WORK IN PROGRESS: The Dark World by Omoruyi Uwuigiaren

It is cruel to negotiate some roads. One could spend several hours and who cares if you die trying. It is a silencer. It hurts. It could bring a man to his knees. The loser is a meal to the bald vultures. In the weakness, I was strong, tough and mean.

Regularly counting the cost of my valor has helped my poor soul to tread cautiously. My loss if I ever had any was taken into consideration because smart people draw strength from their fall. The cost of finishing strong and staying alive against all odds is mine to bear.

I drove through Lawanson road, an old narrow way leading off Itire and I had my first sight of the Palace of the Itire Monarch. It was old-fashioned. It was African with a fine red painted threshold. It was old. Things had changed. Here the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Every day is a journey. The day we close our eyes upon the light of the world, the journey ends. Most times, it is out of our hands to choose how we will embrace the next world. There are forces that rule in the affair of men but fate would place a man where he truly belongs.

Now I am on a journey that looks like a formality. Sadly, in this ever-changing world, there are no formalities. We only have change and challenges and a reasonable man must bend any circumstance to his favour.  

READ:Las' Las' We'll Be All Right by Joy Isi Bewaji

The Lawanson road connects Oshodi-Apapa expressway. If you are in a hurry to embrace silence and get out of a third world misery, you are welcome to this part of the world. You can never have enough of the misfortune on this highway. Trucks queue on both sides, trapped in a constant battle to outsmart one another. There are dilapidated buildings along the road and their numbers scary.

Most of the buildings have no occupants because they are like a dead man bound by horrible tradition that made it difficult for his people to commit him to mother earth without any offence. The cost of maintenance and travelling back and forth from the buildings would leave a deep hole in any pocket. The implications are damning and grievous. Weight of which tied to a large man and tossed overboard a ship into the sea would drown him. Death has no joy.  

No matter how frugal, miserly or clever a man is, he can hardly recover all of the loss of wasting his time. You cannot live out your life in happiness in a city that is poorly organized. It is bad and tragedy to born in such a place.  

The beauty of the city is only a figment of some people’s imagination. The city is overrated. Bizarrely awkward and could cut any destiny short. It is delusional and fraud to put yourself where you are not. Paradise is arguably city of excellence. Is Lagos paradise?

Sanity is a very expensive commodity. You risk raising weak people. When weak people are more in number, they are powerful. If unhindered, they could also raise for themselves a leader. You will think like the people with whom you spend most of your time. The world will perish under the feet of the weak.

The gridlock never dies. The dark nights never end. There is no charity in the air. The cruel hands of fate snatched it. In those buildings are economic losses. Weakness is also borne out of stress. There is no point to prove. You can never live out your life in happiness and freedom in a city under siege. It is tragedy to train up a child in this creepy kind of place.

It is easy to be a prophet of doom when the young men emerging from the college after a hard five years were faced by a world indifferent to their enthusiasm and bursting knowledge. Results that is never palatable. Those who lack courage and a will to survive, leaves the troubled world behind. Others take to vices, which leaves them less human.

Trying to live at all cost, they end up paying the price. The cost of breaking the law far outweighs the price of obeying it. The horror stories of heartless and vicious people cannot be undermined. Tales by young people who managed to secure employment only make one hardened and embattled.

Some were just little bits of dirt to be starved and worked into the ground by the employers who are heartless. There is never a day off. Some to wash the car, dig the garden, feed the dogs, and push trucks and do family shopping for the boss. What about others who are forced to render services to keep their job? Many stretched beyond limit, broken and left for dead. No human is carved out of stones.

  

WORLD RELIGIONS: Mercantilists Methodologies or Deus Desiderata?

By Adeniyi Kunnu

Twitter: @mautin777

No matter what anyone says, until we search ourselves and question certain things, the 'Light of God ' will elude many, especially as Individuals. I believe in the Almighty God, but when those who claim to have a relationship with God turn out to be those who keep their flock in bondage and impoverish them, or Stoke the embers of hatred and religious supremacy, then it simply consolidates what colonialism achieved and still does in these times.

All religions are culpable...for the importance of knowledge; there are 2.3 billion Christians in the world, making it 29% of over 7.8 billion people across the globe - many of whom are in Europe, the USA even Africa. Sadly however, many of these nations were the colonist nations, which continue to impoverish Africa and other developing nations of the world. What then is the correlation between their professed faiths and the lives they live as well their relationship with others nations?

First is the unending racism against but not limited to Africans and those of their ancestry. The forced abortions and termination of lives disguised as health policies; calculated sterilizations of women in Africa, South Korea and India; the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, support for rebels in Libya, incursion into Syria and many atrocities, yet, these are predominantly Christian nations.

Islam comes second after Christianity as the most followed religion in the world. There are 1.9 billion Muslims the world over, accounting for 24% of the world population. The irony also is, how do we explain the evils of ISIS, ISIL, Boko Haram, ISWAP, and of course the intolerance that we have seen emanate from the civilian population of Northern Nigeria, Pakistan and some other places.

Not to forget that Arabs were part of the Slave Trade, and still trade in human beings, having supplied a lot of slaves to the traders in the West and treating non-Arabs as less humans, yet many of them claim to be Muslims.

Agnostics and Atheists are third in rank with respect to religious affiliation, numbering 1.1 billion and accounting for 14% of world population. The question many people are not asking us that, why do we have the rising number of atheist?

Many who are agnostics or atheists who feel there is no God must have had significant turn around in their lives at some point, and perhaps interrogating their non-conformist stance will give a balanced perspective as to why they feel religion could be a product of 'deceitful and subservient machinations'

Can we reconcile the profession of religion and unending and pervasive injustice? What about the deaths of innocent children, men and women in wars they never started, among many other pains suffered by those who never should have been involved in these killings in the first place.

Following closely in 4th are Hindu worshippers, who live predominantly in India, numbering up to 1.1 billion and also 14% of world population.

Buddhists are in 5th position, with a percentage of 6% and over 506 million devotees. The Chinese Traditional Religion follows closely in 6th, with over 394 million adherents, making it 5% of the world population religion wise.

Looking at the incidences of fake drugs from India and substandard good from China, one is left to ask the question, what these religions teach these people, who manufacture 'fakes' that often lead to the jeopardy of human lives without the humanity and honesty expected of them.

The Chinese especially are reputed for various levels of racketeering, especially their operations in Africa and Nigeria particularly, whilst also not absolving India whose caste system is the sustenance of slavery in their country and other developing nations where they operate.

When we put atrocities committed against fellow human beings on one side, and we look at the perpetrators of these crimes on the other side, it simply becomes obviously alarming, that many who profess devotion to many of these faiths are at the fore of these crimes committed.

What we all need therefore, especially in Africa is the rediscovery of our HUMANITY...what the Almighty God has made us for is to see the next man as oneself, as well as other things he has created, which includes animals and plants.

When we learn to appreciate and treat the next man as we would want to be treated, the evils that seem not to be abating will be choked off.  

After all, who needs any religion when God is more than enough?

Let us make the reverence and honour of the man we see, the only true and acceptable religion to make our motherland and the world a place worth living.

The hypocrisies of world religions must be sieved off, because history already shows how religions have been used to oppress, deceive, maim, destroy, ravage, impoverish, enslave and annihilate a group of people in favour of faith-preneurs and their evolving political allies.