Five unchangeable human variables

Believe it, there are things in this world you would never understand. Like the way of the politrician with his supporters. At campaigns, they demonize the ruining party with promises of heaven on earth. Once elected, they wax exegetical reminding voters how God caused confusion the last time people attempted to create a highway to heaven. It is soft blasphemy – a way of reminding that only God could solve all problems and that somehow He has chosen not to do so.
So, here is a subtle defense of minister Ibe Kachikwu who, after taking on the oil cabal and ending up where Mike Tyson lost steam and bit off the ear of punishing Evander Holyfield has finally thrown in the towel, reminding us that only TB Joshua and the league of prophets are licensed to perform miracles in Naija. What is a little surprising is why he would not hire them to bail him out – afterall some of them have PhDs but not from Harvard! Now Bola Tinubu, the godfather of Change, has given Kachikwu the raw side of his tongue. Tinubu’s acronym is BAT resembling the government he helped install.
Because it is sacrilegious, we would not remind people of Sai Baba who as candidate heckled President Jones like the rest of us, for his allergy towards Chibok. He also promised to end Boko Haram by December 2015 and those of us who could not decode military speak believed the promise. It turned out that military deadlines end in ‘technical defeats’. When Sai Baba was blackmailed and cajoled into meeting Chibok parents, usually unreliable sources claimed he charged out of the meeting. He would have since visited Chibok if the town has an airport. The budget did not make provisions for one to be built soon. Lately, Sai Baba apologized and begged people not to lose confidence in his promises. There are three years left to make them real and if anyone lacks power in their homes or fuel in their cars, they should exercise patience – 2019 is just round the corner and walking is good for health.
You will never understand the way of justice when walking with its cousin – the rule of law. A few years ago, Anders Breivik walked into a Norwegian youth party convention and mowed down nearly 80 young and promising compatriots. They were not in a relay race with The President, no. He had an axe to grind with his government, but government officials are usually overprotected, so he dealt with the youths – aka soft targets. Breivik is enjoying the life of a very important prisoner in Norway. He is said to have access to phones, watches television and reads newspapers. But because he is put in solitary confinement, he has sued his government for the restoration of his right to association. Norway is signatory to that treaty. It doesn’t matter that he denied all his victims their right to life. How does one understand that he is likely to live to old age because his nation, like all ‘civilized nations’ subscribes to the rule of law?
Salah Abdeslam allegedly organized the Siege of Paris last year but fled to Belgium where his manhunt led to the shutting down of the entire country. He is finally in the net with a few wounds and you would think he’d gladly return to Paris, where unfortunately the rule of law would’ve prevented them arranging that meeting for him to receive his libidinous reward of virgins. Not so, his lawyer says he would fight his extradition to France. How does any survivor of the Bataclan concert hall or the other four soft targets terrorized that night understand the way of the law?
One would never understand the way of the powerful western media to the suffering of the children of a lesser god. Whenever the human race is under attack, scheduled programming on major news stations are suspended. Recall the Bataclan Concert Theatre shootings; Dylan Roof’s slaughter of worshippers in Charleston, South Carolina or the recent bombings in Brussels. When children of the lesser god are slaughtered either in Nyanya, Maiduguri or Kaduna or in Mali, Westgate Mall in Kenya or Somalia – usually worth five-second headlines. On Sunday, while Pakistan was mourning the slaughter of 65 women and children, normal programming continued after the five-minute breaking news. This is probably not what Dele Giwa meant when he wrote that one life taken in cold blood is as gruesome as a countless number that may go down in a pogrom declaring – so let’s forget about numbers and talk about life.
Lesson for the children of the lesser god – if you want your tragedies headlined in the running order- create your own global media and see if you succeed where Al-Jazeera is wobbling. If you think that all human lives matter, create your own hash tag and let’s see how far it travels, or simply try to ferry Canadian cows the way you carry the dead from your abattoir of slaughters in Maiduguri, Mogadishu or Lahore. Let’s accept it certain things are beyond comprehension.