By Yinka Fabowale
When the inspiration to begin writing these revolution notes came to me on January 25 in a flash, I sensed ab initio that it was not likely to submit or conform to a regular progression or any particular order, form or structure I might intend for it.
Not that I had any strictly in mind other than to sensitize us as Nigerians to our roles and responsibilities in helping to shape the unfolding destiny of our country and by extension ours.
To be or not to be, that is the question that looms large today demanding resolution, a question we have cowardly avoided rather than forthrightly and frontally confront. Although we are all well equipped to contribute to tackling the issue, we have turned the ammo and battle axes meant for the common enemy against ourselves and allowed the tools graciously lent to us for the up-building to rust away, or even pick at and dismantle the foundational bricks laid and bequeathed by the founding fathers. But how a child chooses to dispose with the inheritance of his forebears is well within his rights, I suppose.
Save that the translated spirits of African ancestors don’t sleep and watch their legacies, the fruits of their hard toil run into sands by the ingratitude and irresponsible conduct of some descendants. Hence ancestral worship and sacrifices to appease them when supposedly vexed. When everything started going wrong in the village or kingdom, when there was famine, hardship and war, the priest was summoned to consult the gods on what was amiss. The oracle revealed what the people did wrong and needed to do to earn forgiveness and bring relief to the land. Recalcitrance or failure to heed the warning and prescriptions of the oracle resulted in worse fate for the society.
Abnormality manifesting in different shades and forms of misbehaviour, as well as foolishness took the stage, piling up until they threatened to or actually destroy and bury the people under their ruins! People who suffered such fate are said to be afflicted by ‘Efun’ and ‘Eedi’, two kindred spells which, like mass hypnosis, bind the victim to take and continue on a definite course of actions often ending in tragedy and rarely on a pleasant note. But the spells are cast and work on people possessing affinity with or tendencies towards particular flaws, passions and weaknesses used as pole or bait to hook them usually for self-destruction.
However, only people having differing qualities and are pure are protected from their effects based on the Natural Law of Homogeneity, which ensures congregation and attraction of like species, while dissimilar ones repel the other. Still unknown to many Nigerians, however, is that we are currently subject to a more potent spell-bind that has been active for a while now, albeit sporadically, but now operating with incredible speed, vigour and effect, stirring everything –, wrong, evil, good and bad in us and various aspects of our lives and systems – political, social and economic up, so they can become active and manifest in order to be strengthened and preserved or destroyed and discarded, if found disturbing and detrimental to the God-willed life and ideal society He purposed for the citizens He put there to build, live and enjoy together.
How the distortion started
We have attracted this situation because we deviated from the values and principles by which we were to work together in harmony for our mutual benefits, peace and progress and thereby failed woefully in our task. Although we Nigerians fancy ourselves as godly people, we actually are rebellious, disobedient pretenders who disrespect the Sovereign Divinity and His Will codified in Laws and Commandments aimed at guiding us to a happy, fulfilled life. Had we honoured and lived by the Divine injunction to love our neighbours as ourselves, certainly our country will not be torn by strife and be witnessing serious economic crises as it does currently.
We slipped the wrong alley when we chose to over-cultivate and rely on the use of our intellect over and above our intuition, the faculty for receiving spiritual impressions and guidance for earthly application and realization. The intellect, which has its seat in the frontal brain, is the tool for analyzing and transforming such spiritual instructions into deeds on earth.
By sharpening and relying more on it, we, men, enabled the intellect, which by nature prioritizes everything earthly, to grow more powerful even than the intuition whose voice it began to suppress. The consequence was that mankind lost connection and ability to draw guidance, ideals and beautiful prototypes of how things should be on earth from the spiritual realm. Instead, under the instigation of the intellect, we focused attention and reached out more towards earthly knowledge and other vanities the worldly environment has to offer which, however, of course are of lower and inferior order.
Gradually, man lost the sense of selfless, supporting love, kindness and joint working in harmony, as base passions of acquisitiveness, fame, power and mundane pleasure engendered self-centredness, greed, lust, pride, arrogance, desire to dominate others among others took over and fuel strife, corruption, immorality, conflicts, envy, hate, murder and kindred evils today.
But these have not brought men genuine happiness and fulfilment essentially because they are fleeting and mere caricatures and distortions of his quest, his true life goals! Lagbaja was very correct when he sang: “Me and you no be enemy// We supposed to be family// Na wetin you dey find, I dey find.”
However, by upsetting the normal order, which actually implies looking out for and working with one another, men deny themselves of this enduring peace and satisfaction but continually run the rat race chasing after yet more after each worldly attainment. A waste of precious time and energy that sets him in desperate struggles that further breach the harmony that should exist between him, his fellow men and environment.
Enforcing a straightening up
The present dire condition has been foisted on us by the higher powers to help restore the lost compass and make us find the way again. Without our considered opinion and with limited freedom and choices born of our best interest at heart, given our previous detrimental misuse of similar grace when left entirely to our own devices in the past, we are again now being put on the same boat for a voyage in which we must either sink or swim to survive. It is a chance to correct the mistakes of the past or fail again and shipwreck!
Three score or more since we left port, the vessel has, by design, been tossed to and fro by treacherous waves and run, on several occasions, into tempests and stormy weather contrived by the invincible transcendental powers, who like Prospero, have charge to monitor and guide the progress and fate of the ship and those on board. They carefully watch and mark the reaction, attitude, confidence and emotions of the passengers and the crew to every emergency and threatened danger on the way – setting the sails, helping on deck, dousing a fire, reading the map, manning the helms, preparing the cabins, checking the store dropping the anchor and generally serving to ensure it safely reaches the harbour.
Locked up together, we must liberate ourselves from past entanglements and desist from incurring fresh debts by evidencing our goodwill and commitment to seeing the vessels see land. It is like dirty laundry that finds itself locked in a programmed washing machine, it is not yielded up until it becomes fresh clean!
Scoff all you want, but this is the picture of our current experience in Nigeria. The gravity of the current bizarre happenings our country must jolt you to reality of the peril we have continued to and insist on putting ourselves into with the gross levity, prejudice willfulness and irresponsible attitude we show towards our common fate!
Will there be war in Nigeria, what manner of battle?
We have again been caught in a whirlpool of controversy with beating of war drums, and strident calls for the country to be restructured for fairness, equity and justice. This has been sparked off by reaction of the Federal Government and our northern brothers to the daring push-back by the government of Ondo State and a young Yoruba warlord, Sunday Adeyemo (Sunday Igboho) to the mounting insecurity and wave of banditry, kidnapping and terrorism in the South west, believed to be perpetrated by criminals using pastoralism as decoy.
Coming on the heels of the aborted #Revolution Now and #EndSars protests, Nigeria may have reached a critical phase of an episodic build-up of national revolution bound to significantly alter and affect our lives, relationships and destinies as individuals and peoples for ill or for good! The issue that have been provoked are serious and are at the heart of what has prevented us from being united, strong and making progress as a country. They have been aggravated in recent times by reckless and unconscionable acts of injustice, bias, imbalance, insincerity, impunity and sundry others by actors in the Nigerian project which, unless appropriately handled, can blow up the nation in our faces!
Some already see the country gravitating towards anarchy or war with tension building up due to insensitive, insensible militant rhetoric sauced in bigotry and selfish motives being traded all over the place?
Yes, that is the way of most revolutions and may be unavoidable, but not necessarily so. The direction things eventually take depends on what role we play and how well we play that part?
With the promise in my opening article, you probably expect to find revolutionary thoughts, tips on weapon handling, organization and operation of resistance movements, sabotage operations, martial arts and how to generally cope and survive if the storm should break.
Sorry to disappoint you. I must confess that I yet lack the expertise of an Omoyele Sowore in Aluta struggles and even though I am acquainted with the history of various revolutions – from the American, French, Russian, Cuban and Toussaint of Haiti to the pseudo unrests in Africa, I know these changes of order come at great costs of personal and social misery sometimes with barren harvests! A utopia in which a worse regime of bloody tyranny is entrenched.
But, of course, I make no vain or empty boast. From what I will be sharing, you and I can make a difference in shaping affairs instead of leaving it to a tiny vocal, conniving or influential clique to manipulate our destinies as we have so far complicity done to our detriment! This calls for active participation, that is, not only letting our voices be heard (See why #Sorokoke, ‘speak up’ has become a popular public slogan and battle cry for true change), but also lending the movement action when necessary.
War gear for the new fight
To win you need the Truth as both armour and ammunition. Let it percolate, purify and light up your conscience, intuition, volition, thoughts, speech and deeds. It will free you from and remove the pile of repercussions of your past ill-decisions and misdeeds. Realize you dug yourself into the detestable circumstance in which you are stuck now because you resented and subverted the Truth for falsehood and deceit. To escape you must embrace the Truth, and use it like a sharp flaming sword to victoriously cleave the darkness, heal wounds and transform everything you touch with it.
Deemphasize self, be fair, just and objective in what you think, say or do concerning matters that impinges on the interest of the community, always mindful that the outcome advantages the collective and not just serve your parochial motives and calculations. Thereby, you probably would have settled debts you owe some to whom you find yourself knotted in this geographical space at this time and perhaps, buy for yourself too some breeze of freedom and bliss.
When it is said that: “Man is the master of his own fate”, it is literally and absolutely true because a man’s destiny lies in his own hand. He can shape conditions for himself as he wants it, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, based on how he employs the items in the toolkit mentioned above. This is because he moves the lever of the mighty spiritual mechanism that causes anything, from the slightest to the immense thing in the entire world to shift or happen, with how he exercises the endowments.
The mills of this transcendental machinery produce for men garments exactly corresponding to the nature of fabrics they feed into them and yield ripened fruits of the seed they sowed. In other words, as you call it into the woods, so it echoes in strict accordance with Divine Ordinance without any possibility of variation by human cunning or subterfuge.
With right adjustments to their dictates, man can correct what is wrong with him, and become ideal human being he was meant to be ab initio. By so doing, he paves way for Divine Mercy and Forgiveness which is bound to bring positive change in his fortunes also according to the integrity and lawful operation of the Natural Laws which, in their mutual and complimentary working, also sometimes modify and displace the effects of their verdicts on men.
But I seem to sound like a Satguru trying to gorge and constipate you on bowls of spiritual sweets and teachings.
Sorry, I am just a reporter and hope to regularly share with you relevant news occurrences, with insights from a peerless source of deep spiritual knowledge of Eternal Truth and Wisdom available on earth today that enables you clearly to understand and gain lessons from the marching events.
