INTEMPERANCE

I apologize profusely for being mute the last two Sundays, I have been around Nigeria in ten days. Starting from the North Central, the home of peace and tourism located on an elevated upland with steep sides and flat surfaces, I moved down South into the heart beat of the nation, I navigated further South to the big heart and with my compass pointing west, I entered the centre of Excellence. Eko o ni baje! It was an awesome experience. Road trips are for me a hobby, “j’aime voyager par rue avec les voitures” as the French would say but it would have been a more delightful experience if our roads were any better. I am keeping the hope alive without despair that this administration will lead us closer to Canaan.

My trip around the country ignited my passion for nature more than ever before and caused an explosion in my level of appreciation for the wonders of creation and I daresay with all veracity that all things are bright and beautiful. From the small shrubs and scanty forests of the North to the thick vegetation of the west and to the red colored muddy soil of the coastal areas. The way the atmosphere changes subtly as you gradually descend the geographical slope and the way your body responds in acclimatization to the various environmental changes. For us up the slope, temperature adjustment is the hardest change we face down the slope. I have enough heat rashes on my face as evidence!

 I am back up the slope now and writing from up here, a practice I sincerely have missed. Here is a little metro logical report-the weather is just perfect and if you have never been up here, I recommend you consider it a paramount Christmas vacation spot for 2012; I could find you a concierge!

Today, I crave your indulgence to do a little sermonizing. Lagos is beautiful place no doubt except of course for the beyond hundred percent congestion, a nightmare for a claustrophobic. I have heard people say severally that there is no place like Lagos. I would have objected vehemently to their claims but it turns out to be just hard fact that there is no city on the surface of the earth that could measure up to Lagos in intemperance. They are therefore absolutely correct to say that the city is sui generis!

Mon Dieu! That’s “my God” in French by the way. I wanted desperately to keep off this because all my mental warning signals just turned bright red but it would be an inexplicable injustice to my good sense of reasoning and judgment if I don’t share this via an admonishing perspective.

All I started hearing from the second I entered Ojota till I got to my destination were curses and all manners of swear words- “were”, “olosi” among a host of others. I was headed to Surulere and so I took the “ojuelegba-stadium-barracks” bus. At Obanikoro, a beautiful fair skinned lady joined us. She was looking totally poised and sophisticated. She sat next to me and I was silently admiring her but my high esteem of her was short lived. It died the moment a conversation ensued between her and the bus conductor.

Mon Grand Dieu! I shrunk at the level of obscenities that rushed out hysterically, sans a tinge of circumspection from this young damsel’s buccal cavity like fiends that have being newly exorcised. An outrageous shock consumed me as I felt gravely ashamed for the unladylike lady. I began to wonder how on earth a lady could be so unscrupulous but the answer was not farfetched. I smiled as I remembered the sign that greeted me as I approached the centre of excellence, THIS IS LAGOS!

I chuckled, nodding simultaneously as I murmured to myself welcome to Lagos.

That night as I lay down to sleep, the scenario began to play afresh in my head. Such intemperance I hissed. There was absolutely no reason for that disgustingly degrading conversation between the bus conductor and the young lady. The matter could have been settled amicably without either party hauling invective at the other with gusto. Well, I sighed deeply, THIS IS LAGOS! Occurrences like this are a norm, everyone engages in such inhumane acts from time to time. From the mother returning home from school with her children, to the mechanic that works on the subway, the banker that rides the bus from the Island to the legal practitioner that heads home in his range rover sport……………………………… Lagos is synonymous to such incidents!

I read a book about two years ago whose major character was the “lady disdain”. She had no scruples and could talk to anybody however she deemed fit. Nemesis caught up with her shortly, she gravely insulted the king and was sentenced to be burnt at the stake. On the day of her execution, she maintained she was innocent and lamented injustice. She never insulted the king! Alas, the king had disguised as a sexton whom she had tremendously despised.

You might just be in the same bus with your interviewer, what then happens if you put up a show like the unladylike lady and get to the your interview place to discover that the adept spectator on the bus is the HR manager meant to employ you! You will of a surety feel as though you were being burnt at the stake.

People will certainly get on your last nerve but be weary in great intemperance because you will never know who is watching. It is a small world after all!

“Boundless intemperance in nature is a tyranny; it hath been the untimely emptying of the happy throne and the fall of many kings” these were said by Mac Duff in William Shakespeare’s book,” Mac Beth”. If you love your kingly position, you should heed them! If hypothetically, Lagos is Equivalent to Rome, then we can rephrase this saying to be- “you do not always have to behave like the Romans when you are in Rome”

  

BOOKS AND COVERS

“Never judge a book by its cover” this I guess, was the first idiomatic expression that fastened itself to my cerebrum like a tape worm does to its host with its suckers but it was for a reason. I had learnt this figurative expression from experience because countless times I had been a victim. Growing up, I had received varying treatments from different people who happen to be guided by a similar factor. An erroneous injustice delivered to people as a result of one glance at them and hearsay. The later I came to detest tremendously. I have therefore learnt to relate with people based on who they are, their personality, individual believes, goals and visions rather than what I perceive or hear along the street sidewalks. Each man should be afforded the humane opportunity to prove himself.

Back at the university, I had just about a handful of friends but a huge conglomerate of fans. I choose to call them fans because they weren’t friends if we intend to go by the depth of what embodies friendship. They were people I discussed the English premier league with, Nigerian politics as well as the student unionism and of course microbes. They were some others that I talked writing with, and a bunch of others fed me with normal campus gossip. By temperament, I am a blend of choleric and something else, I have not quite figured out which it is but those days on campus people perceived me as a mean snobbish girl. I wonder why?

They had a way of thinking I was feeling superior even when I did not say a word. Truthfully, I wasn’t the girl that walked on the foyer with a dramatic smile plastered on her face, waving and nodding at every passerby but I was not a mean brat! It was though perplexing why people thought what they thought. In the midst of all the misplaced and unprofound verdicts delivered on my personality by strangers I kept going and one thing I never did was go the extra mile to prove myself to those rumor mongers and their blind gullible followers. They should find out for themselves and be the judge!

In my final year, I took my B.Sc project. The laboratory work was to be done in a group and I was assigned to a group of thirteen people and later reassigned as sub group leader for a smaller unit consisting of five people. There was a certain young man in the larger group that had been my course mate since 100 level but, I never knew him. In fact, we had never spoken because nothing seemed to have brought us together and this is not exactly an unusual occurrence in a class of hundreds of people. Well, lab work brought us together after all and so began a concomitant friendship.  Most times we worked late and he had to walk me to my hostel. On one of such walks he blurted out. He went on and on about how he didn’t like me and how his friends, some of my course mates I had never had issues with thought I was a snobbish, proud, an egomaniac and sardonic.

He said so many hurtful things that lacked a scintilla of veracity but closed his super confession with this “I discovered the greatest injustice you can level on any human being is judging them from afar because I worked with you and I can testify that you are nothing like what I heard, I am sorry I jumped into conclusions without getting to know you. I swallowed hook, line, sinker all the rubbish I was sold” I smiled and shrugged. I didn’t say a word, I wasn’t even angry. He was bemused, he wanted to understand why I took it so calmly, confusion filled his eyes and at that point I began to laugh. Well, he joined me and we guffawed uncontrollable for a few minutes at that time we had got to the hostel entrance and as I turned to leave I paused and spoke briefly, “am used to it, everyone gives this testimony and you just joined the huge list of haters converted to allies, I wonder why people judge a book by its cover”

I have had this same sort of conversation countless times with people who let their hazy perception and hearsay get ahead of them but the bone of contention is this, how do you relate with people? How do you treat people? Are your actions catalyzed by what you heard from a little birdie or do you discover people’s personalities first and deal with them based on it? Fine, sometimes some people may have acted badly under certain circumstances and you may have got Intel on just one side of the story. Do you act based on that forgetting that there is naturally a flip side to the coin?

Most people that had the haters’ testimony of me turned out to be some of my closest allies and we ended up impacting each other’s lives tremendously. That person you are writing off because of some cloudy intuitions and careless words flying in the air could just be one of miracles you have been predestined to receive here on earth. Even the holy writ emphasizes on judging not!

Do not ever deny any mortal the chance to portray himself- good or evil, let them show their true colors and you will be amazed at what you will find.

Allow me to wrap up with the story of the lad who was bequeathed with enormous fortune but his inheritance was locked up in a mighty cave in the midst of a forest and he needed one password to claim it all. He was shown a gigantic library and instructed to pick up just one book, each book bore just one word that could be the password to his locked treasure. There was a down side to it though; each book connoted an action some of which were deadly. His life hung on his ability to decipher the right book. He went into the library with his male servant and after hours of ferocious combing two books were picked out but he could only leave with one. Confused he sought counsel from the servant who advised him to go with the tattered looking book. Enraged, he dismissed him and picked the new, neatly bound book. Well, guess what his password summoned- a huge ferocious beast that devoured him and what happened to his treasure? You should ask the servant because he claimed it all with the word from the tattered book.

“Never judge a book by its cover”…………you might want to scan or skim through it first! The late king of pop put it this way in his song “childhood” “before you judge me, try hard to love me……”   Every man deserves the right to a fair trial, in Latin they would say “audi alteram partem” afford one person that opportunity this month.”

William Shakespeare said “That which you are, my thoughts cannot transpose. “Angels are bright, though the brightest fell. Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace, yet grace must still look so”