Last Wednesday, an event reminded me that although human beings were made beautiful and wonderful and in the image of God and company, we are worse than animals. Let me reword that since it isn’t as harsh as when I concocted it in my head. Our overhyped higher animal-ness notwithstanding, human beings are stupider than lower animals. We are primarily and secondarily responsible for a greater chunk of what befalls our world or humanity.
Consider the internecine hate we spread all over the place. Consider the life-abhorring guns and bombs and ammunition we manufacture, not to fight off the devil or enemies from other planets, but to kill ourselves! Consider the lousy wars and such other fatal criminalities. Pray, can anything be foolisher than the thousand and one ways man shoots himself in the foot?
The date is 13th January. The place is one of those crazily-expensive medical facilities in highbrow Nigeria. The time is 7:15pm. My hyperactive mind is on neutral mode, roaming space looking for fear; yes, false evidence appearing real.
I am not to blame, please: I am human after all. I am wired to love hate and hate love. I am wired to submit to the worst case scenarios since the best things are not meant for me. I entertain fear, doubt and allied dangerous anxieties even when experience has proved beyond every reasonable doubt that these physical paper tigers are psychological wolfish lions.
I sat there lost in thoughts as the hours crawled by. One, two, … five, six, … eight, nine hours since they had wheeled Mrs. Bush away: no movement in the corridor, no reassurance by any staffer, no noise anywhere. Of the three, four people with me in her private room, I remember only one who I think excused herself home just before midnight. My mind travelled, and travelled, and travelled and then, just before the mind wandering would have got out of hand, a nurse hurried in and thirty eternity-like minutes afterwards (5:06am), my wife of 15 years was rolled back in.
Several days later, when I had exorcised the demon of the senseless fear, I found myself scolding, debriefing and shaming myself for having made God so small in my mind throughout that surgery. The ensuing monologue was too much mental flogging for me. ‘Where’s the worst that you feared, which almost harmed your heart? You mouth so much faith, how’s it that when it mattered most, you couldn’t flaunt even that sized like a mustard seed?
‘Why were you so afraid? Why did you choose left when right was available and ready? Why do people like you who claim to know that God is everpresent and all-powerful tremble at the mere thought of Satan who is not one-trillionth as near, ubiquitous and powerful? If you were God, how would you take such chronic put-down by your own children?’
These posers touch my core and compel better-forgotten reminiscences of times you and I put the devil above the only one true God. I remember the thoughts that aviophobia uploads into my system every eve of taking a flight, at take-off and all through the trip. Alas, the fact that the good, old One who sits high up there ensures a safe flight 24/7 does not guarantee my conquest of that phobia. I am back in its cold embrace the very next flight!
Compatriots, I see you mocking and laughing at me. Unfortunate, because you are worse than me. You alienate your benefactors during elections because the same people (who only hate, abuse, use and dump you, and steal your commonwealth in order to keep you down forever) deceive you with their blood money, sweet mouth and sundry Greek gifts? You know their trick since they do it every four years but you fall for it every time; are you not sheeper than a sheep, goater than a goat and assier than an ass?
Which animal is as terminally idiotic as man? Why do Nigerians allow our known haters, users, killers, thieves, maimers and destroyers to buy us with our own money? Why prefer a leader who, apart from not adding any value, squandered the little he met? Why applaud people we should stone; why prefer Warsaw to Peacetown; why nurse the thought of trusting the same leadership gang whose agendum is an encore of the heat and style of Lucifer?
Fellow Nigerians, the 2019 general election offers us the golden opportunity to prove conclusively that awa mumu don du. Let’s frustrate these perennial hijackers of power. A foolish voter in 2019 is a foolish follower forever.
God bless Nigeria!
Lai: The burden of an African spokesperson (Part 1)
I watched Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, on television last Friday, and felt sorry for him. The job of speaking for an African government must be the sorriest, globally. When he leaves office next May, Mr. Mohammed might volunteer that there’s no word yet to describe the horrible task of speaking for black government.
Lai, who always wears a distant smile (of mischief?) while addressing the press, was not himself this particular day. He wore a frown, looked less confident and read his script perfunctorily. It seemed an invisible gun was being pointed at him.
He was talking about his boss’s nemesis of a challenger, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and a certain bank. It was yet another puerile, elementary and Neanderthal politics by the APC central government to douse the momentum gained by the PDP’s presidential standard-bearer landing on the moon, sorry, in the United States. It’s a crying shame that in the 21st century, coming (read going) to America is a campaign theme for the highest office in Africa’s No. 1 nation (are we, though?)