Looking for LAUGHTER

Laughter, where are you? Have you gone with the winds? Gone are the days when you held court in our human life and experiences. In your ubiquitous presence, you surrounded our dinner tables with so much joy, you lighted our dark moments and enlivened our workplaces. In your purest form, you are hearty and unpretentious; instantaneous and genuine. You were a delightful companion, a soulmate. In your absence we now frown. And frowns go for ten a penny. But we would rather spend a billion to have you back. So far, our money has only procured an array of comedians but not laughter. We still have medicines on our shelves but they don’t heal our wounds like you do. We still flock to religious houses but the joy of the Lord you bring still eludes us. 

If we may ask you, Laughter, why did you choose to leave us? Why did you walk away without a warning, without fanfare? You couldn’t even wait for a befitting send off. How greatly we must have angered you. Did we naively take you for granted, thinking we would always have you? In our naivety we never asked what brought you to us and what kept you with us. 

In retrospect, you didn’t leave us, we left you. We left you to pursue fame, power and money, at the expense of genuine happiness. Little wonder we are left with short-term grins and long-term frowns. We now know you mirror the love we have for self and for others. You reflect the undying hope we have for our life’s endeavors and echoes our faith that holds firm in times of trouble. As we stayed in our lane, refusing to compare ourselves with others, you flooded our hearts and faces with joy. Our laughter was from inside out. It wasn’t an external stimulus, but an inner voice of peace. As God’s peace garnished our minds, you lighted up our faces. You routinely depicted the happiness we had on the inside. We laughed because we were happy, and we were happy because we laughed.

It’s fruitless looking for you, Laughter. We know where you are and have always been. We will come to you and not you to us. As the Lord lives, we shall do the needful and start laughing again.

The Nexus Between Hunger And Death

There is the story of four lepers that stood transfixed at a crossroad of history, their stomachs empty and growling, their hopes in the air. It was at the gate of Samaria as recorded in the seventh chapter of 2 Kings. The lepers were stuck between a battered economy and a buoyant economy. Behind them was a decimated nation, before them a Syrian camp of soldiers stocked with food supplies and all, ready to pounce on a fear-struck adversarial nation. There had been a famine in the land as a result of the Syrian siege. The resulting hunger was so severe that mothers took turns to boil and eat their sons to stave off total annihilation. Call it a tragedy or a calamity and you would be right. But to the helpless people of Samaria, it was a most undignified necessity, an excusable indignity, and an explainable cruelty. After all, hunger and death are like Siamese twins. Extreme hunger almost invariably leads to death. And death may be a more attractive option in the face of an excruciating hunger.

The four lepers thought with the small ounce of faculty remaining in their hunger incapacitated minds. They could stay back doing nothing and die invariably. Or, they could break into the Syrian camp and face possible death like men. They chose the latter. Facing uncertain death was more appealing to the hungry lepers. 

Last Saturday in the oil-rich city of Port Harcourt, there were thousands, not four lepers, that thronged the Polo Club. This throng of people, made leprous by the circumstances of life, had heeded the call of their agonizing stomachs. A church had provided them the last straw to cling unto. They were promised gifts and food supplies. The sound of that was enough for them to risk their lives in a struggle. After all, they thought it was better to struggle and die than to die of hunger without a struggle. For this, they neither feared the crowd nor the possibly of death from the expected stampede. At the last count, thirty nine of them had lost their lives.

It was a sad but recurring tale. We have watched with dismay the young and the old scooping petrol from fully loaded petrol trucks that were involved in accidents. In some of the instances, fire had consumed many of the scoopers. We have seen and are seeing many at the political rallies looking for handouts from the political class, risking their lives for their only opportunity to receive the dividends of democracy.  

The saddest part of this normalized anomaly is that the multiple incidences of deaths do not serve as a deterrent to future stampede and further deaths. I have read about some commentator blaming it all on our culture of disorderly conducts. Such commentators should know that hunger does not answer to reason. As long as governments at all levels, corporate and religious houses, individuals, families, associations and communities continue to neglect the poor, we shall continue to breed hungry lepers, who will risk any danger to heed the call of their stomachs. In the hungry man’s thinking, it is better to struggle and die than to die without a struggle.

Deborah’s Blood on Their Hands

Like every girl of her age, she had dreams and eyes on the future. She had looked forward to a day she would receive  her certfificate, earn a decent living, start a family and assist her poor parents. Again, like every girl, Deborah had a passion. But unlike most of others, her passion was neither fashion nor drugs, neither prostitution nor yahoo-yahoo. It was a faith - a faith that made her believe and behave differently in a community dominated by another faith. Those differences led to her gruesome murder. It was not supposed to be so. The constitution to which Deborah and her murdereers subscribe (or, are obligated to) guarantees the freedoms of speech, association and religion. In a discerning society, these difference are assets and not liabilities. Because they open the door wide to inclusiveness. Different shades of opinions and practices make a nation robust enough to deal with its challenges and strong enough to advance its commonly shared values and dreams. A nation’s robustness and strength are hinged on not obliterating or removing its differences but effectively managing them through mutual acceptance, tolerance and cooperative or legal resolution of conflicts. To be sure, mutual acceptance is a tall order, judging from the claim of every religion as the only way to God. Even then, mutual acceptance is the shortest route to peaceful co-existence and the survival of a multi-cultural and multi-religious nation such as ours. Tolerance is the effective management of our short fuses. Tolerance restrains us from acting disorderly or illegally to the behaviors we dislike or disagree with. It is the capacity to endure pain or hardship arising from differences in opinions, beliefs and practices.  Even then, we cannot prevent conflict altogether because as humans the mismanagement of our misunderstanding is inevitable. A nation that is not committed to resolving its religious and other conflicts by following due process is without a soul and will take its ignoble place among the banana republics of this world. 

Happily, the two major religions in Nigeria preach tolerance and abhor violent attacks on non-adherents for whatever cause. At least, as enshrined in their holy books. Christians, for one, are enjoined to love their enemies and pray those that despitefully use them. Koran, according to informed Islamic scholars, has no record of injunction to Moslem faithfuls to retaliate on behalf of Allah when under blasphemous provocation by people of other faiths.

Which means that Deborah’s life was cut short in its prime by criminals hiding under religion. You might say, death is death. But Deborah’s death is the saddest display of our beastly nature and the worst case scenario of man’s inhumanity to man. Think about it, she was snatched from the custody of the College’s security, dragged like a criminal into the waiting arms of an intolerant mob, beaten black and blue by lawless people, and burnt like a sacrificial lamb by some of the worst specimens of our nation. 

Since then, there has been a cacophony of noises, from the sane to the insane, from the sublime to the ridiculous. A religious leader and a college don openly supported the dastardly act. Miscreants took to the streets denouncing, my apologies, defending the gruesome murder and demanding the release of the arrested suspects. In one rarity, a presidential candidate allowed his humanity to take preference over his religion and politics. But as soon as he was threatened with a loss of a million votes, he denounced his denouncement. It is a season of fear as most other presidential candidates have avoided the issue of the murder like a plague. Even the judge sitting over the case of the two suspects hides behind anonymity for fear of backlashes. But unlike the politicians and the judge, the team of 34 lawyers defending the suspects boldly announced their appearance. Such audacity only lends credence to the fact that the miscreants are not without backers in high and low places. 

Which makes Deborah Samuel Yakubu’s untimely death a blight on a nation that calls on its people to arise as compatriots to obey a National call. Obviously, compatriots we are not, and the National call we are flaunting is hard to sell, having been dampened by ethnic and religious bigotry. Until and unless Deborah’s killers are treated as criminals and the law enforcement deploy its full strength to prosecute them, the National call will continue to be a mirage. 

In the meantime, let it be known to all that the blood of Deborah is on the hands of all those that excuse criminality on the altar of religion and all the faint hearted that keep quiet for fear of retribution.

Enough!

One word strikes at the heart of the situation you detest and the change you earnestly desire. Enough! That word, uttered from a determined heart, moves God and the universe into action. 

All of a sudden, the impossible becomes possible. You stand up with gusto ready to dare the demon that has long tormented you. You witness the momentous switch as the tormentor becomes the tormented. From that point, you take every step with courage, charge like a wounded lion and move ahead with fortitude. In the end, you create a new narrative, a new future. 

In your reflective moment, you look out of your window and wonder how far saying the word, ENOUGH and meaning it, has taken you. As the music blasts from your phone, you laugh heartily at yourself, striding into a new life and into an uncharted but exciting future. You are ready and happily so.

Nigeria’s 2023 Presidential Elections Nominations - The Theatre of the Absurd

The drama is playing out before our very eyes. The race for the presidential nominations of the ruling party and the main opposition party is assuming a comical, if not a tragic, dimension. Fifteen candidates have cleared the first hurdle towards the nominations under the banner of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Each had coughed out N40 million ($68,376). As at the time of writing, about twenty candidates of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) have paid N100 million ($240,884) each for the nominations. It’s been speculated that about ten more may pick the nomination forms before the close of the exercise today. 

The wanton display of the nomination forms in photo ops on Instagram and other social media platforms is bizzare, if not scandalous. The parties are cashing out bigly while the nation’s inflation is in double digit and its poverty index is on a downward trend. The Naira rain is being staged in the middle of unbridled insecurity and as the government - funded universities are closed for more than a quarter of the year. 

It would seem the aspirants or the pretenders don’t give any qualms about our sensibilities. Each claims to have come out after consultations with stakeholders, even when they had only conversed with their shadows and dialogued with their ambitions. In what is a dubious and self-deceitful posture, most of them claim the nomination forms were paid for by some faceless supporters or coalitions of interest groups. One aspirant in charge of the nation’s critical economic institution is still seeking a divine direction even though he has already registered as a party member in his ward and has obtained a nomination form. And you wonder why only a quarter of the so-called aspirants are actually traversing the nation, connecting with and wooing the delegates. 

Which begs the question: have the parties settled for a coerced consensus as against direct or indirect primaries during their forthcoming conventions? And could that be why each candidate in APC has been allegedly compelled to sign a ‘voluntary’ withdrawal form?  Is there a hidden agenda in the proliferation of candidates from the South to give the North the advantage of crowning a malleable Southerner? With the Northerners at the helm of the two parties, the natural reasoning is that the the parties are poised to produce Southern presidential candidates. But will crass opportunism and brazen regional jingoism cloud reason and keep the presidency in the North for additional eight years? 

Meanwhile  Nigerians are immersed in the theatre of the absurd with a mixture of disbelief, distrust and disinterest. They hope the pretenders will leave the stage for the serious contenders. They pray that the crafty will be taken in their own craftiness, that the hands of the deceitful will not be able to perform their enterprise, and that the evil men will grope in the day as if it were darkness. In agony, Nigerians hope and pray for rejoicing in the land as righteous and visionary leaders bestride their political landscape in 2023. 

Will their hope and prayers make the difference? How long more shall Nigerians wait?