“Let not your heart be troubled”, the scripture says. The shearer is at work here. Like the barber, his job is to get rid of the hair masking the actual shape and size of what is under his blade. He is usually patient and painstaking. That is why his reputation and capacity for eventually exposing the, sometimes scrawny, creature wielding a massive plume of “grown covering”, or hair, has never been in doubt. It is the shearer’s business and task to remove, or shear off, all the wool on a sheep, or the hair on any other animal.
It is from his shearing work that you may then find that the animal with a nice plume of hair is loaded with rashes, when shorn of the plume. Otherwise unsuspected sores and untidy little bumps underneat get uncovered thereby. Without the shearer’s work no one sees, or even suspects, the actual skin condition of the animal under his blade. The shearer ends the presumed beauty conferred by external coverings and confers, or reaffirms, the real essence, condition, substance and circumstance of any hair-covered entities brought within its purview. Yes, he unmasks the truth about the underlying skin condition of otherwise lovely-looking creatures.
Merchants with sheep of questionable “inner” conditions do not like the shearing job to be done in public. Not anymore, though. Impunity is now on steroids. That is why the commercial and culinary value of our defective animals are now transmogrified in public consciousness, despite the shearer’s revelations. False paradigms and artificially projected values are validated with great aplomb. Not even the discovery of some irremediable deformities, endemic skin blemishes or some underlying cancerous conditions hitherto concealed by the mass of well-kept hair are deterrents anymore.
Looking around us and seeing how a lot of things are unravelling politically, economically and spiritually, one can only say that a great shearer is at work here in Nigeria. Providence to the rescue! Every form of subterfuge we have hitherto masked under various nomenclatures is coming apart. The hidden ontological defects beneath our lovely pretensions and speech making about truth, institutional integrity and much more are on parade, as never before.
As I said on this page, on July 30, 2022, “Look around you, all over Nigeria, today. A great unmasking is afoot. The shearer is at work. No one is taking inventory of the growing misfortunes of the people in whose name all sorts of people are prancing around in the public domain. Not for them the worries keeping the masses awake at night, no. Even as the life of the people is made unbearable by the combined assaults of insecurity, hunger, rising inflation and rising taxes, the leaders are busy with their own conception of moving the people and the nation forward”.
The above was said over a year ago, so it is beyond blaming the incumbent government, or the party in power. Matters were not so radically different in the days of the PDP, only better masked. It is a matter of record, from our extensive experience, that most members of the political, religious and economic elite have coalesced into one great block, across party lines. Are they really concerned about the critical existential problems of daily survival plaguing the people? I think not.
As I said back then: “You cannot speak of safety and security when those wielding state power dare not visit their homes, or their Constituencies, without literally invoking NATO Protocols. The question today is whether we should now say that some members of the political elite, including State Governors, are indigenes of Abuja, State Guest Houses and hotels?
Further still on the articled in question, as captured in the next three paragraphs: “The trends we are seeing everywhere today are not new. It’s just that they are at their worst today. Progressively, and for decades now, Nigerians have been watching, and in some ways abetting, the public projection of “False gods of political salvation”. At first it was poor governance that gave people cause for worry. Then, outright misgovernment came into vogue. Confiscation of the state, as a hereditary fiefdom for which temporary Lords of the Manor must appoint preferring successors, came on. Now, many of those behind it all do not seem sufficiently bothered, or embarrassed, to show propriety in many things. Some are already in a deep dark hole. But, instead of trying to find their way out, they are still digging furiously!
Is this bad news? Maybe it is. But I take a different view. It seems to me that a slow and painful climb to a new day will not begin here, until after a winnowing process and the complete unmasking of the various forms of subterfuge masquerading as leadership and statesmanship are stopped in their tracks. We must, in the process, answer the following questions: {1} How many of our erstwhile elder statesman of the last fifty years have been either true elders, or true statesmen? And {2} Is there any real proof of lessons learnt?
It seems to me that a barber is at work here. Yes, the shearer is quietly, unrelentingly and mercilessly shaving off the headful of hair that has been concealing the true driving spirit behind our nationhood of today. Just as a misshapen skull someone has been concealing by all manner of subterfuge contrived in a hair dressing salon gets called out when confronted with a “balding clipper”, so are Nigeria’s political hair styles and false beauty coming undone. It all brings to mind, using the logic of the German ontologist and existentialist, Martin Heideggar, what I call the “progressive un-concealment of the profanity and sham wisdom that has been cloaked in solemnity.”
So, here we are. Providence is at work on our behalf, and actually in spite of us all. “The opportunities to learn, change and make real progress have been either presumptuously ignored in the past or missed; due to leadership myopia. So, here we are, with the two dominant parties threatening to save the rest of us, and probably the world. They both lack internal democracy. They both are heavily populated by people with some observed aversion for competence in leadership. And, for good measure, the two parties seem to be affiliated to bedlam, in terms of cohesion and ideological focus”.
So, this is five minutes to the midday of all revelations. Presumed heroes, role models and moral exemplars are in the dust. More shocks are likely to come, as the barber continues his work. Stubborn students must learn willy-nilly. It is time for us to face the reality of the real. It is time to repeat the words of Parmenides: “What is, is; and what is not is not”. If what is not were to become, then it was before it came to be; which is absurd. Now, deal with that!
If we leave Parmenides and listen to Aristotle, another Greek philosopher, the latter’s statement “Everything is what it is” at any particular point in time, gives us a better handle on things. A chair is made from wood, so it was not a chair before a carpenter worked on it. The carpenter used pieces of wood, nails, gum, skill, some vanish and more to change the “identity” of these disparate items and have them coalesce into what we call a chair. No one of the components is a chair. All of them lying together somewhere also does not make a chair, unless the carpenter sets to work on them.
Just as there must be a process that transforms the possibilities of disparate objects into a new actuality, so must we acknowledge that there is a process that will transform the disjointed postulations about values and national development under the right type of leaders. So, for now, everything is what it is and the shearer is working on everything, and everyone.
Also as said here on 30th May, 2022, “One basic fact of logic and critical thinking is that a thing cannot be one thing and also not be that thing “at the same time, in the same place and, particularly, in the same respect”. That is the basic pillar of the Laws of Thought in traditional logic. It is the element of Sub oedum respectum that ends the debate, making it possible for the concepts of development, transformation, act and potency to be part of all logical and metaphysical thinking”.
We said, further still: “A political party that is, to all intents and purposes, the Patron Saint of Mediocrity and national decay cannot also ‘at the same time’ successfully pass itself off as an agent of national development. Also, a political party that says it is in opposition, but which has nothing that really distinguishes it from the ‘bad guys’ it is trying to replace has a very bad case. A presidential aspirant with controversial antecedents and credentials cannot, ‘at the same time’, be a presidential aspirant with credible antecedents and credentials. A person who calls himself a bishop when he is not one is simply not a bishop. He cannot, ‘at the same time’ that he is not a bishop transmute into one by self-proclamation. The simple issue here is about reality and illusion, truth and falsehood. criminality and good behaviour.
To be authentic is to be real. An authentic wooden chair is different from a fake plastic chair that is given a coat of paint in order to pass it off as a wooden chair. A person is said to be authentic when he is what he claims to be at any particular time, and completely so. To be inauthentic, on the other hand, is to have your identity, values, statements and avowed beliefs contrived to present “what is not” as “what is”. It boils down to the absence of any true identity.
Chimera! The “Not this” that claims to be a “this”! But note this: Falsehood, no matter how heavily cloaked, as it prances forward through the manipulation of public opinion to proclaim itself as truth suffers a setback when it is least expected. Because what is not is not, at any particular time.
We are making progress, though. Seriously too! It is progress when false gods are unmasked – as the shearer proceeds apace – even when the shearer cannot fathom what it will eventually lead to. Enough said!