Tag: Diya

Necessity triggered by enlightened self interest made me miss out of an important gathering the other week in Lagos. I was in faraway Baltimore in the Maryland area of the United States of America where I was mending my jaded nerves when friends and family gathered to honour an undisputed man of destiny, Lt-Gen. Donaldson Oladipo Diya, who turned 75.

The temptation is there to pooh-pooh the celebration by asking: what’s special about being 75 when we should be talking of 80 or 90 or 100? But in the special case of General Diya, every day of the remainder of his years is worthy of celebration.

In case you didn’t know, this officer-gentleman was Nigeria’s number two man in the military era of the maximum ruler, Gen. Sani Abacha, until he was nicked for “planning a coup”. Although he disputed that and spoke of a phantom coup, truth is that what he was involved in was alien to the military martial laws. But we are not about that today.

We are about divine grace for a man whose boss had decided to terminate his life by any means possible. First, a bomb was being planted in an official aircraft conveying him to an engagement in a North Central state, but a natural stickler for time ran late that one time, and the bomb meant for him consumed the executors of the wicked act.

Scene Two: Not satisfied that the fire ignited to consume the vulture took the rat instead, the evil schemers tried to exhaust the last trick in their bag by nabbing the nation’s number two man on the ground of planning a coup. He was shackled and arraigned before a special military tribunal where he was pronounced guilty and sentenced to death.

Scene Three: When Diya and others implicated with him were being transported to where they would be tied to the stakes like common felons and shot into extinction, divine grace again intervened and made their vehicle break down on the highway.

Scene Four: When they were eventually returned to their detention camp, awaiting the Commander-in-chief’s nod to snuff life out of his estranged deputy, the real owner of life came for the hunter, thus sparing the life of the hunted.

All these poignantly point to one reality which many men of temporary authority refuse to reckon with: that injustice done to man will definitely be redressed by God in His own time.

Those who needlessly pride themselves with the power to wreck innocent people’s lives or truncate other people’s God-approved careers, should learn all the big lessons from the Diya travails: all those who plotted Diya’s untimely death, from the chief planner to the military judges of death he appointed, have all died and are no longer around to be reminded of Sikiru Aýinde Barrister’s immortal song about mere mortals scheming and sounding as if they are God. The fuji music exponent had scrooned in Yoruba: “Iwo ko lo da, iwo  ko lo da, iwo ko lo da mi, o  si nsoro bi Eledumare; iwo ko lo da mi..”

D.O.D, as admirers and colleagues call him, rock; you are indeed the cat with nine lives. Many happy returns of the day!