My open letter to my friends -By Abdullahi O. Haruna

Like great Charles Darwin once opined ” I am a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect…I have no great quickness of apprehension …my power to follow a long and purely abstract rain of thought is very limited.”

Hiding under the confession of a superior product of thought, I stoop low to toe the line of modesty and confess that I am but a struggling baby bird on his pioneer flight. Do not judge me by the prejudice of your thoughts but by the content of my submissions.

In school, I was an average student confronted with the stifling bite of passing exams. I can’t categorically say I am intelligent, my luck perhaps is that I always find myself amongst the colony of intelligent people.

This open epistle is not to denigrate myself but to prick the conscience of those friends who are always slighted by the audacity of my thoughts. I don’t exist to grandstand but to sharpen my intellectual capacity. I don’t hate people but I hate their actions that conspired to infringe on the collective principle of fairness and equity.

You may mistake my post as affront, no there aren’t. I rarely identify with my posts at a personal level, what I do is to euphemize an event and make it an interesting poser. Little wonder you see flood of comments on my posts. So when I see people hitting their heads unnecessary over my innocuous posts I laugh and giggled at their intolerance.

I don’t see myself as a product of any region-that is like limiting myself to the dictate of men. I am a fortress of human race; in me, you find the domain of a global existence. I sail boundlessly like the sea and provide many tiny streams with sustenance. Everywhere is home and home is everywhere!

I abhor religious identity like I would despise a snake. I am a product of spiritualism and not a mask bearer of religious fanaticism. My submission is to the celestial being and not mortal warriors.

So what will it benefit me were my village man to be in power? Other than the deafening noise that will accompany his trip to my village nothing else will come my way. I am a witness to the lifestyle of my brethren who had stint at the top echelon of power. Lamentably the only benefit -evident that we see was the humming of generator in the thick of the night while the other villagers make do with the deafening noise. He was the only that used a power plant!

As for my stance on issues, I have no apology because I am not in this as a temporary stakeholder but an apprentice in the voyage to mastery of my calling. I’m determined to be a master one-day in this chosen field of organized and critical reasoning. My intense connection and desire shall sustain my pain of the process; my mitigated self-doubts, my tedious hours of learning, the inevitable setbacks and the endless barbs from the envious cannot deter my resolve.

For those who question and query my audacity, please refrain from that as the calabash cannot be suppressed under the water. I am not in contest with anyone, I maintain my territorial space as I strive to gain altitude and sustain my flight in the galaxy of stars.
Again, I beg for your understanding and tolerance. My posts aren’t meant to ruffle feathers but mould thoughts. I learn to be educated and reeducated.

Friends aren’t meant to be confrontational. Whisper to me of my smelly mouth rather than telling the world to tell me. The old-age principle of friendship is that “Dogs don’t eat dogs”, any deviation from that alters the bond of camaraderie.

Dear friends, feel free to puncture my reasoning, stand gallant to demystify my thoughts and be bold to take my submissions to the cleaners but dare not to attack my personality, only through that will the ghetto beast in me manifest.

I respect and value with cultivated sincerity every friend on my list, I shall continue to learn new things, get corrected and improve on my voyage to mastery. Let’s continue to engage our thoughts and provide think tank that can be used to solve the many problems of our society. We can do it, we have the number and the intellectual majority to revolutionize our thoughts.

What a glorious and eventful year it has been; lets do it again in the New Year if God permits.

*Abdullahi O Haruna Haruspice is a poet, writer and publisher of the World Entourage Magazine