Tunde Odesola

If I walked into the ground floor of the superstore at the city centre to get my preschool child a gift, and I saw bicycles, balls, boots, dolls, push cars, rackets, etc. I wouldn’t pick a thing. Instead, I would move to the first floor of the store to see the possibility of getting that one impactful gift.

And, if the first floor brimmed with kiddie gadgets in tablets, computers, telephones, headphones, etc, I would move on to the second floor to see if I could lay my hands on that enduring gift. Should I get on the second floor and see rows upon rows of kiddie designer clothes, I would leave for the third and final floor, in the hope of finding that singular gift. But if cakes, candies, cookies, cereals, chips, ice creams, and pizza crowd the third floor, I would head for the exit.

Why? Because the profound gift I am looking for is not in the superstore. What I am looking for is a gift that teaches responsibility early in life. It is a gift that develops empathy and compassion. A gift that encourages emotional growth, promotes physical activity, supports social skills, and helps build commitment and discipline. It is a gift that imparts daily lessons of kindness, patience, responsibility, and respect.

What is that gift? A pet.

It could be a dog, a cat, a chicken, a bird, or a fish in an aquarium; a pet is a nonjudgmental friend. A pet is a gift every parent should give their children early in life.

Growing up in the Onipanu area of Lawanson Crescent, off Kayode Street, Lagos, I came in contact with a pet in my nursery/primary school years through Afolabi, the son of a co-tenant. That was in the early and mid 70s. Afolabi was older than me, while I was older than his younger sister, Arinola.

Afolabi had a beautiful two-storey cage. Inside his sparkling clean cage was a bird the Yoruba call ‘òdère kókò’ because of the way it coos. The English call their ‘òdère kókò’ partridge. If you cared for a pet in your childhood, you most probably have enjoyed the purest form of love and kindness.

Yoruba’s penchant for abridging names shaved off the ‘A’ prefix in Afolabi, shrinking the name to Folabi. Afolabi means ‘born of wealth’. Folabi’s cage was so beautiful, I envied the bird inside it. But the cage was a house made of bars. Rattan bars. And the inmate ‘òdère kókò’, aware of the openness of its privacy, resigned itself to the safety of the man-made prison.

There’s another prison built into the cage. It is called a ‘sàbọ́n’. I don’t know the etymology of ‘sàbọ́n’, but I know that when someone’s lips inadvertently part without talking for a period of time, the impudent says, ‘close your sàbọ́n, boda to la ẹnu sílẹ̀’, eṣinṣin n bọ̀, meaning: shut your trap, brother, a fly is coming.

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The ‘òdère kókò’ in Folabi’s cage cannot access the ‘sàbọ́n’. But its presence in its own two-storey solitary confinement attracts the attention of other birds of the air. I can’t remember if Folabi’s cage ever caught a bird, but I remember his òdèré kókò being eaten up by predatory rats or mice a number of times. The safety of the cage soon became a mirage. The two-storey building was levelled into a tomb by invaders time and again.

My family later relocated from Lawanson Crescent to nearby Awoyokun Street, where my passion for pets grew after meeting an older buddy and fellow Araromi Baptist Church member, Olayeni Akingbala, aka Akinslay, who lived next street. ’Layeni and I were in different secondary schools then. But we had canaries in common. Oh, how we loved our singing ìbáakà, that’s the name Yoruba gave the canary. We made cages. We set sàbọ́ns, but we never caught a bird. I remember we had chickens, too.

Along the line, my family owned a beautiful brown dog I named Bully. I don’t know why I misnamed such a sweetheart. Bully was a crossbreed; so hairy, loving and intelligent. The way I was raised to care for pets and the intrinsic benefits thereof informed my decision to get pets for my children when they were in nursery school. So, I got an alsatian, rottweiler, boar bull and a pitbull for my children.

My childhood memories swam up from the depths of decades past when I pondered the dehumanising plight of the kidnapped pupils of a primary school in Orire, Oyo State. I shiver at what the mental health of the kids would forever be, seeing their teacher beheaded! They are probably watching their female teachers being molested by the maniacs called bandits.

I thought back on my childhood when we walked freely from Onipanu to Fadeyi, Jibowu, Yaba, then to Rowe Park at Alágoméjì, before taking a free bus to Obalende, and from there, head to Bar Beach on Victoria Island. On the way back home, we plodded through Yaba, Moṣalaṣi, Idi-Oro, Olooṣa, Muṣin, and Olorunṣogo, not because of the transport fee, but because walking the beautiful roads of Lagos was sheer pleasure. Then, kidnapping was an abstract word that only resided in the dictionary. That was in the early 80s; long before peace came under intense threat, and carried its bags and baggage on its head, tiptoeing out of the country before dawn. That was before bandits and terrorists leapt out of the Nigerian dictionary and violently delineated the nation’s socio-political and geographical space, giving unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and taking what belongs to them.

Sadly, the negotiation of national issues such as resource control, boundary delineation, and power, which Nigeria had failed to effect through constitutional amendment, has been achieved by terrorists who now control some communities in the North, where they collect taxes and exploit the mineral resources.

The greatness of a country can be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable. This is a favourite quote of a former PUNCH Editor, Ayankola Martin. This quote resonates with the way Western countries treat their aged, children, handicapped and women. It also reflects largely the love and kindness they show to animals in general. While Africa plunders the fauna, flora and aquatic ecosystem due to poverty and ignorance, the West seeks the preservation of the ecosystem in its pristine form.

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That is why one of the conditions for designating the Osun Osogbo Grove as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005 is the banning of hunting at the site. That is why you see monkeys hopping almost side by side with visitors to the site – because generations of monkeys in the grove have come to see man as harmless. Years of unhindered living within the ecosystem are why you see rabbits, squirrels, bushrats, deer, etc, in western countries, going about their business, unmindful of man. If you don’t want to go to jail, you must not kill them if they enter your house, even a snake. If a snake crawls into your compound and you cannot remove it, you call the animal control unit. Kill and go to jail!

Despite its massive woodland and forest, the balance in the western ecosystem is one of the reasons predators like snakes seldom come near residential houses, because they have enough rodents to prey on in the flora. They don’t need to come looking for food around human dwellings. The incidence of snake attacks on African homes is high because snakes’ natural habitats have been largely demolished by man, while their food has become food for man, in utter disruption of the food chain.

Mrs Adesola Ayo-Aderele is a top-notch, senior journalist renowned for her work on gender advocacy, identity, power, education and more. We both worked in PUNCH newspapers. We are Facebook friends.

A couple of days ago, I glimpsed a post on her Facebook page. The post showed a certificate which read, “Cornell University: Be it known that Pillow Stewart, having satisfied in full the requirements for the degree of Masters of Barkness Administration, has been admitted to that degree with all the rights, privileges and honours pertaining thereto in witness of this action the seal of the University and the signatures authorised by the Board of Trustees are affixed below. Given at Ithaca, New York, on the twenty-fourth day of May, in the year two thousand and twenty-six.”

Ayo-Aderele commented, “The dog owner has just bagged an MBA from Cornell, an Ivy League, and her dog, Pillow Stewart, also got his own MBA degree, considering he had attended lectures as much as the owner.”

I think MBA no pass MBA nah. Hahaha!

Commenting on the post, @OluOje Olamese wrote, “I have studied in two separate institutions in Canada; an undergrad and a postgrad, and on both occasions, I had the privilege to have graduated alongside one or two students who had depended on facility dogs throughout their academic programs. And those dogs usually get their certificates as well. Very pleasing to see.”

As I read these posts, my mind went back to the helpless Nigerian children kidnapped in Oyo State by some unhinged men. Again, I thought about my childhood, I thought about how my parents never needed to fear for me being kidnapped when I went to school.

Sadly, however, in all of this grim reality, the Nigerian political leadership, especially the Senate, is embroiled in a power tussle, while the Oyo children languish in bandits’ captivity. Without thinking of the gravity and implications of his words, the President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, alleged that the enemies of President Bola Tinubu were the ones sponsoring insecurity to discredit Nigeria’s democracy.

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Africans have plenty of sayings about slavery and servitude. Here, I bring you one of them from the Yoruba. It says, “Ti a ba ran ni ni iṣẹ́ ẹru, a fi ti ọmọ jẹ́ ẹ” – “When you’re sent on an errand meant for slaves, you should deliver the message like a freeborn.” I’m certain Akpabio did not give a thought to the statement before he uttered it. If he did, he would know that Nigeria’s insecurity is not person-specific. Rather, it is a result of years of broken promises and pacts by Nigeria’s rulers against the ruled. Or is Akpabio saying that insecurity during previous Aso Rock administrations was targeted at the helmsmen of those periods?

If Akpabio is so stony that he could not grieve with the families of the kidnapped children, Nigerians do not expect him to open his mouth and utter such unkind words. Akpabio reminds me of Folabi’s ‘sàbọ́n’, which never caught a bird.

Instead of telling Nigerians what the Senate is doing to ensure insecurity is curbed nationwide, Akpabio reduced a national tragedy to a joke, saying attacks and bombing across the country would cease once President Tinubu secures victory in the 2027 elections. Akpabio! Akpabio! Akpabio! How many times did I call you? You have failed God and humanity.

Rephrasing Akpabio’s mind in one sentence, this is what I got: “The bombings and kidnappings can continue until 2027, when the vultures will have a renewed mandate for another four years of plundering.”

While the nation burned in the furnace of banditry and terrorism, the Nigerian Senate arbitrarily increased its budgetary spending. But one of the nation’s standing beacons of hope, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), dragged the Senate to court. In a landmark judgment, courageous Justice Yelim Bogoro declared as unlawful the National Assembly’s N110 billion spending package comprising N40 billion for 465 vehicles for lawmakers and N70 billion in support allowances for newly elected members of the National Assembly. E shock you? E shock me too that elected politicians could lavish money so brazenly on themselves while many citizens cannot have one square meal a day, even as many die of diseases as common as malaria.

I daresay that the passivity of Nigerians has been exploited to the hilt by subsequent landlords of Aso Rock. If elected officials know that they would know no peace whenever the masses are neglected, efforts would be put in place to ensure the dividends of democracy do not reside only in Aso Rock and Apo Legislative Quarters.

While Akpabio flutters his wings like a chicken fished out from a magician’s hat, nuancing his theatrics for the absurd, Aso Rock maintains false confidence, emitting fake hope, while training its sights on the 2027 presidential election, just as it pretends to be solving the problem of insecurity.

But Nigeria must rescue and bring back every kidnapped child and adult. Nigerian schools must cease to be like the cage Afolabi thought was safe, but which was attacked mercilessly by invaders. Nigeria must do what Afolabi did after the initial attacks. Afolabi took his cage away from the rooftop of Ẹ̀kúnrẹ́rẹ́ De Tailor’s shop and hung it in the hallway inside the house, away from invading rats and mice. That was when Afolabi and his bird knew peace. That is when Nigeria and its citizens will know peace.

Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com

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