Poly Chinyere Samez
Success, they say, has many relatives while failure is in a solitary orphanage home.
I have read quite a number of articles and commentaries on Obi Cubana’s carnival nature of his beloved mother’s burial at Oba Anambra State, South East of Nigeria. .
Many commentaries on the burial carnival, attributed the carnival nature to Obi’s philanthropic spirit to help people.
Some posited that the folks that Obi helped came to show appreciation for the help he rendered to them.
This group opined that help should be given to people irrespective of whatever level one can.
This is true in its entirety.
But You, I mean you wagging your mouth like a sex-starved-dog, how many have you helped at your own low or little base?
My challenge in all of this is the hypocritical nature of most of the commentators, indirectly passing strong emotions to their perceived enemies, they felt neglected and didn’t help them when they could.
What this thoughtless set forgot to acknowledge is that help comes in different shapes and stages and that most people they indirectly or directly point accusing fingers at, had at different times in life rendered help to them which they threw away and never acknowledged.
Also they failed to think out of their tiny boxes, still boxed in their miniature reasoning, that a lot happens in relationships, nuclear or extended, that shape what comes or does not come to one.
It’s natural that many are not created alike, and that What you become or not in life either emanates from the mother, the father or your ingratitude or ingratiating attitude that attracts negativity to the totality of who you are and what you want to become.
“Òfó na Ogu” is the balance, and is the ultimate decider as no mortal being has the destiny of another on his hands. Chidera!
Some of these ingrates have vaguely and vainly redefined help and philanthropy as heaping fish on their palms rather than showing them how to catch the fish.
These are the most dangerous lot in our society, who always ingratiate and cluster around people only for what they can get from them and not what they can do for them.
Helping others is never in their dictionary. Grab and grab are the only words they are mindful of in any relationship they enter into.
No wonder they continue running around like headless chickens shopping for who likes or hates them.
Brother and Sister, please grow up and desist from public disgrace. Your shame dey shame me these days.
Before I go back to Obi Cubana’s partners of show of belongingness – one of the social strata in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs -; let me make it explicitly clear that help comes in different forms and shapes and that the person(s) that better managed the initial help rendered to him or her attract(s) further help.
It goes with the heart of gratitude and un-forgetfulness. Note that you may be offending your divine helpers directly or indirectly. You heard me right.
Someone that offered you shelter, or brought you in under his or her roof, when you hadn’t any to assist has given you help and a hope.
When someone offers medical help to you or your relatives when you couldn’t, that person has given you faith and hope to live again, and to help others at your own time.
When a person offers you any job, no matter how little, the stipend or wages you got from that job solved some needs for you which couldn’t have if the person didn’t extend that gesture to you.
In other words, the person has helped you and has given you another chance to live and eke out a living.
When someone paid school fees for you or your relatives; fed and clothed you or your relatives, at a point in life, that person helped to prepare you for what you claim to be today and hope to become in future.
Perhaps the situation would have been more than hopeless if that help didn’t come at that point in time.
Be grateful and never throw up misplaced emotions or invective on the person at a later stage in life.
If someone picked you up on the road under the rain to safety, he or she helped you to stay away from unforeseen events that may have happened to you.
God planted that person at that time to lift you out of that danger.
It could have been that a heavy storm may have uprooted trees to decimate you.
Nothing takes God by surprise.
Therefore don’t be stupid and stop biting the fingers that fed you.
Don’t remain the proverbial fowl that forsook those that feathered her during the rainy season.
“Ihere anaghi eme Onye ara; ka ma Onye nwe ya”. (The shame of a mad person in the public is on his relatives).
“Onye na amaghi egwu agba, òkó ikiri kó ga umunne ya mgbe nile ò gba ga egwu na ógbò egwu. (Stop disgracing yourself in a public dance of shame because the shame spills over to your relatives).
Obi Cubana may not have been surrounded by his business and social partners only, but also by those he helped or empowered that remembered and valued those low times that attracted his help and empowerment.
They may not have done that out of gratitude but by exercising their sense of belongingness, which according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, dictate an individual’s behaviors in the society.
Suffice it to state that there were still some ingrates that Obi Cubana and his family may have helped that couldn’t have attended the burial either because of family disputes or because they regarded those helps as part of their common wealth from a “money ritual practitioner”.
This set may have remembered one thing Obi Cubana didn’t do for them in exchange for all the good things he did for them in their entire life. This is why I always say that this life is not squared.
Rather than chirp around like a weaver bird, about those that helped, ought to have helped or didn’t help you, prove yourself by enumerating and focusing on those that you have helped now that you claim to have become a “somebody”. Start from your immediate family.
Emulate and appreciate someone that did the same in the past.
Until you do that, you’re nothing but a stupid fellow in the midst of listening idiots.
You only but can attract more opprobrium, infamy, hate and disappointments to yourself.
No reasonable person that worths his or her salt will take you seriously.
I equally observed that none of the commentators remembered to mention how Obi suffered to go to school, or how his parents scaled all odds to see him through to school without help from anywhere.
All they see now is “help” and “no help”.
E mere ya unu eme? Na juju they did una?
He may have had uncles, cousins, even friends that never believed in him and who distanced themselves from any help whatsoever that could have assisted in making him become who he is today.
Let the change begin with you. Stop rabble rousing because no one listens anymore. They will listen when you make the dough.
Indeed, success has many brothers and sisters, but failure is in a solitary orphanage home.
Shut up if you can’t build yourself to attract the sweet smelling butterflies that hovered around Obi Cubana at this mourning and other periods of his life.
Obi Cubana, his Partners and the Carnival are indeed lessons for the rest of us to learn from.
