William Eleje-Abili, reflects on work after retirement
The Book of Numbers records that a certain man named Uriah was a mature man but King David awoke from off-side of his bed feeling macho and ready to do something odd. It got so sado-macho and odd in the even when war was going on, such that it would appear that the King spelled the letters of Uriah’s name tele-guiding him to his un-timely death in the front. A king is a man of letters, of authority to cause action, a power of attorney.
Letters represent affectionate love, loathsome hate, or scholarly report. They sometime require masterful observance of courtesy. Letters are alphabets of named character in transfiguration or man-hunt. They lend themselves to improvisation of explosives. Letters are newspapers written from the holy gods to humanity. If you’re free-lancing, note that the Lance is a Corporal, you are a freedom fighter of some sort and must be corporate elite to be credible. Don’t appear abruptly from the wilderness unless you’ve got a loud voice. Start from the beer-palour or any-place you can engage a constituency in whose interest your positions are constituted or fascinated by your ideas. But here I was on television, not watching my tone or body-language talking about Dictionary in a language am not known to speak, looking like what is known in local parlance as ‘Ijekebee-Ehugbo’.
Let me also use this opportunity to apologise to society for my write-ups on affairs of state. The exacting requirement of newspaper article for brevity, left a lot of issues requiring fuller consideration. My articles on state and governance were imaginative flashes of wishful thinking. It is good for one to know himself, someone like me has no business in politics, I don’t have to do anything to make enemy but cannot keep a friend, though I go the extra mile, what is doing me is name-calling, people live life thought after but mine was as an after-thought…
A few months back, I released a series of articles in an in-house plat-form under the caption ‘Ode of A Speaking Ass’. The series treated capital matters in soft-sell terms, telling simple truths like ‘the governor’s vote is for security but protection is of God’. The Ode were supposed to be a parody of a certain Dumb-Ass and the Rider, conceived like church-bells, drawing attention to my SPIED, Scriptural Paraphrases and Illustrations in Ehugbo Dialect. SPIED represented the intercourse of the Resurrected-JAH with HIS Church, a satire of mad-man and madam, defined by protestation of the testes to Cupid the mother of harlots, accustomed to excise duty, utter obscenity, portraying the church as a body of organs, one of which is the scrotum being a sex-god, a type of Christ, the head of the figure and assizes of my calling. I was carried away by divine inspiration and people read meaning into things…
The problem with Journalism is that the Journalist must not be seen or heard except as represented, making it difficult at times for people to tell when it is no longer him, such that they begin to judge him rather than his work. He’s supposed to go on tinted vehicles and be clean but cannot lean on his appeal to morning jurisprudence, he cannot say everybody’s mind, he’s not a prisoner of his conscience but of his image. I should have known these things, but returned to the world an illiterate and though born again could not pass test of life-lesson on time. In many respects, I was like an over-grown baby known in Ehugbo as Ezenze Uroturo, a precocious elder, delinquent in exposure but somewhat experienced. Till tomorrow, I don’t know how to take plaque, if it is with my left or right. I spent a good deal of my talent, energy and resources on ideas that the time has not come or are no longer current, doing things analogue…
I’m the type that if I see someone doing something I can’t handle I allow them if only I can guide, but was never in a position to do so. I retired without knowing it, when I began to look down on people living in Lagos. I dodged all those after-work-life training because I knew they’d only confirm my fears. My brain got too lazy to sleep until too lazy to work, leaving me awake all night only to have nothing to do with my heart before noon, other than time to spend until my money got counted for days without number for I was not keeping dates as Calendar of a know-how to go out for income, the difference of left from right and the bottom-line of thought. But just when I began to get ready to sleep and work, I officially resigned. I will like to forget my work-life, it was not in alignment with my name, did not balance my number and I never banked on it. But it is not with gleeful delight for I do not know any other means of livelihood. I opened a corporate-account and left it to happenstance but did not enjoy due course of seasonal weather. I remained on a particular grade level for 13 years on rising cost of living, selling my investments in real estate. I now have to return to my homeland without income…
Eleje-Abili writes from Lagos
