THE DANGER OF PUT TRUSTH ON ARTICIAN HAS FAILED .

When our house was under construction, our iron rod supplier- Alhaji Mukhtar (owner of MT Ventures Limited at Monatan) invited me to his office one day and humbly asked to know the type of house we were building. I described the duplex the best way I could. The wise man responded: “if your project is not bigger than that, the iron rods you’ve bought from us is enough to complete it. If your workers keep demanding for more iron, something must be amiss somewhere. Please check them very carefully.“

Anyone who knows MT knows that he’s a man of very few word. That counsel hit me like a thunderbolt.

At first, I met it with denial- ‘my workers couldn’t have been so merciless, I thought!

Then, I felt so stupid and careless at my ignorance. I should have known that my input into that project had exceeded the output by far.

Next, I became furious when I did a quick mental calculation of the tonnes of iron rod I had shipped to the site since the project started.

After that, I became confounded and awestruck with the honesty of this Mukhtar man. How could a person give away the opportunity to continue making sales just like that? Was it any of his business to monitor iron rods consumption in a customer’s site?

Finally, I scooped myself together and called my architect to inform him. He became worried too. We strategized on how to arrest the situation. I also decided to harass the foremen of each of the work teams on site in order to set panic among them and possibly push the thief to mistakenly give himself out.

I prayed much too. It is only those people under God’s anger, who would labor for others to eat.

Meanwhile our former iron bender (who had been sacked earlier) called me about the same time to ‘tip me off’ that some of his boys saw the new iron bender leaving the site in a vehicle loaded with iron rods.

Voila, the prayers were working!

I didn’t expect him to have gotten wind of the latest development, and I confirmed he didn’t. So, I relaxed with him to encourage the flow of information. I ordered the delivery of the last consignment of rods and simultaneously mounted more pressure on the new bender. He in turn went into marathon prayers and finally felt an urge to go to the site very early one morning with his boys to lay ambush. No thief came!

However as the day broke, they noticed some marks made by 16mm iron rods on the road. The marks led them along a bush path which they followed forensically. Suddenly a taxi emerged from the bush with a load of iron rods neatly cut into 8ft lengths. The workers pounced on the taxi driver and the passenger who hired him and beat them blue black. From their confessions, we learnt that my former bender contracted the taxi passenger, who is a thief, to come steal iron rods from the site in order to implicate the new bender. The thief came in the night with the taxi driver, moved the rods into the bush where they were cut into sizes a lift-back taxi could carry, sells them at the black market and split the proceeds with the former bender. That continued for a long time.
We called in the police promptly.

I’ll divide this story into two parts in other not to bore my readers. However before rounding off this part, I’ll like to draw our attention to GOD’s sovereignty in sending help to people when in need, even if one doesn’t know that he’s in need. Often, someone somewhere somehow will step in to help. In spite of the fear in the hearts of men, this world has not come to an end because someone is in trouble. This is the confidence I have over Nigeria’s situation.

I want to point out that Mr Mukhtar was recommended to me by my mentor Uncle Victor Odunjo . Some months before the incidence I related above, I had made a deposit for some iron rods before embarking on a trip. The rods were supplied while I was away. When I arrived, Mukhtar called to inform me that the price of iron had dropped withthe new consignment from which I was supplied, so I should come over to either collect the excess money or choose to use it for purchase. That’s the type of impeccable character and massive integrity that man has.

All my readers should understand that Mukhtar is a very strict Muslim- the type some people call tebliq. He hears me pray in Jesus’ Name and sees insignia of Christianity all over my car, my family and my person. He has the opportunity to discriminate against me in many ways, he chooses never to. I discovered that his children schooled at Bowen University. His amiable and dutiful wife always drapes her head with a veil. His sense of humanity and religious tolerance supersedes the traditional hostility taught by so many heartless religious leaders nowadays.

In my short life, I’ve learnt vital lessons about the divinity of love and possibility of good neighborliness and tolerance. Those of us whose only faith messages are unrestrained hostility and hate mongering should allow the love and peace of GOD to settle in our hearts biko.

An eye for an eye will sooner leave entire world totally blind.

Beyond the endless social media rants, there are so many good people in Nigeria. Some of my readers would know Bovas Petroleum stations whose owner decided not to increase fuel price during those periods of fuel scarcity. That woman’s singular integrity and act of forthrightness is the reason many taxi drivers remained in business during those harrowing period. Mama Bovas is a strong Christian while most taxi drivers in Ibadan are Muslims. Those who ripped people off that time have not built skyscrapers now. The monies they made from taking advantage of us must have been spent. They were excited at the opportunity to defraud helpless motorists, yet their lives are probably still as static.

Our differences are deliberately exaggerated just to exploit us and ruin our peace. We are set at each other’s jugular over trifles while our common enemies cart our commonwealth away. In their covens, they consider no religion. The common thread that binds them together is the relentless lust to steal Nigeria blind.

So many types of pontifical attitudes are on display here. Finger-pointing and critical writing attracts popular acclaim, ever if they leave us worse and more frazzled than we were before reading them. We should be careful what we feed our souls with.
The main reason for this story will come up in part two.