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A mission can be defined as a specific task a person embarks upon or an important assignment given to a person or a group of people. What is your mission in life, It is important for people to identify their mission on earth and follow it. Many people because of the hardship and the challenges they face in their mission abandons that mission and forget about it. Such people will never reach the peak of their lives. We all have different missions; some are called to the ministries as clerics, some are called to be peacemakers or administrators and some are called into politics . It is imperative to know ones calling and be on a mission to fulfil that callings. I read the fiction book Igbo Olodumare ( The Forest of God) by D.O Fagunwa at a relatively young age and is still fresh in my memory. There was a passage that was of interest to me that is related to this piece. I will quickly run through it to elucidate on the subject matter.
Olowo Aye was a great hunter ( He was the father of Akara Ogun of Igbo Irunmale) . He was on a mission to Igbo Olodumare. Igbo Olodumare was a place of hidden treasure and a place to gather wisdom but only a brave hunter can venture there because there were ghommids and powerful beasts there. The place was only for someone who had endurance and perseverance, only those who imbibe those value can lay their hands on the treasure. He had been in that forest for some time and was lost in the forest until he met a beautiful woman with her elder sister there. They had missed their way having been chased out of the town for practicing witchcraft . Initially, he did not recognise her but was attracted by her beauty; he later recognised them as his neighbours. Now when Olowo Aye saw her, he drew nearer to her. Akara Ogun the narrator of the story put it like this “Olowo Aye ko ipako si Igbo olodumare baba mi to obinrin lo”. It means “Olowo Aye turned his back on Igbo Olodumare, my father followed a woman.” In essence, he turned his back on his mission. He left his mission behind; he had forgotten about his mission because of an allurement in the forest , on this occasion a beautiful woman.
It is natural indeed for a young man to look for a woman and seek her hand in marriage and Olowo Aye was not an exception. However, he had a mission at hand but fell in love with the wrong woman and he knew it but he was blinded by her beauty. In the latter end, the woman caused him so much trouble to the extent that God was angry with him. In fact, Olowo Aye himself killed the woman eventually in mysterious circumstances but that is not within the ambit of this piece. I will leave it to another day. It is important for anyone who is on a mission to focus on that mission and not to allow himself to be distracted on that mission whether by allurement or challenges for both challenges and allurement will surely come. It is the way we handle it that determines whether mission will be accomplished or not.
Barrack Obama was on a mission in 2007 to become the First African American president of the United States. The odds were against him, it was unprecedented. Hillary Clinton the wife of Bill Clinton was up against him, then they were the most famous couple in America and they had sufficient money to prosecute the primary election and sufficient connection to make it happen. The contest was uneven. Obama was a junior senator of a little known Illionis, he was not rich and little was known about him and he is also a coloured man which was a disadvantage to some extent but he had a mission. He put up a very good and elaborate campaign and when it was obvious that the pendulum might swing in his favour if he was not quickly curtailed, Clinton the brilliant politician tempted him with an allurement. He made him an offer that was difficult to refuse. He tempted him with the position of Vice President of his wife with an assurance that they would back him too after her eight years. For someone who had just emerged from obscurity to be presented with such a great allurement, it looked good to be true, there was pressure from many quarters for him to accept the offer but he had a mission. He rejected the offer and told Bill that they could only be talking of the vice president after the primary election. Still the odds were against him. But he was on a mission and he just passed the test of the temptation of an allurement that would have derailed his mission. It was a failed ambush from one of the greatest politicians in USA, Clinton. The rest is history as they say. Obama won the primary election and defeated the brave and highy principled John McCain of the Republican Party in 2008.
A man who knows that he has a mission must be prepared to face challenges and overcome allurement. He must put his mission above his personal interest and comfort. When Chief Obafemi Awolowo was arraigned and sentenced to prison over a phantom coup, many people thought it was over. To compound the challenges and the temptation, it was in prison that he was told that his son, Segun Awolowo, had died in a car accident. There was a plan hatched by the Northern People Congress (NPC) and their allied to humilliate, neutralise and break his will power. So, they sent some eminent Yoruba men to him in prison to talk and persuade him that if his wife could go and beg Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, he would be pardoned. Awolowo asked them what manner the plea would take, and whether his wife would be kneeling down or what. He rejected the idea. He knew that it was to humiliate him and he was not even the only person from his party that was sent to prison. Awo knew he was on a mission and his personal comfort would not be a deterrent. He was going through trial, he rejected it outright. They approached him again and asked him if he was ready to change the name of his party from Action Group to another name, they would pardon him. He retorted that the name Action Group belonged to the people and he could therefore not change it. He mocked them that perhaps, if it was his personal name they wanted him to change to become Obafemi Balewa, it would have been different. The emissaries knew he was mocking them.
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He rejected it because he knew he was on a mission . Awo later became Minister of Finance and deputy Head of State. All those who planned and put him in prison were executed by the tsunami of the 1966 coup . Awo fulfilled his mission as a Minister of Finance even in time of war. Nigeria fought a three year war and did not borrow a penny and did not devalue our currency. No one has equal his feat in the history of Nigeria.
Most of our politicians today are not in a mission to save the country but in a mission to loot the treasury, to steal and destroy.
In today’s government, borrowing to do so called infrastructure is now a competition between the Federal Government and the State Governments. They are all borrowing internationally and domestically . Some of those infrastructure are nothing to write home about ; Lagos to Ibadan is just a little bit over 100km and it is taking 8 years to complete. I asked, where are they going to find money to maintain those poorly made infrastructure. Is this borrowing sustainable? Nigeria is heavily burden on debts and there is no money to pay the debts and so we keep on servicing the debts. It must not continue , there must be a change. Unless there is a drastic positive change, the country will be bankrupt very soon.
We need a man on a mission to rebuild Nigeria , a man who will create internal means of paying the debts and make Nigeria to become productive; we need a brilliant mind, we need a man of integrity , a man who is disciplined , a man of respect and honour. We need a man of impeccable character. Unfortunately, all the three major presidential candidates did not possess those qualities and I am not afraid to say it.
We need a man on a mission to salvage this country. We need a man who can fix Nigeria , *we need a man like Awo.*
- Aborisade is a lawyer, human rights activist and historian.
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