By Abdu Rafiu
Three really troubling video recordings were forwarded to me within the week. My heart sank on watching them. One in particular required summoning courage and efforts to watch to the end. One was a live picture of a man using acid to fry groundnuts to make them get done faster than going through the normal process. Along with it was the story of some women putting detergent in the fermentation in the course of some food preparation in order to boost it, to swell it to increase its volume. The preparation of what is called “fufu” made from cassava was cited as an example. And consider the sordid and frightening story of a young girl who entered a bus doing a late-night run. She found she was alone, but two men joined as the journey progressed. Stirred by her intuition, she became naturally ill-at-ease. She wanted to disembark but could not. She was not only violated but murdered.
The gripping report runs in part: “You remember the disturbing incident in Lagos…About a 22-year-old fashion designer named Bamise who entered a BRT bus at Ajah on her way to spend the weekend with her brother. She was the first passenger on the bus, and two other men later joined her. But as the journey continued, Bamise began to feel that something was wrong. She quietly brought out her phone and recorded the inside of the bus. She also captured the detached plate number of the vehicle and sent the information to a friend, together with a voice message. Her friend became worried and told her to get off the bus. When she tried to call her again, Bamise’s phone was no longer reachable. Her family reported her missing the following day.”
“Then, on March 7, that year, the story took a different turn. Bamise’s lifeless body was found around Carter Bridge in Lagos. She had been thrown from the bus and had suffered serious injuries. She was taken to hospital where she was pronounced dead. The video she secretly recorded later surfaced online. When the driver involved in the dastardly act saw the video, he fled to Ogun State. Police tracked him down there and brought him back to Lagos. During police interrogation, he initially admitted to assaulting and raping Bamise and throwing her out of the bus, but later claimed that it was armed men who entered the vehicle and took control of it. During the trial, two women who had similarly fallen victim testified to his horrible conduct in his bus. After a long trial, the court found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging.”
There is also the weird story of a man who buried his wife on paper. He collected the wife’s Cooperative Insurance sum to fund the bride price for a new wife and get her a flat. They have been married for six years but the marriage has been childless. Under family pressure he went for another lady who is now an expectant mother of seven months. The action of the man (Names withheld in this column) was blown open when the lady went to collect her Permanent Voter’s Card (PVC). Her account in part: “The officer scanned my NIN slip. He looked at the screen. He looked at me. He called his supervisor. The supervisor pointed at the monitor. The screen said: VOTER STATUS: DECEASED. (Name Indicated). DATE MARKED: 03/08/2026. I told him there is a mistake. I am standing here. I am breathing.
“He printed the record. It showed my date of death as 15/03/2025. Cause: Cardiac Arrest. Place of death: LUTH. Informant: HUSBAND (Name Withheld). The record was updated at the National Population Commission on 20/3/2025.” The husband had collected all the wife’s contribution to fund a new union with another lady. To succeed he claimed his wife, who made the contribution had passed away and he was the next of kin!
What is the origin of evil? From where does it come? For how much longer is evil going to be allowed to linger and torment our world? These are a few of the confounding questions asked as people in all lands and across cultures grapple with the most troubling complexities of life and the concept and, indeed, the subject of evil. They are questions which have been asked from time immemorial—since Cain killed Abel! Yet the phenomenon has not abated. From century to century and from age to age, rather than abating, the prowling of evil has been on the increase. In this age it would appear to be all pervading—man’s inhumanity to man, and nation’s atrocities to brother nations.
As I did report during his first coming, Mr. Donald Trump, rehearsing, had said if Iran did not behave itself, it would be hit hard to the point of obliteration. Mike Pence, his deputy, warned, boasting Ayatollah not to test the resolve of the United States. This year, Ayatollah was the first casualty when the US carried out its threat over the same issue of nuclear weapon development agenda. At the time, Iran denied vigorously pursuing any nuclear development, saying an instrument of mass destruction had no place in Islam. U.N. nuclear watchdog said Iran had plans to burst the 3.67 per cent curb on uranium enrichment placed upon it in 2015. Already it had risen to 4. 5 per cent. The watchdog suspected at the time that it might go up to 20 per cent. It also had misgivings that it would reactivate centrifuges dismantled under the nuclear weapon deal. As of today, it is an uneasy truce the world is witnessing between the U.S. and Iran, after exchanges of fire and Pakistan had to broker peace.
Back home, the high level of insecurity featuring banditry, kidnapping, bloodletting and destruction of property is indelibly imprinted in the consciousness of most Nigerians. It can be recalled that an 18months-old baby from Oriire, Ogbomoso, was among those kidnapped, carted away and kept in the National Park Forest, exposed to the elements for 56 odd days. The Russian Ukraine War is raging with mindless destruction of lives and property, of precious monuments as well. The xenophobic attacks in South Africa are still fresh in our memory. According to a report credited to the Nigerian High Commissioner Femi Fani-Kayode, on Tuesday, between 2022 and this year, more than 30 Nigerians had been killed in South Africa.
Allan Bullock, a celebrated British historian pondering on the meaning of evil, said: “If evil means anything in this world, it means corruption of people to behave in an inhuman way.” What was on his mind was the obvious evidence in Nazi death camps. The holocaust in Germany claimed six million Jews during World War 11. Since Nazi days, there have been comparable horrors in intensity, devastation and spread. And many a man has been wondering: Where does evil come from? The question arises from the conviction that evil does exist; it can be defined; it has life; it is a force.
Lance Morrow of Time Magazine wrote several years back an essay on evil in which he asked: “Is there more evil now, or less evil than there was …five centuries ago? I believe he was writing against the background of a survey which revealed that three out of five Americans were just coming to believing in the existence of evil. Hitherto, the contention among many was that bad things just happen, it was not driven by any force that may be called evil.
Evil is certainly on the rise, driven by a sharp decline in the “old fashioned” humanity, manifesting in unpredictability of human conduct with the epidemic of suicide among youths and murders spreading like wild fire. The revelation about how man stands, the defiled nature of we human beings is brought about by the abundance of Light Power pouring down bringing into an awakening all that is dead or slumbering in mankind – a feature of the End-Time in which we are. I made reference to this last week. Indeed, Herbert Vollmann in his great work, A Gate Opens, has thrown better light on the situation:
“We are standing in the midst of the great final reckoning of the Judgment Day or the Last Judgment. Daily we experience in ever-increasing intensity and frequency its effects, that is the consequences of the evil seed we have scattered in the world for thousands of years. The very frequency of events is a special feature of the World Judgment. It is the consequence of an undreamed-of, tremendous acceleration of everything that exists and is caused by the Divine Power which the Son of Man brings unchanged into Creation for the Judgment. “
The escalation in evil doing and soullessness has led correspondingly to increased restlessness and the consequent agitation to want to know: From where does evil come? And reflected as man has, the answer seems elusive.
Many believe that, like goodness, evil is a Creation work, without which life on earth would be unchallenging, drab, and monotonous. They equate both poles of good-evil continuum with day-light counterpoise. Some others believe evil came to the world with the fall of the Archangel Lucifer, a once wondrous beauty to behold, who was charged with the supervision of the flowering of man in the world, but who went his way, introducing the principle of merciless temptation, thereby dragging multitude of weaklings into murky swamps and perdition. Very few seek the roots of a solution to the riddle in man and the exercise of his free will, that inalienable attribute of his spiritual nature which obliges him to live the way he wishes, but a choice for which he bears full and personal responsibility. It is an attribute, a treasure without which man will not be man. It is part and parcel of his spiritual make-up.
Good portends beauty, luminosity and lightness; whereas evil scum, ugliness, darkness and heaviness, sordid behaviour. The fact that each goes by a different name suggests different ancestry. For name expresses the nature and essence of the bearer. He is, in fact, the name he bears. He is his name. Good, therefore, cannot give rise to evil, nor can evil come out of good as assumed in several circles in the world since like can only beget like.
Creation is a work which, like all works, by nature or manmade, is not without purpose. The Author of the Creation work stands outside His work as an artist outside his painting. But His work bears His Will in essence and by the stamp of the Will. When we visit an art exhibition, we can see the message the artist is putting across, which he wants those who throng his gallery to read. In this case, the Will of God, Who stands outside His work, is to provide an opportunity for the flowering of the human species. A seed grain does not germinate and come to flower which is not immersed in a soil under the right conditions of temperature, moisture, air and nutrients.
Creation lives, sustained by radiation connections with the Author. In these connections lies mediated power which the growing human seed grains may tap for their strengthening. The human spirit seed grain stood pure in the beginning using this power aright and reaping bountiful and beautiful harvest in the Law which obliges reciprocal experiencing in the exercise of his free will. But that was before. At the time Heavenly melodies could be heard on earth in scintillating accompaniment of beauty resulting from men swinging in the Will of the Lord. It was before; not anymore. Due to various reasons, the knowledge of how to tap aright was lost and consequently man’s harvest like the sowing turned evil. With the loss also came the eclipsing of the knowledge of Creation, which arose from the fall of man. Man fell when he cut himself from all help with self-inflicted damage to his pathfinder.
Man, as his language admonishes him, is not his body. Man, whose body is his tool; man is a spirit. The body is the tool or vehicle of the spirit. The spirit manifests through the body. It was the Will of the Creator that the spirit affects the body through powerful radiations, impressed through the blood system, on the hind brain from the connecting point with the solar plexus. The hind brain is the spiritually receptive part of the brains. It receives messages in pictorial form and passes them on to the frontal brain, the seat of the intellect, which decodes and makes earthly meaning out of the pictures, which may lead to motion, action, deed, speech or thought. The pictures may be decoded coming in form of dreams flowing from the hind brain, which if unhindered by the radiations of the frontal brain become clear, revealing and prophetic. Thus, it is said: “The Lord reveals to His own in their dreams.” Man is in a state of balance when both parts are functional. The fall of man happened when the frontal and back parts of our brains developed disproportionately, the frontal or large brain bigger from over-use and the back or small brain atrophied from little or non-use.
It is with this you begin to understand even if it is over generalised and we disagree with them, when most doctors say there is a little dose of madness in every man! Nature loves symmetry and balance. We do not, for example, speak of a big eye and a small one, a big ear and a small one. A time there was when both parts of the brain were of equal size. Vollmann says: “According to the order of Creation the sprit rules and the intellect carries out.” That order, he says, has been disarranged giving dominion to “one-sidedly cultivated intellect which is bound to the perishable” while the spirit is suppressed. This results in seemingly inexplicated material suffocation confronting mankind today.
It can be gleaned from the foregoing that to trace the origin of evil, we must permit ourselves knowledge of other correlations. When a person does good, thinks aright to benefit and uplift others, his goodness is reinforced by rays from Luminous Realms in On High. The author of goodness thus becomes strengthened in goodness, is happy, is unfettered by pressure, and knows inexplicable joy. But an impure thought brings deposit on the soul, casts shadows and darkness around it. The thought is strengthened through attraction from similarly unworthy conduct by others. The impure thoughts take on form and together with similar deposits of thought forms from other men give rise to power centres of impure thoughts. Every author of impure thoughts connected by radiation threads, is linked with his dark thoughts. The expanded shadows envelop him, and increases with every unworthy act. A time then comes when the soul becomes irretrievably dark that it is cut off from help and enlightenment. He is completely on his own, impervious to correction, to ennobling values and dead to virtues. With the horizon narrowed, he becomes callous, unfeeling, uncaring, ever cold, insensitive and cruel. Wrong doing becomes a propensity to evil. In other words, the origin of evil remains man himself who uses the neutral power of God, the Creator, flowing unceasingly through Creation from His Throne of Grace, out of his free will to do evil and produce evil forms. The Lord Jesus Christ did say: “It is that which cometh out of the man that defileth the man. From within out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts.”
When man became dark, he became thereby the tool of Lucifer whose self-will brought about his downfall. Evil is alien to the Light Realm, and totally strange to the Almighty Creator Who is the embodiment of goodness, purity, and from Whom all virtues flow. It should go without saying from the foregoing, that there are no two Powers but One, which is why goodness always overcomes evil and Light triumphs over darkness.
What has made evil to be widespread today is that thoughts of hate, murder, lust, avarice, debauchery and envy, to mention but a few, pervade the world. Such is the conduct of a majority of mankind that he has made his world homogeneous with the dark world called nether region or hell where aberrations are the order of the day. A bridge has been built and let down there through depraved conduct. Through higher knowledge available on earth today, we now know that sauntering through the bridge more than 50 per cent of human beings on earth at present do not belong here. They should have been left in the dark region of the Beyond where through living and bitterly experiencing their own kind, hellish conditions and torment, they mature and come to the recognition of their depravity and errors and atone in order to make progress.
Once the majority of mankind change to doing good, concerned with what is honourable and noble, the societies will change in reciprocity, gradually at first, but open afterwards, with the dross gone, in flourish of beauty and splendour. Said Goethe: “He who desires god, should first be good.”
The Guardian
