The Forest, The Trees And The Axes -By Ambi Moses

There is an old East Asian proverb that goes as thus: The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.

There is also an ancient fable from Aesop (6th century BC) that explains this proverb succinctly and I think its message is quite profound. I believe in many ways it potrays the reality of the African people in general and Nigerians in particular.

“A man came into a forest and asked the trees to provide him a handle for his axe. The Trees consented to his request and gave him a young ash-tree. No sooner had the man fitted a new handle to his axe from it, than he began to use it and quickly felled with his strokes the noblest giants of the forest. An old oak, lamenting when too late the destruction of his companions, said to a neighboring cedar, ‘The first step has lost us all. If we had not given up the rights of the ash, we might yet have retained our own privileges and have stood for ages.’

This fable reminds me of the story of a shepherd who lovingly raised his sheep for years, taking care that the wolves don’t get to them, and in the end slaughtered them himself.

These stories are not exclusively related to politics alone, they apply to any situation where minds are caught in vicious cycles.

Whether the forest was kind, foolish or naive is an issue I have no interest in discussing here but in the following pages. However, one thing is clear, all three attributes cost the trees.

But there is a new reality to this proverb which i’d like to point out: The forest kept shrinking but the tree kept blaming the axe forgetting it is made of wood and that REALLY makes it one of them.

Therefore, the forest can only stop shrinking when the trees produce loyal and trustworthy axes! The funny thing is that now that the axe has been empowered by the wood, it went further to say that any tree that refuses to bear good fruits in God’s name must be cut down.

Without the forest there can be no trees, and without trees there can be no axes and without axes, the issues of betrayal wouldn’t have sprung. The equation is simple: The man from that fable is the European, The forest is the country, the trees are the citizens and the axe is the government. The big question here is which comes first? The trees or the axe? It would be nice if both the axe and the trees understood that without the tree, the axe would not exist.

In Nigeria, when the trees began to suspect the axe was responsible for the shrinking forest, the chainsaw came and was also clever and convinced the trees that because it was mechanical and that the handle was plastic, the chainsaw was nothing like the axe. And so at the end, the forest was left with no option than to vote for either the axe or the chainsaw. That was where the real confusion began.
This illustration is the perfect way to explain the brainwashing of the Masses. It is a simple way to explain why people vote for the wrong people in many countries including mine. The aim of this work is to make trees become wiser.

When the axe came into the Forest, the trees said “The handle is one of us”. The axe conviced the trees because it told them what they wanted to hear. And as for the trees, they were not smart!