ONE A PENNY, TWO A PENNY, HOT CROSS BUNS!

My wife has more nursery rhymes in her repertoire than a Red Indian brave has arrows in his quiver. I on the other hand get constantly ribbed by her; she consistently implores that I should not taint and muddy the crystal clear spring of erudition from which our son takes his daily sips. Since I did not attend the kind of posh and exclusive schools she went through, most of the rhymes I know are those in my local lingo like the one about cigarette metal containers, excessive carbohydrate consumption and farting culprits (in Yoruba, it is titled “Pangolo Cigar”). But for some reason, after seeing a hawker advertising his pastries in a kiddies verse book as a child, the hot cross buns rhyme was seared on my mind like a Ranchers coat of arms on a bullock’s hind quarters.

Recently I saw the aforementioned baked rolls in a supermarket’s catalogue and asked the wife to get me some but to my surprise; I could not abide the taste of it. It ended up being a waste. But what was the big deal, anyone can afford to do away with a couple of buns that cost a penny or two. For crying out loud, they are dirt cheap.

The history of Africa is riddled with sacrificial killings like holes in Swiss cheese and it’s so sad that the advent of education and enlightenment have not extirpated these abominable acts. Some times I think the most western education has done for a lot of Africans is window dressing. Clothed in suits and frocks, most peoples mind are still barbaric and cannibalistic, even the most educated and elite amongst us. That is why ritual killings and murderous rites still abound and not necessarily the slitting of throats on pagan altars.

Back in the day, it was normal for young virgins or lads to be killed or buried alive to help a dead king achieve seamless crossing through the underworld. In our day, young children are killed everyday by malaria and other diseases because the funds that would have purchased their drugs have been used for the councilor, local government chairman, Governor or President’s latest travelling machine. They are sacrificed to ensure these people have groovy rides. Thing is in this part of the world, there is little or no value for human life. Human beings are ridiculously cheap.

This truth like yeast permeates the dough of this nation and that has contributed so much in keeping us behind in the race of life with other countries. Irrespective of how much our natural resources might be, without human resources this nation will not go anywhere. No good General ever toys with his men. The reason behind the exodus from our land even at the risk of death sometimes is because other nations place value on our people more than we do. An average American would gladly die for his country because most of them ran away from death, pogroms, famine, racism, and segregation to a land of liberty that gave them the opportunity to become presidents, billionaires, industrialists, moguls and titans of businesses. A value saturated environment helps the realization of potential. This is why somebody who is nothing to write home about in Nigeria travels abroad and becomes very successful and valuable to his community.

Pre-revolutionary French aristocracy placed little worth on its common citizens and what did they get in return, anarchy and their heads chopped off during the French Revolution.

The basis for which a father provides for his family is because he loves them and they are of great worth to him. A dad with a different view goes on the lam. In the same vein, a nation that places great premium on its people will provide a conducive environment for them to grow and flourish.

The lack of value for human life shows up on our roads with their pot holes and craters, veritable traps for motorists. It is revealed in our transport system where people rush for buses like rhinos on a stampede. My pastor travelled to a first world country and saw that the vehicles used to transport animals have more dignity than the rusty cans of destruction used to move people here.

How would you explain the short and long sleeved haute couture that was formed from people’s limbs using machetes during the Liberian civil war? It is absolutely insane.

I walked into a general hospital recently and was heart broken to see the laissez faire attitude of the medical crew while patients needed urgent attention. A friend of mine told me that while he was doing his house job in a government hospital, the husbands of bleeding pregnant women were the ones holding the infusions while the patient lay on the floor due to shortage of beds and drip stands. He confirmed that blood pressure measurements could not be taken because there was no blood pressure measuring equipment.

Lately, there has been a spate of loss of lives in which armed robbers attacked inter-city buses and passengers who had been robbed were asked to lie on the road and were crushed by the buses. What about the fact that there is no water for our firemen to quench raging flames despite the fact that we are in a tropical area with heavy downpours and famous rivers?

In spite of all these, our leaders have become inured to it all. They steal from the national treasuries and talk about elongating their terms.

Jesus said that the worth of a man is more than all the cars, money, houses and everything in the world. He understood the value of a human life and that is why as befuddling as it might be he put his life and the lives of his men into jeopardy to save a crazy man living in a grave yard (the continuance of his work was riding on those disciples) yet he braved the storm with them to save a loony that had been given up on by his community. The man was of no use to anybody but the son of David knew no man was ever a waste. He saw worth in a supposedly worthless man. After his healing the lunatic became sane and profitable to the ministry of Jesus. The former fruitcake became a marketer for his Saviour’s product in 10 cities and we all know that the best advertisement is by word of mouth.  VALUE TURNED A NUT INTO AN ASSET! How many certified mad men do we have walking on the streets of London? How many do we have in on the streets of Nigeria?

Beyond our leaders, the buck also falls into our laps, the way we treat the people around us is an indication of how much value we place on them.

During Israel’s slavery in Egypt, mothers willingly gave up their new born children to be murdered after Pharaoh’s edict but Moses mum refused because she tagged her son special. Her son went ahead to become a great leader. It’s the value you place on your offspring that will prevent you from surrendering them to the pharaoh’s of abortion, ignorance, lack of care and attention and all the other ills to which children are exposed to.

Truth is until we stop putting a price tag as cheap as that of hot cross buns on human beings, throwing them to the dogs will remain instinctive. We have to start seeing our people as invaluable, if not our country will remain bogged in the quicksand of despondency.  A person that is just worth a penny cannot be of much value to himself or his country

The organization Jesus started two thousand years ago is still waxing strong because he gave worth to his men. He provided food, security, medical insurance, training, dreams of a better tomorrow and ultimately died for them. The most worthless person’s value increases when he sees another give up a life for him. His value and esteem shoots up astronomically. The guys returned the value their master placed on them and gave their all into propagating and developing his business. Most even gave up their lives.

For nations, businesses, marriages and families to survive and flourish, we need to place more value on our people and loved ones. What you give is what you get. It is all about value my friends!

THE KISS

The image above is about the most famous kiss in human history. It is a camera immortalized legendary kiss between a sailor and a nurse on August 14, 1945 after the announcement of the capitulation of the Japanese, signaling an end to the Second World War. What strikes me most about this osculation is the ardor, borne on the wings of euphoric jubilation, more so when seen from the angle of the man who made it acclaimed, a world renowned photographer called Alfred Eisenstaedt (I couldn’t use his own print due to copyright reasons, so I had to make do with this one in the public domain shot by a naval photo journalist called Victor Jorgenson). Alfred Eisenstaedt was celebrated for his great candid pictures until he died in 1995 but none still compares to his magnum opus, a passionate kiss captured by a man with the fever of photography running through his veins like boiling magma under the earth crust.

Recently, I was stuck when I had to take a portrait for my first book (watch out peeps), wondering where I would go since there are more photo shooters in Lagos than there were snipers in the battle of Stalingrad. I quickly remembered someone whose exhibits I had been following for a while. I gave him a call and an appointment was fixed. But the session turned out to be a lesson in life instead of just a photo shoot.

A cool Friday morning found me on 12b Fagba Street, a cool, quiet area of Ogba in Lagos. The warmth with which his workers greeted me in the reception made me feel like a film star on Hollywood boulevard. The first thing I noticed in eloPhotos was a shelf of books and more books and of course they pulled me like a variety of Zinnias singing a fragrant romantic song to a butterfly’s soul. To my amazement they were all on photography, books that could fill up the whole library of Pergamum, all on a single topic. The room also had beautiful framed pictures hanging on the walls like priceless stamps in a philatelist’s collection. The wedding ones were mesmerizing because they were sprinkled with the stardust of creativity but the one I particularly liked was the one in which the photographer froze time for any avian lover to appreciate a green bird on a banana leaf. It was masterful artistry inducing sheer delight.

Noticeable on the bookshelf was a plaque from an American university showing a degree in Business Administration. By now the questions were twirling in my brain like clothes in a washing machine. Then behold the man, he walked in, short sleeved with baggy pants and after the initial niceties, I went into my Gatling gun mode and started firing him with questions. Having a foreign degree in Nigeria is about the fastest way to climb to the top of any career ladder. I would have expected this guy to be in an office, decked to the nines in designer garments, with his whole person buried up to the neck in papers and not this so relaxed dude toting a camera before me.

He told me he got a camera from his mom when he was in the US and the rest is history even though his father initially put up enough barriers before him to have deterred the incredible Hulk (his dad wanted him to be an accountant like him). The bro stuck to his guns, sorry, his camera and thus created his path into destiny.

After observing Seun Akinsanmi’s style and imagination, the way he ensures that every snap is a shot of passion, it dawned on me that his studio has painstakingly been built with the bricks of devotion and dedication.

As I left the hallowed grounds of this temple of photography, the one word that kept popping up in my mind was PASSION!

Passion, the exceptional quality that never says no, it is what kept God on until He finished the world before He could rest, it made Churchill stand strong before the steamrolling might of the Nazis, it caused James Cameron to stay on the Avatar project for twelve years, it was what initiated Marco Polo and Columbus to discover new worlds, it brought David Livingstone to Africa, it is the ingredient that spurred on Vince McMahon into building a billion dollar industry from wrestling, it crowned Mohammed Ali the greatest, turned John Grisham into a bestselling novelist, eggs on a city bred zoologist into the Amazon jungle to save a species on the brink of extinction and  made Mother Theresa sacrifice all for service. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, George Washington all had this ingredient (PASSION) in prodigious amounts.

A life without passion is akin to being served a Mexican dish cold and without the chili sauce. Passion is what gives life a rush, without it our relationship with God dies, marriages become nonexistent, businesses go bankrupt, and life becomes boring and mundane like an interminable carousel ride instead of the exciting exhilaration of a bungee jump.

The other day I saw the new Thai prime minister speaking on telly in a banking hall, since the sound was hushed I could not hear what she was saying but I could feel her passion. Passion is what makes you go the extra mile when others have thrown in the towel; it is what keeps you awake at night burning the lamp like Florence Nightingale, when others are frolicking with Peter Pan in Morpheus induced dreams, it is what makes one a burning flame when others have become the charred remains of yesterday, it turns an ordinary night into a fireworks extravaganza when mixed with a canoodle with your spouse. IT’S THE FUEL THAT KEEPS THE WICK OF VISION BURNING!

It would be well to note that passion like fire is useful to potential only when it blazes in controlled and defined conditions. Outside these restrictions, it can become negative and dangerous. Examples are Hitler’s mad quest for world domination or sexual passion outside the confines of marriage. Such passionate flames usually leave in its wake, disaster, torched destinies, burnt feelings, toasted futures and scorched lives. It culminates into a conflagration of destruction but positive passion is healthy, life without it is cold.

What is your passion? Are you true to it? The answers to these questions are what will make your life either a butterfly kiss or a nuclear powered smackeroo! Discover your passion, give it wings and you will soon start living beyond the limits of gravity.

"The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire." Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch

ELUSIVE BRANDS

Walking down memory lane sometimes is like taking a walk down the corridors of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Like the artworks of Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh on the walls of this esteemed art house, so are the pictures of some great commercials that have been shown over the years on the walls of my mind.

Taking the lead amongst these timeless advertisements are Coca cola’s like, “come to the festival with me”, “when the music starts to play”, “I am the future of the world” and the one for world cup 2006, where the chicken hugged the cook who wanted to kill it after a goal was scored.


MTN, is also absolutely magnificent when it comes to commercials, I particularly like their yellow Christmas, “I will be your hero baby” and the latest one making the rounds about their new number. It is amazingly melodious.


Beyond advertisements, what these two companies have in common is that they are both strong multinational brands worth billions. Their products saturate our world like mist on a foggy morning.

Strong brands bring in foreign exchange and make a country richer. I dare to say that one of the reasons Nigeria is stuck in the rot and rut of poverty and delayed growth is because we lack very strong indigenous brands.

A country like Japan is much smaller than Nigeria and does not have as much natural resources but comparing it’s GDP to ours is like comparing Aphrodite to an old, scabies infested, arthritic hag. But this reality would not wow even an infant considering that Japan has some of the greatest brands in the world, for example, Sony, Toyota, Honda and so on.

But what befuddles the mind is why a country like ours with the plethora of human and natural resources we are inundated with lack indigenous brands that can compete with some of the world’s best.

The reasons for this economic malady are like the ugly head of Medusa with its hair of multiple hideous snakes.

If you take a walk into most Nigerian companies, it will be noted that there are more vision plaques than there are lianas in the rain forest, yet most of these institutions grope in darkness. Reason being that in this part of the world, we cling to the routine and perfunctory like a drowning man to a life boat without ever understanding the essence of why we do the things we do. People are infected by the Lemming effect and join the band wagon, without having any notion of where they are headed. Eventually these outfits fizzle out the way Sir John Franklin and his men died after getting lost in the arctic. I am sure you know a few cases in point over the years. Vision is beyond the mere scribblings that are inscribed in golden settings as big as castle doors. Vision lives, it’s like a heart beat that pumps life into the existence of any corporation. It is not a mere recitation, it is a force. it is infectous. It is like a map through which an explorer travels to new worlds and explores new territories and opportunities. But the sad thing is that around here it is usually sacrificed to greed and ostentation like a baby to the abominable fiery maw of Moloch.  Can you imagine a business owner with a vision of global dominance spending his initial profits and part of his loan on a jet liner with marrying a second wife to boot? That company will soon pass on without a whimper. This is the kind of scenario that exists in this society. 

When the stock market was still roaring like a Guy Fawkes’s bonfire, one of the big eateries around town had an IPO that brought in millions but instead of the company expanding, it has become a husk of its old self and its food has become deplorable. Whatever happened to all that money? I bet some people moved all the dough into their own private coffers. Irrespective of how big their plaque is or how beautiful the calligraphy of their vision, they are more blind than bats and will die in stygian darkness.

Following the burst bubble of the stock market, it is becoming clearer and clearer that duplicity is a main feature of our companies. Most companies cook the books better than a French chef cooks exotic cuisine. Most financial reports can only be ingested with a pinch of salt. A country where the bourse is regarded with suspicion cannot raise world class brands because that’s like the engine room where funds are generated for growth. A closer look behind the doors of some of the supposedly strong brands will have them toppling like Humpty dumpty.


Greed also prevents most of our companies from carrying out social responsibility, aside from the little they do to minimize tax payments. In a place like India, which has become a breeding ground for world class CEOs, corporate social responsibility has been attributed as part of the reason for the development of these world leaders. It has been confirmed that they are guided more by a bigger goal than by the bottom line. Now we have Indians in the top echelon of brands like Motorola, PepsiCo, MasterCard, Harvard Business School, which is more than I can say for our own compatriots. How many companies are still standing strong after they were indigenized to Nigerian outfits? A number of great brands have been destroyed in this nation over the years while in some of our neighboring countries; they still thrive like wheat in the Nile delta.

Selfishness is another snake wrapping itself around our establishments. Most owners will gorge and feast on the profits while leaving the crumbs to their workers. This creates an atmosphere without motivation, leading to fraud, high turn over of staff and poor financial results. The workers have no sense of ownership. In Japan and first world countries, employees are given a sense of entitlement by motivation through stock rights and other incentives. Such benefits make the workers give their best because they see the firms as theirs and will be ready to sink or swim with the enterprise. They take ownership and responsibility because they are partners who are affected by either the profit or loss of the business..

Strong brands are associated with great customer service, but to many corporate structures, service is as arcane as hieroglyphics to an unschooled villager. Business owners usually feel they are doing the customer a favor instead of the other way round.

Unless like Perseus, the holders of these syndicates get a mirror to check out the reflection of their dark state, use a sword of decisiveness and change to cut off the head of the Medusa freezing their businesses into cracked stony edifices of the Jurassic Era while global brands speed past at dizzying speed into the future, developing universal brands will remain as elusive to them as an exotic butterfly being chased by a tottering toddler.

AN ORIENTAL STAR!

Amazingly, Christmas is on my mind in July. Pictorial simulations of the nativity scene have been swimming in my thoughts, like a school of myriad colored fish in the depths of the Atlantic. And maybe I am not way off since some historians purport that Christmas must have been in summer considering that the shepherds were outdoors which would have not been possible in winter.


The part that has stuck to my mind like graphic superglue is where Mary in the throes of parturition was denied a space in the inn to deliver her dream child, her promise son to the world.

For me this is a truth that permeates the atmosphere of life like the smell of crushed garlic cloves.  Thing is that we are all pregnant. Everybody on the surface of mother earth has something to deliver. Like the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, sperms of creativity from God has been embedded in the womb of our souls. Each one of us is heavy with a saviour for mankind; something to save humanity from depression and sorrow like comedy, music and sports, another thing to make the world’s labour easier like machines, IT and telecoms, something to enlighten the burden of ignorance like literary materials and speeches, another to protect man from the elements and diseases like clothes and drugs.


But the truth is that sometimes the door of the inns of life is slammed in our faces and we are left in the cold. This is where the disaster usually occurs. Lots of people abort at this stage. You might have the gift of football and your dream club shuts its door on you with the excuse that you are not good enough, the manuscript of your dream bestseller might be rejected because you are still unknown and have no literary agent, the five star hotel says you don’t have what it takes to give your speech in their grand ball room.


Do I hear you say you are a virgin? Good news is that so were Mozart, Edison, Gates, Rembrandt, Einstein, and a host of others before they got pregnant with ideas and went into the labour room of possibilities.


Yeah, a lot of people have gone ahead of you and they have filled the inns. Maestros, masterpiece artists, Grammy and Oscar winners, Nobel laureates, name it. Life tells you, there isn’t any room for you; your ship came in late and you missed the boat. You turn around, head bowed, tail in between your legs like a flea-infested, homeless mongrel and head towards the slimy cold fingers of insignificance’s darkness, the blood of the life of your dreams about to run down your legs into the unfeeling arid sands. Your gift is about to become a colossal waste.


But hold it, look around you, hear the lowing of the cows around you, a stable is not far from where you stand. The smell of hay wafting from yonder stable is that of hope. Inhale and change direction, unglamorous and unsavoury it might be but it is somewhere for you to deliver your baby. The manger is a place of birthing dreams. Your dawn begins here.


Your manger might be, your living room, your garage ( like Apple computers), the boot of your car(like Sweet Sensation), your kitchen, the local football club without kits, a rundown building ( one of the most popular churches in Nigeria today started out in such a dump), self publishing your own book. Do not let all these deter you, just go on and give life to your baby.


It is after your delivery that your star will begin to glow and shine until it is seen all the way in the east, the orient, the land of the rising sun. It’s your star that will direct wise men to you. It will guide men from distant lands to your manger. You stop being inconsequential at this juncture. It is written that the wise men opened their gifts and presented gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold signifies wealth and kingship, frankincense typifies priesthood and myrrh is associated with death. This means in the arena of your gift you would become a king Midas of that kingdom. A priest is a mediator, a spiritual leader who shows others the way to a higher reality of life. Birthing your dream will make people see you as a priest (Henry Ford is the priest of the religion of cars; Walt Disney is the priest of cartoons).  Myrrh shows that your old self dies for a BRAND new you to resurrect.  Lionel Messi is an ordinary guy until he starts playing. The gold people give to him for promotions is not because of his person, it’s for his starry achievements’ with the round leather. YOUR STAR ATTRACTS YOUR GOLD!!!


You see, there are some Herod’s that are prancing around our locale because your star has not shown up yet. The Herod’s of politics, industry, fashion designing, architecture, shipping, banking and so on. When you birth your promise to the world, they will become yesterday’s news. The throne will be yours to mount. That is why sometimes they refuse to let you put a foot in the door; the present monarchs try to put your potential to death before it is birthed. Refuse to die, run from the Israel of your comfort zone and grow your dreams, even if you are in Egypt. The Israel might be a big multinational that would stagnate your gift to the world; Egypt might be a small shop where you grow your entrepreneurship skills. These skills will later help you to go back to Israel to change things.


When the wise men told Herod about the new king, the old ruler inquired of his scribes if they were privy to the information regarding the boy leader and they said a Prophet had made predictions about him in the past.  This shows that this thing has been written into your destiny. Like the infant in swaddling clothes, your fledgling enterprise will soon be recognized and feared. It is on its way to becoming a super power.


The sun rises in the east and never sets there, from the time it rises in the orient; it only gets brighter and brighter. That is your destiny my friend. You are on your way to becoming an oriental star, if you can just deliver the song, the invention, the clothes, the designs, the ideas, the corporations, the books and all that is in you. The tragedy will be if you never bring it forth. Then you will only remain an oriental star that would have been. DELIVER IT!!!

GENESIS, MAGIC AND THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.

After watching “Megamind” recently, I concluded that I prefer the old Disney cartoon classics to Pixar generated ones, especially those spiced with romance. Even though they are two dimensional, there is something about the timeless quality of their plots and music that appeal to my soul. The enduring character of the love of Capt John Smith and Pocahontas, Ariel-the little mermaid and her Prince, Belle-the beauty and her Beasty beau, heats up my being like burning logs on a wintry morning in the Arctic and make my heart as snug as a princess sleeping on an eiderdown filled mattress.


On the other hand apart from probably “Seven” or the odd exception, I really don’t like movies, books or anything that has to do with serial killers. The gruesomeness of the murdering spree usually puts me off no end.


I am sure you are beginning to wonder why I seem to be mentioning Jack the Ripper and Cinderella in the same breath. Yeah, I know the horror attached to the first name makes the comeliness of the “they lived happily ever after” of the other shatter like crystal.


But as distasteful as the combination might be, that has been the reality buzzing around Lagos like the drone of angry hornets in the last few weeks. The city has been agog with the news of the guy that sliced and diced his wife after two years of marriage. Our airspace has been filled with outrage and vats of boiling anger have been poured on the guilty party. Thing is the lady might eventually be canonized because her death has opened a can of worms concerning the marriage institution. The incident revealed that a lot of ladies go through physical and emotional torment almost every day of their lives and men are not exempted too.

I saw the wedding pictures of the couple in question and could not understand the short and sudden leap from the genre of romance to that of murder. It was a mystery that would have Sherlock Holmes stumped and the luridness of it would send the hounds of Baskerville to flight in fright.


Certainly, along the line an evil mutation had taken place that ought to be brought to the light of recognition. Unlike this society where problems are tackled by hacking away at the leaves and branches with vehemence instead of attacking the roots, I decided to get to the bottom of this thing by digging out some answers.


My quest egged me on like an Arthurian Knight looking for the Holy Grail. I finally had to borrow the Tardis from Dr. Who and travel down the corridors of the past to the pages of Genesis where it all began.

I got to lush Eden, so verdant in its beauty that I gasped for breath and saw Adam, fine looking hunk that he is, all alone. He had the companionship of an assortment of animals but none of them made his heart tick. After frolicking with the animals all day, he went back to a cold bed of leaves under a tree shade with no one to talk to after each day’s hard work. Finally heaving a sign of aching heaviness, he turned his gaze to the trunk of the woody perennial and slept off. Same story, day after day, night after night until God intervened and put him into a deep sleep. Mind you, it was not stupor derived from restless romantic lethargy, neither was it a sexual fantasy filled slumber or a dreamy haze of infatuation. It was a deep sleep of connection with God, a somnolence of relaxation while God worked out things for his destiny.

What struck me here is the fact that this bro was patient and not in a frenzied state of hitching up with any animal that had breath because he was alone. His canniness in waiting for the opportune time and right woman was amazing. It hit me that this is the point at which most of the problems of the ring begin.  Life has it that many people (especially ladies) in the frenzy and haste of getting out of the alone state end up marrying beasts. They hitch their lives to soulless animals- feral cats that tear their hearts to shreds, poisonous snakes that poison their self esteem, electric eels that shock the light out of their destiny and the list goes on.  Adam did not make this mistake because there was a peaceful calm about him, a serenity that made him partner with God unto the unveiling of a lifetime companion. The man had enough will to have made his pick before his creator got on the scene but he waited patiently like a cat expecting the choice cream instead of feasting on soured milk.

By the time the operation was over, God did not need to introduce Eve. Adam instinctively knew and was cock sure she was his helpmeet. There was no second guessing, no attempt to just make do with what was presented to him. She was it, a part of him, an extension of his person, a soul companion, not just a bearing mate, bed mate or cooking mate. This was his life mate, the one for whom his heart stopped beating, the first lady rocked his world! Something exploded in his brain and ran all the way down to his toes. Where had she been all his life? He said she was the bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. This heavenly, yet earthly being was made from the hardiest part of him; she was his flesh, the sensitive part of him. This was nothing to be trifled about. She wowed him and he called her Woman (Wow-man). The man exhaled, finally, at last, the search was over, the wait had ended. The studious hunt had come to a screeching stop. There was a right feeling to it like a coin dropping into a till. The inference is if your wow-person doesn’t make you exhale, you might need to have a rethink before the vows, because the expedition might still be on.

There was a fierce certainty to Adam’s decision, he did not go into the tie, wondering whether she was the right one or not, the question on his mind was not whether it was going to work or not. He did not gamble because he knew the stakes were much higher than losing millions in a Vegas casino, instead it would be akin to a Russian roulette with a shot gun.

They were connected, naked and not ashamed and could share everything and anything. This opened my eyes to where we miss it big time, when we hide secrets, thinking the truth would make our partner drop us like a maggot- infested fruit. The truth eventually surfaces like a submerged dolphin coming up for air causing the relationSHIP to capsize and drown. Your true love will accept you as you are, irrespective of your past, looks, class, size, height, bank account, tribe name it.

(Adam also did not believe in-laws interference either, it was made known that after Eve showed on the scene, that a man would leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. In-laws interfere with the cleaving process).

It was all magical and romantic thereafter until disaster struck; Eve messed up and made her husband lose it all. She brought him down from the top of the food chain to the bottom where he was now terrorized by microbes and bugged by mosquitoes. His career went down hill, everything collapsed like a card house in the path of a raging typhoon but the guy held on to his wife. He did not divorce her, he could not divorce her, he had named her (what do you call your lady Bro?) the bond was too strong, the tie was too tight and together they weathered the storm. Out of the sustained union came the seed that turned everything around positively. The marriage survived because Adam made the right choice. Choice is the foundation of any marriage. It is the similarity between the laws of evolution and marriage. In the case of the first, it is by natural selection, whereas for the second, SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON SPIRITUAL SELECTION!!!

When I say spiritual selection, I am talking about a making the choice of a life partner based on a deep compatibility connection, a connection that is above good looks, star status, vital statistics, bulging bank accounts, ethnicity, good sex and so on. Adam did not even sleep with this being that made him doe-eyed with wonder before his decision, yet he knew she was exceptionally wondrous. Most factors for our selection are as flimsy as an arachnid’s spun fabric. A deep soul connection based on God, personality, values, purpose, belief and faith is as strong and as lasting as the Everest. This is the secret to survival. (I noticed the unison in their lives, elucidating that the two had become one flesh. Their partnership was evident; Eve did not own all the baobabs in Eden, while her husband claimed all the Cedars. They were a connubial consortium).

My next stop was Galilee, a large rocky region in Northern Israel with vast fields of greenery and colorful wild flowers. I alighted in a place called Cana where there was a jubilant atmosphere, Jewish musical instruments filled the air with pure golden tunes. A rollicking party was going on, it was a wedding.

I joined in the festivity and blended with the cavorting crowd. With time, I noticed trouble was brewing, the wine had run out. (One of the reasons the wine ran out was because there were too many folks relative to the amount of wine; the fellowship of the ring runs into trouble when too many people are allowed into its hallowed circle).

Even when the ring selection was right on the mark like Robin Hood’s arrow, this happens to the best of us. The wine runs out without notification, creeps up on us like a cat burglar.

Wine signifies joy, heady euphoria, extravagant love, hot affection, intoxication and inebriation. That is why it is written, ‘kiss me with the kisses of thy mouth for thy love is better than wine. A kiss expressed from the heart of a kisser whose love is better than wine, will be rapturous for the ‘kissee”. She will be transported beyond the Milky Way without a space shuttle. But thing is with the passage of time, the roaring flames of love in the hearth of our heart burns down to glowing embers. Our heart becomes cold with having kids, loss of the battle of the bulge, work in bucketfuls and the quest for more money snapping at our heels like rabid dogs. The bedroom loses it steam, the kiss acquires the taste of vinegar and we begin to just go through the motions.


It was evident there was a lot of water at the event but no wine. Water is essential to live but does not rejoice the heart like wine. This is the phase where things become perfunctory, the marriage becomes routine without any excitement. We land from the magic carpet ride of Aladdin to the hard earth with a hard bump. The world is not shinning, shimmering and splendid anymore, all becomes dry and dull! The lady suddenly stops feeling like Jasmine and goes back to the chimney sweep status of Cinderella before her transformation.

Then Jesus came on the scene and turned the water into wine. This could be said to be “magical”. The routine became tinged with excitement, enthusiasm, delight, elation. After the fall, Adam still had this “magical” moment with his bride. The Holy Writ said that he knew his wife. That knowing was more than a wham, bam, thank you ma’am thing. There was deep connection to it coupled with an explosion of pleasure. A good portion of the time, it is the search of this magic, which causes the straying outside our nuptial confines.

(Jesus was at the wedding because of his mom. The kind of people we bring into the ring’s circle can determine the success of the marital koinonia. People never come alone; they usually bring something or someone with them).


The wedding ceremony was salvaged from the doldrums and the latter wine was better than the first. The norm was that the wine diminishes in quality as the ceremony progresses but Jesus turned that around by furnishing better wine. I believe he was passing across a message that the fellowship of the ring should be vintage. It ought to get better with time.


A marriage that has become boring but essential like water needs some zing because it is at this point sthat the shadow of the Balrog threatens to drown us in the blanketing thickness of heavy darkness. Here the union desperately needs some “magic”. Whip out your wand and like Gandalf, cast a love spell, telling the bugger to go back to the shadows, that it will not pass.


Are you still single? If you are, the GENESIS of your journey should be based on a spiritual selection. Are you married? After a spiritual selection, “MAGIC” sustains the FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING! Convert the ordinary into extraordinary. Do some new things. Get out your wand and zap some colors into your matrimonial climate.

A SUNFLOWER IN THE WILDERNESS

A name that used to strike fear even in the heart of the stoutest heart in Lagos is Oshodi. It used to be a terrible part of Lagos filled with hoodlums and delinquents coupled with unsavoury and filthy surroundings. But, this was way before Governor Fashola’s reign. He arrived on the scene like a fairy godmother and waved a wand of transformation over the location.

But despite the change, the place is still the last place I would expect any rational business owner to establish an outfit. This reason was why my mind was boggled when I took my dad to a diagnostic center he was referred to in the locale. I felt like a flower enthusiast who had discovered a sunflower in the desert.

Stepping into this cool totally air-conditioned white atmosphere from a dirty, noisy environ, made me feel I had passed through a dimensional time warp. Wonderment coursed through my veins as if I were a hillbilly seeing a mega metropolis for the first time. This site had more efficiency than a computerized bee hive, and there were enough LCD screens to make a clodhopper think he was in Times Square. With the teeming crowd of clients, the activity was reminiscent of an ant colony and also as orderly.

Seeing this laboratory right in the heart of Oshodi was like discovering a coruscating jewel in pig swill. It was almost unimaginable, the only unsurprising thing being that the outfit is owned and managed by Indians and not Nigerians. To cap it all, this business has been a real blessing to Lagosians because their rates are about the cheapest in the whole country. It costs an arm and a leg to carry out the same investigations in Nigerian owned diagnostic centers.

The questions that assailed my mind like a band of Visigoths attacking a legionary base are why, despite  the huge number of radiologists and radiographers we have in this country, it had to take immigrants to establish about the hottest lab in this city.What magic did they employ that our own people do not have?

As I thought about it, it occurred to me that some of the distinguishing factors are VISION AND FAITH. As different as these two indispensable factors might be sometimes there is actually a thin line between both of them, hence it is stated in the Holy Writ, that we walk by faith and not by sight. Faith sees what the ordinary eyes cannot see; vision sees what normal sight cannot visualize. To stand out beyond the frontiers of a life that is middling at best, we need vision. Someone said that the eyes that look are many but that the eyes that see are few. VISION MAKES YOU SEE WHAT OTHERS DONT SEE!

This is why Helen Keller said it is a terrible thing to see and not have vision. She went ahead to say that the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched but they must be felt with the heart. The question might arise that the Aston Martin 177 (since it’s connected with James Bond, I will give it the most beautiful car in the world) or the impressive Burj Al Arab Hotel can be seen and felt, thereby debunking her statement. But the truth is before they existed in the natural, they had been seen and felt by someone and that is why they materialized in the physical. Innovators had created them in their minds. They had lived in some believer’s heart. FAITH AND VISION ARE OF THE HEART! They make the tangible from the intangible. By the time the invisible things become visible, they become ephemeral and temporal and very soon will be taken over by more beautiful things in another person’s heart when converted from the spiritual to the physical. Before anything can exist on earth, the creator would have already seen it in his inner eyes, there would have been crystallization in his inner man where the physical eyes cannot probe. It takes a spiritual telescope to see the stars of possibility in this immaterial Milky Way. This telescope is vision. Those Indians had seen that center before they built it. Creativity thrives on vision. It is what makes the incorporeal real.

It is vision and faith that built that center in Oshodi, converted the Las Vegas wilderness into a neon city, turned the semi-arid untillable land of the Jews into bountiful yielding soil, and made Governor Fashola transform Lagos from a filthy state into a green land.

For us to move ahead as individuals and a Nation, the twin towers of vision and faith must become an integral part of our lives.

Do you know that lower animals like moles and bats cannot see but get along pretty well in their world? Moles build great tunnel systems and earthy skyscrapers (molehills might not be considered to be a big deal but for a small animal it’s noteworthy) yet we can’t build roads. even though bats can't see, they navigate their air space but our air travel is still nothing to write home about. These animals can achieve these feats even though they lack sight because they have vision.

The truth is that our eyes cannot penetrate the stygian darkness of ignorance, the dense gloom of bad leadership and the murky depths of blackouts that permeate this nation/continent. Sight is useless in Africa because all we mostly behold are heart breaking and incapacitating things. We need vision. Our sight can only penetrate as far as a struck match in a bottomless pit. VISION GIVES A LIFT ABOVE LIMITATIONS WHILE SIGHT BOGS POTENTIAL IN IT!

In martial arts training, blind folds are used so that the trainees can depend less on sight and have other senses heightened. That is quite a lesson for us to place less premium on what we see around us and to increase the depths of our vision. For this nation and continent to move forward, we need more visionaries and more “Imagineers”.

Did I ever mention that Helen Keller was an American author, political activist and lecturer? She achieved all these even though she was deaf and blind. The distinguished lady was the first blind person that earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. SHE DID NOT HAVE SIGHT BUT SHE HAD VISION. So if we should ever listen to any expert on vision it would be her.

What about you? Do you merely see or you have vision? Do you have what it takes to see a sunflower in the wilderness?

ICE CREAM AND FLAVOURS

              

                                                    

If someone calls me a sweet tooth, the person might not entirely be wrong. Amongst the toothsome things that are agreeable to my palate, ice cream about tops the list. There is something about walking into an ice cream parlor and seeing all those different flavors beckoning at you from behind their glassy sanctuary. Chocolate, butter pecan, vanilla, coffee, strawberry, chocolate, name it. They make my gastric juices pop like a profusion of lilies in June.

Sometimes I wonder how life would have been if it were a huge tub of one flavored ice cream. Very boring I would bet, even for ice cream lovers.

Just like with frozen dessert there is something about variety that adds to life and beauty. This also applies to human beings. The sweetness of life is in our diversity. The assortment of gifts, complexion, complexities, race, taste, style, etcetera that we all possess in varying degrees make our world fun and exciting.

You would agree that what enlivens any circus show or carnival is its multiplicity of acts. Each new act injects verve into the show like gas into a racing Ferrari. Each show is unique but together like enmeshing gears they combine to produce a phenomenal display. In war video games, you would see that to defeat an enemy, the soldiers usually have different personalities, one might be a marksman, another, an explosives expert, one might be a machine gun carrier, the other a sapper. Their victory lies heavily on their different specialties.

But the tragedy is that the distinction of our diverseness is lost on us a whole lot of the time. In the cartoon little mermaid, Sebastian the lobster said the seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake; alas this applies to quite a number of people. Like Ariel, the underwater princess, we have a treasure filled trove within us, we possess whozits and whatzits galore but we think its no big deal. We want what someone else has got, we desire to be a part of someone else’s world and be their kind of vanilla because vanilla is supposed to be the rave. The beauty of people who are releasing their flavor to bless the world and the rewards that accrue to them make us want to be them. We would rather squeeze ourselves into someone else’s mould than be us. It would appear that being a clone has more appeal than being an original.

But the truth of the matter is that we all have something to offer in the act of life and no one else can do what we were born to do better than us. We are the only one of our kind just like fingerprints and voiceprints. Without you and me, life would be incomplete. The world would be like a rainbow missing some of its colors. You are the blue, I am the violet. And no color supersedes another. Without our unique individual colors, the rainbow of life will be dark and grey.

We are much more special than we usually think, so there’s no reason to envy any other person.  You are so essential to our world but the problem might be that you have locked up your essence for too long. This might just explain why you feel pretty ordinary. Can you imagine buying your favorite ice cream flavor on a very sunny day and scooping it into your mouth with feverish anticipation but instead of it exploding like a confectionery bomb on your buds, it is all tasteless and insipid. Disappointment and anger will make you spit it out in a hurry. The whole exercise becomes a waste of time and resources.

The verbal illustration above is a depiction of how we are when we don’t release our natural endowments. Our world does not feel us; we are dull and uninteresting, bowed and dejected. Releasing our talents gives us a lift and makes us soar like a Peregrine falcon ruling its skies.

There’s so much locked inside you like an invaluable pearl in an oyster shell. It could be your singing, dancing, football skills, writing, baking, administrative skills, leadership ability, drawing, the list is inexhaustible. Sometimes we can be likened to nameless designer perfumes amongst numerous others on the shelves of the mall of life with our fragrance locked in our containers. Unless our stuff is released, no one will perceive our aroma. Become a self triggered atomizer, fill the olfactory cells of the earth with your essence and take the world to dizzying heights. Saturate your atmosphere because YOUR NAME IS IN YOUR FLAVOUR!!! The name of the butter pecan ice cream is what it is because it tastes like butter pecan and not strawberry, and likewise every other flavor. Michael Jackson is called the “king of pop”, Pele is called the “black pearl”, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is known as the” great one”, Hippocrates is the father of medicine, Mohammed Ali is called “the greatest”, Henry Ford is the father of the automobile, Picasso name is associated with masterpieces and so on.

So the question is, what can you do? WHAT IS YOUR FLAVOUR BRO/SIS?