When it feels good to be wrong
By Olugu Olugu Orji
Friday April 06, 2012
Goodluck Jonathan
When I was much younger, I believed winning every argument was a mark of distinction. I went out of my way to amass all manner of facts and information. I devoted an inordinate amount of time researching both current and extant subject matters. All these was in a bid never to be caught napping. Not to know was a prospect I absolutely dreaded. To be wrong was utterly unimaginable.
Looking back, I can only laugh at what I can now best describe as folly. Or how else do you qualify a mere mortal laying claim to omniscience and infallibility: qualities exclusive to deity? For to pretend to be God is a mere click away from denying his very existence.
Happily, the process of time and life’s exigencies have since secured my deliverance from this slippery path to perdition. That bogus world of my youth started to unravel sometime in 1982 while studying in the then University of Ife. In that world, it was unthinkable for a woman to spurn one’s proposal.
So when I strutted off to Mozambique Hall to propose marriage to Olamide, I did not even vaguely imagine the possibility of being refused. For me, it was a question of how many days before she came swooning at my feet with the obvious response. Never mind that at that point, I was barely twenty and still had five years to spend; all things being equal.
The days of waiting soon rolled into weeks and the weeks quickly added up to months.
Still, there was no response from her. To make matters worse, to my utter bewilderment and chagrin, that there were at least three others on queue for the selfsame Olamide. Two were Yoruba and one was Ikwerre, and I had to grudgingly admit I was no match for any of them. So to save face, I crawled back to Mozambique Hall when I felt certain very few wiould notice, to tell Olamide to forget about the whole issue.
That was as much soft landing as I could muster. The crude truth, however, was that I had been generously fed the humble pie and I couldn’t even spit it out! I had finally to acknowledge that I could be turned down. I had to accept that I could be wrong: and embarrassingly so. It’s extremely hard to acknowledge we’re wrong. That’s why most usually initially plead ‘not guilty’ when confronted with their iniquities.My surviving the rigours of matrimony owes largely to the fact that I’d first learned, not only to embrace the fact of my fallibility but also to honestly say those magic words, “I am sorry,” without feeling any sense of loss. This journey of discovery was to reveal even more profound vistas. I was to discover that, sometimes, one can even look forward to being wrong. Two examples will suffice here.
I was with friends who were medical students at the prestigious University College Hospital Ibadan, when I spotted this pretty lass. A little inquiry revealed she was a student of dentistry and an officer of the Ibadan Varsity Christian Union (IVCU). The combination of beauty and brains is a clincher any day; at least for me. But to have the troika of beauty, brains and deep spirituality show up in the same person, is as rare as a blue moon.But, the two friends I considered best suited to set up a rendezvous weren’t exactly forthcoming. On this point they concurred: she was a hard nut to crack and trying to make her acquaintance was fraught with risks.
With this revelation, I immediately began developing a bias. It was, therefore, now easy to notice her annoying aloofness and every other character trait that seemed to validate my deepening prejudice. I had to painfully conclude she was a snub: and I didn’t like snubs. A few months later, I was surprised to receive an invite to Bukola’s birthday; with a request to do a special song. Now, that didn’t look like a snub to me. It turned out she wasn’t a snub or prick after all. I’d been wrong and I was glad about it.
The second instance was in the mid 80s while still studying at the University of Ife. . On one of my journeys from Ile-Ife to the East, I came across the gory site of a ghastly accident that must have happened the night before. Three vehicles, a fully loaded luxury bus, a heavily-laden articulated truck (trailer) and a 15-ton cargo truck, were involved. The scene was littered with corpses splayed out in unimaginably grotesque forms. It wasn’t surprising to learn there were no survivors.
I arrived Ohafia later that day only to learn that my in-law was involved in that accident. Ngwobia, husband to my cousin Orieji, was the driver of the 15-ton truck.
Of course, he was presumed dead and my having seen the accident scene was further confirmation of their suspicion. The challenge for the people sent to the accident scene was to identify his remains,but having spent the first two days scouring the accident scene and mortuaries of hospitals, they began to entertain the remote possibility that he may have survived. They later located him in a hospital in Benin-City. For me, it was an unforgettable experience.
What happened on Saturday, April 16, 2011 is etched indelibly in my memory. That day, Nigeria voted for who would be president come 29th May 2011. I’d left Abuja on Wednesday 13th April on a rigorous journey that was to take me through Agulu in Anambra State, Asaba in Delta State and Uromi in Edo State. Because of the polls, I had to be back in Abuja on Friday the 15th. Not having been able to register close to my residence, I had to leave the house before 7 am for my polling centre in Wuse Zone 2.
That morning, I had woken up with severe abdominal cramps and I would have been perfectly justified if I aborted that trip. Instead, I drove twenty very long kilometres to where I usually parked my car and walked another tortuous kilometre to the polling centre. It’s nearly a year since that fateful day and like they say, plenty of water has passed under the bridge. Apart from the progressively deteriorating security situation, there is this sense of lethargy and tentativeness that government’s responses always seem to exude.
Often, the president seems unsure of what path to take, and even he finally takes to a path, his feeble strides betray fear and unbelief. Some of his lieutenants may be seasoned technocrats, but that’s no reason for the president to dither and demur.. The recent subsidy removal saga provided another opportunity to do a critical assessment of President Jonathan, and by extension his administration. Sadly, the outlook isn’t pretty.
Once again, I recall April 16th 2011, and I’m beginning to wonder whether it was worth all that sacrifice. A sense of foreboding is deepening by the day. But again, I hope I’m wrong. I sincerely hope I’ll once more be proved wrong.
Orji writes from Abuja
