by Favour Adéwoyin
In just a few months, Òkèògún has recorded some kidnappings. One of such is the kidnap of the Medical Director in charge of Baptist Hospital, Òkehò, on Sunday, July 23, 2023, with a security man. However, the two have not been released until now that I am 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 prayers, God expects us to do something. He expects us to take steps to provide security for ourselves. God would not have asked us to do it if we could not.
However, let me 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 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 cost of greatness is nothing but responsibility.
What is responsibility? Responsibility is the readiness to do something to achieve what one desires or wants. It is to work or to be diligent in carrying 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 “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 makes one person different, unique, particular and peculiar from another. In other words, no matter how close Taiwo is to Kehinde, they are different in many ways on a closer look and consideration.
This agrees with what a great man had in mind when he said, “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 every one of us has 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 the 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 bear me witness, 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 to crimes and anti-social behaviours because they have not discovered themselves. Those who have found themselves among them don’t believe in themselves because the society they belong to doesn’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 a good idea alongside a man with money in an election, nobody or only a few will vote for the former. The latter will win the election because we value ideas less than they do in other climes.
Good ideas are not respected again, and people have become terribly impatient with the process. Nearly everyone, especially the youth, wants to get rich quickly, which is 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 midst.
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 like 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 about 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 content to what we teach our young ones in school.
iii. Religious organizations (churches and Mosques) must change their messages to value-oriented and moral rebirth.
iv. The media – print, electronic, social media on the net – should begin to write content that will change the people for the better.
v. The Government must introduce sanctions and punitive measures to punish offenders.
Bringing it to Okeho, our community, all the socio-cultural associations should come together and work out a strategy to 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 had been praying in front of Goliath without confronting him, the story we read would have been different today.
In conclusion, this is the time for proactive steps to deal with these issues. Nobody will come from outside to act on our behalf if we don’t act.
Don’t forget what Isaac Newton said: “Everything assumes a state of rest until an external relevant force is applied”. But, maybe the scientist should help me to tell Isaac Newton that his theory can no longer be sustained in modern times, and he should permit we change his approach to: “everything 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 is now moving from bad to worse. So, before we get there, let us do something to stop the decadence and retrogression.
