Taking Care of Tomorrow 

Taking Care of Tomorrow 

 The serpent understood human nature more than most. Many men learned human nature from the serpent.
 A lady once told me her "sugar daddy" advised her to pretend to be a gentle and submissive woman until she got married to any man of her choice and then she could display her true character. She said it was good counsel, she tried to implement it several times but somewhere along the line her true character would be revealed under a bit of stress and the man she was with at the time would take to his heels. If a good man comes to ask for the hands of a lady in marriage dressed like a pauper and speaking like a tout he most likely will leave the lady's family house empty-handed. If a serial killer comes to ask for the hands of the same lady in marriage dressed like a gentleman and speaking like a gentleman, he most likely will be the one to marry one.
 We trust too much in sight and place too much emphasis on words and feelings. The last four years have been tough for the whole world because some people chose feelings over common sense.

During the Trump years, we had effigies of Trump displayed in the UK and other countries, we had people calling him  "The Orange Menace"  and   "The Twitter Warrior". Many disliked him for not being diplomatic, statesmanlike, and well-put-together, they preferred an orator like Obama, a man full of platitudes. They preferred a Clinton, a man who could work a room into a frenzy, he was too rough on the edges, he was too masculine, and behaved like a typical cab driver. The man Trump, not the Uber or other modern-day driver who would pay attention to ratings and the good comments of his passengers, was more like the typical Nigerian bus driver who would throw a fit of words and curses with a hoarse voice and a gut full of the stench of alcohol, the epic picture of what parents tell their children never to become in the future. Does it matter that he didn't start any new wars and stopped all the existing ones during his reign? Does it matter that Israel and Palestine sheathed their swords during his reign? Does it matter that he didn't mind being disliked and hated for the sake of the goals he set for himself which he achieved without fail? Does it matter that his results were so good, the opposition had to engineer a pandemic towards the 2020 election so that they could rig the numbers and get him out of office? He ruled for four years, in those years, the opposition wasted billions on investigations like the Russian hoax, Impeachments over nothing of note, trump-up charges, and all sorts of meltdowns. As soon as he stepped out of that Oval Office, the opposition wasted no time in engineering three new wars.  The soft-spoken, well-dressed ones who sold words in exchange for the lives and destinies of young men and women sent to war fronts while they raked in billions of dollars from defense contractors, Big Pharma, and other lobbyists, inflation under Trump was at 1.8 percent, inflation under Biden was at 4 percent. The cost of everything is up, America sent money to Iran and Iran is using the money to prosecute a war on Israel through Hezbollah and Hamas. America keeps pumping money into Ukraine to keep the war against Russia going. The current administration understood that war means a lot of money being spent that no one needed to account for. Imagine the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the war machines left behind by the American troops because they could simply order new ones and print more money to procure them. The smooth talkers have bled the American people financially, morally and in some cases taken the lives of the very people who voted for them on war fronts while Trump did everything to protect these lives. Many would rather be persuaded by words rather than by deeds, the memories of many are so short that they couldn't even compare the last four years to the previous four years under Trump so that they can come to the right conclusion.

 When I was in Ghana, I met a man who had applied for an American Visa to be with his wife who lived there and had to wait for fifteen years to get his papers, he approached me at age fifty-five to ask me if it was worth it to leave everything behind and start afresh in a foreign land. If you apply for a USA visa from anywhere in the world, you will most likely face at least a 200-day waiting period to get a visa interview, then you turn on the TV and see immigrants pouring in through the borders and wonder what is going on. What about the question of "Who is running America right now?" Is it AI? Will I wake up one day in the near future to the headline "How AI governed America with Joe Biden as a front?" I am not a politician, I am not eligible to vote in the American election I might have gotten my opinions tangled together somewhere and there might be other reasons why people chose to support one party and not the other. Voting should be done with the desire for better governance and not sentiment, I may not like you but if you will give me the best value for money I will patronize you, that is the right business sense.

When I was an undergraduate, we were invited to participate in a competition against other Universities. The lady who was chosen to be the captain of our University team was not very bright but she was chosen by the Student Affairs Officer because she was quite beautiful. I thought she was just a figurehead and would do us no harm until we got to the finals of the competition and the figurehead insisted she would be the one to present our closing argument. We had three skillful debaters on the team, they had all done excellently well, this lady had never done a debate before in her life, she was in school for summer classes because she failed woefully the previous session and needed to retake some classes so that she could salvage her CGPA. We were all on holiday when the Student Affairs Department reached out to us inviting us to return to campus so that we could participate in the competition. We were all guys and the Student Affairs department decided we needed gender balance this was how this lady and two other ladies were picked to join us on that journey. Naming her the captain of the team was just a formality, Well... She waited until we got to the final to insist she wanted the limelight, we argued and protested but she stood her ground The Student Affairs Officer backed her he said she was the captain of the team and as such had the final say on who does what. The minister for Youth and Women affairs was seated and so were other dignitaries. The other School, a state University represented by its law department presented a meticulous case and their closing argument was delivered succinctly. When it was our turn, the lady froze right under the limelight! We lost the competition in the most ridiculous manner even our opposition team felt sorry for us It really took the sting out of the whole competition. The Honourable minister had to invite me to his office to hand me a personal award and take a picture with me, he had followed the competition keenly and was shocked to see the lady doing the closing argument instead of one of the debaters from our school. He understood right there that sentiment had been given the throne at the expense of competence. I learnt a lesson from that experience which has stayed with me till now. I look at the result, not the empty talk.
PS: If you are reading this, know that I am just an observer from afar I didn't write to provoke an argument or stroke anybody's ego. I understand the nature of politics and the fact that once most of us have made up our minds about something, we usually find it difficult to just change our stance. I am not an American I know most Americans like Nigerians would rather prefer a quick fix to issues than a comprehensive overhaul of a broken system, who has the time or the patience to suffer through change when we can just let things go on as they used to be and leave the problem for the coming generations? Hezekiah happily chose to leave the problems to the coming generation, why do we insist on tackling them? Isn't tomorrow supposed to take care of itself? 
-GSW-