By Victor Ehikhamenor 234next.com
.EXCUSE ME: My mother, information management czar
When I was growing up, my mother took me through some gruelling training in public behaviour and information management. I doubt if CIA, NSA, FBI, KGB or SSS operatives go through the kind of exercises my mother designed for me. Some of the poignant ones came to mind after I read WikiLeaks’ public laundering of the US envoy’s private conversations with my dear President Jonathan in the Yar’Adua dark days.
Growing up in the village, there were unwritten manuals on how to navigate the high wires of surviving a tough terrain. My mother started early on me because I was a bit exuberant and quick to trust people. She knew she needed a strong arm to manage me, so she would tell me to curb my enthusiasm whenever strangers were around. She focused on keeping secrets mainly because many embattled couples came around to my father to resolve their differences and at a young age I was privy t o all sorts of adult crises....
She also embarked on training me to read her unspoken language in public, like grunts, eye movements or outright rough handling. Many times when I failed, she would be left with no other option than to resort to her beautiful black hands. My mother’s hands were elastic in dishing out some Guantanamo Bay spanking, no matter how fast I tried to run from my crime scene.
As kids, when some aunties would come from the city with Cabin Biscuits and Goodie Goodie during Christmas, I’d get carried away by misguided excitement, knocking off tumblers and China. I’d forget myself and run my mouth without sifting the kind of information I wasn’t suppose to release. I’d also think my mother was in the same euphoric state at seeing my city aunties. When my excesses got too many, she would excuse herself from the visitor and arrest the situation by delivering justice faster than a Balogun market mob on a thief. In all fairness to her, she would have sent out all the warning signs like a few grunts, two seconds silence in the middle of her conversation, one minute stare without a blink, shuffling of her right foot on the floor, knuckle crackling, go-get-me-a-cup-of-water even if she had just drank the entire River Niger - warnings which I’d ignore because when the gods want to kill a dog, they inflict it with deafening insanity.
Seriously, nothing irked my mother more than you endangering the family with your basket mouth in the midst of strangers. A stranger by this definition was anybody other than my father, grandmother and four other siblings; these were the only people that got my mother’s high level security clearance. This meant if anything bothered us the children, we were to tell her or my father. She must not hear about it elsewhere or she would not spare her elastic hand.
For instance, I was ten years old when my brother got the elusive visa and admission to go and study in America and I couldn’t go screaming down our street telling all my friends that my brother will soon go to the white man’s land and start sending me toys and cool T-shirts and jeans. Do you know what it takes to contain such excitement for a ten-year-old? O my belly was on fire! And even later on when I could talk about my brother in America to neighbours, I was not to blab about every detail I read in his letters home. As my mother would say, you never know who would misuse information they receive – listen more and talk less. You could say she ran an air tight Costa Nostra, with her eyes and ears everywhere in the village and other places we her children went. So we never broke her rules.
And during those strenuous training sessions, which were so many, I couldn’t honestly tell you it was fun at all, but she balanced her stringencies with supersize love. She would buy me the coolest gifts, including an unforgettable silk bow tie and a blue velvet suit that I wore on my 11th birthday. So you can say my mother believed wholeheartedly in Hebrews 12:11 “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”
The reason why I have gone into all this history about my mother’s training style (which by the way if she were to read now, she would give me one of her long looks of “did you not learn anything”?) is WikiLeaks’ revelation about President Jonathan. The information is not damning as such, it only shows a meek political lamb in a land filled with heartless hungry lions. Only if he knew that my mother would have considered Sanders a “stranger” and telling her his most kept secrets, what he would’nt tell us ordinary citizens, was like taking a leak in a public toilet built of glass. So to my good friend, President Jonathan, I would say, next time please bridle your tongue even in your innermost sanctuary because you never know when that innocent looking visitor would put uzonta in your mouth for ulterior motives.
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