By Abdu Rafiu
William Shakespeare said a long time ago that there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. That will be generally speaking. Sometimes, you hear it said: “As if he has picked my thoughts.” Thoughts are generated by the frontal brain, cerebrum, the seat of the intellect with the intellect transmitting them. The mind serves as the window to glance at the generated thoughts. But it is not given that we read them in the mind until they are expressed. Clairvoyants read forms to which thoughts give rise. Those words which tell of other things than the gross material can only arise through unimpaired cooperation of the intuitive faculty of the hind brain, and these come in pictures. In other words, the back brain is the spiritual receptive part of the brains, the prompting of the spirit in pictures passing through the solar plexus to the heart and then to the back brain. Thus, the hind brain was created for reception but the frontal brain for transmission into the earthly world of thoughts, speaking and action. When the back brain is obstructed and hindered in its activities, the man is solely dependent on the frontal brain which gathers from the earthly and the environment and is thus limited, lacking in freshness and newness of vision. Its capacity cannot go beyond time and space. Another consequence is that “the abundance of the heart” from which “the mouth speaketh” is uninfluenced by the perception of the spirit. Unguided, therefore, by the intuitive perception, so very often, there are missteps and we misspeak. Leaders and the led will always act in accordance with the varied degrees of their inner radiance or even lack of it or trammeled and dimmed.
With distorted intellect must, therefore, ensue fraud and deception, slavery and force, sensuality and lust, discontent, envy, hatred and murder. There is sole reliance on imagination, most times mistaken for right guidance, but which flows from the combined working of the intellect and physical feeling.
Wholesome guidance can only come from the intuitive perception — what the spirit draws from On High and is mediated in pictures ending with the hind brain.
How do we then enter the minds of our leaders to read from therein for the face? Unfortunately, Mr. Shakespeare states there is no art to find the mind’s construction on the face. King Duncan in Macbeth was reflecting on the human nature, how deceptive it could be. He realized he had been taken in by the false loyalty of the Thane of Cawdor; he had misjudged him. Yet, we must strive to understand our leaders. We must learn their language; where they are coming from. We must be open and alert to read their body language and to sense aright. This is because we are inexorably subject to how their minds work.
I was reflecting on the spate of defections by governors and legislators everywhere. And I was asking myself whether the idea of opposition is no longer about competition, of ideas and beliefs so that the electorate can be presented alternative choices according to their own light. This is the stage of recognition of human beings in our development in the present time. For we would find later as we grow that, as I have stated in multiple times, leaders are born, not made; they are sent, not electable. Following the failure in the era of Divine Right of Kings, human beings discarded the ordinance placed in Creation by the Maker with which man is to be governed, and replaced it with their own devices.
Undergirding the defections is absence of principles. It is pursuit of power for power sake; it is the pursuit of inordinate ambition, visibility and influence, pomp and emptiness. In nearly all cases, when a governor defects, he does so with all his commissioners, the Speaker and members of the House of Assembly in the state. Where in all these is honour, where is wholesomeness for the health of our land? In Edo State, the hero-worshipping has gone overboard, indeed to the depths. There, the permit to attend the state’s executive council meetings is, henceforth, the wearing of Bola Tinubu signature cap. You must flaunt it. The artistic design on it is to depict the breaking of chain which he grappled with in the years of struggle to drive back the military to their barracks. It is his symbol of freedom. Ordering that the passport to state executive meetings must be the possession of Tinubu Cap is carrying fawning to the extreme and to the ridiculous. People will always demonstrate love and loyalty to a leader they admire, but not through compulsion. These were to identify with their leaders. Of course, we had Shagari Cap; to a little extent, Buhari Cap. We had Awo Cap, but not once did anyone find it on Chief Adekunle Ajasin; Chief Bola Ige, Bisi Akande, Olusegun Osoba — all his ardent followers. These were not forced on any followers. People would wear them to copy their leaders, some for certain motives, some to bootlick and curry favours, many in false admiration to put flowers on the head of their leaders and some out of genuine affection.
And closely related to the foregoing, are strikes. Some are justifiable such as the two-week warning dispute by the university lecturers and the strike by resident doctors. The one called by oil industry labour leaders against Dangote Refinery was uncalled for. Now, the nation has not recovered from its consequences. The price of premium motor spirit that shot up during the strike has not come down.
Movement is driven by the Law of Motion. Where there is no motion, there is no life. Motion drives all human activities. Motion itself is triggered by heat. Absence of heat generated by the spirit is absence of movement by the body. Complex chemical substances called Carbohydrates in plant storage organs supplying energy to the body gives impetus for the movement of the body when we eat them. When the body moves it could be by walking or using automobiles. What powers automobiles in the modern world is fuel and gas. Now, through the technological wonders of this age, automobiles are also being powered with electricity. Any disruption, therefore, to fuel production and distribution is disruption to life and living, to daily rounds of activities and duties, to the economy and to political and social lives of a nation.
It was shocking that the labour leaders in the oil industry would not give Dangote Refinery, the only one which has come to the rescue of the country in its most trying period time, to settle. The Yoruba elders would say, “Oko s’ero ni alagbede in p’oko ta!” That is, “Oh so, if it were that easy, a blacksmith would not stop at merely fashioning and producing hoes, he would go out there in the bush and till the ground himself.” Former President Obasanjo issued out 18 licences for the establishment of modular refineries. How many have plucked the courage to utilize the licences? Perhaps only Edo State Government! The public refineries have since Obasanjo era gone comatose even after humongous sums of money have been expended on them. Commonsense ought to have dictated that the unions should give Dangote Refinery time to breathe and settle down properly. Would you collect check-off dues from a non-existent refinery? Dangote, the brave one, plunged into it, giving the country a $19 billion plant. The work force is about 4,000! And he says he pays the least worker in the refinery three times the minimum wage, and what a driver earns is four times a graduate is paid elsewhere even in the private sector. Such is the success that within a year Nigeria is exporting aviation fuel overseas. And that is what union leaders wanted to pull down!!Nigerian history books
The ASUU strike
This column is in sympathy with the university lecturers. We must have a warped sense of equity and fairness as a people to pay a Professor N533, 000 a month and pay his product he taught in the university N29 million a month, as revealed by Professor Itse Sagay. I am also referring to the figure of Senator Shehu Sani which put a Senator’s take-home pay at M14 million after certain deductions have been made. Even then! A former Member of the House of Representatives somehow corroborated the revelation by Professor Itse Sagay that the pay of a Rep is N21 million a month. Vice-chancellors who produce the legislators get about N1.5million a month.
Lecturers cannot maintain their vehicles. Some sleep in their offices. In some cases lecturers stand by the roadside to be picked by their colleagues to the campus, and this is alternated. To be a legislator from most parts of the country, you must have a university degree or equivalent to qualify and even to think of being a legislator. The authority to issue the degree certificates are the professors. For me, that is where we should start. We must make our university lecturers feel worthy and good.
Over the years, the university activities with regards to providing solid education in our land have been disrupted too often. Students stay longer to get their degrees than is scheduled. The children of the rich, not being able to bear this flee to the Western world or India for quality education. Lecturers themselves are fleeing overseas in search of greener pastures. University education has become basic. Even if later a product from there becomes a mechanic, he will be different, he will make a better and an all-rounded mechanic.
From Babangida era when lecturers were accused of teaching what they were not paid to teach and Professor Ben Nwabueze was Minister, Professor Babs Fafunwa was also — to the time of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan to Buhari, and now to Bola Tinubu, the story is the same and the posture of the authorities not seeing this as an emergency to rectify the shortcomings is sickening. And there has not been any rethinking.
Prerogative of Mercy
There has been uproar on the prerogative of mercy President Bola Tinubu exercised recently. The exercise followed the report of a committee set up for the purpose. The committee looked into each case meticulously and with care. The most controversial of the cases, however, is that of the young lady, Maryam Sanda, 37, sentenced to death in 2020 for killing her husband, Bilyaminu Bello, in a blind rage. The uproar is predictably so as murder is a heinous, first degree crime. The court consequently sentenced her to death. Anyone with human feelings must feel miffed by the show of mercy for her by Tinubu in view of waves of killings sweeping through the land. A great many believed the government was overgenerous to her and that the least should have been to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. But the committee report thinks otherwise. It says she has shown tremendous remorse and has changed. If she has changed, why would we still keep her within the prison walls which we have rechristened Correctional Centres? The purpose of punishment or imprisonment is to correct, make a person see his or her errors and be a new human being, that is, change for good. President Bola Tinubu did the right thing in setting the young lady free.
Hardly does it occur to us that the lady’s greater punishment is just beginning. How does she face her children and explain to them what happened, what she did to their father? The thought will menace her for several years to come, if not throughout what remains of her life on earth. The husband will appear to her continually in her dreams, perhaps still boiling. He may not have gone far in the beyond and is perhaps seeking an avenue to avenge his murder. Since the departed can pick thoughts, if she is truly remorseful and full of regrets, his rage may begin to give way. If she is open enough, she will feel the change in her husband as well. Sensing he is around she might wish to deepen her atonement by apologizing more profusely and regularly to him and to her children.
There are two classifications of crime commission. A crime could be committed borne out of impulse. The other classification is when a crime is committed from out propensity and is therefore deliberate. Sanda’s case was borne out of impulse from what I read when her trial was on-going which may be why it was easy for her to recognise the enormity of her crime and she was able to quickly become remorseful and come to atonement. The remorsefulness was palpable that the Custodian Authority became impressed by her becoming a new person. The new thinking by administrators of justice in the enlightened world is that in inflicting punishment there should no longer be time-limit to how long a convicted person stays in the confines of a jail house as atonement cannot be determined in advance! It is believed that punishment without time limit offers sufficient guarantee for a complete inner change of a wrong doer for good. The new thinking being mulled is said to be already being put to test in some prisons in the United States.
The advocates of the new thinking are saying a wrong doer should stay in jail forever until he becomes a new person, watched over by psychologists and the like along the field to monitor and test for progress and complete change. The thinking is borne out of experiences and knowledge that some felons complete serving their terms and are released without the slightest remorse and in no time they go back into crimes. All in all, the earthly laws must align with the Creation Laws. The three major Laws of Creation are what unfailingly will bring about reward as well as punishment for the human being. It is then, “we shall also understand the real purport of the words of the Old Testament, ‘To me belongeth vengeance, and recompense’ (Deut.32, 35) and “An eye for an eye and tooth for tooth’ (Deut. 19:21) whose deeper meaning has so far never been understood.” (A Gate Opens, by Herbert Vollmann). To set anyone free, it must be borne in mind that the immutable and self-acting Laws of the Creator are operative and awaiting the wrong doers unless the guilt and the attendant burden have completely dropped off him or her through genuine remorsefulness, atonement and change.
It is also being suggested that prisoners should be separated using the Law of Homogeneity as it is automatically done in the ethereal world, the Beyond, so that prisoners will experience themselves. Out of disgust and abhorrence for the experiences there would be a longing to get out of the bind and that it would lead to atonement as the intention of the law and punishment should be to help and reform out of love. It is through total change that the threads connected to a criminal will not receive further nourishment from power centres in the Beyond. Not finding any more anchorage, the threads will simply shrivel and slide off! And the wrong doer is redeemed. There is no ascent to the Light Realm of Paradise until man’s dirty linen is washed clean.
• Abdu Rafiu is a renowned editor, newspaper manager and respected elder of journalism.
