Rafiu contributes the Ram column to USAfricaonline.com
In matters of human affairs, experiences and what have you bordering on what editors call human interest stories, reactions from readers are fast and sometimes they come in torrents. Predictably so because we are part of global human family. We see ourselves in the experiences of others. Even if it is easy to file away some, it is hardly so when it concerns children or the vulnerable. Last week, this column ran the story of a 12-year-old girl fighting for what she called her identity. Another of the subjects that drew instant reactions is the column’s piece on Maryam Sanda Bello captioned ‘Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth’. Following are reactions to the two subjects and the piece on Vanishing Harmattan:
ANU, AYOTOMIDE, DAVIDO
The outcry of Ayotomide Labinjoh is not about furthering of education or emotional stability for her daughter or herself. Dr. Adedeji Adeleke already provided both and she is not satisfied. She is inordinately desperate for her daughter and by extension herself to live in the United States. Little does she know that a person’s birthsoil is what provides the most solid foundation.
She claims her daughter is psychologically unstable, but worse awaits a 12-year-old migrant in the United States of today. There the child stands to end up scarred spiritually, in no time, Ayotomide’s yet unachieved goal to become a US citizen is a blessing in disguise but her craving for a fanciful lifestyle overseas is making her miss the point. Majority of our gen-z females are only about fame, show-off, hedonism and flippancy. What a pity! Ayotomide’s mum should know that here in Nigeria, Dr. Adeleke’s compassion and connections can easily help her daughter and granddaughter actualize all their abilities but due to their being birds of the same feather, she too is nursing the ambition to have access to the United States, thus narrow-minded to see that in the United States, Davido is just another citizen and it’s only here in Nigeria that the name Davido-Adeleke opens doors.
By your ardent reader, M. LARNEE, Otta, Ogun State.
THE HEAT WAVES: BEWARE OF WESTERN OPINION
I thank you, Sir, for sharing your concern on the current heat waves sweeping our coast in recent years—this, in particular! I believe it is a subject that merits serious academic inquiry and empirical observation as the essay attempts to do. I am, however, sceptical of received Western opinion on this subject. The West has foisted many insane views which eventually became global-think and conventional practices on the world. We can cite modern medicine and agriculture as ready examples and what Rockefeller did with both, capturing them from the 1950s onwards, destroying both existing organic knowledge, food and medicine, and replacing them with his dictated medical curriculum and spurning in the process many generations of people with high blood pressure, heart attacks, diabetes and other diseases previously unknown to the world.
Rockefeller’s heirs have been with us ever since then in the formal medical and pharma professions and his patently unqualified direct daodus of this world together with their accursed Foundations. So thoroughly have they corrupted and bankrupted the food, medicine and agriculture chain in the world that even the WHO, FAO and other global institutions have become active enemies of humanity by the global policies and agendas they pursue. Because of them, we no longer know what a vaccine is or what it does or should do? COVID-19 vaccine was and was not a vaccine, yet it was forced on the world through the WHO and the agency of a man whose true qualifications are that he has none to champion global health or agricultural apostleship. New pieces of evidence are coming out now, particularly in the social media which these Big Budgets cannot control, that thoroughly discredit the Western notion of medicine and control and propagation of seeds and creation of the GMO as a global food and health managing (read damaging) initiatives. No, this is a Rockefeller creation of world medical practice which is largely against pristine organic medical practice and against the manufacturer’s manual in the Word of God which prescribes our food and medicine in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible. Herbs, which God prescribed were condemned by the orthodoxy and its disciples in the medical profession; hence many millions have succumbed to the manufactured diseases that came with synthetic drugs over the decades. We all know that the health system in Nigeria is not much to write home about any longer, not in terms of expertise, no; but in terms of facilities and instability triggered by unflattering service conditions. Many Nigerians of means, therefore, seek refuge in institutions with reassuring facilities outside the country, in mostly Western Europe.
No, we cannot receive opinions merely from Western orthodoxy and consider it the gospel. I know that’s what our universities still teach—received opinions and expired knowledge—but they no longer carry the weight of infallibility. In fact, where evidence seems to point to now is not just that these global-thinks are not only infallible, they’re downright fraudulent and devil-inspired because they have no roots in science. I’m not a climate expert, but experts have been asking pertinent questions which those consumed with global warming orthodoxy have not been able to answer. I’ll send you two clips sir—or more—for you to assess what climate change or global warming hysterics are all about. I have done my own assessment, and my conclusion is that it is a grand deception. It is like a man following his own shadow in a dimly lit night and pretending to be on a journey of discovery. It’s a huge hole to pour global resources into while humanity, people with flesh and blood, suffer basic needs.
By Patrick Edebor, CEO, Tallwalls Publishing, Ibadan, Nigeria.
My Comments: We do not have to wait for “received Western opinion” or its affirmation of Climate Change to notice changes in natural atmospheric occurrences manifesting in our clime as heat waves, vanishing harmattan and delayed rains. What we are experiencing in our lives! Climate Change with the attendant and hardly predictable weather conditions is empirical. No one can fail to observe and feel it. It does not require much gift of discernment to note that in the last two years harmattan that grips every part of the country mostly between December and January has receded and, in its place, enervating heat. Do we need Rockefeller or Bill Gates barometer to alert us on the state of inclement weather Nigerians are passing through in these times.
We are wont to attribute our circumstances to imperialistic fangs baring and victimhood. Drop the hood, it may well be that the victims of imperialism of today that cry the loudest were the authors and drivers of imperialism of centuries past. As I did state in these pages recently, man’s problems are earthly in consequence, but spiritual in cause because we are spiritual beings.
There is knowledge acquired through experiencing which is recorded through the instrumentality of cerebrum the frontal brain, the seat of the intellect. Being material, it cannot traverse beyond space and time, and science its product is correspondingly limited. In other words, the perceptive capacity of the brain is limited firmly bound to space and time. There is revealed knowledge mediated from outside space and time which is received by the cerebellum, the hind brain which is the spiritually receptive part of the brains. It is ever fresh and inexhaustible depending on how open human beings are to receive it and familiarise themselves with it. The revealed knowledge answers all questions of life and existence. It throws light on every subject, every issue because it is of the Light. The frontal brain gathers from the environment while the hind brain is the vehicle of the spirit transmitting through it. Because the frontal brain is over-cultivated at the expense of the hind brain we talk of the large brain and the small brain which is the hind brain. It can be observed that what is used grows and gets enlarged and what is neglected shrivels. The hind brain suffers atrophy from non-use! The imbalance in the cultivation leads to the intellect overshadowing it to the extent of crippling it. This constrains the spiritual mediation by the weakened hind brain. The consequence is estrangement from God, our Creator and His Will that governs the whole of Creation. The virtues awareness that is to flow to guide man is mangled by the overpowering intellect. Grasp of issues beyond the material is thus severely impaired; all manner of man’s peccadilloes manifests and virtues recede, characterising daily living. It stands to reason also that revealed knowledge can only come from very high above man.
He who stands in knowledge would know that with intuitive volition as the key, he accesses the Divine Power streaming through Creation and taps from it. Whatever he taps he is free to use as he pleases, exercising his free will. The Living Power of the Creator itself is neutral. Man uses it to create and nourish whatever is his volition but must bear responsibility for it—choice to do good or to do evil. Man is, therefore, the master of his own destiny, as is often said. He chooses out of his own free will what and where and even that parentage that will do him the most good for his development in his life journey. Man elects and elects, every split second; the power he taps vitalises what has been chosen and he is tied to the consequences of the choice. It is, therefore, said that man is the architect of his fate, and holding his destiny in his own hands. We may be influenced by the opinion of our neighbours, friends or the opinion of the Western World, but the choice is ultimately ours at all times. The events in our world today be it in atmospheric phenomenon, politics, the economy as well as chaos and confusion, are the balance sheet of the deposits we human beings have made individually and collectively in the bank of life.
RE: EYE ROR EYE—MARYAM BELLO
I found this advocacy difficult to swallow because of the uncommon degree of violence involved in killing a fellow human being. If a husband killer or wife killer is pardoned lightly for showing remorse (medicine after death), what do we do with ritual killers, kidnappers, terrorists and wanton dealers in human blood and human spare parts. I have even heard in whispers that some obas, but very few indeed, have squads they use to harvest human souls and body parts. I found this level of degeneration too barbaric to associate with thoughts of pardon or clemency. Still, I must thank you for the sublimity of your essay. Wonderful weekend, Sir.
My response: I spoke of classifications, one crime committed on impulse and the other driven by propensity. Ritual killings and those that come under banditry, kidnapping, corruption and terrorism cannot be classified under impulsive action but under pre-meditated, intentional criminality. I concentrated in the column on Maryam Sanda Bello whose action came under impulsive reaction upon seeing the nude photograph of her husband’s girlfriend in his phone. She could not believe it because she loved her husband very dearly. When the scale dropped from her eyes after the dastardly occurrence, she could not believe herself that she did it and wondered under what influence she came to commit the act. She knew remorse and regretted her action, thus paving a path to atonement for her crime. It was in that state the Presidential committee reviewing cases found her. The prison authorities also had the same report on her. She lost control of herself feeling betrayed. There was a scuffle and the rest is painful history!
Let’s face it: how many women can hold themselves finding their marriage threatened in that manner? Without first reconsidering she dealt her husband a mortal blow.
No man can match a woman in love or in cruelty when they fall. I may have to write on this soon, using your reaction as a peg! The modern judicial practice in Western world courts is to put criminal actions into categories and see in which one or the other falls! Impulsive action is looked at with understanding and mercy, more leniently and it receives lesser punishment.
Reaction to my response:
Good morning, sir, and thank you for gracing my reaction this charitably. In truth you qualified your essay with all the facts you mentioned here—and I took notice of them. I too was moved to the other extreme of cold-bloodedness because of the abominable degree of bloodshed in our geography. I think of the 100 years of civil war in Yorubaland, the attendant bloodshed; the 400 years of slavery and anguish, the 221 years of Fulani jihad and the Holocaust, native colonialism and the pogrom they all have unleashed on us. These historical foundations were the ancestors of modern forms of killing in Nigeria and even when we thought we had moved away from our pristine existence people are still dying daily, most in cold blood.
You are of higher grace, and I appreciate that, but Nigeria needs to find a formula to extinguish this fire consuming people like ready plant tinder. It is abominable to God and the sense of our humanity and decency. God bless your pen, sir. It is always seasoned with grace, wisdom and strength. Always a joy to read. Happy weekend, sir.
