historical events, and participating in sports, including soccer, table tennis, and fitness. “I love the look on a patient’s face when he or she looks in the mirror post-smile design, and witnessing the emergence of a new-found confidence. The value in that cannot be measured by numbers.”

      “O-HEALTH”

It is still unclear what the onpassive health application will be called. Personally, I think of “O”- health or “O”-med or “O”- medicine. Whatever it is, the project has room for natural medicine, my passion. The hint of this is in the statement that, from some locations across the globe, ONPASSIVE would produce physical products and bio available medicines which would not be polluted by chemical substances. This sounded like an indirect reference to pharmaceutical drugs.There would be four laboratories to power this initiative. This will be for gathering and processing data. An other two laboratories would be for the production of those physical products.

“O-BLESS”

This is a pet project of Mr Mufareh, like O-cademy. He again spoke passionately for both. “O”-bless is a fund-raiser window through which hope is to be brought to the hopeless among suffering mankind. As Mr Mufareh prepares to address Nigerian “O” founders, I wonder about what may happen if each of the 1.4 million “o”- founders contribute U.S. $1 through “o”- bless to Nigeria’s flood victims.Will a huge impact  not be made in the introduction of the company to this country?

“O”-cademy

I have shared this idea with my friends in the universities. It is “a global university of sort where professors and lecturers may earn between N10 million and N30 million monthly, depending on their acumen, rather than going on strike for more government funding yearly.

ONPASSIVE has sought the participation of about 1,600 universities globally. Not all students will be in the classroom. These universities will teach on-line and award degrees to deserving students. The world is changing. So are the ways of doing everything. ONPASSIVE says it is set to change the world. If the world of medicine changes, can that of education not? Can a professor of African History at the University of Lagos, for example, not expand the student audience from 100 in Lagos to one million globally, and getting paid by all of them who read his instructional materials, not earn millions of naira monthly? The address of Nigerian “O” founders by Mr Mufareh at this time is right on the mark … Nigeria needs philanthropists who can help to lift many citizens out of poverty and misery. So, is there a great need to pull our university teachers by the shirt collar and tell them the age of depending on the government has gone for good worldwide and that a new world order in education has arrived in Nigeria? A link to my article on “o” -cademy and the Nigerian university lecturers and professor will be forwarded on request.

Next month, ONPASSIVE will make a global market debut with four applications like other applications that will follow them.These four are said to be so superior than the corresponding brands they will compete with by no fewer than three years market edge. This means that it will take competing brands at least three years to catch up on performance, cheap price and several benefits. By that time, says Mr Mufareh, these products would have upscaled to a new top.The four products the market is expecting are O- mail, O-net, O-connect and O-trim.

O-mail is in the market of G-mail. It will be free. O-net is in the market of Facebook. It will be free. Where Facebook allows no more than 5000 friends on the user’s accounts, O- net will accommodate about one million. O – connect is like Zoom. It will not be free. Where Zoom accommodates not more than 50,000 persons in a conference, O-connect is limitless. O-trim is an application for making and sharing links. It will make links shorter, faster and easier to forward.

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!

Onpassive has just announced its co-hosing of the 2022 Fifa World cup. This is a great stride  for a company which will be only a few days old in the market place before the start of World Cup. Before the news break, the news was that…

The first volley of internet applications which ONPASSIVE, its designers, say would shake up or disrupt business life in the industry and other facets of human life should be released by mid November, 2022, according to chief executive officer ASH MUFAREH.

It was his most important statement since the ONPASSIVE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS company set to work in 2018, determined to become the most gigantic internet business company on earth by the time it arrives in the market. Many people  Ash Mufareh shared his thoughts with considered him to be a pipe dreamer. But he kept emphasising that he had a CALL to cleanse the internet industry of corruption, cheating and greed, and to enact a new way of life and business that would rid humanity of corruption, cheating, greed and the worship of money. He said the worship of money had made mankind unable  to rise beyond a life of paying bills and freed to achieve their visions or dreams of higher goals. As for him, Ash Mufareh said his goal was to leave the earth a better planet than he found it.

Many people shared his vision, and by June 22, 2022, when he stopped recruiting his “disciples” as it were, about 1.4 million persons in about 200 nations had signed up to be o founders of ONPASSIVE. Today, they are called “O – founders or ONPASSIVARIANS”.  I am one of them.

It was this group Ash Mufareh addressed  to fire their enthusiasm and energy for a business “war” the world has probably never witnessed or will ever see. He is honest enough to admit that, in many cases, ONPASSIVE will not approach the market with brand new products. What that meant in simple terms was that these products were already in the market. But what will paralyse and eclipse them was comparable to, say,, the emergence of a motor vehicle or aircraft to train which runs on water, a free commodity in a world of archaic automobiles powered by petrol or diesel. ONPASSIVE has upscaled several existing applications with an Artificial Intelligence  (AI) technology which, as Ash Mufareh, says, will take the industry no fewer than three years to acquire. And by that time, he said, ONPASSIVE would have created “A NEW TOP” in a game of “CATCH ME, IF YOU CAN”.

The global ONPASSIVARIANS audience anxiously waited for the “first volley” of ONPASSIVE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS to be named. Lately, there had been many guesses in unauthorised fora, and Ash Mufareh had been displeased with this, and had preferred to leave the decisions in the hands of the design engineers and their support staff in India. He, too, was in it with them as the project had become “a do-or-die” affair for him. Ash Mufareh had previously spoken of being not afraid to lay his life for the CALL, if need be. He said the internet industry was already sensing that ONPASSIVE would eventually take the market, and some persons had wished he would sell his ideas and walk away with billions of dollars in exchange. But, as he said on September 1, the Almighty Creator would not ask any of us whenever we returned to heaven how much money we made on earth, but about how we spent it and if the way we spent it made people happy, lifted them out of poverty and misery and enabled them to live a life free of cares or wants so they could actualise their dreams.

THE ARROW HEAD

One of the applications which I had thought would be in the arrow head was “O-CADEMY”. I had told some of the professors in Nigerian universities on strike for more than half of the year for bigger pay and better teaching facilities that any hard working one among them could earn up to N10 million a month if they could design course work with international and Nigerian flavour which O-cademy can help expose to the GLOBAL UNIVERSITY. In this global university are billions of persons, young and old, searching for knowledge. This application can expose every professor to millions, if not billions, of students against the background of under a hundred students in the archaic classroom of Lagos, Ibadan, Zaria etc they are used to.

Personally, too, I had expected o-cademy to be in the arrow head or first volley of the internet “disruptive” applications from ONPASSIVE. It had been so much talked about at several webinars that I thought it would be in the front lines of this battle for change. In their places, Ash Mufareh with the wisdom of the man with the eagle eye on this project chose the following for the arrow-head.

1) “O mail”

2)”O net”

3)” O connect”

“O mail (for ONPASSIVE MAIL) will compete with such old variants as e-mail, Yahoo mail and Gmail. The advantages of “o mail” over these include Artificial Intelligence drive, larger storage space, “integration and e mail synchronisation across multiple devices, import contact from existing e mail addresses, just to name a few”. Other uncommon benefits are stated in the “O mail” platform in the ONPASSIVE website.

O net

This is in the market of FACEBOOK with “disruptive features” over which Ash Mufareh beats his chest. These features are about the same for all ONPASSIVE INTERNET SOLUTIONS, i.e integration of the entire digital eco system, speed, bigger storage space, clearer screens and pictures, access to bigger and safer integrated servers, protection against environmental hazards etc.

O connect

Here comes the ONPASSIVE version of zoom but with a much larger capacity for everything. For example, there is no language barrier even when more than 1000 persons from different language backgrounds are in a conference. O connect has a language connectivity. A participant only needs to click on his choice language and all the discussions by participants in their various languages are automatically delivered to him in his own language, putting him at ease and making him feel at home among strangers.

An O connect literature says:

“Worldwide connectivity is today’s necessity. O connect, developed by ONPASSIVE, is an HD Audio and online video conference tool that provides unmatched clarity and quality to every virtual connect.”

O connect comes with a highly detailed dashboard that allows every user to manage and track their activity with utmost ease. With unlimited participant addition to a meeting, and its many features like dual-screen share, external link integration, easy invites, and others the tool simplifies every virtual collaboration. O connect offers an automated speech to- text  service in multiple languages bridging any vernacular gap between participants. Providing seamless connection with unmatched ease, O connect brings to the fore advantages of AI enablement that enhances the output of every virtual meeting in a world that gets smaller, with distance becoming immaterial as a limitation”.

CONFIDENCE BUILDING

It has taken four long years to get this far. The interest of some believers in the business model waned all the way. Ash Mufareh said they did not see what he was observing, and that they had to straighten or refire their vision. He was a methodical man, he said. And he liked to not make his followers despair by bringing everyday challenges to the table. This included the problem of COVID 19, internet King pins who wanted him to abandon his vision in exchange for humongous cash returns, and some trusted persons who became persuaded to serve Mammon rather than support the mission. About two weeks before the 1st September 2022 webinar, he was prepared to show such persons the door, and announced that the United States Government was following the progress of ONPASSIVE March to the market. Before then, the “O-founders” had been prepared for the launch with inspiring chats and subject discussion at various webinars worldwide.

Part of the confidence building was the announcement that ONPASSIVE had brought two floors for its Dubai operations in the world’s tallest building. BURJKHALIFA is 829.8 metres (0.83 kilometers tall and divided into 163 floors. Onpassive bought 134th and 151st floor. There are luxury residential apartments in the building which is visited by about two million tourists every year. Building BURJKHALIFA  took 12,000 workers toiling there everyday over six years at a cost of six and a half billion Dollars. The BURJKHALIFA is not a place for small businesses. This builds the confidence of “O-founders” that theirs is not a small Enterprise or one doomed to fail.

WEBSITES

Another confidence builder has been the sheer number of websites ONPASSIVE designed and built for “O-founders”. They number about 1.4 million. It is said that hardly any company has done this. The sites are individualised. That is no two sites are designed to look alike of the1.4 million  or no sites. Besides, for some items, each site has been changing configurations no fewer than two times a day for some time with the possibility of the frequency even increasing. The idea is to make the visitor stand amazed or dazed before them, hardly recognising in the mid afternoon what he or she observed in the morning. This is at no cost to the “O-founders”!

Onpassive billboards are strategically located in Dubai, one of its soft launch pads which include Singapore, Bangladesh and India, the United States, among others. ONPASSIVE celebrated WOMEN’S DAY for Dubai women. For its activities in Dubai, it obtained permits from the city’s administration etc.

A CALL

Ash Mufareh stands steadfast in a “CALL” he says demands he fights and eradicates corruption, poverty and misery among humanity, beginning with the internet industry, as I will discuss below. He also senses a calling to fight poverty and liberate humanity from everyday financial woes. Among o founders are persons such as Catholic reverend fathers, Nigeria’s pastor Paul and Islamic clerics who have a faint idea what a “CALL” may be all about. The heavenly host who accompanied Baby Jesus to the earth came on a “CALL”. So did the three wise men and the 12 disciples. There may be calls in medicine for a cure for cancer for example. Who knows if Mikhail Gorbachev who has just passed, aged 92, was on a “call” to save humanity from a nuclear third world war by easing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics out of communism and dissolving the U.S.S.R, thereby easing the cold war?. Ash Mufareh says he would “rather die” than sell or mortgage his “CALL”, as it may be heinous to do so. He said again on September 1 that money should not be seen as evil or used to achieve evil but to be used for the enablement of vision and dreams. Is this a message he has brought to humanity so overwhelmed with the pursuit of money for money’s sake?

INTERNET DISRUPTION

When Ash Mufareh says ONPASSIVE will cause disruption  to the internet on global scale, he doesn’t mean it would engage in illegal business. What he is saying is that ONPASSIVE will come with so many internet business solutions that would be superior to any other over a three-year mark, yet come so cheap and revolutionising to ways and means that internet consumers would abandon the present variants and follow ONPASSIVE. And one of the ways he hopes to achieve this is by not “CHOPPING ALONE”, as we say in Nigeria, but by distributing the wealth from the internet common wealth among the poor peoples of the world.

The following are not Ash Mufareh’s descriptions but my own opinions.

Anyone who has read WALTER RODNEY’S book, HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA and CHIWEIZU’S book THE WEST AND THE REST OF US, both of which I read in the university, should suspect where Ash Mufareh is coming from. Industrial Europe took Africans as slaves to work in Europe and America. Industrial Europe bought African produce for next to nothing and brought it back with value added products at humongous prices. Industrial Europe scrambled for Africa and fought two world wars with Africa in tow over courses it neither knew nor understood. It took away African systems of government and replaced them with European’s. Today, Africans migrate to Europe on their own in a second, but wilful, second slavery this time. And as Chiweizu would challenge us to observe, most Alsatian dogs in Europe and America eat better and enjoy better medical facilities than many Africans, because the exploitation of Africa continues. Lately has been the practice of business in which the agents move cash capital out of Africa and pay Africans return on their investments through bit coin which does not enjoy wide acceptability as the U.S Dollar in their countries.

I believe that, without saying it, Ash Mufareh may be inviting us to watch what the owners of Twitter, Instagram, telegram, zoom etc do to us. Google says about 220 million Nigerians subscribe to it and that about 99 per cent of Nigerian internet users use WhatsApp. These companies render good information services, no doubt. But the bottom line is that they cause humongous cash out flow from the continent, without in some cases paying tax or putting back a soothing balm on the bruised or bleeding economy. It is like a rape of the land once again in the information age.

Like a William Wilberforce who helped to stop the slave trade in 1833, Ash Mufareh  plans to stop the internet exploitation, corruption and rape, and empower poor peoples and nations which are at the receiving end of the internet or information age. The 1.4 million o founders are his foot soldiers. He told them on September 1 that they would change the world and the “world will know your name”. They are the first line of ONPASSIVE customer base. They guarantee the company a unicorn business status and a huge customer base even before the start of business. The way things are working out, the 1.4 million o founders may be entitled to about 50 per cent of net earnings, with the company keeping the rest for itself, its design engineers and their support staff. The net earnings may run into billions of dollars over the next few years when ONPASSIVE may have as many as 200 products in the market. Next year, it would begin the manufacture of “physical products” in various locations on earth. These will be additions to internet products which will be emerging on monthly basis.

CUSTOMERS

Although the register of o founders closed on June 22, 2022 and will “never be reopened”, as Ash Mufareh promised, probably to prevent big internet players losing out in the “disruptions” from buying ONPASSIVE up through the back door, there is a way anyone who meets the register can still do business with ONPASSIVE and earn good income. Such persons will be customers of ONPASSIVE products who persuade other persons to be customers of Onpassive through them. In simple terms, if you would like to become a customer of Onpassive now, you would have to go through an o founder. As an o founder for example, anyone who signs in to ONPASSIVE through me will become a CUSTOMER of whichever application he or she has interests in. Some, if not all, of the applications may be available on a free trial offer. Upon signing up at no cost other than that for the purchase of an application,  for, say, one month or one year, the purchaser becomes a CUSTOMER. If the CUSTOMER introduces the products to some other persons who make purchases, the CUSTOMER becomes a RE SELLER and will be entitled to passive bonuses from such sale for as long as the customer uses the application. Such a customer would become a reseller to some one else if he or she does likewise.

Through this model, ONPASSIVE targets billions of the five billion global Internet services consumers every year with superior, cheaper and effective services. Beyond this goal, considered achievable in the shortest possible time, ONPASSIVE hopes by 2023 to produce for the market two new superior products and one physical product every month. Ultimately, it looks forward to hundreds of “above market value products in two years or so to become the world’s biggest or most gigantic internet company which would have disrupted or consumed the greed in the industry, corruption, freed poor peoples and nations from the stranglehold of greedy and vulturous business class and nations.

Many Nigerians did not recognise the foregoing as the goal of Onpassive when their o founder country men and women began to tell them about it. They had been severally stung by many vultures and thought yet another scam was upon them. But how wrong they were! Luckily and happy, they have another wonderful opportunity to partake of the wealth from the common wealth of the internet industry.

We humans are not the world, even  if we are the Lord’s in this wonderful Creation. Even our earth is not the  world. It is no more than a grain of sand in a vast sphere spread for  light years right, left, up and below. But it is, nevertheless, a  intangible and  useful material soil on which all sorts of beings congregate to work for the purpose of developing and becoming self conscious.

In this vast sphere we human beings co- exist with all sorts of  beings, seen and unseen, such as germs, giants, elemental beings, their  leaders, nature beings and their  leaders and , of course, animals. It may shock us to learn that some animals, such as those  the Bible reports are at the foot of God’s throne (the Lion, Eagle, Ram and Bull) are Higher Beings than we humans are, and that we cannot behold them without dissolving or, literally speaking, disappearing!

In the search for  natural way and means of achieving “sound mind and body”, the goal of this column, I think alot about  Creation which governs my existence, whether I  like it  or not and   to which I should subject my behaviour if I wish to  be at peace with it and be happy in it. Early this year, I discovered that  some other  persons have  given  more thought to this matter than   I have and actually dedicated 22 August 2022 to the honour of THE DOG, that animals which, arguably, is man’s best friend. My August diary was crowded for a column on  THE DOG. So,here on 1 September…it comes.

AUGUST 22 was uneventful day for many people.   I discovered it early this year to be THE WORLD DOGS DAY! It is a DAY on which dog meat eaters especially are expected to give the dog a standing ovation, treat it with more respect and STOP eating it’s meat!

I am not a dog meat eater and have no problem with the dog. But I cannot vouch for millions of Nigerians in states such as Ondo, Akwa Ibom, cross river, plateau, Gombe and Taraba.

During my first visit in 1977 to Watt market, then the only foodstuff market in Calabar, I was shocked by the large number of dogs I saw. Many of them looked famished, diseased and troubled by flies which feasted on their open skin wounds. Of what security values would these dogs be, I wondered,  forgetting that I was not in Lagos where dogs were specially bred for house, office or Patrol services. The dogs I saw in Watt market were brought there to be slaughtered for their meat as a prized delicacy in homes and restaurants. I wasn’t that taken aback about 20 years after, when I visited a friend, Mr Atsu, a retired civil servant, in Obudu and we hung out somewhere for lunch at one of the restaurants opposite the Obudu main market. There were more dogs than humans around. So, I quickly asked my friend to tell the waiter to not serve me dog meat or sauce in which dog meat had been cooked. He gave me the assurance that dog meat was served only on request. Last, month, I remembered these scenarios.  A young Akwa Ibom woman I mentored to  higher grounds invited me out in gratitude to a Calabar kitchen, and suggested it offered no dog meat.

 

VICTORY

This was the name of my first dog. I do not remember how old i was when I had it. A colonial policeman, my father must-have picked up the idea of a dog as pet at home  from the District officer (D.O) at Abeokuta. He probably named the dog VICTORY after the name fashion of those days. The second world war ended in 1945 with the defeat of Germany,Italy and Japan by the Allied Powers of Britain, France, China, United States and the Soviet Union, behind which  queued the rest of the world, including Africa. So, victory songs and signs went up everywhere to remind the conquerors never to go to sleep. My dog VICTORY was one of such reminders. My father taught me to care for a dog. It ate what we ate but in its own special bowl which was well washed and dried after it finished a meal. Its  meals were never served on the bare floor. It recognised it’s plates, and went to sit where they were kept whenever it was hungry. On the day it was to served corn pap, it had a share of the family’s peak milk. I guess this, also, was an idea my father picked up from his boss. Victory saw me to the highway on my way to St.Andrew’s Primary school at Ibara, Abeokuta, from the central police station barracks at Ibara. Then, suddenly, we had to part ways. Why we had to, I do not know till this day. Sometimes, I wonder if the authorities in the barracks prohibited dog ownership by officers and the rank and file. All I remember is that my father always worked for three years without a holiday and banked his vacation for three full months at the end of it all. On that fateful vacation,  Victory went with us to the village, where the dogs were unkept, were hardly fed and had to fend for  themselves. Their  staple food was the excreta of children. After a child finished moving his or her bowels, that child or the elders would call out to the dogs…”Gbe, gbe, gbe”. Dogs would rush in from all directions, swallow the excreta in no time and lick the anus of the child to the bargain,  perhaps in gratitude for a fulsome meal. Why they had to lick the anuses I did not know. I can only guess it helped the natives save water. There was no municipal piped tap water in those days. The stream was about two kilometers away, water was fetched in earthen wave pots and ferried on the head up a steeply inclined hill back home. How much  water would anyone fetch on a single trip? Yet, water was needed for drinking, cooking, washing dishes, bathing and for laundry! We the OMO IDALE(foreign children) were advised to wear our shoes 24/7 and to not touch dust with our hands because of a widespread wormy infection called JIGAR. It was in this setting that VICTORY was brought in the early 1950s. I thought victory would follow on our return to Abeokuta after my father’s vacation. I was mistaken. When we boarded the truck, victory was not boarded. When the truck sped away, victory gave it a chase but dropped back when its heart and fours could not support it. Where Victory lived thereafter and how it adapted to its changed environment and the lifestyle there I do  not know till this day. What I know is that we were bonded in love, and would meet someday! Belief in meeting with a dog I parted ways with about 65 years ago and must have gone its way may appear idiotic. But, then, it is a reality. Animal souls, like human spirits, are on this Earth for self development and maturation of their beings. Man comes from a higher world, the spiritual realms or paradise. Animal are not Spirits like humans but ANIMISTIC. Their souls originate from the ANIMISTIC realms which lie below the spiritual realms. Through their activities and experiences, the human kernel, the spirit seed germ, can and does develop itself or evolve an independent, personal ego which we depict as the “I” in our languages. But the animal soul cannot do this on its own. It needs to be loved by man and to give love in return to be able to do this. Even the human kernel can hardly develop or unfold without LOVE. Its carrries deep within itself  a spark from  out  of  the Radiation of the Almight Creator.   In this spark lies, among other intrinsic features, an unconscious sensing of the LOVE OF GOD. This is why love slumbers within us.  When we love, its bursts aflame, connecting us to forces of Love in the Universe and to the Almighty Father Himself. Love for a spouse or child or nation or profession or neighbour, will ignite and awaken these slumbering attributes and automatically connect with the forces of Love throughout the universe. This connection connects us to Love itself, to God Who is…LIFE. If we do not love, we are empty shells. We are like the refrigerator which is not connected to the live electricity socket. Animal souls cannot connected on their own. They need the love and radiations of man to indirectly connect and form their personalities. That is why man is given DOMINION over them. That is why the cat likes to live with you, sit around you, sharve your bed, if you kindly permit, and why the dog is your friend. By now, mankind should have domesticated the wild animals of the forests for this purpose. Why he failed in this task of uniting other creatures with themselves and with himself is not the subject of this article( next week,I will give an example of how, working with my fourth dog, I tried to do this). When we have helped an animal to form its soul, it becomes our friend throughout its existence in the universe. If it did not form its soul, it cannot be personal. Upon its departure from the earth, its soul would return to the universal soul, its labour at self development lost. It would be like the drop  of rain water which ever returns to the stream, river, lagoon, ocean or sea! That undeveloped animals soul, in the manner of rain droplet which rejoins the river and the ocean, will rejoin the group ANISMASTIC SOUL, were its personality is lost and its has no life of its own.

But when the animal souls becomes an independent personality through the love we give it, it goes ahead of us, to its own abode in the universe, from where it may come to welcome us to the so-called GREAT BEYOND when we leave the earth. Oftentimes, many human  who have left the flesh do not know what is happening to them at the other end of the DARK TUNNEL where they find themselves, alone.

Often, if it is not the appearance of a loved one who had gone ahead of them which awakens them to their new reality, it is a pet beloved on earth which died long, long ago that is lovely wagging its tail in welcome greetings which enables  them to suspect that they are in a new world! We should live in this consciousness before we leave the earth.

 

SENIOR BINGO

After Victory,  a dog named SENIOR Bingo was the Next dog in my life. I met it at Olivet Baptist High School, Oyo, when i enrolled there for the first form in 1964. My 1964-68 set was told several sets before us met SENIOR BINGO.  That was why all students who came to the School after SENIOR BINGO called the dog SENIOR! we had about two or three dining halls and a great kitchen where the cooks ran about two or three shifts.   SENIOR Bingo never lacked food. Even the cooks called it SENIOR Bingo and served it own meals. To its benefit, too, was reminant food. How it coped during the holiday i do not know. SENIOR Bingo knew our School uniform, often went out with the day students and knew their homes. No student dare treat SENIOR Bingo like a common animal. We all gave it the respect we accorded humans. Then, one day, i do not remember exactly when, one by one we discovered many of us had suddenly grown sullen. No one dared say it aloud that SENIOR BINGO was dead! The dining halls were almost empty. Everyone  was grieving, all because a dog had died. How SENIOR Bingo earthly remains were disposed of, i do not remember.

 

MERCURY

This was the first dog i brought home for my children. Their Children class teacher on Grailland  Mrs Sola Sowemimo, had taught them about animals and man. They had learnt  about Bhuddah who knew the language of most, if not all, animals and easily conversed with them. Then, one day after sunday worship, we visited Mr M.A Kafaru at home. He was the husband of Mrs Elizabeth Kafaru who, when I was  Editor of the Guardian Newspaper (1988-92),i invited to write a column for me on herbal medicine. The children sighted some puppies. Mr Kafaru lovingly gave them one. But we couldnt take it home. Their mother hated dogs.  One had bitten her when she was a spinster and she had to take several injections. So, we connived as a group against her. I had to respect their CHILD LIKENESS to play with animals and make her love animals for the aforestated.  She taught political Science at Lagos State University (LASU). So, she should not only  know about democracy but respect it as well, i told the three boys. They must all agreed that we discussed with her that we were bringing the dog home and she agreed. So, Next sunday, we brought the puppy home. I had never seen her so furious as  at the sight of the puppy. One after the other, the boys reminded her that she agreed we brought it home. A very intelligent woman, she searched her brain for any reminder of such a meeting and found none. Then, I learnt  my weight behind the boys. We put the questions to vote and won by a 4 to1 landslide.  The boys decided we name the puppy MERCURY. They had learned from sunday School that MERCURY was the leader of the elemental beings. The elemental are the unseen yet existent tangible beings behind what we call Nature…the sea, the mountains, the land forms, the suns and the Stars etc.  These physical forms are merely the material effects of the activities of elemental beings. To imagine what MERCURY may look like, imagine the being who is said to carry the earth on its shoulder around the sun while  spining  it on its axis (rotation). A single button on the apparel of this being is said to be bigger than the earth! No  wonder the solar systems, galaxies and seven universes do not deviate from their courses unless need be!

Puppy MERCURY grew into a powerful dog. I needed two heavy chains to hold it down in the cage. Its meals were served about two metere from the cage to enable it excercise its limbs. I reared about 12 native hens and two cocks in the backyard at 34 Ajanaku street, Awouse Estate, Opebi, where we lived. They were glutonous. They would gather’ around Mercury’s food while it was in the cage. Suddenly, it would come for them. They would flee to the backyard on top of their cages where it couldn’t reach them. Sometimes, it caught one or two and ate them.

I would bring the carcases to mecury and beat hell out of it to teach it they were meant to be Friends. It was getting Wild for my liking. One day, i pursued it right under one of the cars, and a rusted six inche nail drove itself into my knee. I dared not touch it. I sent one of my children to MR KINGSLEY OSADOLOR, one of my colleages who lived near by, to drive me to the company’s Clinic at palmgrove Estate where the nail was safely  removed. Anytime i went near Merc, as the children fondly called it, MERCURY growled as if ready to attack me. So, my wife began to feed it. Meanwhile, she too, had become fond of Merc and they liked each other. We can not forget Merc. The day an air conditioner  caught fire in the children’s room, setting  it ablaze,  the children were evacuated  to the road by about 2am while neighbours, awaiting fire fighters, stormed the house to  extinguish the fire in their own little ways. Merc stood protectively around them. Moving Merc out of 34 Ajanaku street when we  moved to 39 Emina street, off Toyin street, also in Ikeja, was a tug of war. Six hefty men ran cables in and around the cage to lift it into the truck and to unload the cargo at Emina. Merc died soon after. I called Mr Dotun Akintoye my Best man at my wedding in 1983, to support me to give Merc a befitting funeral. We did not throw Merc’s body  into a canal or a body bag for dust men to pickup. We dug a grave, gently let it down, offered prayers of thanksgiving for its life and service to my family and shovelled earth into it.

Next week: my fourth dog… this column  welcomes interesting experiences of readers with their dogs.

The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI), Dr Adeleke Mamora, has promised to solicit for more support and funding for research in traditional medicine.

He spoke during his maiden visit to the Natural Medicine Development Agency (NNMDA) in Lagos.

The Minister, reacting to the challenges earlier highlighted by the NNMDA Director-General, Dr Samuel Etatuvie, said the research centre needed more funds as a knowledge-based economy to enable the agency carry out research on the integration of traditional medicine into modern medicine.

“As your parent ministry, we will continue to struggle and strive to get more funding.

“We need to put more money into research because we are talking about a knowledge-based economy. Knowledge comes through research; so if we want to get more, we should also put more.”

He explained that the ministry was looking forward to having a centre for authentic alternative medicinal plants market in Abuja and the six geo-political zones across the nation.

“Medicinal plant market, you will recall that some months back, I was still in the Ministry of Health. You recall that the First Lady, Dr Aisha Buhari, organised a two-day conference on Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine Council Bill, which attracted a lot of stakeholders across the nation and one of the things.

“She put forward was alternatives for the medicinal plant market. We are looking forward to having that in Abuja and the six geo-political zones.

“Because before I left the Ministry of Health, I wrote a letter to the Minister of FCT. It will enable us to have authentic medicinal plants so that people can approach the market and see that this is it. Because it is not just in modern medicine that we have quackery, we have quackery even in traditional medicine.

“That’s where we need to separate the chaff from the wheat. I saw something like that in South Africa where you have traditional plant markets, people displaying their wares and you that what you are getting from this market original. It is good we are looking at that,” Mamaora said.

Commending the NNMDA Director-General, Mamora said he was impressed by what the agency had achieved over the years without much funding. “And after moving around and then capping it up with your presentation, I can only say ‘well done.’ And to your team, because you did it all alone. That is the joy of ‘we.’ That is the spirit of teamwork.You achieve more when you work as a team and there is a united purpose.

“In the spirit of innovation, you have also brought in some renovation because when we were going around, you were telling me you needed to invite some people that can make use of the laboratory, the hall and cause not for free. I have been to Freetown and in Freetown food is not free.  That is part of thinking outside of the box so that you can increase your IGR,” he said.

On the lack of Active Pharmaceuticals Ingredients (API) for research purposes, Mamora said that it was not enough in the country but that a bulk of it is imported from India and China.  “You talked about Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API), which come from the natural product, but you know we don’t have much of that in this country. We are getting the bulk from India and China; so that’s one area in which we can get a lot if we put in the work and I believe we can. So we need to explore and exploit what we have.”

He added that the integration of traditional medicine with modern medicine is important if Nigeria must achieve the universal health demand. “You mentioned the case of Senegal and that’s the goal of integration because the truth is we can’t achieve universal health coverage without that integration. Traditional medicine has been with us for ages and the truth is that it can’t be wrong. If it were wrong, it will not last over the centuries and whether we like it or not it is the first point of contact for our rural area dwellers. We need to modernise it where we need to if we want to achieve universal coverage. It is cheaper and safer and less complicated. So why are we not embracing it for the benefit of our people? We need to recognise and do the needful in that regard.”

On National Assembly passing a resolution for the agency funding, Mamora promised who to follow up on it. He said: “Resolution without appropriation is like a proverb without cash value. It is not enough for a resolution to be passed; it should go further to appropriate because they have the power for appropriation. It was when I got to the public service that I knew what was called approval without cash value. We need to work on that because it is desirable for you; you know what to do but you are constrained because of funding.

“You will not rely just on government funding, you will need to reach out to partners. You need to reach out to men and women of goodwill, people who are willing to assist provided you can justify and give assurance of effective use of whatever available funds. We will open our eyes and ears to look over the place where we can get additional funding for you to carry out the mandate and goals you have set for yourself as an agency. From what I have seen so far, I will say you have done very well but you can still do more and I know you will do more.”

Earlier, Etatuvie said  NNMDA lacks funding to carry out its research. “We do a lot of ethno-surveys and veterinary surveys. We carry out researches and documentations. When the agency was established during the commencement of democracy in this country, the Senate set up a Committee to review the parastatals; they acknowledged the relevance of the agency in their report and stated that the agency is very important. Therefore there is need for adequate funding,” he said.

Etatuvie added that the agency is involved in the promotion of bio-resources. NNMDA promotes cultivation of bio-resources on a large scale, at least a minimum of 12 acres of land, in the six geo-political zones.

The words he would like to hear now are …”To Joyful  Life Shall I Awaken”. This is the prayer of every cross bearer who is leaving the earthly mud body for the next plane of existence. I cannot vividly recall when I met Pa Olajide Shoboyede, who left us on Sunday, July 17, and whose earthly remains were interred five days later on  July 22, 2022 in The Garden Arden  of Remembrance  on  Grailland, Iju Hills. But I remember his daughter, Mrs. Bolaji Adenle, of blessed memory, some years before him, inviting me to her father’s 60th or so birthday. I obliged. She was what we call my “downline” in multi-level marketing business (MLM). In the 1990s, I was a pioneer newspaper writer and advocate on this form of business in Nigeria. As the one who introduced Bolaji to this world of marketing, I was her upline and she was my “downline” in any MLM business I introduced her to. One of her sisters, Mrs. Sade Olusesi, was working at The Comet newspaper where I was the editorial director/editor-in-chief, and I did not know. Perhaps because of Mrs. Olusesi, Pa Shoboyede took interest in this newspaper, as he did in The Guardian newspaper where I held similar positions, and he had been following my writings on alternative medicine and MLM. Thus, when Bolaji told him she was interested in alternative medicine and MLM, he gave her my telephone number.

The first network I remember  I took Bolaji into was Katine Communications. It was owned by a young woman who partnered with some of her friends in a church to transform her telephone and recharge card business into an MLM company which distributed Nigerian products. For me, that was exciting. Before Katine, MLM had been criticised in Nigeria as opening up the country to become a dumping  ground for foreign plant medicines. Few people appreciated the benefits of it. One of these, by today’s account, is that more than one million of Nigeria’s 200 million population are gainfully employed and it’s full time or deriving Plan B or Plan C income from the business. Besides, it was quickening business pace for many companies, generating income for governments, bringing foreign capital into the country and helping to prevent the death of traditional medicine against the backdrop of government unwillingness to protect and develop it. Not many Nigerians know that their country is a signatory to a United Nations Treaty which requires that member nations to develop their traditional medicines to the status of orthodox medicine by 2010. That meant, for example, that there should be tertiary medical institutions which train and certify the competence of Nigerian traditional medicine practitioners. The illiterate and semi literate men and women who sell herbs in the markets are to be taken along. The United Nations recognised that these were the persons who attended to the needs of about 60 percent of the population in many poor or struggling nations. In addition to their being taken along, there were to be traditional medicine hospitals, research institutions and a governing council for the trade. South Africa and Ghana took the lead in Africa. In Ghana, the proprietary secrets of traditional medicine are not stolen by civil servants or researchers. The government set up research centres. Once a medicine was found to be potent and had no side effects, it was accepted for Mass production by the government and the owners of the intellectual property paid royalties from sales. The sales were guaranteed because the products were listed in the essential medicines list and approved for doctor prescription. Dr Ampofu, now of blessed memory,  put Ghana on the map with his herbal antimalarial. He visited the practices of several malaria treating herbal medicine practitioners and formulated their common indices into a product which became  a national anti-malarial medicine in the hospitals and pharmacies. South Africa gained international recognition and marketing for its Roibos tea as an anti-oxidant. Commission Q, Germany’s equivalent of Nigeria’s NAFDAC, took away from South Western Nigeria a potent anti inflammatory herb called devil’s claw, properly researched it and then put it on the world market  as a plant medicine for inflammation and related health conditions. It is with selfless and unceasing hard work that Mr Olajuwon Okubena was able to place his Jobelyn on the world map. Today, official involvement in the training of traditional medicine practitioners is still scanty. The bill for their registration has been unattended to since the days of the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo, and Nigeria is hardly able to bring money home from the world market which is projected to hit 178.4 billion U.S dollars by 2026. Last year, United States accounted for 22.8 billion U.S Dollars or 18.4 percent of world trade. Nigeria is lagging behind although its forests are among the world’s most blessed forests in terms of healing plants.

You may begin to get a picture of why I said I found the coming of Katine  Communications into MLM business to be an exciting one. It was Nigerian. My advocacy for foreign MLMs was premised on the belief that they would “open the eyes” of Nigerians to new possibilities. Truly, it did! It took me four whole days of standing on queue which formed from as early as 5am to register as a distributor of their products. The queues were formed on kodeso street, between Obafemi Awolowo round about and Julie Pharmacy Stores and stretched almost a kilometer away to the offices of Ikeja Local Government Area. If you left the queue to have a meal or a snack, you could miss your place on it on your return, or the people behind you  who excused you out could claim they had never seen you on this earth! That was my travail for four days until I was lucky one of Katine’s directors was walking by. I remember him as Barrister Ayo.

He screamed:” Mr Kusa, what are you doing here?”

I was embarrassed my identity could be known in that crowd. With the down trodden in Nigeria , the rank of which  was swelling, I was jostling to eke out a living from my second passion after journalism. Barrister Ayo had known me from my days at The Guardian when he was a fresh law graduate. In fact, he had sent one of his cousins to The Guardian to seek employment. Being unsuccessful in the editorial department he had found his feet in the marketing department. Barrister Ayo pulled me out of the crowd with profound apologies almost every minute, irrespective of the anger of the crowd that I was being helped to jump the queue.

What was Katine selling? Why all this trouble? An Ibo gentleman had a factory in Isheri, Lagos where he produced a wide array of skin and beauty products he called Carrot. My original assumption was that they were made from carrot juice or the extracts. Oh , no. Far from it. They were made from a type of soil which many people from the South east, Delta and South-south regions ate for health reasons in its unpurified forms, thereby risking the ingestion of microforms. The Igbos call it Nzu. In Akwa Ibom, it is known by different names, including Ndom in Ibibio language. I suspect that is what the Europeans purify into a full grade product they call diatom or diatomaceous earth. The cream easily healed any skin injury. There was an adapted form for pedicure and manicure. There were many others I cannot remember now. In about two months, the sale outgrow Lagos bounds to as far as Sokoto or Maiduguri. But, alas, Katine could not manage the success. Distributors and the staff in the  stores connived to steal the products, the company could not easily make remittances and order to meet demand. The business went down, and the owners of the business took it over, but could not manage it either.

Bolaji and I were in this business and several others. Her father was happy and had himself begun to show interest in MLM. Some of the networks in which I would later become his upline were

1)Edmark

2)Kasly

3)Greenworld

4)Dynapharm

5)Chymall

6)Wellness water produced by Ogechi at 39 Emina Cresent, off Toyin Street, Ikeja, Lagos

7) When I discovered Bell before it came to Nigeria, Pa Soboyede did the runs for me and became my supplier. But when Bell opened shop in Lagos, he showed no interest, and I went in without him. In compensation, I informed him about Nature’s gift for life (NG4) when it arrived, and he became my upline and I his downline. We were not together in many MLMs, including Friends of Nature. Had he the health for it when I sent out invitations about early this year, I am sure he would have come along. Where he was not in those days, Bolaji was present.

BIRTHDAY

As I said earlier, Bolaji invited me to Pa Shoboyede’s birthday and that strengthened my relationship with him. He was about 12 years older than me  but never carried himself as such before me or before any member of my household young enough to be his great grand child. A week hardly passed without his dropping in to see us, even if I could not return those visits on account of my vision. I saw a flaming, adroit spirit in him when three members of his family passed within one year. Bolaji was the first to go. Financially and otherwise, he struggled to fill her position among her children. Then, another daughter passed. Finally, his wife also departed.

These events are enough to devastate any man. Except one is not human would one not be rocked. The difference between men is that, while some bow and cave in under pressure, others ride the storm over and become stronger persons. I cannot tell from his outward nature what toll the passages may have had on Pa Shoboyede’s spirit and bodily health. For he always spoke of them all, as he did of other earthly events, from spiritual perspectives. When I mention the spiritual, I do not refer, as I always say, to the “religions”. Religion examines life from bottom up, groping in the dark as it were, whereas the spiritual describes it from the top to bottom, in clear sightedness. In the spiritual perspective, one does not cling to family or anyone or anything else, but to the Almighty Creator of the seven universes which the Book of Revelation describes as The  Seven Churches of  Asia, Asia being the spiritual name of the physical portions of creation. This creation, shall we say “subsequent creation”, is not the original creation in which human spirits are made “in our own image” but shadows of it. To these shadows have unconscious spirit seed germs descended to literally germinate, flower and fruit until they become mature enough to return home to their own paradise in the lower lying regions of the imperishable parts of creation. Thus, every parent and child and family is on his or her own journey for spiritual self fulfillment willed by the Creator. No one can hold another from moving on when the time is ripe to move on, unless they have become attached or bonded. It is a spiritual crime to be bonded. Let us imagine one person bonded to hundred persons and each of these hundred persons bonded to hundred or more persons. In no time, there will be a clump or masses of bonded souls. Under the law of motion which compels everything and everyone to perpetually be on the move or perish, including our earth, the air,our lungs etc, these human masses would be like blood clots in the blood circulation system which may cause heart attacks and strokes. The danger for such human souls caught in such clusters is that the individuals which form them may be unable to free themselves and return home to the safety of paradise before the disintegration of the perishable world in The Final Judgement. Even among close family members, no one is owned or owns another. So, there is no basis for such attachment to anyone from which one cannot or should not free one self. Unresolved questions and quarrels may cause attachments. Thus, knowing persons deliberately remove themselves from malevolent equations even if in doing so they are seen by unknowing persons to be weak or simpletons. From what I observed about Pa Shoboyede, he took these spiritual admonitions very seriously . What may be shocking to many persons is that husbands and their wives may never meet in all eternity after they leave the earth. Children and parents, too, may never meet in eternity. That is why it is profitable for all to make the best of opportunities of their associations on earth. For only in the love that envelopes them lies the opportunity for reunion.

Pa Shoboyede took these events we call “sad” in their strides. He was a formidable family man for his extended family. In that ebbing age, he could drive himself to Abeokuta for family meetings. He never forgot the children of his departed friends and neighbours and siblings who now live in foreign lands. Always , he called out to them to not forget about Nigeria or be lost abroad. He gave himself to everyone who came into his world, and did not bother if they treated him with less respect and love than he showered on them.

Sunset years

What many persons call the “sunset” years of life were no sunset years for Pa Shoboyede. He rose early enough to move out of his home by about 5am. If he was not on Grailland, on Iju hills, for Grail funerals, he was there on Saturdays for cleaning work  in preparation for worship on Sundays or  he was in a canoe ride across Ogun river to buy fresh fish which he roasted and sold. In his seventies, Pa Shoboyede learned from the Federal Institute of Industrial Research (FIIRO), Lagos, how to grow mushroom and to roast fresh fish. I was glad to be one of his customers. He could also be found very early in Lagos Island where he bought such products as coconut milk powder for his customers and mine who were giving up cow milk for plant and fruit milk. He will not be easily forgotten as well by those his customers who bought  alkaline wellness water from him and those who depended on him for the medicinal products of Pax Herbal Centre of Catholic Rev. Father Anslem Adodo. There was hardly any PAX seminar anywhere in Nigeria Pa Shoboyede did not attend.

Suddenly…

Pa Shoboyede was not a man who left events to chance. While some persons are reluctant to think about their passages someday, he gave serious thought to his by making all the necessary financial arrangements for the internment of his earthly remains in THE GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE on GRAILLAND. That, for you was a hallmark of a man who never intended to be a burden to anyone or to be bonded to anyone.

Nevertheless, I always asked him about his experiences with his body, recognising that 85 years is no mean age. When I discovered he needed company at home, I appealed to a young man to live with him. Papa was happy.

TOBI OLUPONA

That’s the young man. Wherever he is, pa Shoboyede would not be happy if I leave him out of this narration. Tobi is an aluminium Mason. He, like his brother,Damilola, are among those few fellows of the young generation who are not disconnected from African life. He went to live with Pa Shoboyede, cleaned the house, made his meals and helped him with fish smoking. He is multi talented, makes shoes and is a painter, besides. He turned out a huge blessing in Pa Shoboyede’s last days when he had to be helped out of bed and taken to the hospital for medical attention. Even when Tobi got married and had a baby, I appealed to him to stay with Papa.The house was fuller and richer with human voices, especially a baby’s and this may have helped to prolong his life. Our experiences are wonderful teachers to us and to those connected with us or who behold us from a distance. Would Pa Shoboyede have known in his hey days that this would be the family who would share with him his last days and who would be privileged to announce his passage?

Funeral

The earthly remains of  Pa Shoboyede were interred July 22,  five days after his passage, in the Gardern of Remembrance after a funeral service at the Temple of The Lord on Grailland. Goodbye, Pa Shoboyede. May you be accompanied by our loving prayers that you find help all the way to the luminous gardens