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!