Tag: troops

There are good men in every land; the tree of life has many branches and roots; let not the topmost twig presume to think that it alone has sprung from the mother earth; we did not choose our races by ourselves; Jews, Muslims, Christians, all alike are men; let me hope I have found in you a man.”

Jonathan Von Goethe

 

Proverbial Adage

Leaders are not those who ascribe leadership to themselves by whim and thus become unworthy impostors. Real leaders are those who are acknowledged as leaders by their followers and are willingly assisted by those followers to pilot the affairs of the people.

A Yoruba proverbial adage which informs that “all sorts of knives surface on a day of an elephant’s death” may not be far from the truth after all. Politics in Nigeria today is like that proverbial elephant.

It throws up all hidden agenda and exposes all clandestine moves by some dubious characters in the society. In other words, the satanic cloak under which some obscure, chameleonic politicians masquerade in a bid to benefit from Nigeria’s new political paradigm called ‘stomach infrastructure’ seems to have become an implacable calamity that devours the vestiges of peace in the land.

The Yoruba Muslims of the current generation who were never privileged to witness the political and religious trauma to which their parents were subjected in the 1950s and 1960s in the old Western region, when Yoruba Muslims had not fully imbibed Western literacy, can still feel the impact of that trauma today.  They may however take advantage of today’s atrocious spectacle to view the religious cloaks of those years and use it to unmask some dubious characters who then masqueraded under those evil cloaks.

 

The sun and the brook

An Arab poet once observed thus in one of his poetic stanza: “…..It does not bother the sun that some blind people deny the existence of its rays just as it does not bother a brook that some herd boycotts its water”.

If the above quotation is thoroughly analysed by men of literary prowess it would be discovered that the blind men who deny the existence of the sun rays are the ones to lose out in their animosity.

Their refusal to recognise the rays of the sun can neither diminish the grandeur of the sun nor enable their blind eyes to see. Yet, they will suffer severely under the burning heat of the sun rays.

Likewise, boycotting the brook water by some herd can never affect the brook in any way. If anything, it is the herd which boycotts the brook water that may end up dying of thirst.

 

The parable of owl

The similitude of the above analogy is like that of a self-adulated group in Yoruba land called AFENIFERE which, like an owl, cannot freely interact with credible, well-meaning Yoruba men and women on issues of substance. Like the owl which, by its own design, is essentially a bird of the night that cannot comfortably associate with other birds in the day, AFENIFERE is now a pariah group that can only arrogate leadership to itself on the pages of some pariah newspapers in its search for relevance. If we may ask, at what forum did the well known and globally acknowledged Yoruba leaders of thought appoint the so-called AFENIFERE to serve as the megaphone of the Yoruba tribe?

Even if the group was ever appointed the megaphone for the Yoruba tribe does that confer leadership on it? When did Yoruba leadership become so cheap that any pariah group can rise from an obscure corner of the region to start claiming it on the pages of newspapers? The theory of stomach infrastructure which just crept into Nigeria’s political thesaurus has surely brought a new dimension to the cultural value in Yoruba land.

For people who know the owl very wellwith its queer operation in the forest, the antics of the AFENIFERE political demagogues cannot be strange. Here are people of yesteryear who had spent their time and the time of their children as well as that of their grandchildren and are yet seeking to spend the time of their great grand children to their own benefits alone. At a time when vision rather than improvidence is the order of the day it is strange that this group’s deleterious political activities are still geared towards the search for any relevance even where relevance for them has become impossible.

But what else can be said of a group that once claimed to be progressive but now turns round to become ultra-conservative?

 

Living in the dark

With some dead woods and half baked elements in Yoruba land as its members today, AFENIFERE is currently arrogating Yoruba leadership to itself and claiming to be the megaphone of that Nigerian major tribe as it once did unchallenged in the remote past. That group which still lives in the dark days of the primitive past seems to be too visionless to coin a contemporary name for itself other than that of its progenitor in the early 1950s. Thus, in its failure to keep pace with the modern reality, the group still believes that the situation of the 1950s is the same as that of today an indication that it has long outlived its time and its relevance.

The group (AFENIFERE) was recently reported in the media to have told a particular presidential candidate in the forth coming general elections that Yoruba people had decided to give him their block voting. That report has not been denied. And that was not the first time the group has fraudulently made unsolicited claims on behalf of Yoruba people.

Sometime early last year, the same group hijacked the Southwest presidential nomination to the national confab and put 15 of its members (all non-Muslims) on the list of that nomination to the exclusion of the entire Muslims in the region whose numerical strength cannot be underestimated.

When, in reaction to that clandestine act, the Muslim Ummah of the South West of Nigeria (MUSWEN) wrote a memo to the National confab to put the records straight, the group quickly but deceptively wrote a letter to MUSWEN inviting the latter to a meeting of mutual understanding. But the meeting never came up as AFENIFERE began to play its usual chameleonic hide and seek game that is still on course till this moment.

 

Evidence of ignorance

What these people do not and may not know in a foreseeable future is that with the coming of Internet and social media the definition of literacy has tremendously changed from mere reading and writing of tales and fables to that of modern browsing and messaging through the Internet in the 21st century. And without such standard of literacy this time around any person who still claims to be literate is half-dead. However, it takes only the seeing to recognise the light and make the best use of it. Therefore, it cannot be a surprise that the members of this group are still snoring in their primordial bed while expecting others to be off like them.

Even in Yoruba land where AFENIFERE is supposed to be based the group merely operates in a certain obscure corner of the region only to randomly roar out to impress its ignorant backers in Abuja through the pages of some obscure newspapers. But since the dance of a dragon fly on the surface of stream water can only be in mandatory rhythm of the drum beat beneath the water no one should expect the owl to come home to roost.

Judged by the public utterances and conducts of its members, AFENIFERE has become a ridiculous paradox between yesterday’s fictitious dream and today’s disappointing nightmare. Had the members of the so-called AFENIFERE group known how much they have become a laughable stock in Nigeria today they would have probably reclined into their obsolete cloak and stopped behaving like the owl among birds.

But how can they know when they can hardly realise that the trend of literacy which once gave them the opportunity to be relevant in the region has since changed when most of them cannot put their fingers on the computer let alone prying into the modern world of literacy through the Internet.

 

Yoruba Muslims in the 21st Century

To this so-called AFENIFERE group, the usefulness of the Muslim multitudes in the Western region does not transcend voting and clapping for the region’s ‘lotus eaters’ which it (AFENIFERE) typifies. Despite the glaring difference between the Muslims of the 1950s who were treated like slaves and those of the 21st century who are highly sophisticated in essence and substance the groups still pretends not to take note hence the ignorant wish to maintain the anachronistic status quo.

 

Warning

Let it be known to this self-elevated group that the antics of the yore with which the so-called AFENIFERE outsmarted and relegated Yoruba Muslims to the background in the past have gone with the irritating particles of the past. And any further attempt to want to continue such primitive antics to the detriment of Yoruba Muslims will be adequately resisted in letters and in law. We have paid our due in terms of tolerance, patience and endurance. Elasticity has its limit.

No group of sheer opportunists that still ignorantly believes in the deception gimmicks of the past will be allowed anymore to ride roughshod over the Muslims of the Southwest. Enough is enough. Though the unofficial policy of ‘stomach infrastructure’ of this era seems to have taken away the once valued wisdom associated with old age there can be no substitution of light for darkness now.

 

Conclusion

Gone are the days when wisdom was genuinely attributed to old age because old age then personified experience. Today, from the experience of technology and its effect on the modern society, the human wisdom of the bicycle age seems to have been rendered anachronistic by that of the internet age. Like the rise of a modern building from the debris of the old, the Yoruba Muslims of this generation have come of age and can no longer be swept with the rubles of irrelevance into the refuse bin. We do not need a borrowed mouth to speak out when necessary and nobody has a right to speak for us without our mandate.

As it takes two to tango it must also take a give-and-take relationship to ventilate a peaceful environment in a mufti-religious society. No group should assume any vain superiority over others and expect peace to thrive. To live side by side and cohabit in harmony, mutual respect must be in the front burner of our relationship.