It does not have to be the most excruciating in the gory history of human adversity, whatever hits a nation so hard that a collection of condolences queue up at her psycho-spiritual door step unfortunately qualifies as the wickedest, and entitles citizens the philosophical instinct of profiting from the promising pains of such huge tragedy.

Sunday, 23rd October, 2005 roamed in my mental Rome, some inexplicable chemistry of tragic tragedy. Like every other gone Sunday, I planned to spend two extra hours in bed; my traditional way of making up for the solitude offered it on week days. That sweet experience in the Slumber Island was halted by the entrenched desire to keep the appointment I long booked with Jesus at the fine venue my spirit elected to meet him that day.

The purpose of that appointment is never to file an application for heaven's visa, it is to fortify our earth with those moral, kind and visionary principles and actions which make heaven an enviable place even spiritual and political rogues who devoutedly destroy our earth always wish to go; to spiritually yoke and laias with Christ to deploy all the power in his arsenal to fortify reliably sane and morally humane men and women in all parts of the world in readiness for the deadly battle between devil's timeless bellegerency that hourly hopes for the life of our survival and peace, and our desirable dream of bliss, not only within the Chritiandom, but also throughout the collective kingdom of our precious humanity.

This is because, the tasking sacrifices involved in the gradual building of a happy humanity constitutes the most affordable premium chargeable in the assurance and the insurance of all peoples, groups, interests, sects, ideologies and countries. No matter how holy any sect is,or claims to be,doom shall be the consistent end of any spiritual adventure aimed at individual or denominational fulfillment; irrespective of their resources, power and influence, disaster must mark the might and muscles of countries which derail themselves from the pursuits of earth's oneness.

With this samaformistic injunction permeating my social perceptions and forming my spiritual vision, I rolled my reluctant body out of my elevated pallet in normal preaparation for the church that Sunday morning. The first person I saw after opening my door was one of my nice friends' mothers, my neighbour, who, expecting that I would have learnt about the late Mrs Stella Obasanjo's death and the BellView plane threnody as our tenement's CNN, announced the news before offering my disappointing ignorance an invitation to corroborate or refute her view on the tragedy at hand.

Almost instantly,the departing body weariness in me styled itself into an unwarry worry. As if my body had operated on some password in the past, I felt logged off from the network of fun and happiness, feeling blank in my all like a medical customer just surgically relieved of astrocytoma or primitive neuro-ectoderma tumour,in the theartre. I became strongly weak and sought for ways of wishing this perturbing news away. In the end,the truth it was, that the first lady and a group of one hundred and seveteen Nigerians on board a BellView air craft had been taken away by death!

In any death involving a loved one, the memory of the spent past lactates into an ample pain and becomes the bedrock of a rumpled heart; batters dreams and organises miscariages in the protuberant womb of aspirations' hope. Who today fills Stella's mightily tasking space as the most active first lady in our ranbunctious socio-political history? Who occupies the life and office of a matrimony and nation she had existed to favour and disfavour? What is her husband's, friends' and family's state of mind now? This was the wickedest weekend of death for Nigeria!

At the BellView tragedy scene,human somatics and germinals in vital organs went on seccession, unstoppable by the structurally sick, death-happy, big, gas-guzzling electro-mechanical monster that duped our weak Aviation Industry with the status of a plane, as soon as silly death knelled explosion. The hot splash skyrocketted straight into the earth and the blood-soaked smokes piped out stinkingly with horrible shock and sordid gore, further masacring the badly killed Nigerians; sacrificing their flesh onto trees and irrigating the sanguinary site with our citizens' blood. Oh, this was Nigeria's wickedest weekend of death!

There is no shield against tragedy I know, but man must only hope to lose to Providence in effective and accurate execution of his duties even if he must die. The lavatorial policies of our Aviation Industry must be altered to tighten up the numerous loopholes which had cost us series of losses in the past. If all Air Lines, Air Travels and Air Ways are regulated or even forced to operae on the canon of quality, Nigerians will savely die if that means has been predetermined as their exit route into everlasting oblivion. Air crash may occur again, but let it not be assisted by our own laxity.

Men are made to live and die it is true,but tragedy becomes doubly tragic when with human doing and undoing, hidden maps to the bearing of safety,they give out to misforune. Uplift the poor standard of our hospitals before banning all Nigerians from going for foreign medical care of any form {and I do not think it promotes the needed state of New Humanity, banning foreigners' goods and services from penetraring our shores. Just do things the right way, and Nigeria too will be sought after in all aspects of life}.

It adds some shame to the loss we now live with that the first lady of the greatest African country was murdered by the saving surgery of an exotic surgeon. Do this for us, our President, for loss is better than shame!

While I so much feel for President Obasanjo and thousands of those on whom the incidence of the last plane crash victims may eternally lie, I invite you all to take some lesson from, "LEGACY", a poem I wrote three months ago:

" Every coming moment
Is the next for mortals' death
We control in our conducts
The marrows of morrow's mood
What we do today
Dictates what coming
Say of us tomorrow
Dubiously honoured graves are
Glories their owners refused to dress
For comforts beyond
Disparaged deeds must be
Mortals whose effecient facilities
Offered others to rancour
Legacy is the self sacrificed for love."

greatmankind@hotmail.com

© November 2005 By Olawale Oyewumi
Afromerica staff writer

Brother Olawale Oyewumi will be keeping the Black community updated on Education And General World Development. Visit regularly for new information that could help you overcome and make the best of your everyday experiences.

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