In just few months, Òkèògún has recorded some kidnapping. Yesterday, the Medical Director in charge of Baptist Hospital, Òkehò was kidnapped with a security man and the two of them have not been released up till the time I’m writing this article.
People are already praying fervently for their release and I also joined them in prayer because our God is a prayer-answering God.
But, beyond prayer, God expects us to do something. He expects is to take steps to provide security for ourselves. If we cannot do it, God would not have asked us to do so.
However, let me try to examine some thoughts with you as we are praying to God to answer our prayers and are waiting to know what step to take to find a final solution to our security problem.
The first thing I like to say is that everybody wants to be great and it is a good and Godly desire to want to be great.
But, not everyone would be great because not everyone will want to pay the price of greatness.
What is the price of greatness somebody may want to know? The price of greatness is nothing but responsibility.
What is responsibility? Responsibility is readiness to do something to achieve what one desires or wants. It is to work or to be diligent to carry out an assignment in anticipation of a desired result.
Responsibility is to have the duty of taking care of something. It is to be answerable for an act performed or for its consequences. It is to be accountable or amenable.
Someone said responsibility is a compound word that contains the following three English words:
- Respond.
- To.
- Ability.
If we bring the three words together, it will give us “Respond” + “To” + “Ability” which equals to “Respond to ability” and, then, “Responsibility”.
Going a little bit deeper, it means there is an inherent ability that God has given to each of us which make one person different, unique, special and peculiar from another person.
In other words, no matter how close Taiwo is to Kehinde, they are not the same in many ways on a closer look and consideration.
This agrees with what a great man had in mind when he said that: “every man has a divine deposit in him. It takes vision to locate it and it takes motion to accomplish it”. This quotation simply suggests that there is no nonentity in the creation of God. It means no one is empty because everyone of us had been given a talent or a gift by God, the Creator of all beings and all things.
But, the most unfortunate thing is that many people are burying their talents or gifts because they lack vision to see and motion to pursue which is why Dr. Myles Munroe said the cemetery or the graveyard is the wealthiest spot on the planet earth.
Now, one indisputable truth is that anyone who buries his or her talent is an irresponsible individual who is robbing or shortchanging the world of the divine quality of God in him or her.
Today, if you will bear witness with me, you will agree with me that we are now living in an irresponsible generation where our young ones have been programmed by the adult generation not to tó discover who they are (self-identity), why they are (purpose) and what they have (potential) to become contributing members of the society.
Many of our young people have turned into crimes and antisocial behaviours because they have not discovered themselves. Those who have discovered themselves among them don’t believe in themselves because the society they belong to don’t fancy what they have to offer.
In our society today, we worship money and what money can buy. We worship materialism. If you place a man with good idea side by side with a man with money in an election, nobody or only few will vote for the former. It is the latter who will win election because we don’t value ideas like they do in other climes.
Good ideas are not respected again and people have become terribly impatient with process. Nearly everyone, especially the youth, wants to get rich quick and this is the reason why crime has become a lucrative business in our time. This is why we have thieves, armed robbers, occultists, drug sellers, internet scammers, advance fee frauds, human parts sellers, kidnappers, insurgents, terrorists, etc in our midsts.
Today, in Òkehò, the NDLEA has told us that we have more than 40 to 50 hot joints where young people are taking hard substances like cannabis, Marijuana, cocaine, heroine, cocaine, colorado, tramadol and the likes because cigarette that is dangerous to human health is no longer in vogue.
As I want to close, the question we should all answer is: what can we do to this? The answer to this question is that:
i. All hands must be on deck to bring back the lost values at home and in the society.
ii. Government should review our education curriculum and introduce transformative contents to what we are teaching our young ones in school.
iii. Religious organisations (churches and Mosques) must change their messages to value-oriented and moral rebirth messages.
iv. The media – print, electronic, social media on the net – should begin to write stuffs that will change the people for better.
v. Government must introduce sanctions and punitive measures into the system to punish offenders.
Bringing it to Okeho, our community, all the socio-cultural associations should come together and work out a strategy that will lead to a strong, formidable, virile, dynamic, well-structured and all-inclusive Security Task Force (STF) that will be well-funded.
Prayer is good and we should continue to pray. But, if David was praying in front of Goliath without confronting him, the story we are reading would have been different today.
In conclusion, this is the time for proactive steps to deal with the issue at hand. If we don’t act, nobody will come from outside to act on our behalf.
Don’t forget what Isaac Newton said that: everything assumes a state of rest until an external relevant force is applied”. But, may be the scientist should help me to tell Isaac Newton that his theory can no longer be sustained in modern time and he should permit that we change his theory to: “every will begin to decay and retrogress until something is done to prevent the fast process of decadence and retrogression”.
As we can all see, before our very eyes, things have moved from good to bad. It has moved from bad to worse and, now, it is moving from worse to worst. So, before we get there, let us do something to stop the decadence and retrogression.
Thank you.
