How so easily could I have forgotten the stormy events in Ebenezer Obey’s marital life in the early 1970s? Thanks to Mr. Kolade Roberts, a fellow policeman’s son and avid reader of this column, who pulled me by the shirt collar over the reference in the first part of this series that Mrs. Juliana Fabiyi was the mother of Olayinka, Ebenezer Obey’s second son whose death in London at 48 is the subject of this column. As the entertainment reporter-cum sub-editor of the Lagos Weekend, between 1971 and 1974, I reported Obey’s shows and the news behind the news of his albums. I must have been away at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), when Olayinka was born and Ebenezer Obey‘s marriage to Juliana was rocked. Olayinka’s mother was a dancer in Ebenezer Obey’s Inter-reformers Band. Naturally, Juliana must have felt offended, and she may have threatened to quit. Musicians are witty persons. Obey’s response was an album, the title of which I do not remember now. The lyrics advise married men whose wives discover their girlfriends that cows on the slaughter slab do not smile when the slaughter man’s knife is upon their necks. Should their wives be angry, said Obey, they should prostrate and beg for forgiveness. If that didn’t settle the quarrel, “bold face” should be the next line of action. Should that, also, fail, such wives may be told to pack bag and baggage and go because “Isolo” is not the home of “Olo”, and replacement for them are not scarce. Isolo, a Lagos neighbourhood, grew out of a market where grinding stones were sold. “Olo”, a grinding stone, was produced at the quarry works on Olumo Rock, Abeokuta. That was a great hit for many men. Chauvinistic husbands sang it for possessive wives to drive home an African marriage view point that a husband’s home was not a wive’s possession.

But Obey would soon reverse himself in another equally market-worthy album when he asked his fans to answer this question: Between our wives and parents, who is more important? He answered the question himself: they are both two ends of a pole; one cannot meet the needs of our lives that the other can. I believe the matter ended there with about six more baby cycles which may have escaped public limelight. You cannot place a great musician’s life beyond the reaches of women who traumatise them on the dancenfloor and elsewhere. But Obey danced his way out of their tentacles as he became more and more evangelical. Thanks! Mr. Kolade Roberts. (E ku iranti ojo).

The child

When a child is born nowadays, the parents hardly wonder about who he or she is, and what his or her journey on earth is to be. They see the child more as a possession.  Nigerian parents value children as old age security, for their wants and needs. Such parents impose their will on their children, often times, suffocating and frustrating the young ones who may buckle under pressure and become derelict.

A child is not the possession of his or her parents. Children and parents have a common ancestry in the Almighty Creator whose sowed their kernels in the material world for a purpose. Children inherited no spiritual essence from their parents. They are only children of their parents because, while coming to the earth, these parents were the most homogenous to them in nature such as character and karma. There are a thousand and one possible factors which may make their parents the most-suitable human environment for them to come to the earth through. Thus, a child may be a complete spiritual stranger to its parents even when he has similar character and has come to the earth merely to experience what the laws of nature has in stock for him and not those of its parents. The rule of parents over their children is limited by The Laws of Nature to only about five situations…

• Parents serve as channels for their children to come to the earth.
• Parents have a duty to protect the young physical bodies of their children from physical and other harm when these children cannot take care of themselves.
• Parents are obliged to give the young bodies proper dietary nurture in line with The Creation Plan, an area in which almost every parent fails nowadays.

4) Parents are to properly educate their children based on the right conception of education, as explained in the first part of this series. Nowadays, many parents educate only the frontal brain. They rush their children to school at about the age of three years, get them into high school from primary five, encourage them to spend only four or five years instead of six in high school and then push them into university sometimes through cheating in examinations or some other unorthodox means. They show off these children with pride before their friends, not realising that they have brought up thereby empty kernels. For the intellect may be sharp but the kernel, underdeveloped or ill developed, have become a slave of its tool which must now mount the master’s throne and control its Lord! Such children are inwardly weak and hardly able to ride through the storms of earthly existence. Their parents had neglected the education of their souls while bringing them up! Often times, these parents substitute religious education for spiritual education. Where the education is not spiritual, the effects are the same because religion cannot bring about spiritual experiences.

• Finally, in my view, parents must lead their children to God Almighty, according to their own light.It would be up to these children, when they become discerning adults whose unfolding spiritual kernels have gained connections to the spiritual world, to deepen their recognitions of what they had been fed, reject what they may consider false teachings or education, search for the Truth and move on with their lives.

Children who are to find spiritual fufillment in earthly activities other than those of their parents may not necessarily be “Disappointing Children of Eminent Parents”, as Prof. Sanya Onabamiro tended to infer. He would be right though, if the child is a rolling stone which gathers no moss or collapses inwardly and becomes a slave to alcohol and drugs. In this case, his earth life may have been suffocated by not only parents who may not have let him go his or her way as an adult but also as shown in the first part of this series. Intellect and knowledge equation with a resultant knowledge gap is by no means a play on words. It is evident in the rise and fall of nations and of empires. In Atlantis, that magnificent civilisation sunk deep into the bowels of the earth and overran by water of the Atlantic Ocean, the inhabitants transported themselves from one corner of the earth to another in nano seconds without the need for motor cars or airplanes. Doubting Thomases who rely on recorded history for faith and conviction in transcendental matters may wish to wonder how the pyramids of Egypt were built outside the realms of today’s building construction sciences.

Back home, Nigerian cultures distinguish the intellect  from knowledge, as did the first part of this series. The intellect, on which today’s education focuses 100 per cent from too early in life, is the capacity of the brain to receive, classify, store, retrieve information and analyse and use it. Knowledge, on the other hand, is knowingness. Learning leads to sharpening of the intellect, intellectualism and erudition. Knowledge, on the other hand, is wisdom which comes from intuitive perception of the human spirit  through guidance from above, through spiritual (not religious) activities. Knowledgeable old persons in Yoruba land often rebuke intellectually-bright but inwardly empty persons by telling them: Ogbon l’o’gbon, oonilaakaye. (You are erudite; you are not wise). Wisdom comes from knowledge and knowledge from guidance. The Pharaoh of Egypt dreamt of seven lean cows swallowing seven fat cows. He knew it was a message which he was not wise enough to interprete. Wise slave  Joseph gave the erudite Pharoah  the  interpretation which saved a powerful nation from  an oncoming seven-year famine. Joseph had shown evidence of spiritual connections in a dream in which the sun, the moon and the stars bowed before him, suggesting supercesion of  parents and  siblings, and in another dream, where 11 sheaths of maize belonging to his  siblings bowed before his. There was, also,   terrorist Goliath approaching shepherd boy David with intellect and David approaching him with wisdom. Stammerer Moses before another  Pharoah indexed encounter of wisdom and intellect. An encounter between guidance, knowledge and wisdom on one hand and, on the other, the earthly bound intellect! I had an uncle who needed no medicine to treat any victim of the poison of a snake bite. He knew the primordial name of the snake. He said incantations on the wound, and the poison flowed out. He lived in the village where bushes surrounded homes. He spoke to snakes which crawled into homes, and they obediently crawled back into the bushes after assurances that it would not be hurt or killed. Hardly any palm wine tapper or palm fruit harvester climbed the tree he had not cleared of lurking snakes. But, alas, none of his three children, all men, learned these skills. They were all products of intellectual life! My younger sister suffered from serious migraine as a teenager.My maternal grandfather took her to a bush,  picked a leaf,  placed it on her head and tied a scarf over it. At sunset, he made her bury the leaves in the soil somewhere. That was the end of her migraine. She didn’t learn this art. Nor did I. We went off to school, instead, and the art probably died with him. Were we not disappointing grandchildren of an eminent grandfather who was a doctor in his own right but denigrated by an intellectualised society as a “native” doctor? I will ever remember my early life encounter with ulcers, inflammation, pain, gas and constipation in the gastro-intestinal tract. I was 20, out of Higher School Certificate (HSC) at Igbobi college, in Lagos, and landed a beautiful job as trainee sub editor at The Daily Times newspaper under the editorship of Mr Henry Odukomaya. It was a tough job with hardly any time for meals. I lived virtually on meat pies, sausage rolls and “soft ” drinks.

In no time, I was like a pregnant woman expecting twin babies. One slice of bread was enough to set off gastric pains and bloating. I was hungry but could not eat, growing lean and living in fear. Two of my cousins of the same age had just passed though under different health circumstances. I feared I was the next in line. I went to Grandpa. He took me to a woman who inherited a recipe for this condition from her husband who had passed. She instructed my uncle’s wife who accompanied me to cook as sauce or soup a type of fish and herbs she gave her.  She was to speak no  word to anyone as she did the cooking, and was not to speak to me as she roused me from sleep to eat it and while I ate it. That meant I was to eat without brushing my teeth and gums, something I couldn’t imagine in those days. A sinking man clings to any straw, they say. By about 9am, with the fish and herbs sauce behind me, my uncle’s wife brought me corn porridge or pap. I was afraid to eat it. But after the first four spoons caused no harm, I emptied the bowl. Rice followed for lunch and beautifully went down as well, followed by eba (made from cassava flour) and soup for supper. Again, common sense did not advise that I ask for this recipe. What does the intellect know? Thus, I would regret this failure at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) in the late 1970s when my school mate at Igbobi College and at UNN, Adedamola Willoughby, had a similar challenge prompted by emotional challenges. Had I not been losing track of a family history? I knew joy, however, when after UNN and youth service, I came to the conviction that “Neither drugs nor injections, but the right kinds of food and drink bring lasting health”. This was a statement I learned from one of the lecturers of The Grail Message on the subject of the care of the healthy physical body. I had been adding spiritual contents to both my religious and intellectual contents. Please, note that religious content deals with the attempt of earth man to understand the spirit world, groping in the dark from below upwards, as assumed to be decreed from above, while spiritualism concerns… The Reality or “What is” as brought down from above to earth-man who must not distort them or modulate them with his pseudo intellectual understanding, the way he has remodelled some spiritual messages and turned them into religions. Based on the education about healing stones, herbs etc, I began to gather and to dry healing herbs for personal use and gifts to my friends. I was the editor of The Guardian newspaper, and had just introduced the reporting of Natural medicine on its pages and persuaded Mrs Elizabeth Kafaru to write a weekly column. One day, someone contacted me about a man in Opebi village who had been vomitting for three days running anything he put into his stomach and stooling at the same time. The only two medicines I had at home were powdered Blue Vervain (verbana histata) and Basil. I mixed both and advised he make them into a tea. He was to receive his stomach by not taking large amounts at a time. Just one tablespoon of tea every 15 or 20 minutes. Both herbs were antispasmodic and anti microbial. What was wrong with him was that the nerves and muscles of his stomach and intestine were reacting in spasms to an irritating agent. He began the tea therapy on Saturday evening. By Sunday morning, I went for worship. By Sunday evening, my wife advised me to see  him. So, I did. Sighting me from a distance, this man began to shout… “Its a miracle…Its a miracle”. He took the tea all through Saturday night. A drowning man will cling to any straw. By Sunday morning, he ate rice and in the afternoon, fufu. I jubilated with him, and with myself. Had I become a disappointing son of an eminent father, simply because I was not a policeman like my father and, to surpass him as a Divisional Police Officer, aiming to become the Inspector-General(IG) like one of his orderlies at the police college, Ikeja, Lagos, Tafa Balogun, who  recently passed?. My paternal grandfather was a prince of the royal court of the Awujale in Ijebu ode and a herbalist who consulted for the Awujale of his days. My father went to school and to the police, and I to school and to journalism . But I will ever remember that, soon after my birth, it was advised that my mother keep a small earthenware pot in which were stored some cowries and palm kernel as a reminder of the guidance she was to give her son. She died when I was nine , but one of my aunts told me about this and I recalled seeing the pot and its contents.

Today, the pursuit of Alternative Medicine, like journalism, has become a passion for me. It is possible I am following my own path in life different from my father’s. Therefore, I will not write off Olayinka Fabiyi as a Disappointing Son of an Eminent Father simply because he did not become a greater musician than his father. His path in life may have been different. Many factors other than alcoholism and drugs may have made him unable to easily see his way through his paths. He may have resorted to alcohol and drugs only because he lacked sufficient energy to pull through. Let us not forget that he came to this earth in a storm which his father documented in a hit album. Did the waves of this storm envelope him and even suffocate him? The intellect may not be able to figure this out.

Ebenezer Fabiyi (a.k.a Ebenezer Obey) got me thinking last week about education, the child, drugs, depression and parenting when he announced the death of his second son, Olayinka, 48, in London from alcholism and drug abuse. The announcement was shocking for those of us who did not know of the travails of this iconic gentleman and his family and reminded me, also, of Prof. Sanya Onabamiro, one of the most brilliant Nigerian academics of his time (1913-85). Noticing that the children of prominent Nigerians were not great achivers like their parents, and becoming vegetable, Prof. Onabamiro published a series of newspaper articles he titled Disappointing Children of Eminent Fathers. Ebenezer Obey who, with Sunday Adeniyi (a.k.a Sunny Ade), has co-led juju music industry for about 70 years since the 1960s, said the agony of a parent he experienced over his son’s condition and death has guided him to add a new dimension to his singing profession. He began his career as a praise and dance musician, and added evangelism to it as he became more and more evangelical. Now, he will set up a Christian ministry through which he would join forces with individuals, groups and governments which are fighting alcoholism and drug abuse among young people. As Ebenezer Obey  confirmed,  he had been traumatised, like many Nigerian parents who have lost one or more children to Nigerian youth alcoholism and drugs epidemic. His wife Juliana Olaide Fabiyi,  67, died in Lagos  on August 23, 2011 of  heart-related conditions probably caused by their son’s  departure from Christian norms. He said he did everything within his powers as a father to save his son after doctors in England informed him that the young man had about six months to live. Doctors always give a definitive time frame when the threat to life involves such important organs as the brain, lungs,  heart,  liver, kidneys, etc.  I imagine Ebenezer Obey keeping the vigil, fasting, spending huge sums of money in  hospitals for six long months when Olayinka’s condition became critical and, in addition, shelving his business and social engagements to always link up in spirit with him. The only situation I can liken his experience to is  that of biblical King David when the son Bathsheba bore him was sick. David wore rags, covered his body with ash, fasted and prayed day and night for his son’s recovery. When the child died, David bathed and anointed himself with oil, wore clean clothes, played his harp and sang and danced unto the Lord. Ebenezer Obey’s semblance of this u-turn is his setting up of the FADM— Fabiyi Alcoholism and Drugs Ministry.

This is good psycho therapy for healing emotional injury and pain which no hospital drug can cure. Deliverance and freedom come only by taking the bull by the horn, confronting it and killing it. Thus, any time from now, we may expect Ebenezer Obey to  impact the hard drugs world with music evangelism woven around the hidden message in Prof. Sanya Onabamiro’s evergreen newspaper article titled Disappointing Sons of Eminent Fathers. He  did not promise a coming album.

Onabamiro

Drugs were not so much a huge social question and problem of the Nigerian society of the 1970s which formed the background of Prof Onabamiro’s Disappointing Sons of Eminent Fathers I do not know, even now, if I got right that title of his newspaper essays which he may have titled: Disappointing Children of Eminent Parents. Prof. Onabamiro lived for 72 years, between 1913 and 1985. He was education minister and, later, agriculture minister in the First Republic. He was a zoologist and discovered three guinea worm pathogens (Cyclops). He named one after himself (Tropocyclops Onabamiroid) another after a friend, Dr. Mallamby and a third after his home town Ago-Iwoye.

In 1966 or 1967 (at 16 or 17) I had the privilege of listening to him at a public hearing from the gallery of the Western Nigeria House of Assembly when he testified against Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the Action Group (AG) party. That testimony stained his political and brilliant academic careers. It was much later that I would read his essays on disappointing children of prominent parents. I was too young to understand what he was hitting at. But I got the picture of the children of well known public and social figures in Nigeria not aspiring to reaching the top echelons of the ladder as their parents or of actually slipping off the ladder and sinking into the gutter class of society. This scenario contradicted aspirations of the parents of old that their children succeed and surpass them, and of children dreaming likewise. In this generation, the popular female singer Teniola reminds us of this beautiful dream… Ibi ti Daddy mi o de, ma d’ebe’  ma tun koja o… (Where my daddy cannot reach, I will reach and surpass).

In other words, Prof. Onabambiro was suggesting  that many children were failures because, in knowledge or social relevance or recognition, they ranked far below their parents on a who is who scale. I will not mention the names which readilly stood out in his social address, for many of them are still around. But we can figure it out that “butter bread” children of rich parents nosedived in the social struggles while the children from rank and file backgrounds easily skyrocketed past them in the upward social mobility process of those days.

We can ask that same question about the children of today’s top shots. Many of them are nowhere to be found in the social records of our time where their progenitors were or are still high fliers, ruling the waves. Many reasons are given for the phenomenon of disappointing children of eminent  parents.

Drugs or What?

Reasons given for disappointing sons of eminent fathers include a wracked economy, alcoholism and the drugs question. I believe these are mere corollaries or addendum to the facts, that the highpoints are miseducation in the name of education and misconception of the conception of The Child and of Parenting. The misconception of education is a broad field. Misconception means the conception of education is misunderstood and children and adults alike are  miseducated about themselves and the world in which they live. Since they cannot understand themselves and the world, and since the world will not yield way for them, they must totter and fall or crash. Alcoholism and drug abuse and addiction will then possess them in their bid for escape, which is illusory anyway, from realities of the world.

Read Also: ​Ebenezer Obey opens up on son’s death

Education

If the conception of education is right, human character in Nigeria should have been better developed and the country better managed today with more than 200 universities than when we had only about five in Prof. Onabamiro’s days. Since that time and even now, educators have been educating only the intellect and not the “owner” of the intellect. The curricular do not recognise an owner of the intellect or believe that this owner exists. Thus, from about the age of three years, the intellect is sent to teachers at school for sharpening in a system which shuts out the owner. Yet the owner is the Living Essence who speaks of “my Brain” or “my hand” or my “teeth” or “my intellect”.

This entity owns the body about which it speaks and the intellect, in  the frontal brain,  is no more than the perceptive capacity of that portion of the brain. Where I am going is that the human body on which educators shower too much attention is no more than a tool of its owner, the human spirit kernel which lives inside it. This scenario of the human body and its human owner is very much like the “motor vehicle” in which the owner, a human being,  moves from place to place. Who among us can say his motor car is himself or herself or that his or her clothes, however beautiful, are him or her? This is saying that we human beings are not our bodies. I cannot, for example, be the house in which I live. To the extent  that Living  Essence has not been recognised and given education which matches its own needs is the extent to which today’s education is one sided and has  failed, creating all the disturbances all around us.

The brain

Serious minded researchers are now pulling us by the shirt collar and informing us that, at a stage in foetal development, the frontal brain or “The big brain” (cerebrum), the seat of the intellect, and the back brain or “small”brain (cerebellum) are equally sized. But the frontal brain outgrows the back brain at a  later stage because it was over cultivated than the back brain. This imbalance is what has created unbalanced human beings on earth today. The biological Change, which some reseachers now term “biological misconstruction of man” because of the perceived absurdity, is a powerful message from nature. The developmental process spans the history of the existence of man on earth, and the message is that he  once had a balanced brain but now has an unbalanced brain. For everywhere in the architecture of his body, but his brain is balanced. There is no big hand, and a small hand, a big eye or a small eye, a big breast or dwarf breast. There is symmetary everywhere except where atrophy from disuse of an organ has created differentiation.

Balanced brain

In the balanced brain, the frontal (big) brain and the back (small) are not “BIG”and “SMALL” but of the same size. They  co-operate with each other as tools of a common owner of the human body. This common owner is the human spirit or human being who lives in the body, to experience life on earth. The human spirit is connected to its home in the spiritual world.

Brain structure is unbalanced today because of the overcultivation of the frontal brain through one-sided education and the disuse and atrophy of the back brain which, over time, restructured it into the “small brian”.

Today, we are advised by knowing ones that

• The human being on earth is a human spirit from the spirit world
• He was sent to the earth on a mission he has to learn to discover and accomplish
• On earth, he needs to move about in a mud body just as an astronaut requires a special paraphernalia to live on the moon and a diver requires yet another apparel for under water life, each “garment” consistent with the nature of the environment
• The earthman or human spirit on earth, therefore, requires two types of education. One set of education is for his i• Ideal education begins with the second set. It tells the human spirit about who it is, where it has come from, what it is meant to be doing on earth, where it goes after the earth, the gift of a mud body in which it lives on earth and, among other things, how this body is to be looked after and used.
• Everything in the universe is connected to its source. The mud-derived human body is connected to everything in the material world. The human Spirit, being spiritual, is connected to the world of the spirit, that is paradise, from where it came. On earth, the human spirit is expected to implement advice communicated to  it from  the spirit world. The Guidance, often pictorial, may come through dreams, conscience, visions, inspiration or even Extra Sensory Perception (ESP…Clairvoyance, claiudience and Clairsentience). The spirit passes the radiated messages  through radiations of the blood to the back brain, which forms them into pictures that it transmits to the front brain. The front brain converts these pictures from the spirit to thought, the spoken word, and physical actions. The frontal brain never acts on its own in a balanced brain system. When the human spirit dwelling in the mud body doesn’t receive spiritual education, it is spiritually inactive and the back brain becomes little used  and atrophises. That was how it became known as the “Small”brain. On the contrary, the frontal brain,  cultivated from about  three years,  enlarges from over use and becomes the “big” brain. When the spirit is cut off from the spiritual world, it begins to take dictation not from the spiritual world but from the material world and the intellect, its servant, becomes its master. That is why everything on earth today is up side down. How many of us vividly remember our dreams, can correctly interpret them or meticulously act  as guarded?
• In balanced education, frontal brain cultivation begins after the human spirit has become reasonably educated about itself and his animistic environment.This environment comprises  Works of Nature such as the earth, streams, rivers, plants, animals, rainfall, the stars, the sun, the moon, and even Nature Beings and Elemental Beings among others. To do otherwise is like giving a toddler a rifle and leaving him to pull the trigger as he likes. The brain belongs to dust and cannot, thereby, recognise anything beyond the material world. It is, therefore, to be controlled and  used by the spirit man who has become mature enough to use it for the purpose of his existence on earth.
• In the early part of his earth life, the Education of the earth man is meant to be Nature based. In the villages, we observe children playing in the rain, with rain flood, chasing chickens, goats, rabbits, catching butterflies and birds, marveling at how birds build their nests, going to bathe in the streams and washing their clothes in them, learning about water sprites and mermaids, following their parents to the farms, learning about Nature beings, the elves, gnomes and salamanders, asking a myraid of questions, answers to which may expose them to knowledge of  elemental beings and their leaders, wondering why the moon always “follows” them about…until , finally, they come to the recognition of God, their ancestry in the spirit world, the purpose of their existence on earth and what happens to them after they leave this earth. How will such a child wish to abuse his body with alcohol and drugs, when he would have gained deep convinctions about why it was given to him as a priceless gift on earth? How would such a child wish to point a gun at another person, save in self defence, and unnecessarily kill him? Why would he covet or become grossly materialistic etc when he knows these are not the purposes of his earthly existence? Why would he abuse the trust of people who elect him into power when he knows that , someday, he would account for his time on earth? Such a child is different from the city child born into and reared in splendour who may think yam tubers grow on trees and that maize is dug from the soil. Often, such a city child born into affluent homes are sinfully denied the opportunities for a life of struggle without which he cannot generate enough inward heat to make him easily overcome his environment. He is driven to school in  posh cars, his bed is, like his  laundry, made for him. His meals, fixed for him and not permitted to face challenges and find solutions to them, inwardly, he is weak,the flame of his spirit probably dying out. It is in this circumstance he is hurried to school to begin the cultivation of his intellect. When intellect   over develops  but  he cannot handle existential issues,  he becomes like a hot  house plant which hardly survives harsh weather.

Their parents have great resources, but they cannot manage them, management of these companies is too much work.

They would rather that their parents continue to lavish money on them. That is why many Nigerian sole proprietorship collapsed where the owners wanted their children to inherit the business. Watch the political leaders of all times whose children are unknown after them. These persons rose from grass to grace and not the other way round!

• It is a different matter if education of the spirit makes it mature when it is ready for earthly experiencing, a time usually signalled by changes in the mud body we call puberty, and, being strongly prepared, takes on its intellect as his work  tool, its servant, and not the intellect becoming the master. Such human spirit will easily connect with its spirit home for spiritual values which, through the natural interface of the two brains, the intellect will be obliged to effect on earth to make it paradaisal. The reverse is that an over bearing intellect will always drag down a weak spirit for  earthly agenda. Any wonder that the Lord Jesus, at the start of His earthly mission, rebuked Lucifer: MY KINGDOM IS NOT OF THIS WORLD!