Please grant me one minute to talk about The Key to Peace And Happiness. I coined this title from the advice of a wise one to suffering people who did not know their condition was caused by their thoughts. The Wise One said: “Keep the hearth of your thoughts pure. By so doing, you will bring peace and happiness”. The hearth of any thought is the foundation of that thought. In my speech making days,THE KEY TO PEACE AND HAPPINESS was my favourite subject for turning upward the listener’s gaze. I reasoned that keeping the thoughts pure at this time would be a Balm of Gilead when petrol price is above the roof and instigating a riot of other prices under its canopy.
Before I proceed, please excuse another minute to quickly detour to the second of six mafia ‘wars” I mentioned last week (June 8, 2023) were likely to follow the inaugural speech of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on May 29, 2023. This second battle field is the abrogation of the foreign currency black market.
Currency war
To avoid the currency war, there are three options…
• Expand foreign currency earning,
• Curtail foreign currency expenditure,
• Confront the cabal or mafia which has created a black currency market out of the official currency market.
I have been imagining for more than 20 years a bone breaking “war” in this area. This may involve hundreds of thousands or millions of persons who are knee deep in “black currency” business. Government success in this” war ” should enable foreign companies who do business with Nigeria to have easier access to foreign currency on better terms. But it will be despised by Nigerians abroad who “sow” little foreign currency into the Nigerian economy but reap “bumper harvests” from them , in the local currency, the naira. Many of them emigrated just to be able to return in a few years to take commanding heights of the economy. Of what benefit will be their suffering abroad if their home remittances amount to little or nothing? should the US Dollar begin to exchange for, say, N250, their dependants at home, too, may not wish the naira well. What about the bank managers who round trip foreign currencies? Can we forget those young Nigerians back home who, unemployed for years, have learned to do internet businesses which pay them in foreign currency? There are several armies the President is going to do battle with within this sector. They all want Nigeria to become better. But do they realise that Nigeria becoming better means that the naira has to be rescued from the strangulation of other currencies and that, doing so, will pull the carpet from under their feet?
About 32 years ago, I had the privilege of having lunch with Gen Aliyu Gusau (rtd) then national security adviser (NSA).
I was Editor of The Guardian newspaper. Soon, Gen. Shehu Musa Yar’adua (rtd) showed up in the room. Gen Gusau introduced us. I knew they wanted to sound me out over election- season promises of presidential candidate, one of whom was Gen. Yar’adua. The economy was in distress and the “black market” was a major cause of it. Was he ready to take on the “black market?” If he was, would he accept my suggestions? The police and the armed forces should hatch a secret crack down plan as follows:
• Principal operational zones of the “black market ” nationwide should be pre determined
• At zero hour nationwide, security operatives should crack down on them
• Black market currency hawkers should be arrested, handcuffed and bundled into police Black Maria and other vehicles.
• Next day, they should appear in magistrates courts on holding charges, pending further investigations. They should state the sources of foreign currency found on them, and these “sources” should be immediately arrested for prosecution
•Regular and unexpected mop up operations nationwide should continue indefinitely.
• The foregoing should sanitise the banks and the currency market. But the government should expect a backlash from the unseen “hands of Esau”. These persons are the currency “black market” mafia.
Understandably, Gen. Yar’adua did not warm up to the suggestions. Who would deliberately step on the tail of the cobra in his backyard? He looked at me, flashed a pretentious smile, nodding and puffing a cigarette and coughing. Even garrulous President Olusegun Obasanjo, a retired army general, avoided the terrain as though it were a quagmire or minesfield. His successor, the younger Yar’adua was too sick to bell the cart. President Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan avoided brinkmanship and Gen Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general, was not a man who could look his kinsmen or friends straight in the eyes and square up with them. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a “make or break man”. For 22 months as Governor of Lagos State, he defied the garrulous President Obasanjo who denied him of federal funds to run the state. But Tinubu found money elsewhere and Lagos State did not know a President Obasanjo existed in Abuja or in Nigeria! Was Lagos not robust enough to be a country? If it was, would it need Obasanjo’s money outside its frontiers to survive? That is the man who, now as President of Nigeria, has declared war on the “black currency” mafia! It is yet unclear if the suspension from office last Saturday of Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele had to do with other matters or a single market drive or both.
Yet another interesting battle brewing is in the electricity sector. President Tinubu wishes to double capacities on electricity generation, transmission and distribution in a country where capacities are crashing almost everyday (more about this next week)
The key to peace and happiness
We are back to the advice to “Keep the hearth of your thoughts pure. By so doing, you will bring peace and happiness”. The HEARTH of your thoughts is the FOUNDATION of your thought. This message is not original to me. It is the message of a wise one about 100 years ago to suffering people. It sprang from the knowledge that you are what you think. Many people erroneously believe that thoughts are free and that it is the tongue that we should always discipline. People who think like this may not realise that the tongue merely expresses abundance of the mind and that the starting point of any action, be it the spoken word or physical action, stems from the thought. There is fleeting thoughts which, like rolling stones, may gather no moss, as the English man says. There are also serious thoughts which may gather such large amounts of moss that they may become a VOLITION, the driving motif of one’s life, or a propensity which, like one’s shadow, may be difficult to detach from. I say “difficult” because propensities may also be the easiest things to knock off our lives if we understand them for what they are, where they come from, and if we have the courage and the will to shake them off.
Many of us have the propensity for the blame game. We blame other persons for whatever befalls us. That is why the modern day priest smiles to the bank. If you listen to FM radio in Lagos from about 4.30am everyday, you may understand what I am saying. I never knew we would ever degenerate spiritually to the point that a so-called prophet would set up testimonials on radio, dictate his account number to listeners who want him to ask their Creator to expedite action on their prayers, even if they do not deserve what they are praying for. That’s not where I am heading.
In the first part of this series, I outlined the possibility of the subsidy mafia exploiting the pains of pump price deregulation to defend their interests which is above N400 billion naira every month.
Thoughts
We humans are wired up, as though we are radio and television receiving sets or even the cell telephone sets on which we make wireless telephone calls or send text or voice messages. When we send astronauts to the moon, we communicate with them and they with us. This idea was borrowed from the universe, from worlds higher than ours.
In the universe, there are several spheres of existence which we may call Power Centres. We may call them so because the nature or characteristic of everyone in a power centre is homogenous or similar. Thus, there is a concentration of likeness in everything everyone does there. Grumbletonians stick together. So do murderers, thieves, kidnappers etc. On earth, there is a mingling of propensities, although we may sense tendencies towards homogenuity in families, tribes and unpolluted nationalities.
When we think, we connect with power centres homogenous with the nature of our thought. It is like when we switch on our laptops and we call out to GOOGLE, WHATSAPP or to PLANET, ZOOM, and now, OTRACKER Or O CONNECT or O VARSITY. The laptop takes us to wherever we connect with. If the network provider is not playing funny, my cell phone cannot take me away from Jide Ogundele, who is on my contact menu, when I dial his number and connect me with John Smith, who does not know I exist and who is also unknown to me. Should this happen, it means mankind or the internet service provider has not perfected an idea it borrowed from higher regions of the universe.
What I am saying in effect is that our thoughts link us with those regions of the universe we are homogenous with.
Subsidy aches
Petrol price deregulation is provoking different thoughts in all of us and, accordingly, connecting us all to different climes in the universe. There are some persons who believe the deregulation will crush them. Each time they so think, they would generate thought forms of their worries and fears and these would team up with similar, ugly thoughts generated by other persons. The combined thought forms will re-enforce one another and, together, they will be sucked up by homogeneous power centres in the universe. These power centers must be negative power centres which, in turn, connect with the negative souls, feeding them with negative ideas about why and how they must find existence more difficult than hitherto. If they are hateful, the hate in their souls will be reinvigorated. Poor, fearful soul, a supposed Lord in the universe who has been giving dominion over everything, including petrol prices and paper money. The negative power centre will re-inforce the worries, ideas, fears and self-created helplessness of such negative persons through feedback. Thus, they would be trapped in the quagmire of their thoughts which, through intensification by the power centre, would become larger, stronger, self entrapping and socially disrupting. It is of such persons the Yoruba elders say:TI A BA GUN IYAN NINU ODO, TI A BA N RO OKA NI INU EPO EPA ENI MAA YO A YO! (If we pound yam in a mortar and make eba in groundnut shell, whoever will have the stomach filled will have it filled). So, while the negative person delimit their potentials and enlarge their physical encumbrances and psychic entanglements, positive persons will be connected to power centres which would dispense positive ideas to them. Whatever their situations, our forefathers did not diminish themselves with negative thought. They did not know about Norman Vincent Peale and his books, The Power of Positive Thinking and Amazing Results of Positive Thinking, before they deducted their knowledge of survivalism from the universe based on their experiences. Why are we such indolent souls in our generation, always dependent, hardly able to find ways out of a quagmire, always playing the blame game? Do lizards, ants, birds or butterflies talk about subsidy problems?
Charles Idehor
In a long, long while, I haven’t listened to a positive interview as I did the Charles Idehor programme on Jordan FM radio in Lagos on May 4, 2023. Maybe the personalities of Gbola Oba and Adeniyi Adesina made the difference. Gbola Oba is the son of a womanly fish seller now of blessed memory at the Baba Oloosa Market in Mushin, Lagos. He has been the victim of kidnapping and spent several days in a forest. He supports principles, not persons or political parties. Adesina is the Editor of this newspaper, The Nation. Both were effervescent and electrifying and positive, and the otherwise bellicose regular callers agreed with them. Adesina said we would never know why politicians take their decisions and challenged all of us to say our decisions are not survivalism propelled. Gbola Oba said we all needed to readjust our lives. He was spending about N40,000 every week to entertain his friends at their Hangouts in Surulere. But since petrol prices went up , he had stuck more to his bed at the weekends. He challenged women in particular to adjust their lives. Nigerian women were spending as much as six billion U.S. dollars every year on Brazilian human hair. Indian women were cutting and selling their long hair for this market and regrowing them for more deals. To catch some of the market, says Gbola Oba, the Chinese are making artificial human hair from bamboo. The direction women are going is the direction the nation will follow. If Nigerian women are fashion spend thrifts and economy destroyers, women are no more than what men see in them and want of them.
Beyond this, neighbourhood life is what we should encourage. Children should attend schools nearest to home, to cut transport costs. Young persons should find jobs that are walking distances from home. There is no point earning N40,000 a month 30 kilometers away, which transportation and stress will erode, when a N20,000 job is next door.
Poor Charles Idehor
He spends N17,000 in these subsidy days to arrange a telephone interview with Gbola Oba and Adeniyi Adesina. The credit finished midway and he had to recharge. I wondered if he had not heard of O connect from ONPASSIVE, which I have been informing my professional colleagues about. O connect is cost saving in these times. It is a telephone conference application which can host about one million persons or more. The credit purchase is once for life because the application is self crediting. O connect is so designed because Onpassive, the newest, biggest and best internet business company in my view, shares 50 per cent of its profit with users of its applications and recharges for them from this account. Therefore, subscribers to O connect would not only earn bonuses every month from ONPASSIVE, they would never have to recharge the credit from out of their pocket once they have purchased this application.
Self confession
I admit to being negative until 1994 when Gen Sanni Abacha upset my apple cart. I was director of publications/Editor-in-chief of The Guadian newspaper. Gen Abacha shut it for one year on claims of anti-government publications. I had three school age children and a wife to look after. She worked as an academic at the Lagos State University (LASU) which was on ASUU strike, one of the longest ever, during which she earned no pay. I was on half pay, and had to sell egg, chewing stick, ice block and palm oil, largely to mallams, for survival. I was helped by the story of Bhudah, the Prince who lost his throne and became a happier and more successful person as a truck pusher and snake charmer in foreign lands. Whenever I lost a customer or two, I had sleepless nights. Then, one day, the thought occured to me that there were more than 180 million Nigerians. Why should I be unable to sleep over one or two of them? I learned to pray to be connected to persons who needed my services. Mrs. Beatrice Oloyede, one of my family friends since then, introduced me to piggery. In under one year, I raised about 300 pigs and piglets. I sold about 300 crates of eggs every week to mallams who sell bread and tea at road junctions. I bought vegetable from farms and sold them to market women. I sold honey from Obudu Town and from Ago Are, near Shaki. I began to sell herbs, starting with Patminger, Bitterleaf, Vervain and Lemon grass which I grew in the backyard of my residence. Whenever I took my children back to their boarding house at Kankon Model College, after Badagry, I picked up coconut which I sold in the Lagos Market. What did I not sell? I learned from this experience that the average Nigerian worker needed a second stream of income. Many people are inwardly immobile or are too status concious to make them explore survivalism in the informal market. My children were never sent home on account of school fees. We ate whatever we desired and to cap it all, I began to build a house before General Abacha released The Guardian newspaper from under his jack boot.
