Treading a lone path to right the wrongs and stand for commoners whose rights to basic necessities of life have long been denied and put an end to bad governance is unarguably one of the hardest decisions one could make in his/her lifetime.
Without mincing words, one of the hardest nuts to crack and the longest walk is to go against misrule and dare to go contrary to the whims and caprices that hold the tentacles of the cabals.
There has never been an easy walk to alter the status quo and all the reformists who dared to tread this path were vehemently fought by the authorities who instituted the wide gap and misgovernment to keep the masses at the perpetual position of mere objects who will also plea for their rights.
When Nelson Mandela from a small village of Mvezo in Umtata alongside other activists started the anti apartheid campaign in South Africa, it was called an impossible mission by pessimists and those gaining from the evil of apartheid regime. At a point they saw Mandela and his fellow activists as people who were wasting their time and the lives of the populace for ‘ordinary people without power’ to fight highly powerful authoritarian, white supremacists behind apartheid regime.
Mandela never gave up for being called master of failure by pessimists and white supremacists. No! He never gave up for failing repeatedly, he never gave up for being imprisoned for twenty seven years, he never gave up even with juicy promises to join the anti people’s regime, he laid bare his life and focused on how to right the wrongs even behind bars. Mandela chose an unfamiliar path and stood for truth and his people not for inordinate ambition and self aggrandizement.
When Mandela, an activist, ‘yesterday’s failure’ became the first elected president of South Africa, part of his landmark speeches that remains indelible in the heart of men who chose to tread his path has always been the part he averred that, ‘do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”
Dear Barr. Natasha Akpoti, like Nelson Mandela opines, “there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountain tops of our desires”, and to right the wrongs instituted by an instituted authority is one of the toughest struggle a reformer can venture into.
But I put to you that, those who gang up against you for falsehood and darkness to triumph over truth will soon gather in their numbers to gnash their teeth to regret their actions when your truth overtake their falsehood and put an end to the misrule they are projecting.
– Isah Bala writes from Lokoja.
