…SAMUEL UFOT EKEKERE…
I will hark back to several years ago when pipe born water was a novelty. For us who grew up in the countryside, we had to make do with the flowing streams about two kilometers away from our homes. For the luckier city chaps like me, getting water was a game. We had to search the neighborhood for a lucky host, the only person who had a Well. This was often distance away but we managed to make it fun walking as a crowd with all the children and our pet dogs. We considered the owner of the well a god and we had to beg sometimes to have this benefit offered us. The community gathered at the Well once it was open for use and as it only had one “fetching bucket,” we had to wait for turn to use it.
While this present dispensation has provided us much comfort, with water now flowing in the comfort of our homes, I vividly remember the many times we had to get through tussles. Fist flying was common, and women, for they were the bulk of matured fetchers, would raise hands against themselves for whose turn it was to fetch from the Well. My friends and I loved those scenes as we would chuckle over to a distance from them and mock at how easy one person was being licked. These days, such fights are considered crude in a world where tussles are no longer characterized by strength but by wits.
Like the well in our community, we have open opportunities where everyone has equal chance to tap. The challenge has been that some persons make claims to what should be everyone’s. They seize the resources for themselves
In the well of life are unending opportunities enough for everyone to draw from. These opportunities are like reservoirs where you can remove from without it ever finishing. When you have had enough from the well, allow some other person chance to it too. Live and let live. Do not be a barrier to some other person’s joy when you have had more than your normal share.
It is not unheard of, stories of persons who have sabotaged resources meant for the overall good of citizens of a community, state, or country. These persons make profit of what should be general use by virtue of their position. They claim right to the Well and refuse to obey set down orders and rules guiding its use, breaking the process they should be part. They raise their shoulders in pride not knowing that close by, trouble lurks.
The many revolutions the world over were movements cause by the abuse of opportunity. I reckon with Abraham Lincoln in his sober letters to his son’s teacher that “bullies are easiest to lick.” Some persons at the Well saw it as their birthright often breaking line protocols and seizing the “fetching bucket” from its present user for their own use. Some persons became tired of seeing such and decided they would stamp their feet and stop it. It was often a bullfight that ended in favor of the down trodden.
Recent acts across the middle east and now finding its way into eastern Europe are testaments to the fact that if one chooses to drink from the well meant for everyone all alone, it is only a matter of time before he loses chance to drink from the well altogether. If you have the chance to see Mummuar Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein in hell, you can ask them.
All over the nation, youths are craving for some change. They are gradually losing hope of getting an opportunity to visit the Well less having to drink from it. While our “ogas at the top” are posing over the Well meant for everyone including themselves, they should remember that hearts are breaking. Soon, hearts will choose not to break, they will join ranks and be the propellants for the change that we so much need. They would say, it is our turn to drink.