Separating The Curse And the Effect -By Kehinde Oluwatosin Babatunde

Kehinde Oluwatosin Babatunde

After failing my final paper as a wannabe professional accountant for the third time, not only did my cloud of sympathizers doubled but also the proposition of solutions for my umpteenth failure ranged from the inconceivable to the unimaginable.

There were some who wager that I was not expressing myself well enough , probably I was not writing the right tenses to attract the appropriate mark, such inappropriate attempt at empathy often reminds me that the demise of the elephant often allows a gathering together of different shapes and sizes of knives to frolic on its collapse carcass.

Of all the empathic tidings rendered to me, of note was those who told me “Tunde this your continuous failing of case study kò kin sé Ojú lásán o, go for deliverance.” Every time my culture describes an event as meeting more than the eye then we are in the arena of the metaphysical and the transcendental, solution of which defies the logical. I went for my fourth attempt at the paper and I passed, I did not go for deliverance.

Given my culture’s affinity for the spiritual and the mythical, she often ignores the logical. While I’m a strong adherent of the biblical snippet of the weapons of our warfare not been carnal, our resolve to often reduce all negative eventuality to the mythical sometimes is a disservice to the devil himself ,for the devil could have killed me rather than make me fail an exam whose purpose isn’t eternal.

Those who popularized the belief that a life in God is one without risk have also altered our psyche and created in us an utopian perception of the world. This utopian perception of the world not only renders us lazy, it makes us pseudo-believers who only associate with faith, having the expectation of the good only.

Non of my empathizers mentioned the place of timing as a reason for my delayed success. Our cultural attempt at associating cause and effect often makes us associate the results we get to a wrong cause, and in that we miss the real cause.

A popular instance in folklore is what my culture describes as Èkùn n bímo ( The Tiger is giving birth) ,an event my culture alludes to, anytime it’s raining and there is sunshine ( Sun-shower). Ironically no one has taken me to where the Tiger is giving birth ,yet we refused to talk about the real cause that sun shower is usually the result of accompanying winds associated with a rain storm sometimes miles away, blowing the airborne raindrops into an area where there are no clouds, therefore causing a sun shower.

Over the past five years there has been mindless killings in the north and the dislocation of farmers in the middle belt from their farm lands. Do not forget that the north and the middle belt is the nation’s food basket, in five years to come, the nation might experience an unprecedented level of hunger and famine, but our poor reading of cause and effect will make us attach such scarcity and famine to the mythical or probably the anger of God, yet we forget the real reason, that farmers have stopped producing in the wake of the insurgency in the north . May be it’s time we understand that causation is not always correlation.

Kehinde Oluwatosin Babatunde is a prolific writer and public speaker based in Lagos Nigeria.

Email : Kehindeobabatunde@gmail.com