By Adewale Adeoye

 

 

Eri Okan in Yoruba means CONSCIENCE- The inner most part of mankind that tells you what is righ or wrong. Every human has it but has the capacity to detroy it.

 

CONSCIENCE is value added: It is the most truthful, honest soul in mankind. When Eri Okan is dead, humans act like beasts or like a rock: no feelings, a log of wood, no morality, no compassion, no emotion, the tear glands run dry.

 

The absence of ERI OKAN is responsible for terrorists who slash the throat of infants, slice up the womb of pregnant women, storm mosques and churches and rain bullets. Someone without Eri Okan wll kill, cook fellow human beings and eat the flesh.

 

Ironically, it is the same absence of ERI OKAN in Nigerian leaders, that is responsible for the spineless stealing of public resources, at the root of a former CBN Governor that built over 700 housing units from stolen funds. It is the lack of Eri Okan that embolden leaders to laugh and exchange banters at the burial of terror victims or drink wine as they watch the massacre of hundreds of poor Nigerians. They care not to visit thousands of people killed for them. Where a memorial was built, they order the monument be pulled down.

 

They do not even recognise soldiers who die for the county to survive. That is why Nigeria has neither memorial nor yearly remembrance for hundreds of soldiers already killed by blood sucking terrorists.

 

Lack of ERI OKAN is responsible for the rabid defence and rationalisation of evil by a section of the media and the populace. It is at the root of terrorism and banditry and even its justification or attempts to rationalise their heinous actions.

 

They tell you so what: Its happens everywhere !!!

 

When CONSCIENCE is dead, the system “brings out the beast in us” (Fela).

 

Beasts do not have ERI OKAN. A gorilla can tear up a new born baby; a lion can devour a new born baby; a cobra can swallow a pregnant woman; a goat can urinate on its body; a dog can bits and suck the blood of its owner. Some animals even eat up their own offspring.

 

Both the terrorists and Nigerian leaders have something in common: Absence of ERI OKAN.

 

The presense of ERI OKAN is what makes leaders to resign when they watch helplessy the flow of innocent blood. It is ERI OKAN that motivates leaders that go decisively after terrorists and hunt them down

 

The presence of ERI OKAN is what motivates law and order, honest and incoruptible judiciary, efficient police, the rule of law, security and prosperity in every great nation.

 

In nations that have skipped into anarchy and war: Sudan, Zaire, Iraq, Syria, the primacy cause is that those legally and financially empowered to act and stop the drift, suffer from the self imposed affliction of DEATH OF HUMAN CONSCIENCE.