By Lasisi Olagunju

“There is a kind of price for life,” says Charles A. Curran, and that price, he says, “moves in the direction of death.” Death blows no trumpet but we all know it is coming. It is the unalterable final part of the process of life. Some of us spend our entire life worrying about death; some simply ignore it; some mortally fear it; some calmly look forward to it. Whichever you and I choose, the final portion is that we all have to die one way or the other. It is destiny at work.

In the afternoon of Thursday last week, I was with the Orangun of Oke Ila, Oba Adedokun Abolarin, who lost his wife, Olori Solape Christianah Abolarin, exactly one week today. She was 51 years old.

I knew her; she was my wife’s friend and colleague in the civil service of Osun State. Her death has made us poorer here. If anyone had asked the dead what she thought was next in her life, she would probably have said she looked forward to becoming a permanent secretary. Her diligence at work was preparing her for the top job. For her, death was too far-fetched to consider. She had so much ahead, and a lot in her plate to attend to. But she died. We all mourn her untimely passage.

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“We care, God cures” is a bold inscription on the wall of a popular hospital in Ibadan. A very sensible thing for every person and physician to say is in that message. No matter the degree of care, people die, some young, some old. Probe certain ailments; for women, for instance, probe fibroids: “The exact cause is unknown” is what comes up. Modern medicine and its prophets get confounded now and then despite humanity’s progress across centuries. That is why since the beginning of creation, women anatomy and freak deaths appear together, constantly holding hands. German physician, Eucharius Roesslin (1470-1526) told his readers in 1513 that “very many (are) the perils, dangers, and throngs which chance to women…” Read about him and why he wrote his ‘Der Rosengarten’ (The Rose Garden), later translated to ‘The Birth of Mankind’.

The death of our king’s wife reminds the mindful of a hugely cerebral editor, columnist and Queen of Letters, MEE (May Ellen Ezekiel). Married to Richard Mofe Damijo, MEE died after a fibroid surgery on 23 March, 1996 in the best hospital of her day in Lagos. She was aged 40. The uterine course (and cause) of her transition was identical with this exit in Osun State. The stabbing pains of the whys, till eternity, rack the brain.

Amidst a torrent of personal grief and familial lamentations, Oba Abolarin reeled out the pearls of his companionship with the departed Olori: “Many of the things people praise in me, she was the architect. Everyone who was my person was accepted by her as her person. She was mother to all the boys and girls in our college. She made our home cosy for orphans. She was from Igbeti in Oyo State, she married me and became completely Oke Ila and Osun State …” The king’s men and women in attendance nodded in agreement.

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The grieving oba went on and on punctuating prayers from visitors and friends with tales of the great bond he shared with the departed. Hearing him and looking at the histrionics that accompanied what he was saying reminded me of a passage on intimacy, death, and grief: “…with a person’s death and our experiences of grief comes…the clearest view of what that person and relationship have meant to us in life” (Brian tie Vries in ‘Grief: Intimacy’s Reflection’).

When a loved one dies, everyone periodically pauses and queries their efforts. We’ve all lost persons whose death left us to wonder if we did enough to keep them around. I ask myself till tomorrow if I put in everything I should to keep my parents alive despite their very old age. With the deceased’s immediate younger sister beside him retelling, amid sobs, the last-moment stories, I heard Oba Abolarin asking himself repeatedly what he ought to do which he did not do. “I am a finicky person, so what happened?” He asked no one in particular.

Those who experienced it would swear that a spouse’s death is a life-altering experience. They say it is a tough one. I read in Phyllis R. Silverman’s ‘Widowhood and Preventive Intervention’ that during courtship, people commonly rehearse for marriage, but “no similar rituals prepare the individual for the inevitable termination of the marriage when one of the partners will die.”

Between this husband and his late wife is a 12-year-old prince, Tadeniawo. And I heard Kabiyesi asking how he was going to cope going forward: “I am close to 70. How is a 70-year-old man going to take care of a 12-year-old, all alone? The boy was very close to his mum.” The oba said; then he went on and on even as he struggled to put on the visage of courage.

He has to be strong; he is an oba, husband of the whole town. One of the covenants he had with those who had been on the throne before him is that his hard wood must never shed tears. Ako igi kò gbodò s’oje. He has handled it so well so far. We keep praying for him.

“Death, thou shalt die” comes as a verdict from seventeenth-century English poet, John Donne. In that Holy Sonnet, Donne asks ‘Death’ not to be proud because “One short sleep past, we wake eternally,/ And death shall be no more…”

May Olori Abolarin’s soul rest in perfect peace. May God look after her husband and child and all her other loved ones.

By Lasisi Olagunju

MODERATOR: We take this space for ‘The Sick Nation Debate’, a town hall exchange between two political tendencies recommending themselves to our sick nation. Today’s edition is between the ruling APC and a budding coalition which, for now, uses the ADC label. We start in alphabetical order.

APC: Alphabetical order? No. A good debate should be between equals, or at least between near mates. Ambition Disguised as Change (ADC) is a perfect example of an oddity, a horror movie in rehearsal. ADC looks new, but acts odd and old, arrogant. It has no pedigree in morality. It is a sheep; it has no head to lock horns with my ram.

ADC: I think we should start this with some measure of decorum. But you can’t give what you don’t have. You have just announced yourself as a cocky cocktail of disaster. A drug called APC was banned in 1983 or thereabouts for being injurious to our health. I remember you as an alliance of purveyors of death: APC Elerin – three-in-one. Imagine a drug that advertised itself as a painkiller, it turned out that it was actually a kidney killer. Its full name was Aspirin-Phenacetin-Caffeine. Now, that is the name you are throwing about with pride as a slogan of expired hope. You should be known for what you are: Ailments, Pains and Catastrophe (APC).

APC: On 29 October, 2006, a passenger plane crashed near Abuja. One hundred and four people were on board the Boeing 737-200 which was travelling to Sokoto. There were seven survivors. Alhaji Muhammadu Maccido, the then Sultan of Sokoto, was among the dead. You know the name of the airline involved in the unfortunate crash? ADC. Again, a foremost professor of political science named Claude Ake, was killed in an air crash on November 7, 1996 in Lagos. You want to know the culprit airline? ADC. I can go on and on. So, each time you pronounce your name, those are the incidents Nigerians remember. May we not board a plane destined for a crash. May it not happen again.

ADC: You share no name with an airline but you have hijacked and crashed the country. In ten quick years, APC has worked Nigeria into the mortuary. My current mission is to take our country back from you, a band of buccaneers who have abducted the country and its destiny. I wonder why you are not ashamed that your record of destruction is phenomenal. Everywhere you touch, disaster drops.

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APC: Your coalition is DOA – dead on arrival. Yes, there are challenges today. But, you know Bertolt Brecht?

ADC: Yes. German playwright and poet; 1898-1956. What about him?

APC: Brecht once asked a question and answered it himself: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing / About the dark times.”

ADC: We are already singing about your darkness. You are death hanging a stethoscope. With APC, every dose is a bout of deadly side effects. You came very popular in 2015 but everyone who embraced you with the innocence of patriotism has landed in a dialysis clinic. There was a celebration of democracy last week. You heard what your man, the president told Nigerians who told him that things are bad? “I am not here to make you happy” was the message of hope from your Renewed Hope exponent. Your party came popular ten years ago. And in those ten years you have shown the world what it means to be a popular poison. A textbook definition of dictator. There was Idi Amin, there was Bokassa, there were Hitler and Mussolini. They all waltzed in into the world’s infirmary popular like the drug of death, APC. What ended the romance? Regret. From the desert to the coast, APC has made the sick sicker.

APC: But we started this journey together, ask Atiku, ask El-Rufai and Amaechi.

ADC: Just don’t go there. Now we know that you are a capsule of band A bandits. We did what we had to do in 2015 because it was the best at that point. Imagine you joining hands to build a hospital only to finish and discover that what you have is a shrine for suffering; a nursery for pain. That is the reason we abandoned the curious combination called APC and opted to have this without the deadly ‘P’ element. The ‘D’ in our name represents deliverance. We will give health and deliver our people from your evil.

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APC: The ‘D’ in ADC actually represents disaster. “Barbarous invaders” is what Zulu king, Shaka, called dissidents like you. And he said more: “A wild collection of desperadoes do not compose a nation/ However numerous their numbers.”

ADC: Since you know how to quote from Mazisi Kunene’s ‘Emperor Shaka the Great’, you should also add this line from that epic: “The greatness of a people lies in the richness of their lives.” With your wicked policies, you’ve ruined the world and damaged the heavens. We are coming to detoxify the polity.

APC: The best chef in world’s history is the mouth; its vegetable soup is the champion. You are simply jealous that I do to perfection everything you can’t collectively handle: headaches, body aches, heartbreaks. I tackle them. All. I deliver immediate results.

ADC: Our ancestors warn that “If you give bad food to your stomach, it will drum for you to dance.” You are that bad food in our stomach and we are flushing you out. You cure nothing. You deliver pain and death. Slowly and arrogantly, you wreck vital organs. Like Phenacetin, the ‘P’ in the banned drug, you flaunt economic and security Armageddon as trophy. Horror is who you are.

APC: What you are doing is what Sun Tzu, author of ‘The Art of War’, said 2,500 years ago: “the noise before defeat.” ADC is a plane with lots of announcements, no flight. Any person who entrusts their life journey to you will end up stranded, disappointed and depressed. What you have on the label is not what you really are. You are the killer pill that must not be in our regimen.

ADC: I am convinced now more than ever that you should be banned like your namesake, the bad drug. You are actively leading the nation into bankruptcy and you shamelessly do peacock preening. I heard the president talking about his record of achievements. Like the lizard that jumped down the Iroko tree, he is praising himself, marking his own script. Who does that? Did he see Nigerian beggars deported from Ghana? Nigerians go to Ghana to do street begging. Haba!

APC: Dear ADC, begging did not start with us or with this president. You’ve been around for a long time, taxiing the tarmac endlessly. You are like your other name, Aide-de-Camp, an orderly with royal ambitions. I advise that you stop wasting your time and money. If you become broke, we won’t open the vaults for you. The best you can ever get is to be a miserable attendant, a courtier, the ragged guy holding PDP’s umbrella. You know placebo?

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ADC: Is it not better to be placebo than be poison? You are poison, we are panacea. You remain an expired brand, snobbish, haughty and petty; you kill. Daily, you work hard at transforming headache into paralysis. Agony Promoting Confederation (APC) is your full name; the other one I call Permanent Defection Platform (PDP). You claim to be cures but you are no drug, you are an epidemic. I am the light of the nation; I am coming as a breath of fresh air.

APC: You are a chattering bird, you can never build a nest. I am sure, ADC, that if you do not crash the state, you will excel in flight cancellations and flight delays. May Nigeria not suffer you.

ADC: PDP’s carelessness and bad behaviour dragged us into APC’s darkness. Now, APC is drugging us into coma. Yet, you say you are the best option. What you want is a trauma cycle but we won’t allow you. Whatever it will take, we don’t care, we are stopping you and your arrogance. You can say whatever you like. ‘The End’ is the end of cinema. That end for you is the next election. If the calabash won’t let us open it gently, we will smash it. We will match you grit for grit, intrigue for intrigue; madness for madness.

APC: May madness not be our portion. Our people are not suicidal. They know that you, in particular, you are too desperate to give health. You can say whatever you like. This country was critically ill before I was introduced into its treatment in 2015. Today, the patient is stabilised and singing our praise. The president was in Katsina some weeks ago. You know the verdict of the people? Mounted on billboards were great words of thanks. He was in Lagos for sallah. You saw how big men, including the elderly prostrated to have a handshake with the president. The people say we are doing what they expect us to do. When the righteous rule, the people rejoice. Nigerians have never been happier than they are. Even the Financial Times of London said so: “Nigeria is in better shape than at any time in the past decade.” When a patient says “No Complaint”, what else is there for the doctor to do other than to keep the drug that cured them? Go to the far north, the dominant slogan there this moment is “Ba Korafi”, it means “no complaint.”

MODERATOR: Thank you, our promise makers. And thank you esteemed listeners…

ADC: Mr. Moderator, you can’t stop this at this point. APC cannot roam freely the 419 way, relabelling expired hope as renewed hope and going away with it. It deserves a response…

MODERATOR: I am sorry, we have to go now. We’ve come to the end of the maiden edition of The Sick Nation Debate. We hope to keep the conversation alive and going. We will meet again. When? Well…

The Debt Management Office (DMO) has put on offer a N50 billion Green Bond on behalf of the federal government.

Director-General of the DMO, Ms. Patience Oniha, told investors at a stakeholders’ meeting in Lagos on Monday afternoon that the proceeds would be used to fund several climate-friendly projects such as renewable energy, afforestation and dams across the country.

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The instrument has a five-year tenor and will be benchmarked against the FGN Savings Bond which is treated in the nation’s capital market.

Details later…