I stumbled on this page of Vital Obiter Diary written a while a go and I will not want to carry sharing same with you till Next Year.

So I have decided to keep revealing the page on ‘Presido Aspirant in the Pocket of Naira Marley’ till New Year. That page has even been adjusted now in view of certain fellas calling attention to lessons society or business people can learn from the Naira Marley’s catastrophic rise to what they call A-List artist…

Here is the part of the Vital Obiter today and I am your dearly beloved Roving Public Lawyer…

‘Hey, come here.’

‘Who?’

‘Yes you…’

‘What is the matter sir?’

‘Your eyelashes…’

‘What about it?’

‘They are attached…Don’t try me o… You can’t go into the school.’

‘Please o Oga Gate, but you know you are disgracing me before my friends, shouting on me. What did I do to deserve this now?’

‘Hmmm, you are asking me? If you don’t want me to shout on you, you will not wear this Delilah’s eyelashes. Please move out of here now before I remove you… Go and remove your eyelashes… Come back and collect your lashes and then you can now enter the school you this ‘wobe’ child…’

‘Oga Gate, sorry o…I am just a Roving Public Lawyer o and I saw all that happened…But are you part of the Disciplinary Committee of the school?’

‘Do you know why the child is wearing the artificial eyelashes and do you really care to know? So the child is guilty on the face of it according to your own judgement?’

‘O ga o, Oga Gate, are there no rules and regulations in this school on how to handle erring students?’

‘Mr. Rover or what do you call yourself, please face your business o. I am facing mine here. You don’t know these children…You don’t know the children of nowadays… I know them like the back of my hand…This one is a little Jezebel.’

‘Ok o Oga Gate, hmmmm…I am not trying to obstruct your work or how you do it…While I do not know your rules here, I don’t think public disgrace is the way to deal with young people. I think, it would have been better to take her aside and report her to the principal or a superior officer, who will look into the matter professionally, according to the rules and regulations of the school… Besides, this thing about about ‘children of nowadays’ sounds like a labelling out of a regimented and biased mindset…’

‘Olorun ma je…Take who to the Principal? Somebody caught red-handed with artificial eyelashes? When I take her to the Principal, she would ask me why I am reporting the obvious.’

‘Ok o, Oga Gate, I will be on my way now…It is like your mind is made up and your ways are set…Thank you…’

‘Oga Gate, see a woman is approaching o. ‘

‘I know her…She is the mother of that Jezebel of a girl I sent home the other time.’

‘Ha! Oga Gate, this young girl is now Jezebel and Delilah rolled into one because she wore artificial eyelashes… Which part of this your ‘disciplinary’ method is restorative now? Or is the purpose of discipline to destroy or dehumanise the child or is abuse part of discipline?…Oga Gate, believe it or not, this is persecution of a soul your institution is supposed to nurture…It is worse than punishment…Even an adult, when he/she is accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty, not to talk of a child…I fear for this our nation o…:

‘Mr. Rover!!! But you said you were leaving…Leave now o or else…’

‘Good morning o, Oga Gate…My daughter returned home, saying that you sent her back home….I am here to understand why?’

‘Understand what? You don’t know why we sent her home? You mean your unruly daughter didn’t tell you why we sent her home. Madam, please don’t play on my intelligence… The reason we sent her home is written all over her woman!!!…I am not even suprised that you are here asking me obvious questions…Shio, like mother like daughter.’

‘But Oga Gate, you know you are very rude… Anyway, I want to go in and see the Principal…’

‘Which Principal? She doesn’t want to see anybody and please can you leave now?’

‘Why can’t I see the Principal? Why!!! I am going nowhere until I see the Principal…’

‘Please can you leave the gate now or I remove you…’

‘Remove who? Mewa e o to be! Remove who? O ya, if they born you well come and touch me not to mention removing me…’

‘Don’t push her! don’t push her!!! Oga Gate this is not right…You can’t be pushing a woman like this…’

‘Oga Roving Lawyer please leave me alone o…This one is not a woman… Somebody, who cannot raise her daughter well…This gate is my office and she came to meet me here. She is an intruder and I will treat her like one…’
…………………………………
‘Brother I saw you at the front of that school gate; what was the matter?’

‘My sister, it is not a small matter o. I was just a bystander o, witnessing the madness of a system…I wonder why a school, where children are to learn order cannot handle things orderly…’

‘I think they are just trying to instill discipline in the children…’

‘Discipline? But the word, ‘discipline’ comes from the Latin word, ‘disciplina,’ which means, “teaching, learning”…It is my principle that until you teach you cannot rebuke!’ Discipline is not pronouncing judgment on the child. It is inculcating the right value system in the children first by example and then by instructions…’

‘Brother, I think you are making a lot it sense o.’

‘Thank you sister…You see all these schools and even parents don’t spend time to teach…So since they don’t plan to teach, they don’t deliberately develop genuine relationship with the children under their care…’ A man, called Josh Macdowell said, ‘instructions without relationship lead to rebellion…’

‘Hmmm, my brother, I agree with you…’

‘You see children are reasoning beings and until we reason with them we lose them…They may appear to have submitted to us, they have only sucumbed. They wait for the day of emancipation.’

‘The day of emancipation? How do you mean?’

‘Yes, my sister, the day they will be free from our authority as adults. What we forget is that our authority over our children is very transient…It is for a while…Authority must not be a tool of oppression in the hands of caregivers but a tool to inculcate the right value system in their children…My sister, when authority expires, values takes over where it is deliberately inculcated but where value is not deliberately inculcated, chaos takes over…’

‘Hmmmm, brother, I have learnt a lot from this discussion o?’

‘Thank you my sister… Again what we have not accepted is that it is not easy to be a young person in this 21st Century…The distraction is just too much and we must take it easy with our children, embrace empathy, humble ourselves, come down from our high horse of entitlement mentality as caregivers, befriend and learn from our children…’

‘Learn from them?’

‘Yes o my sister…They are in their world, in which we are strangers…They need to be our tour guide in navigating us through their world…If not so, we will be lost in their world, while we think we are leading them…No matter how wrong we think our youngsters are, there is always a socialization behind every human behaviour…’

‘You know the most painful thing about this matter we are discussing? I saw a man there, who came towards the end of show of shame at the school gate recording with his phone…He will go and put it on Social Media platforms now and people will not seek to find the full story before they begin to pronounce judgment on the matter and those involved…’

‘The new jungle justice is now online…It used to be on the streets, where the mob used cane, cogel, club, cutlass, stones, used tyres and petrol to kill the victims…’ Online, the mob uses words…When the jungle justice was on the streets, the death was instant but online now, the death being dealt with words is in installments and more excruciating and painful…’

‘If I may add, my brother, and I think it is a sad thing to be tried and found guilty in the court of Social Media, where most people do not seek to hear your own side of the story…Where majority are possessed by the spirit of the mob and you know it is often said that the mob has no conscience…’

‘You are very correct…It is also sad that our youngsters are observing this indecent exchanges on Social Media…While in other climes the Social Media is being used to advance the cause of humanity, we use it here to destroy ourselves…It only depicts the quality of our minds as Third World people…’

‘I have continued to say it, my sister, when we say a nation or continent is developed, it is primarily a reference to the quality of the minds of her people…’

‘May I meet you brother, I need to invite you to my children’s school for sessions with our children, teachers and parents…’

‘It will be my pleasure dear sister…I am simply a Roving Public Lawyer…Always on the move, observing matters of human importance, particularly as they affect our youngsers and sharing my thoughts on same…’

‘Why is this BRT smoking like this self…My eyes are already red with the fumes from the exhaust…The engine seems gone and who knows when last they even serviced it sef? After a while now, we will be saying we are committed to fighting Global Warming and be speaking big English on the Depletion of the Ozone Layer…’

‘My sister, have you also noticed that all roads in this our city now leads to bad roads…Yet they call it SMART CITY…’

‘Roving Master, sorry Lawyer, SMART CITY without good roads…How SMART? Shio! All of these speak to our gross lack of maintenance culture as a people…’

‘Next bus stop wa o!’

Here is your Dearly Beloved Roving Public Lawyer, Taiwo AKINLAMI

(C) 2019 Taiwo AKINLAMI
234-8033620843