By Mike Kebonkwu
“See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil”; (Turn blind eyes to wrongdoing). But why? Death is the finality of everything; it brings to an end the bad, the good and the ugly. When a man dies, his mirror is held in an X-ray not by himself but by others to the world. Death is a leveller of human equilibrium; whatever position you attained or title you may have earned whether rich or poor, everyone will end up six feet below. You will be remembered by the way you lived; if you lived good, it comes back to you through the living and if you lived evil, men will talk about it.
It is sometimes erroneously assumed by those brainwashed with religious or cultural beliefs that one should say no ill of the dead. Speaking the truth about the way a man lived is not to speak ill about him, but exaggerating about what a dead man was not would be speaking ill of the dead.
You would not have caused pain and suffering to the people and expect to have them turn around to eulogize you as a saint. Outward show of piety in religious pretensions like our leaders do will not earn any man acceptance before God. If you like build the biggest cathedral or mosque, you are condemned to receive your judgment before the court of the people. Make no mistake about it, judgment starts here on earth at the grave side.
The day of reckoning is coming for all those invested with public trust. It is immoral to dress a wolf in the linen of a sheep because it is dead. We cannot build the future on falsehood and expect mankind to overcome its numerous problems of bigotry, hatred, intolerance, nepotism and greed. As a man sow, so shall he reap! Often times, we forget about the transient nature of existence and our own mortality. Let the elegy for the dead be the true reflection of his life time as his testamentary certificate. Heaven is the imagination of the man’s mind. No research can bring out with mathematical exactitude the dying process of man in his final hours and life hereafter. Nobody has ever died and came back to life unless our Lord Jesus Christ. The religious and artistic portrayers of heaven and hell are mere moral lesson of the mind.
We do not need to whitewash a dead man simply because he is dead. Let the living know him for what he was and let posterity judge him!
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People are still paying tribute to the former president, and former military Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari who passed to eternal glory on Sunday, July 13 in a London Hospital and was buried in his home town in Daura on Tuesday, July 15. He was an accomplished soldier and highly decorated no-nonsense military officer. He was courageous and fearless to the hilt. He had the discipline of a Spartan and was a taciturn to boot. He seldom smiled and when he did, like the Shakespearian Casca he smiled as if he mocks himself.
If Buhari had died in 1985 when he was removed from government in a palace coup, he would have gone down in history as one of the greatest patriots and statesmen Nigeria had known. If he did not become president in a democratic dispensation, he would have been taken to the pantheon of canonized sainthood. May history judge him, and may history judge all of us!
For those who want eternity, eternity is in the memory of those left behind and our lofty deeds while on earth. My scripture tells me that all becomes dust. From dust we came and to dust we shall return! Live well here on earth and live good! We should never attempt to hide the misdeed of the dead.
You are what the people say you are; if you are condemned by the people, you are condemned indeed! Vox populi vox dei! The voice of the people is the voice of God. As William Shakespeare famously put it in one of his great works, Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones, so let it be with Caesar”. Our shadows will always follow us and we cannot cover up the evils we did even in death.
I read some undeserving eulogies and elegies on the late President Buhari. Some were acerbic epitaphs like the one written by the ace columnist, Sam Omatseye of The Nation. Sam did not hate the former president. I am not holding his briefs; he was like many Nigerians simply disappointed. To whom much is given, much is expected! Buhari was an ethnic irredentist and a great Fulani leader and hero who contributed his quota to the nation in his own measure. He had inflexible and unapologetic commitment to his tribe and religion to the detriment of anything else.
Most of the eulogizing tributes came from politicians not surprisingly; politicians are deceptive and noted for double speaking and very dishonest. They are also the ruling class and I do not expect anything less or contrary because as they say in my Ika sub ethnic nationality in Agbor, ‘it is when you mourn the departed that you celebrate your own life’. We should open the ugly visor of the dead if only to teach the living the legacy that we should strive to leave behind us. Our political leaders see themselves as statesmen and name institutions and edifices after themselves, no problem! But make no mistake about it, merely working in public service as a minister, president or head of department is not the same thing as being a patriot or statesman, No! Let us stop misleading people and doing violence to language.
People who deployed public resources to kith and kin in nepotistic behaviour are not national leaders. Leaders who have all the opportunities in the world to build first class infrastructure and develop our healthcare system but choose to patronize hospitals in America, Europe and Asia are not deserving of encomium dead or living. Those who benefited from first class public institutions and federal and state scholarships that today sentence the masses to exploitation of proprietors of private schools from kindergarten to tertiary institutions should not have public institutions named after them; that is injustice to the people. People who deploy hooligans and mercenaries to win elections and throw the country into state of insecurity should not be celebrated as statesmen, they are not. People who are protective of criminal elements because they share the same ethnicity and religion may be celebrated as ethnic champions but not national leaders. Nigeria is yet looking for national leaders and statesmen. May the soul of Muhammadu Buhari rest in peace! Amen and amen.
