By Theo Adebowale
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Life is a mystery and many have come to regard that as an important reality. They make deliberate efforts to benefit from understanding the mystery before another, because it profits them by granting an advantage. Man goes to no end wanting to know what a mystery is. Through careful observation, he was able to know the path of the sun. Having confirmed the universality, he confidently tells us that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. He created a file and labeled it geography.
He continues to build on it and even more, to expand its subsidiaries. In this unending search for knowledge man has been able to unveil several mysteries. And so, it has become fashionable to call for eradication of illiteracy as it is the most dangerous disease. Coronavirus, the most notorious pandemic of the moment is lethal but not as deathly as ignorance, or illiteracy.
To be sure, man contracts the virus through ignorance. So man, groups, communities and the world in general are enthusiastic about acquiring knowledge in total endorsement of the fact that, thou shall know the truth and, the truth shall set you free. A man whose family was a victim of infant mortality was set free by the knowledge of genotype. They had spent fortunes offering sacrifices, fasted for months rebuking death, untimely deaths until the knowledge of genotype and its application was brought to their village. The words of a counselor have since eradicated untimely death.
In these parts, subsistence agriculture was the mainstay of the economy which remained essentially operated through trade by barter. Suddenly, new information about how economy could really redefine life and existence unfolded, economic crops were so identified. Ignorance was discounted and a new economy emerged. It affected individuals, homes, territories, regions and cultures. The more mysteries are revealed, the better the peoples prosper. To penetrate mysteries, man makes deliberate efforts like forecasting boldly taking some risks which on many occasions yield quality dividends but some resulting in disaster. Nigeria which was building an enviable economy was attracted by the lure of petrodollars, abandoned the various articles nature had provided her to prosper and be in health by listening and settling for the words of the forecasters who believed that a monocultural economy would sustain it. She rejected the truth and signed up for economic self destruction and seals it with constitutional contradictions under a miserable political leadership.
In other lands, the polity is zealous about knowledge of mysteries of good governance, nation building development and security of lives and property. Over here, men and women of power are interested in tenure security, and elongation, appropriation of national wealth to sub ethnic and sectional members, arrogant display of intolerance to alternative opinions and protests, impunity and insanity. Insanity is when a bunch of those in leadership position believe they can cow the majority to submission as they withdraw the inalienable rights. These are forecasters who could encourage it as an antidote to the mystery of wishful displacement.
Whereas in the land where leadership is constituted on wisdom, one civil war was sufficient to produce patriotism and nationalism, not so with a people whose stomach is their god. Can we not see a pattern by which the same set of people that strategically locate themselves to empty national treasury so they can muster enough resources to dispossess peoples of their ancestral homes, and promptly replace them with themselves and their livestock? Forecasting would include, where possible, an attempt to manipulate actors and factors that would be considered prominent in the anticipated revelation. What more? Nobody unlocks a mystery with arrogance and its noise. The political template that throws a population into hunger, makes innocent citizens victims of banditry, kidnapping, rape and insecurity is not likely to sustain itself or, to pursue its goal beyond the point when the people know the truth will set them free.
Spokespersons of a group of people are bold enough to admit they killed another because those ones resisted destruction of their means of livelihood. Government and individuals, groups and corporate bodies have no response to the dastardly act. In the year when Satanic Verses was published, a religious organisation whose members were ignorant of the content of the verses promptly issued a fatwa against the author. Their champions continue to declare that security measures being contemplated by the vulnerable citizens are targeted at them, is it not hypocrisy that anyone would find a voice to abuse or condemn Sunday Igboho for serving them a quit notice?
There must be at least a voice for the people who are violated, raped, kidnapped, slaughtered. If their assailants do not need legal pronouncements to waste and dehumanize them, neither do they have any business to wait for the courts to displace their tormentors. If the National Police can look away as right to life is violated with impunity, then those who have no training and expertise in law and selective obedience must not hesitate to counter the offensive.
At a time like this, common sense dictates that a people conscious of their humanity must refuse to be confounded and blackmailed by common criminals who happen at power. A united effort against terror and rejection of intimidation would overturn their criminal objectives. When official machinery has been deployed to actualize the treasonable agenda of a minority, the majority should simply organise a protection system that can mutually stand for the whole. Fake news, hate speech are unhelpful at a time like this. Intelligence reports, need to preserve internal unity, political enlightenment for the ignorant, sanctity of motherland, conviction that our land can yield all that we need to collaborate with others for life more abundant and on our own terms cannot be wished away.
A major reason Nigeria disintegrates is that a bunch of criminals subjects it to corruption including looting, disregard for merit and injustice. Would a more wicked, brutish set of criminals make of it a standing fortress by dispossessing original settlers through cattle rustling, kidnapping, banditry, criminality including mindless killings of innocent souls?
A prophecy may not be of any use if the men and women who are to benefit by it cannot appreciate the value in the mystery to be revealed. A united German spirit brought down the Berlin Wall, a united citizen spirit would bring down any treasonable project in Nigeria, anywhere in the world.
