The Concourse
By Soney Antai, award winning columnist
Musings about life
The present is a reality, death a certainty, Life a swiftly passing possession.
They who enjoy know what they are getting.
The rest is dismissed as altogether in the air – R. A. Watson
As a boy growing up in my village and falling in love with reading newspapers, I took a liking for the column, This Life, in the Nigerian Chronicle, hosted by Etim Anim. I didn’t know who Anim was then. However, decades later, I met and interacted with him, and later sat under him as my lecturer in the University of Uyo. Anim would later become a professor of Mass Communication, but he has since passed on. Yet, I keep remembering that column, This Life. It still resonates with me, and I think his column sparked my interest in journalism.
How does one define the word, ‘life’? Ask a lexiconophilist, a medic, or lexicographer what their definition of life is, then you would realise what Babel doesn’t mean. You might also realise that we may not explain satisfactorily all that we claim to know.
For our purpose here, let’s operationally say life is all of what humans go through between when they are born and when they die. Let’s take it as experiences enclosed between an opening and closing parentheses, and the opening paragraph being birth and the closing paragraph being death.
If there is one thing that seems absolutely certain in our world, that is the opposite of life – death. To aggravate its mystique, not even a suicide knows when they die. No, you can’t refute that, and I tell you why. We go to bed readying to sleep, but we can’t say when we sleep off. That, take it or trash it, is irrefragable. But that paints a sombre picture and makes life look like a scam. But really?
If death is this certain, what are we doing here? Why were we born in the first instance? Why are we obsessed with illicit s*x, money, wealth, falsehood, betrayals, arrogance, bigotry, fame, power, food, and you name it? Perhaps we go on doing these because we are not fully conscious of what death entails.
Death means, without prejudice to what waits beyond it, that we no longer have anything to call our own – all the properties, paramours, children, jobs, cutic affiliations, money, fame, positions, etc cease to be – forever! Perhaps that is what informed Henry Longfellow’s lines: “Tell me not in mournful numbers/Life is but an empty dream.”
Perhaps the troublers of our nation need to be reminded that even if they would end up stealing all of our commonwealth, they too will die. If they like, let them ford through the blood of the masses to take power and capture for themselves and their cronies our common treasury, that won’t save them when death comes. Of course, this is true of all of us – no poverty or prosperity keeps the Grim Reaper beyond the reach of anybody.
Seeing that we are born alone and die alone, we should be concerned about our legacy. To be dead in infamy is a sad thing to happen to anybody. Worse still is to wake up on the other side to face a perfect but frightful, condemnatory, regrettable record of our dealings while on earth.
I think that by showing love for our families, friends and communities, we can live the kind of life Henry Longfellow mentioned, “Lives of true men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime/And, departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time/Footprints which perhaps another/Sailing o’er life’s solemn main/A forlorn and shipwrecked brother/Seeing, shall take heart again.”
Of Natasha & Akpabio
Those who have taken sides to insult the person of the Senate President Akpabio, and call Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan names, have not only been hasty, but have also lost sight of the fact that the sexual harassment allegation by the female federal lawmaker boils down to her words against the Senate President’s and vice versa. Besides, the Senate President as a lawyer knows the legal dictum, “nemo judex in causa sua” or “nemo debet esse iudex in propria causa” (nobody can be a judge in his own case). Presiding over Natasha’s suspension, no matter how justified that seems, goes against that basic legal principle, some have rightly wrongly argued.
Don’t tell me who is telling the truth here because I can’t say. But perhaps at the end of the day, the words of Jane Austen may win the day: “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.” Let time do its work; it is always on the side of truth#
#12.03.2025