Photo credit: the conversation
Adekunle Oluseyi and Edward Soje are no more!
May their souls find peace with their creator!!
Both of them committed suicide in the outgone week. Like I wrote sometime ago, I salute the courage of those people who were so brave enough to commit suicide!
So many of us have thought of suicide at one time or the other, but we lacked the most essential thing, courage!
We would rather let whatever situation propelled our thoughts of suicide take it’s course. And, here we are.
Man no rotten!
Man no fine!!
Man dey inside cloth!!!
While I’m not that familiar with the cause of late Oluseyi’s action, I’ve read the apparent cause of the late Soje’s unfortunate death in the papers.
After looking for a fruit of the womb for so long, he was blessed with, not just one, but three fruits.
Meanwhile, the state government in which he happened to be a director was owing him eleven months’ salary.
Where was he supposed to start from? Where he should have bought a cot, he would have had to buy three. And that would be same for everything the triplets needed.
So, he left a note for madam and the kids. A case of giving up? Now, don’t let anybody give us that crap about, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough starts going.’
Yet, if either of them was unlucky enough to have been caught by law enforcement agencies, they would have been arrested and possibly arraigned in court for attempting suicide (without permission?)
This suffering is just too unbearable. We are hearing that Nigeria is out of the self imposed recession but how many common people are feeling the impact of the good times?
A director is not by any standards a junior staff in a government establishment. If gold rusts what then happens to iron?
And to think the state governors have received money to enable them pay salaries. I think any governor who is still owing salaries should be sanctioned. The state house of assembly could impeach him.
But then, is it not a case of expecting an impossibility? That’s so because our legislators are no better.
Our major problem is that of followership. We are just too docile. If we don’t ask questions, how can we demand accountability from our employees, our rulers?
We always expect them to bribe us before they get into power. That’s great, except for the fact that we would have sold our birthrights by so doing. And that’s why our legislators and even executives believe they owe us nothing.
Yes, nothing!
The purpose of every business is profit. The investments of our political class are those empowerment programmes they organise before getting into power. So, we should not be shocked if we don’t see them after elections.
I hear that some of them are even masters of subterfuge. They have perfected the system of pretending to empower us before elections by putting some instruments of empowerment there only for those instruments to disappear immediately after elections.
Ole gbe, ole gba!
We just have to step up our acts, we must be more discerning, and, above all, we must learn to keenly participate in the rulership of our land. If we keep saying politics is a dirty game, we won’t have any moral justification to accuse anyone of inept leadership!
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