What kind of “soldiers” waylay, ambush and kill an 86yr old man?
And what kind of people celebrate such “brave soldiers”?
Are you not ashamed?
Is this how you want to win human hearts over to your cause?
You are not only killing lives. Even more importantly, you are killing any sympathies that billions of people all over the world could have ever felt for you.
The more you kill, the more you lose.
Stop it. Become human.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
I see you in this moment as a river, flowing out.
If you touch it, it makes your fingers wet. If you drink it, you get thirstier. If you watch it, you never come to find out its wherefrom or whereto. If you dive in, it takes you to a place from which you can’t return.
So you have to be strong, and outriver the river and outthirst your thirst, for the river flows in you.
And if these words mystify you, then you understand the effect you have on many people.
But when you dive in, dive deep into the river’s bed and clench its roots with your teeth and bite, so hard, that it bleeds. Then will you see the river run…
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Everybody cannot be rich and everybody cannot be the boss, and yet everybody can be happy. Everybody cannot be the acclaimed best in their chosen fields of activity, yet everybody can be happy and can know that sense of fulfilment that only joy can bring.
So the question is: What is it, deeper than wealth, health, status, acclaim, power, that can make a human being happy and, through the bequething of joy, give them fulfilment? How does one approach life so as to attain to the highest prize – joy and fulfilment – irrespective of the outcome of one’s most ardent striving and efforts?
Where does ‘Pride’ factor into all this? Must one subdue and swallow one’s pride, or even become uncompetitive, in order to be happy with every outcome? Or can one channel one’s pride to a higher cause, a nobler idea, a deeper clarity?
At what point do all human beings become one, working together towards the same goal, despite all forms of competition? Can this be generic, i.e. applicable in all things? What happens then to the ‘Joy of Victory’?
As the world and the individuals hurtle on at blindening speed towards the pinnacles of Anger, I-am-better-than-you-ism and Hatred, driven each person and each group by the urge to be FIRST, it is important to consider if there is not another measure of success more fulfilling and, most importantly, more sustainable than this winner-takes-it-all competiton model of domination-desire.
Because through the continual establishment of a level playing field in the scientific education sector from generation to generation, a point in time will arrive in the future where too many people and peoples will have the knowledge and the ability to wreak wide-spread havoc on the earth. And then the I-First and I-Only mentality will unleash a terrible War within and upon Mankind, on all levels, that will bring our species to the brink of destruction, if not take us over it.
The meaures of Success and Fulfilment have to be redefined. Success, the chalice of deep inner personal joy, is the development of one’s inherent abilities and virtues to full bloom. Fulfilmemt then follows in the united pooling of abilities towards an ennoblement of humanity. Victory in this undertaking alone will bring us eternal Joy. In this endeavour one can and should be inspired by others, yes. Also through the healthy ethical competition between people an impetus to innovate and grow is intensified. But a proper context of a shared common human goal will alone make us grasp this: that victory of virtue is victory for all.
Because, as child-like and laughable such concepts as Altruism, Humility, Egalitarianism, Cooperation and Impartiality sound to the entitlement-poisoned modern mind, the truth is that only these concepts and their kind will spare mankind certain self-destruction in the future. And in self-destruction, none shall remain to savour any joy of victory.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
BIGOTRY CONTINUES to exist upon the face of the earth, but not within its heart. And just as skin-characteristics are skin-deep, so is bigotry only surface-deep. I’m talking about the face of the earth.
But anyone who nurtures bigotry within the heart will continue to nourish it for a long time yet to come. It will not die easily. Is there hope for the flower?
Should I revert to the tales of the heart? Should I revert to the inner sequence? Should I revert to yesterday’s tenderness? The first woman? The last kiss?
Or should I continue into the desert? Should I seek a new oasis and wander after the unknown treasures of the sand? But who can open up the secrets of the sand? A flower?
The first strike was a miss. The first step was the first fall. The first sight was blinded by a pitch-fork. But there will be a second. The second is the other side of the coin.
I want to write a poem. I want to penetrate deep into the heart of the broken home, there where the spirit in us resides. We are all to one another strangers. Bridges we build, communal words we use, eyes we touch when we will, hands we give, yet remain unto one another strangers. The shared blood was poisoned aye ere we were born. The shared earth was divided already long ago and divided we stand and stare at one another across the border, the boundaries of our little egos and remain each alone. But each is but alone. Little egos. Little worlds. Little by little, if watered, like flowers, perhaps, we grow.
The secrets of the sand, approaching, covering up our footsteps. Hey, I wrote this poem before, when I was young. But if I was young then, what am I now, older or younger? For the first poem was the greater and the latter flow gropes for reconnection with the source that thundered out of the young heart of the finalised decision. Seen once. Pondered once. Grasped once. Perceived once. Decided once. At the start of the journey. And everything else is just the hanging on, the wondering, the new search. We have found but have not yet reached the Goal. We are still on the path. Believing in the flower.
This is what I would like to give to you, a flower in the desert. Do not perhaps think that the Desert is more powerful than the flower. Nay. There you would err. But treasure and protect the flower. Water it anywhere you see it. For the flower alone, of all the forces in the universe, can subdue the Desert.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Taken from my collection of thoughts and stories: “There Is Always Something More.”
Now that I’ve consolidated all my former blogs into this new one, I will – apart from new works – also reblog for a whole year anything I once published somewhere else on that particular date under my pen-name “Aka Teraka”…
TODAY YESTERDAY – …
Ich habe alle meine früheren Blogs in diesem neuen gebündelt. Zusätzlich zu neuen Einträgen reblogge ich nun ein Jahrlang – immer zum jeweiligen Jahrestag – alles, was ich in den verschiedenen Blogs jemals unter meinem damaligen Autorenname “Aka Teraka” einst veröffentlichte…
HEUTE GESTERN – …
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije (Aka Teraka)
Last year, President Buhari arrested Nnamdi Kanu, accusing him of urging Easterners to arm and protect themselves.
Today, ARMED herdsmen from our president’s own ethnic group have started falling on those same unarmed Easterners and on other unarmed peoples of Nigeria, killing, maiming, raping and slaughtering them and forcefully taking over their land. The spike in these activities has been all over the news for months, and rumours now abound that there is even a secret bill in the making to legalize the unconstitutional one-sided freedoms of these armed herdsmen.
President Buhari has not arrested or brought to justice any of his own armed kinsmen and fellow herders. Infact on this issue he has been uncharacteristically soft-spoken for an ex-soldier who has severally fumed of how he will use the military might and intelligence of Nigeria to crush any violent or armed groups within the country.
If this is not the cold cynical Conspiracy that it looks like, then it is a case of a president turning out to be more clueless, inefficient and inadequate than he accuses his predecessor of being. Choose one.
The world is moving ahead, leaving Africa behind to continue to wallow in our ancient small-minded animosities. The OAU was founded in 1963, yet Africa is still not united and still not honest with itself. The Biafran War ended in 1970, but Nigerians still don’t trust one another. We are in the fourth republic, but the law and the constitution are still being interpreted selectively. Caught between the opposites of Meritocracy and Federal Character, we have not yet solved the basic puzzle of what form our democracy should take in order to succeed long-term.
The Age of Oil is slowly coming to an End. During these decades of global oil-dependency, certain Non-African oil-producers have used the proceeds of the Oil Trade to catapult their nations from the dregs of primitive rural backwardness into mind-boggling heights of beauty, industry and technology. Today while we pathetically and anxiously monitor the price of oil daily like mindless helpless victims of a system beyond our control, some scientific nations are investing heavily in New Energy, rushing at a feverish pace to hurriedly create a parallel technological space that will eventually replace the fossil-fuel-based technology and infrastructure of yesterday. The economic dynamics of tomorrow will not be kind to Nigeria and Africa.
In the arena of social and cultural engineering, upheavals are rocking the universal human soul which will shape the global social dialectics of tomorrow. Displacement, migration and integration have become issues facing more and more nations and societies. Peoples and ideologies that have always been strangers to one another and seemingly mutually incompatible are now locked in an intense discussion on how to co-exist peacefully within the different contexts of their different social systems and nation-types. Those who bring the solutions will be those who rule the future.
Rapid advances in the synergising of equally dizzying advances in new forms of information and communication technologies keep opening up wider and more customisable possibilities for any person, groups of persons, peoples or nations who really want and are committed to progress – to source out, engineer and implement the solutions they need. Living in the transitional era of the matrix of all these forces, the times could not be more conducive for progressive African minds to finally achieve the leap out of the state and the sad image of a non-producing, non-inventing, self-oppressing, corrupt, beggarly continent to a self-dependent, socially secure, rights-protecting, technologically inventive part-carrier of the future. Knowledge, once the rarest and most sought-after power-broker in the world, has become a cheap commodity easily available to any serious seeker.
In the midst of all this, it is the more primitive problems that continue to bog us down. Ill-health, lack of education, corruption, power-abuse, tribalism, broken infrastructure, the lack of basic amenities, the lack of social security, the lack of a tourism industry, the lack of a culture of incubation of ideas and new technology, issues of human, civil and minority rights, insecurity, and the list goes on. And at the top is the baffling question of the paradox of why Nigeria, an African country, should make herself the crude battleground of two imported world-religions. At these present cross-road where only UNITY gives us a fighting chance to catch up with the global shift in technology and social re-engineering taking place. My favourite song in my village has very simple lyrics – “Idinotu, o bu ya bu ike.”: UNITY IS STRENGTH. When will African “Muslims” and African “Christians” figure out this little trick?
In an integrated world in which diasporan Africans globally are increasingly looking to the motherland as a source of inspiration, a fountain of ancient knowledge, a bedrock of self-respect, and a field of new progressive activity, self-mockingly the continent is momentum-wise worse off now than at the dawn of independence.
And now Fulani herdsmen have joined the fray in expansionistic dimensions last seen only before colonialism, taken up their walking sticks and their new sophisticated firearms and started brutally doing everywhere in the country the very thing the President said he would never condone or allow under his watch. Lailai.
We are watching. Africa is watching. Quietly?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 