Step forward for recognition, the likeable, the dynamic and committed governor of Lagos State, His Excellency, Babajide Sanwo-Olu. He strikes me as one large-hearted governor who is easily touched by human suffering. The video evincing his deep feelings for two girls apparently in need of help went viral last week.
Mr. Sanwo-Olu was on his way to launch a welfare scheme in Lagos when he saw the two girls, Amarachi Chinedu and Suwebat Husseini, on the street, on an errand to grind pepper for their parents.
The time was 11 a.m. The governor was curious that they were not in school on a week day. He alighted from his vehicle to find out why they were not in school. Amarachi is nine and Suwebat, 12.
The girls said they were not in school because of lack of the means to pay school fees; Suwebat was to add that she and her parents had newly relocated to Lagos from Kano, just about a month ago. It is even more curiosity evoking that Amarachi’s mother is a teacher and fees are not charged in Lagos public schools. And at nine, Amarachi is a house help to somebody, undoubtedly to augment family income!!
However, the import of the meeting between Sanwo-Olu is what concerns this column more at this juncture. In my contemplation of the meeting, I asked myself several questions: Was the meeting a coincidence? How come the attention of the governor was drawn to the two girls in particular? There are thousands of out-of-school children in Lagos running errands or roaming the streets. It is a national emblem of retrogressive thinking and shame.
The governor himself admitted this much when he said: “There are several Amarachis and Suwebats out there who will not have this kind of opportunity…” According to UNICEF, there are 13 million out-of-school children in the country, about 10 million in the North, with North-West and North-East leading.
Rotimi Sankore, a journalist did an exhaustive study of out-of-school children in the country, part of the findings he shared with Kaidara Ahmed in a no-hold-back interview. It is revealed that from 60 to 80 per cent of girls are forced into early marriage from between the ages of 12, 13 and 14 in the far North with the result that by the time a girl is 30, she has had between seven and eight children.
One family, it was revealed, could have as many as 32 children. Because of malnutrition of children within zero to five years, 48 to 53 per cent of the children suffer from cognitive and intellectual impairment and so they are in banditry without knowing what they are doing.
Sankore, an international journalist links this to the pool of ready hands for banditry and kindred evils and all-pervading insecurity in the land as the bandits reproduce themselves, and children giving birth to children.
From UNICEF and Federal Bureau of Statistics he made copious references, saying only 61 per cent of 6-11 year old children attend primary schools regularly. In the North East, 802 schools are closed, 497 classrooms have been destroyed and 1, 392 damaged but not irreparably; they can be fixed.
The lingering unanswered question, therefore, is: How come that of millions of out-of-school children, it was Amarachi and Suwebat that had the fortune of crossing Sanwo-Olu’s path? There are more questions still: How come that the meeting occurred on the day he was going to launch a welfare programme? What about the timing? In the real sense of it, were the governor and the girls strangers to themselves, to one another? Curiouser, curiouser and curiouser!
There are two possibilities. As I did state in August, 2019: Our today is the harbinger of our tomorrow. The piece then was captioned ‘The past as our today, and today our tomorrow.’ There are no accidents in life. The inevitable meeting is in the course of the cycle of beneficial service. Everything in which we are engaged is by definition service. However, to come to a proper understanding of the meaning of service, we must first under its constituent parts. These are the doer/giver; the recipient and the deed, that is, the one performing the duty or work, the work or duty performed and the beneficiary.
The doer is the active agent, the beneficiary the passive agent and the deed, the nexus which links the active with the passive. If service is properly conceived and properly executed, as well as properly received, it involves motion which is not linear but cyclical. It leads to a situation in which the active agent soon becomes the passive agent and the passive agent the active agent even if all he sends out is his expression of gratitude.
Obviously, Amarachi and Suwebat, particularly their parents were transported into a situation they could not believe themselves. The governor promised to fund their education at all levels and to all rungs of educational ladder. For some people, fate and destiny seem to have an intricate plot.
We can see that the active agent or initiator of the cycle of actions must not only be able to know who is in need of service, but also what kind of service is needed and when. Otherwise, it is either he will give it to the wrong person and throw pearls before swine or he will carry coal to New Castle, or give the wrong kind of service ( a white elephant). Service can also be given at the wrong time and in the wrong place. If any of these conditions is breached, the action would fail since the passive agent would fail to appreciate the service. Failing to appreciate it, he would not take the necessary steps in thought, word or deed that lead to the closing of the cycle of actions in the person of the initiator.
This can be a cycle of act of goodness that is fresh and which takes on life of its own, and not necessarily a debt from a previous earthlife. If it were a debt, in their tapestry of life, that is Sanwo-Olu, Suwebat and Amarachi, who owes whom what? This is to invite us to reflect on the past as our today, and today our tomorrow. Who was father, and who was daughter or wife, or grandmother? Theirs is a beneficial weaving. I will come back to it presently. Take this other event as an example of the inexorable and inflexible weaving that cannot be said to be altogether enheartening.
Sir William Osler, the reputed British physician, once said: “It is better to know the patient than to know the disease.” The verity of the statement is proven by a case of a professor the renowned seer Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) handled. The college professor, according to reports, was blind from birth. He heard about Cayce in a radio programme called “Miracles of the mind.”
He contacted Cayce who traced the cause of his plight to his previous earthlife in Persia, now Iran, about 1000 BC. It was one of four incarnations he had had: One in America during the Civil War; another in France, yet another in Atlantis before it sank. The reading of his spiritual journey showed that while in Persia, he belonged to an ethnic group whose custom was to blind their enemies with hot iron and he played a leading role in the dastardly acts.
What I am getting at is that our existence gets meaning when we get familiar with other correlations of life and get to know our life, indeed the entire Creation, is governed by immutable, perfect and self-acting mechanisms otherwise known as Laws of Nature, Laws of Creation, or Divine Laws. There is the Law of the Cycle and there is the Law of Reciprocal Action which encapsulates the Law of Sowing and Reaping. But out of ignorance we are hardly aware that we are a mirror of our past lives, good and bad, the longing to build on the good and the striving to overcome the bad. And so it is said a man’s character is his fate. (Greek philosopher Heraclitus: 540-470 BC). In deep contemplation in closets as well as in restaurants; in clubs, in casual conversations, the question has a way of agitating the minds: what has our today got to do with our past? And what can you do about it, about the past? These are said to a person who sometimes feels some stirring within or pangs in menace of his past. The past is dead and long buried is always the retort, sometimes as a balm, or for comfort and reassurance. Many a man lost in thought about the past is known to slip into depression. In helpful love, he is asked to forget the past and face the future.
There are two main conceptions of the past. This is when we discountenance the transitional past which could be a few hours past, a day or two days past which may not fall strictly under the definition of recent past. Recent and transitional past falls within memory. There is the wider and longer stretch that covers contemporary history, the range of individual lives and lives of nations.
The past beyond the earthly is what I am referring to that has no material evidence but which never the less exists and determines the present and perhaps the future, depending on how individuals stand in its current streaming into our world. It is the past that is filed away.
Today is a past in the making, filled with activities. Tomorrow it will be past. In a hundred years, in two hundred years or a thousand years, it will slip into the past of which man has no memory. The past of the governor and the girls is being rewritten and we must then realise that the past is not as dead as it is often believed. The past thought dead is in truth alive, driven by the Living and eternal Laws of Creation.
As I have said a few times, the first and urgent duty of every human being, therefore, is to have a thorough knowledge of these laws. They form the foundation of all true spiritual teachings availed mankind by Teachers of mankind and the Prophets. It is from these Laws that The Ten Commandments of God revealed to Moses, first given by him to the Israelites but meant for all mankind, are derived.
All thoughts, all speeches and deeds thought dead filed away in Cosmic past awaken and go through maturation process; they ripen and are available for harvesting by no other than the sower. This past cast into oblivion of our own creating and at best of our own imagining is called by those who occupy themselves with it the proverbial Book of Life.
As we now know in higher knowledge spreading on earth today, all names of all human beings are inscribed in the great book and the pages are the souls of all human beings themselves.
Since there are no accidents in life, the fateful meeting with the girls, Amarachi and Suwebat, on the one hand and Sanwo-Olu on the other, must have deeper meaning than is apparent. Come to think of it, here is a relationship forged devoid of consideration for ethnicity, religious bigotry, class feeling or political fanaticism. The meeting calls for our rejoicing with the governor who was to open to inexplicable promptings and did not allow the opportunity to pass him by!
