Not All Israel Is Israel (Romans 9:6)

 

Not All Israel Is Israel (Romans 9:6)

The Question We Dare Not Ask

Could modern Israel be part of an end-times deception?

A provocative reflection on Revelation 16, Armageddon, Romans 9:6 and the meaning of Israel.

Overheard in a Molue

I’ve been thinking…

Could the emergence of Israel as a nation in 1948 be one of the greatest “false signs and wonders” of modern times?

Could the Israel we see today be a false Israel, raised up as part of an end-times deception to mislead many?

It is a provocative theological question, certainly, but one I think is worth exploring carefully.

As I’ve repeatedly argued, the Antichrist does not merely oppose Christ. He seeks to replace Christ, to receive the worship due to Christ and, ultimately, to deceive people into believing that he is Christ, or that what comes from him comes from God.

If that is the nature of the deception, then perhaps the most powerful false sign would not look obviously evil at all.

Perhaps it would look biblical.

Perhaps it would appear to fulfil prophecy.

Perhaps it would be convincing precisely because believers desperately want to believe it is from God.

That is the theological concept I want to explore.

Who’s bold enough to peep behind the veil?

I’ll circle back to this…

The Frogs

There is a passage in Revelation that has troubled me for a long time.

John writes:

“And I saw, coming out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs.”

Revelation 16:13

Then he tells us what these spirits do:

“For they are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty.”

Revelation 16:14

And finally:

“And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.”

Revelation 16:16

Look carefully at the sequence:

Dragon + Beast + False Prophet

↓

Deceptive spirits

↓

Signs

↓

Kings of the earth influenced and gathered

↓

War

↓

Armageddon

That sequence has given me considerable concern.

Because the road to Armageddon, in John’s vision, is not simply a road paved by obviously evil men announcing obviously evil intentions.

There is deception involved.

There are signs.

There is persuasion.

And somehow the rulers of the earth become participants in something whose true spiritual character they apparently do not understand.

That brings me back to the provocative question I overheard in the Molue:

Could the Israel we see today be a false Israel, raised up as part of an end-times deception to mislead many?

Scripture does not explicitly say this. I certainly cannot claim that Revelation 16 identifies the modern State of Israel in this way.

But the possibility raises another question that I find even more disturbing:

What if the true Israel is yet to gather?

And then Paul whispers something rather unsettling into the discussion:

“For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.”

Romans 9:6

That single sentence should, at the very least, make us cautious about assuming that the biblical word Israel, the modern political State of Israel, ethnic Israel and the people whom God ultimately recognises as His own are necessarily interchangeable concepts.

Paul himself forces us to ask the question:

What exactly does God mean by Israel?

What If?

I have asked this question in several of my treatises.

There are Christians who look expectantly towards the return of Christ after Armageddon.

Some therefore interpret events in the Middle East through an eschatological timetable in which a great final conflict must occur before Christ returns.

And this creates a frightening theological possibility.

What happens when people begin to want prophecy fulfilled?

What happens when Christians become eager for Armageddon because they believe that once the battle comes, Christ will return and all His enemies will finally be destroyed?

And then comes the question I almost hesitate to ask:

What if, in eagerly working towards the destruction of those they have identified as Christ’s enemies, they themselves become enemies of the Christ they claim to await?

What if?

Because Christ left us an extraordinarily inconvenient test by which to recognise His followers.

Not their ability to interpret prophecy.

Not their ability to identify geopolitical enemies.

Not their ability to predict Armageddon.

Love.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Perhaps one of the most dangerous possibilities in religion is that a person can become so consumed with defending God’s programme that he ceases to resemble God.

Sometimes the things I overhear in the Molue overwhelm the mind.

And then I remember something I once wrote about the Village Idiot.

It came from one of the many feisty exchanges I had with Gabi, my favourite Australian.

“You think too much about these things,” she once told me.

“Just breathe!”

Gabi, I should mention, was born to Jewish parents in Berlin in the dying days of the Second World War. She rejected religion about as completely as it was possible to do and was as staunchly anti-Zionist as she was pro-Palestinian.

We argued.

Boy, did we argue.

And during one of those exchanges, I wrote something in anger that, with a little refinement, went something like this:

The Village Idiot

The happiest of men may simply have given up trying to discover some greater meaning to life.

They gossip.

They laugh.

They sit together at the pub, beneath the village tree or outside the church after Mass.

And they are perfectly content to leave no footprints upon the sands of time, or whatever it is upon which human beings imagine they are supposed to leave footprints.

That’s what you suggest I be?

She responded, rather unkindly, with something along these lines:

Those who cannot simply sit at the end of the day in fellowship with others, amused and satisfied by the ordinary rhythm of existence, perhaps even by the possibility that their lives may ultimately have no greater meaning, may have condemned themselves to a peculiar kind of misery.

Perhaps they would be well advised to become like the village idiot.

And now, all these years later, sitting once again in the Molue and thinking about Israel, Armageddon, false prophets, frogs, signs, wonders, Christians, enemies and Christ…

I find myself wondering:

Perhaps Gabi was right after all.

Maybe I think too much.

Maybe the village idiot was really not an idiot?

Perhaps he was the only wise man among us!

Perhaps his idiocy, though entirely uncontrived, rested upon information sounder than that available to those of us who chose a different path.

RIP Gabi!

But what if? What if the greatest deception is the one that looks most convincingly like prophecy fulfilled?

What if those waiting most eagerly for Armageddon fail to recognise the spirits gathering the nations towards it?

And, most troubling of all:

What if, in eagerly working towards the destruction of those they have identified as Christ’s enemies, they themselves become enemies of the Christ they claim to await?

What if?

Don Kenobi

#MyFrancisEssays | #OldManInTheMolue

Idi Amin, Julius Nyerere: The Giant and the Monk

The Giant Who Ran and the Monk Who Stood

Idi Amin and Julius Nyerere offer a powerful lesson in leadership: true strength is not found in size, titles, boasting or power, but in humility, character, faith and a life whose light speaks for itself.

The Buffoon President

And then there was Idi Amin — Conqueror of the British Empire, and all the other grandiose titles he bestowed upon himself. Perhaps one of the great buffoon-leaders of modern history.

A man-mountain, too: 1.93 metres — about 6 feet 4 inches — tall.

And then, across the border in Tanzania, there was Julius Nyerere: diminutive, soft-spoken, austere, almost monk-like.

The Monk-Like President

After I described Nyerere as “monk-like,” I became curious. I had used the expression simply from what I knew of the man and the life he lived.

So I decided to check something:

What religion did Julius Nyerere actually practise?

What I discovered fascinated me.

Nyerere was a devout Roman Catholic. He was baptized on December 23, 1943, and became known for a life of extraordinary simplicity, discipline and integrity. He attended Mass regularly, reportedly practised fasting, and lived his faith with a quiet seriousness that apparently followed him even into the highest office in the land.

His Catholicism was not merely private devotion.

It helped shape his conception of ujamaa — familyhood — with its emphasis on community, solidarity and human-centred development. He translated religious and liturgical texts into Swahili. And despite being President of Tanzania, he reportedly refused special treatment in church, preferring to join the queue for Holy Communion alongside ordinary citizens.

Then came the detail that stopped me.

In 2005, the Catholic Church formally opened the cause for his beatification, and Nyerere was given the title Servant of God, the first formal stage on the possible road toward sainthood.

I had no idea.

When I called this man “monk-like,” I did not know that the Church had already begun examining his life for possible sainthood. I simply looked at the man, considered the way he lived, and that was the description that came naturally to me.

And perhaps there is a lesson there.

His Light So Shone

His light so shone that the conclusion was almost inescapable.

Christianity is not performative.

Ultimately, it shows.

If people have to tilt the light — or tilt their heads — to see precisely what makes you Christian; if elaborate theological arguments and doctrinal contortions are required to widen the Christian umbrella sufficiently to squeeze you underneath it, then perhaps your light isn't exactly “so shining before men.”

But I digress....

The Giant and the Monk

Why am I talking about Idi Amin and Julius Nyerere?

Here’s why.

For reasons best understood by Idi Amin himself, Uganda eventually found itself at war with neighbouring Tanzania.

Consider the contrast.

On one side stood Amin: enormous, flamboyant, boastful, theatrical — a man who had accumulated titles almost as enthusiastically as he accumulated enemies. At roughly 6 feet 4 inches, he towered physically over the diminutive Tanzanian president.

On the other side stood Nyerere: perhaps 5 feet 6 inches, soft-spoken, austere, almost ascetic.

Amin was confident he would prevail.

He didn't.

The Tanzanian armed forces, together with Ugandan exiles fighting Amin's regime, drove the Ugandan army back across the border and ultimately captured Kampala.

The giant fled.

Idi Amin escaped into exile, eventually settling in Saudi Arabia.

He never saw his homeland again.

And the little, monk-like man remained standing.

Strength and Stature

There is something almost biblical about that contrast.

One man cultivated the appearance of strength.

The other cultivated character.

One announced his greatness in titles.

The other allowed his life to speak for him.

And when history finally placed the giant and the monk on opposite sides of a battlefield, it was the giant who ran.

Perhaps nations, like people, eventually discover that: Strength and stature are not the same thing —a lesson desperately needed in an age when arrogance is increasingly mistaken for strength, and swagger for foreign policy.

I rest my case

Obi Akaraiwe | Don Kenobi

#BigAgendaAfrica 
#OldManInTheMolue 
#MyFrancisEssays 

THE CARGO PLANE THAT DELIVERED THE FAITH

A reflection on the allure of Islam, the failures of the Prosperity Gospel, and one Christian’s journey into Catholicism. Through the metaphor of a battered 2,000-year-old cargo plane, this essay explores how Scripture, tradition, ritual and community carried the Christian faith across the centuries.

Christianity did not arrive in our generation from nowhere. Before discarding ancient traditions we do not understand, perhaps we should ask how they helped preserve the faith that ultimately delivered Christ to us.

The Prosperity Gospel is nothing. Nothing.

And I am glad we are beginning to understand the allure of Islam.

When I first visited Dubai in 2006, Kosa and I would kneel whenever the muezzin called the Muslims to prayer, and we would say our own Christian prayers. The call was Muslim; the prayers we prayed were Christian. But there was something profoundly moving about a whole community stopping what it was doing, several times a day, because God was calling.

There is something extraordinarily powerful about a society in which faith is not merely something one does for two hours on Sunday morning. The fervency, devotion, discipline and brotherhood I saw among Muslims are things Pentecostal Christianity desperately wants — envies, as a matter of fact — but too often tries to manufacture through excitement rather than cultivate through a shared life of faith.

And the brotherhood!

I had rarely felt more safe or more accepted in a foreign country than I felt in Dubai. We were not living in the glittering, postcard Dubai either. We lived downtown, among ordinary people, in the not-so-glitzy parts, and the experience left a lasting impression on me.

It also reinforced something I have increasingly come to believe: many of our woes as Christians are self-inflicted.

Christ is simply lacking in so much of the Christianity practised across our denominations. Yet strangely enough, after wandering for years, I found HIM hiding within the confines of the Catholic Church.

Hidden in plain sight.

Not because Catholics are necessarily better people, and certainly not because every Catholic practice comes naturally to me. But because beneath two thousand years of dust, argument, ritual, scandal, beauty, failure, saints, sinners, martyrs, monasteries, councils and cathedrals, I found something astonishing:

Continuity.

I found a Church that remembered.

THOSE IMAGES!

And suddenly some of the arguments I had heard against Catholicism all my life began to sound rather childish.

"Oh! They bow before images!"

Really?

What about you who tell your congregants to "raise your offering," "speak to it," and "declare what you want this money to accomplish"? At least the Catholic is bowing before an object regarded as sacred. You are raising, speaking to and investing spiritual significance in a filthy, diseased piece of paper called money.

Perhaps a simple search for "Why do Catholics bow before images?" might be worthwhile. At the very least, we might first ask Catholics what they believe they are doing before confidently telling them what we have decided they are doing.

And while we are at it, why do you kneel in prayer and stretch your hands towards a television when the television minister tells you to?

Oh! You don't know a television contains images?

What makes the statue in a cathedral automatically idolatrous while the glowing image of your favourite preacher on a 65-inch Samsung television is somehow spiritually neutral? The important question cannot simply be whether an image exists. The question must surely include what you believe you are doing with it.

Just because you haven't thought about it doesn't mean it ain't so, brethren!

THE FAITH THAT ARRIVED

We have received a faith that was delivered across the ages and somehow arrived in our hands two thousand years later. Think about what that means. Christianity survived persecutions, empires, schisms, barbarian invasions, plagues, wars and the collapse of civilizations. It survived through monasteries and universities, councils and controversies, through monks copying manuscripts by hand, and through priests, bishops, theologians, mothers, fathers, hermits, martyrs and countless ordinary believers teaching their children what had first been taught to them.

The faith did not arrive naked.

It came accompanied by sacred traditions and observances that helped communities preserve and transmit it. It came with imagery and ritual, prayers and sacraments, seasons and feast days, fasts and calendars. It came with the memory of saints and martyrs. Most importantly, it came through communities of people who understood themselves not merely as individuals who happened to believe similar things, but as members of one living Body — a community of saints and aspiring saints.

A living community.

And then we modern Christians arrived.

THE OLD CARGO PLANE

Imagine an ancient cargo plane landing on a runway after the longest flight in human history: two thousand years in the air, somehow, impossibly, still flying.

Its doors are creaking, its fuselage is dented, its engines are dirty and its windshield wipers barely work. The aircraft bears the scars of storms, wars and near disasters. Emerging from the cockpit are these ancient, greasy pilots who appear to have been flying the thing since the Roman Empire. Worse still, they speak some quaint old language we can barely understand.

Latin!

We look at the aircraft in horror. Look at this ancient thing! Look at those doors! Look at those pilots! Look at those ridiculous clothes! Surely God cannot still be using THIS!

But there is one small problem with our mockery:

The cargo arrived.

The faith arrived. The Scriptures arrived. The story of Christ arrived. The Cross and Resurrection arrived. The teachings of the Apostles arrived. The testimony of the martyrs arrived.

The Gospel arrived.

And instead of first asking how this battered old aircraft managed to carry such precious cargo safely across twenty centuries, we grab the boxes, run away from the aircraft, declare ourselves the new crew and leave the bewildered old pilots standing on the tarmac wondering what exactly they did wrong.

"We delivered it, didn't we?"

THE NEW CREW

Instead of carefully reading the manuals and ancient manuscripts that arrived with the cargo, the new captains began deciding which parts they liked, which traditions were unnecessary and which interpretations were obviously correct because, well, we had just thought of them.

The history of the biblical canon itself should make us a little more humble. Martin Luther famously expressed serious reservations about several New Testament books, especially James, which he described in an early preface as an "epistle of straw." He did not simply erase James from his Bible, but the fact that such a foundational Reformation figure could question its apostolic weight should at least remind us that the history is far more complicated than the tidy stories we sometimes tell ourselves.

Imagine Christianity without the uncompromising clarity of James:

"Faith without works is dead."

We would undoubtedly have reached that truth through other passages of Scripture, but perhaps not quite so unmistakably.

And therein lies my difficulty with modern Christianity. A faith that spent centuries discerning, arguing, debating, praying and preserving its inheritance cannot suddenly be reduced to:

Me. My Bible. My interpretation. My church.

Because an obvious question follows: Who gave me the authority?

If two thousand years of Christians can be casually dismissed because I bought a Bible last Tuesday and received a "revelation" on Thursday, Christianity has ceased to be an inherited faith.

It has become spiritual improvisation.

SO WHAT IS MY POINT?

My point is simple, although I know it will irritate some people:

Christianity in its totality is found in the Catholic Church.

That does not mean I am comfortable with everything. Far from it. I remain terribly uncomfortable with "Queen of Heaven" language and with several Marian practices. Some things still make this relatively new Catholic squirm in his seat.

But I have also learned some humility.

I understand now that many of these practices, doctrines, devotions and traditions are part of the cargo hold that delivered this glorious faith to me. Before I smash the cargo hold because I don't understand why it was built that way, perhaps I should first ask the people who built it. Perhaps I should read. Perhaps I should study. Perhaps I should listen. And perhaps I should remember that Christianity existed for a very long time before I arrived.

And so I cherish those to whom Marian devotion comes naturally, even when it does not come naturally to me. Within this enormous, ancient and occasionally bewildering faith, I have at last found Christ — hidden in plain sight.

Perhaps hidden from those who would turn Him into an instrument for personal gain; hidden beneath the noise of those who reduce the Gospel to wealth, turn the Cross into a motivational seminar, worship into entertainment and prayer into a technique for acquiring things. Hidden from those who have somehow transformed the Son of Man into the chairman of an eternal prosperity scheme.

HE DID NOT LEAVE US A MAKE-IT-UP-AS-YOU-GO CHURCH

Those are my thoughts.

Jesus did not leave us an anything-goes, make-it-up-as-you-go, pleasure-loving, sensual Church. He did not call people to Himself by promising that everyone would become rich. He called fishermen and tax collectors, sinners and outcasts. He called people to repentance, service and sacrifice. He called them to take up their crosses. Many of those who first carried His name into the world eventually paid for doing so with their lives.

That is the faith that eventually reached us: bruised, battered, ancient and sometimes difficult to understand, carried in an old aircraft whose pilots occasionally embarrass us and whose machinery sometimes appears hopelessly antiquated.

But before you mock the aircraft, remember what it carried.

Across two thousand years, somehow, by the grace of God, it landed.

The doors opened, and there He was.

Jesus Christ.

Still alive. Still calling. Still demanding that we become something radically different from the world around us. Not prosperity, spectacle or religious entertainment. Not endless declarations about ourselves.

Christ.

And perhaps He already gave us the simplest test by which every ancient tradition, every modern denomination, every charismatic preacher, every cathedral, every megachurch — and every one of us — should ultimately be judged: BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM.

Obi Akaraiwe | Don Kenobi

#MyFrancisEssays | #OldManInTheMolue 

When Government Governs: A Private Note to Self

When Government Governs: A Private Note 

From Onyeka Onwenu’s 1983 Nigeria: The Squandering of Riches to the present day, this reflection examines four decades of corruption, gofment pikin, squander-mania and organised extraction dressed up as governance.

Nigeria may need restructuring, but structure alone cannot cure a culture of entitlement, impunity and incompetence. Good government begins with something more fundamental: a culture committed to making life work for ordinary people.

This piece of news from the BBC got me thinking: #BBCNews: London restricted highly polluting cars. Now, a new study suggests that children's lungs are getting healthier....

I wrote a private note which stated, "This is what GOVERNMENT does. It sets out policies for the good of the people.

Government should exist to make life work better for ordinary citizens, not to rob them in broad daylight. And in Nigeria, I mean that almost literally.

Successive generations of governments in Nigeria have robbed the people blind. It is almost guaranteed that the next government will be worse than this one, and the one after that, worse still.

Flashback: 1983

In 1983, Onyeka Onwenu, the Bryn Mawr graduate, socialite, journalist and musician, put out a documentary, Nigeria: The Squandering of Riches.

You may watch Nigeria: The Squandering of Riches here:

The documentary made my blood boil, I recall. Four decades later, it is still boiling.

There was Minister Uba Ahmed, I believe, who came to work each morning in Lagos from Kano, a distance of some 520 miles, in a private jet.

Scandalous at the time!

There was corruption on a scale that, back then, we imagined was off the charts. Election rigging was brazen, and the then-ruling party, like most ruling parties, was supremely confident in its invincibility, its staying power.

A certain politician from Ibadan was said to have celebrated his attainment of millionairehood by having champagne bottles specially printed with his name on them.

He had no factories. He produced nothing. He had created no great enterprise that anyone could point to.

But he was now a millionaire.

And that, apparently, was something to celebrate.

Meanwhile, scarcity ruled the land.

A new term entered our vocabulary:

EssenCo: Essential Commodities

Sugar. Salt. Milk. Soap. Toothpaste. Rice. Garri. Beans....

You could not get them anywhere.

Import licences were issued for their importation, but to government agents, who sold them to those who sold them to those who sold them, and so on. By the time those essential commodities eventually landed on our shores, they were just as expensive as the hoarded ones.

A Quick Word About the EssenCos

The EssenCos for which import licences were issued in 1983 were always available.

They were simply hoarded.

Please watch Nigeria: The Squandering of Riches. It is worth watching again more than four decades later, if only to understand how depressingly little has changed.

Click: https://youtu.be/y-OzTxlstw8?si=64TLMfRiGTLDzpIk

Enter the Government Pikin

Clearly, this egregious period in our economic history left a lasting impression on me. Here’s how I described the import-licence and gofment pikin phenomenon some 30 years ago in my book, Of Gods and Negroes:

Import licences for everything had to be bought from middlemen who bought them from the lowly government officials who fronted for people who fronted for the leaders of the country!

The leaders!

Hindsight, they say, is telescopic vision.

Sitting in the here, dissociated from the past, you just wondered what the purpose of all that greed and avarice was.

The aboriginal thieves who had a chance to build a virile nation were now mostly aged and mostly impoverished.... like every true order, these thieves recruit their sons into the realm, the order of the gofment pikin, to continue from the point where they, on account of their creaking bones, arthritis or possibly dementia, had had to call it a day!!

Today, the successors of those who helped destroy the nation, properly groomed parasites, gofment pikins, now managing the family business of extracting from the masses, gently explain to us that the problem with Nigeria is the structure.

Not their relentless extraction from the masses.

Not the corruption they perpetrate.

Not the culture of entitlement that defines them....

...Not the system that rewards those who plunder the public purse and then celebrates them as pillars of society.

The structure.... 

That, we are told, is the problem.

Especially the amalgamation in 1914 of the North and South by Frederick Lugard, the Empire's man Friday - that they say, is why Nigeria does not work.

Sadly, many amongst the suffering masses, find this spurious, nonsensical argument perfectly logical and nod their heads solemnly in agreement.

Declaring with fervour: "Yes.... Nigeria needs restructuring!"

Me: Of course Nigeria needs restructuring. Every nation probably does. Every organisation does. Even factory shop floors are continually being restructured in pursuit of greater efficiency.

Entire disciplines are devoted to studying how work is organised and how processes can be improved. One of the best-known philosophies is Kaizen, the pursuit of continuous improvement.

But Kaizen does not take a factory where nothing works and magically transform it into a unicorn.

Kaizen begins with something far more fundamental:

A factory that is already trying to work.

The work ethic exists.

The corporate culture exists.

Personal and professional integrity exist.

People show up on time!

Machines are maintained. Procedures are followed.

Management manages. Workers work. Quality matters.

Waste matters. Time matters. Accountability matters.

Then Kaizen enters and asks:

How can we make this better?

It studies the shop floor.

It examines work methods.

It identifies waste, unnecessary movement, bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

And then it proposes changes - often small, incremental changes that, accumulated over time, make an already functioning organisation considerably better.

Kaizen builds upon the strengths of the existing system.

It does not manufacture those strengths out of thin air.

And that brings me back to Nigeria.

Before we prescribe restructuring as the cure for everything that ails us, perhaps we should ask the more uncomfortable question:

What exactly are the strengths of the Nigerian system upon which this new structure is supposed to build?

If we carry the same culture of:

Extraction.

Entitlement.

Impunity.

Incompetence.

And Gofment Pikin.

...into a beautifully redesigned political structure, then what exactly have we restructured?

We have simply redesigned the architecture through which the same people continue doing the same things.

The Nation That Gave Us Everything

Cry, my beloved, beautiful Motherland, Nigeria!
You who did all you could for us when you were strong and virile.

You gave us free education.

You nurtured us. You opened doors for children whose parents could never have afforded the opportunities you placed before them.

And now, in your old age, you suffer destitution at the hands of those to whom you were once Alma Mater, a kind and generous Mother. 

You raised us - I speak for my generation.
And we repaid you by devouring you....

When I consider the fact that squander-mania has continued virtually unabated in the 40-plus years since that documentary was made....

...that Nigeria still stands in any recognisable shape or form is as great a miracle as any nation in history can boast of, and a testament to the seemingly inexhaustible riches bequeathed to us.

A British Prime Minister is said to have once quipped that the amount of public money routinely stolen in Nigeria in a single year, if similarly extracted from the British system, would be enough to bring the country to its knees.

Whether or not the remark is authentic, the point it makes is difficult to dismiss: few nations could withstand, year after year and generation after generation, the scale of organised corruption that Nigeria has endured and still remain standing.

Back to 2026

And so we return to where this note began:

#BBCNews: London restricted highly polluting cars. Now, a new study suggests that children's lungs are getting healthier.

This is what GOVERNMENT does. This is why government exists: to set out policies for the good of the people. Government exists to make life work better for ordinary citizens, not to rob them.

Look at Nigeria:

What the taxman misses, the FRSC checkpoint on Falomo Bridge, or elsewhere, and their many other law-enforcement partners in crime will somehow ferret out of your bony, clutching fingers, leaving you and your family to go "without"one more day, yet again.

Pleased with the ingenious ways they have devised to feed on the struggling masses, they retire for the weekend and may be found at the most extravagant parties and nightclubs, congratulating themselves over caviar, fine wines and cigars....

Sunday comes.

They are ushered into reserved seats in church, celebrated as distinguished guests and generous benefactors, often because they are among the heaviest tithers.

Do You See the Vicious Cycle?

A system that impoverishes the people while feeding itself.

Public office extracts from the citizen.

Privilege rewards the extractor.

Society confers status upon him.

Religion supplies respectability.

And on Monday morning, the extraction begins again.

What we have perfected is organised extraction....

And dressed it up as governance.

André Gide: "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."

I rest my case.

---

Obi Akaraiwe | Don Kenobi

#BigAgendaAfrica
#ReCultureNotReStructure
#CultureNotStructure

We Started Playing Basketball Before Michael Jordan

A group of young basketball players on their way to the National Stadium in Surulere sends the Old Man back to 1974 — to Edo College, long walks to the basketball court, kalokalo machines and childhood friends.

A Molue Monologue About Starting, Mastery, and What We Do With the Years

---

The Molue slowed just enough for the Old Man to climb aboard.

He grabbed the rail, hauled himself up and found a seat near the back. The conductor slapped the side of the bus twice and shouted something that was immediately swallowed by the Lagos traffic.

A few seats ahead sat a group of young boys, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old. They were tall, lean, noisy and full of that peculiar energy young people possess when the day still seems capable of becoming anything. Two of them had basketballs. Another had a pair of basketball shoes hanging by their laces from his shoulder.

The Old Man watched them for a while.

"Where are you boys going?"

"Stadium, sir," one replied.

"National Stadium?"

"Yes, sir. Surulere. Basketball practice."

The Old Man nodded.

"Basketball..."

One of the boys bounced his ball lightly against the floor of the Molue.

The conductor spun around.

"Ah-ah! No break my motor o!"

The boys laughed.

The Old Man smiled.

"Basketball," he said again.

Then he looked through the window at Lagos passing by.

"You know something?"

The boys turned towards him.

"We started playing basketball before Michael Jordan."

There was silence.

One boy frowned.

"Michael Jordan?"

The Old Man looked offended.

"Yes. Michael Jordan. Is there another one?"

The boys laughed.

He leaned back in his seat.

"Let me tell you a story."

---

1974

The Old Man smiled broadly.

Yes. That Michael Jordan.

"Back in the day at Edo College, we would trek from the New Site to the Old Site, which had by then become Idia College, to play basketball. It was quite a trek, but when you are young, distance is a very different concept. You simply walked. Nobody counted steps. Nobody congratulated you for exercising. Nobody wore a watch to announce that you had burnt 427 calories.

"You wanted to play basketball, so you walked to where the basketball court was.

"But somewhere along the way, just before the gate of the old Edo College site, there was a kalokalo joint."

Now, for those born after civilisation apparently improved, kalokalo was our colloquial name for slot machines — the famous one-armed bandits. You slipped in 10 kobo, pulled the lever and waited to see whether the machine had suddenly developed an interest in your financial wellbeing.

Ten kobo was real money then. It was roughly the old British shilling, which ultimately became 10p. And naturally, being schoolboys with basketball on our minds and highly questionable investment strategies, we stopped there.

The entourage, as I remember it, included Okojie, Alaba, Emeka, Idehen, Kehinde Osemwegie and, I believe, Chiamaka.

Kehinde and Alaba are no longer with us.

I'm talking about 1974.

---

The Kalokalo Investment Strategy

I've got to say this: there was something peculiar about Emeka.

The rest of us apparently possessed absolutely no talent whatsoever for gambling. We would put our money into the machine, pull the lever and watch our wealth disappear.

Emeka?

Emeka would win.

Sometimes twenty 10-kobo coins would come tumbling out. Two whole naira! That was a mini-fortune to schoolboys in 1974. And he wouldn't do it just once. Sometimes the fellow would win two or three times.

Eventually, being budding scientists, engineers and economists, we developed an investment strategy based entirely on empirical evidence: whenever we were down to our last 10k, we handed it to Emeka.

And boom!

The machine would start coughing up coins.

Nobody sabi the juju wey him been dey use.

The Old Man chuckled. The boys were listening now.

He paused.

"Where was I?"

"Basketball, sir."

"Ah!" He slapped his knee. "Yes. Basketball."

A small digression: 10k was what we called 10 kobo — one-tenth of a naira. Today, 10k refers to 10,000 naira. Funny how the same three characters inflated so quietly.

Where was I?

Ahh, Michael Jordan...

---

We Beat Michael Jordan to It... Sort Of

We were playing basketball in 1974, around the period when a young Michael Jordan was beginning the journey that would eventually redefine the game.

Wonderful.

Do I go to bed at night thinking, But Lord, I started before MJ!?

No.

What would be the point?

Starting first was never the point.

Michael Jordan was blessed with extraordinary gifts, yes, but gifts alone do not explain Michael Jordan. Plenty of people have been gifted. Plenty have been tall, fast, athletic and naturally coordinated. Plenty of boys have picked up basketballs and discovered that something about the game came naturally to them.

But Michael Jordan took whatever nature had placed inside him and worked on it relentlessly.

He carried the flame and then fed the fire.

He developed the discipline to do extraordinary things on a basketball court and, in doing so, inspired people across races, countries and generations. Jordan put a little bounce into millions of people's steps. He made children believe they could fly.

But beneath all the mythology of Air Jordan — beneath the shoes, the advertisements, the championships and those impossible moments when he seemed to remain suspended in the air while gravity waited patiently for him to finish what he was doing — Jordan provided something far more useful than inspiration.

He provided a roadmap. And that roadmap was work.

---

What Can Happen in Ten Years?

Think about this.

1974 to 1984. Ten years.

By 1984, Michael Jordan was already an NCAA champion, an Olympic gold medallist and one of the most exciting young basketball players in America. He was about to enter the NBA and begin the professional journey that would turn him into a global icon.

Some of us had started playing at roughly the same time.

But there is the difference.

While we were playing basketball, Michael Jordan was becoming a basketball player.

Those two things sound similar. They are not.

One is an activity; the other is a vocation. One occupies your afternoon; the other begins to shape your life. One is something you do when the opportunity presents itself; the other is something around which you begin organising your time, your effort, your discipline and, eventually, your identity.

And that raises a question far more important than whether Obi Akaraiwe touched a basketball before Michael Jordan did:

What have I been doing for ten years that I should have mastered by now?

---

The Ten-Year Question

Ten years is an enormous amount of time when applied deliberately.

Think of what ten years of writing can do to a writer. Ten years of engineering to an engineer. Ten years of business to an entrepreneur. Ten years of studying history, learning an instrument, practising a craft, developing an idea or building an institution.

Not merely ten years of being around something.

Ten years of working at it.

Ten years of showing up when nobody is applauding. Ten years of making mistakes, examining them, correcting them and trying again. Ten years of reading what other people have discovered, learning from people better than you, discarding bad habits and acquiring better ones.

Ten years of being willing to discover that something you believed yesterday was wrong.

That is growth.

You may not become Michael Jordan. Most of us won't. That isn't the point.

The point is that ten years of deliberate effort should leave you somewhere radically different from where you began.

If you started something in 2016 and you are still approaching it in 2026 with essentially the same knowledge, the same discipline, the same mistakes and the same level of competence, perhaps the problem isn't talent.

Perhaps you have accumulated ten years of repetition rather than ten years of growth.

There is a world of difference between ten years of experience and one year of experience repeated ten times.

---

The Danger of Worshipping the Starting Line

We place far too much importance on beginnings.

"I was there before him."

"I thought of that idea years ago."

"I started doing this before it became popular."

"We were doing that in 1974."

So what?

The starting line awards no medals.

Being first gives you time. It does not guarantee that you will use it. Someone can start ten years after you and pass you because, while you were admiring your head start, that person was learning, practising, failing, correcting, adapting and improving.

That is one of life's uncomfortable truths.

Seniority is not mastery. Longevity is not excellence. And experience is useful only when experience teaches you something.

The calendar does not automatically make us better. Work does. Reflection does. Correction does. Humility does. Persistence does.

And perhaps most importantly, the willingness to remain a student does.

---

Fifty-Two Years Later

The Old Man looked at the basketball in the boy's hands.

"1974," he said quietly.

"Fifty-two years ago."

That little group of Edo College boys could not possibly have imagined what the next half-century would bring. We were simply walking to play basketball. We stopped at kalokalo, laughed, lost our 10k, watched Emeka perform his mysterious financial miracles and then carried on to the basketball court.

Somewhere else in the world, another boy was discovering the same game.

We did not know his name.

We could not have known what he would become.

That is how life works.

The future often begins very quietly.

Greatness rarely announces itself at the beginning.

The first basketball does not know whose hands are holding it. The first page does not know whether the person writing it will become a great author. The first experiment does not know whether the young scientist conducting it will change the world. The first little business does not know whether its founder will build an empire.

The beginning tells you almost nothing. What matters is what happens afterwards.

What happens tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.

For ten years.

For twenty.

Perhaps for a lifetime.

---

What Will You Do With Your Ten Years?

Yes. The ending will feel much more like prose if we keep the dialogue but stop giving every action its own line:

The Molue began to slow. One of the boys looked through the window and announced, "Sir, this is our stop." The others began gathering their things, and the Old Man nodded.

"Go."

The boy with the basketball stood up, then hesitated. "Baba..."

"Hmmm?"

"So what happened to you? Did you keep playing?"

The Old Man stared at him for a moment, then laughed. "Young man, have you not been listening to anything I said?"

The boys laughed too. The conductor slapped the side of the Molue and shouted, "Stadium! Stadium!" and they began jumping down one after another. The last boy stepped onto the road with his basketball tucked beneath his arm.

The Old Man leaned towards the window. "Young man!"

The boy turned.

"It doesn't matter when you started!"

The boy smiled, and the Old Man pointed at the basketball under his arm.

"What matters is what you do with the years after you start."

The conductor slapped the bus again and the Molue pulled away. The Old Man settled back into his seat and watched the boys disappear into the Lagos afternoon.

Edo College, Idia College, childhood friends, Kalokalo. 1974. Michael Jordan,... 6x NBA Champion

He smiled at the strange procession of memories. Fifty-two years had passed, and perhaps that was the lesson after all: the starting line tells you almost nothing about where a person will eventually arrive.

What matters is what you do with the road ahead.

#OldManInTheMolue #MolueMonologue #Mastery #PersonalGrowth #Excellence #NoteToSelf

---

Don Kenobi

#CultureNotStructure 
BigAgendaAfrica 
#ReCultureNotReStructure 

The False Corporate Intellectuals

The modern workplace is increasingly better at talking about work than doing it. A critique of corporate theatre, false gurus, HR excess, and why organizations must rediscover the simple discipline of getting things done.

---

PREAMBLE: The False Prophet Analogy

We have false prophets in religion.

We have false messiahs in politics.

And we have their corporate equivalent: the false corporate intellectual.

You know the type. They know all the vocabulary — alignment, engagement, collaboration, transformation, culture, agility, psychological safety, stakeholder management, cross-functional integration — whatever new phrase has just emerged from the alphabet soup of corporate management.

They always seem to have an explanation for why something did not work.

And, even more remarkably, they always seem to have a slogan for what we should do next.

But somewhere along the way, the workplace stopped being primarily a place where people came to do things.

That, I think, is where we went wrong.

---

I. THE WORKPLACE WAS ONCE A PLACE TO SHOW YOUR METTLE

There was a time when the workplace was where you brought your learning, your technical skills, your experience, your judgement — your unique perspective as a human being sitting near the pointed tip of human evolution.

You were supposed to know something.

You were supposed to be able to do something.

And after spending a year in an organization, there ought to have been something you could point to and say:

I did that. I made that better. I solved that problem. I reduced that cost. I built that system. I improved that process. I delivered that project.

Increasingly, however, the modern corporation seems fascinated by something else: the appearance of being smart.

I saw this repeatedly during my corporate years. Among some of us rebels, we developed the habit of sitting quietly at the back of presentations, observing the so-called high flyers.

Someone would present, and inevitably one of them would raise a hand and ask a sophisticated-sounding question. Often the person already knew the answer. The question wasn't meant to discover anything — it was meant to be heard. It announced to the room: I am here. I understand this. I am one of the smart people.

And invariably, these were often the people receiving the highest rankings — even when their body of work for the year struggled to justify the reputation.

That is when you begin to understand that a corporation can gradually develop two economies:

• The economy of work
• The economy of impression

The dangerous moment comes when the second begins paying better than the first.

---

II. THE PROFESSIONAL COURTIER

Every organization has them.

They understand people. They understand power. They know whose jokes to laugh at, which meetings matter, when to speak, when to disappear, and how to make important people feel good in their presence.

There is nothing wrong with being personable. Emotional intelligence matters. Relationships matter. Trust matters.

But good feelings are not, by themselves, output.

• A contractor does not complete a difficult project merely because everyone feels good.
• A compressor does not become more efficient because the team had an excellent bonding session.
• A production target does not become reality because everyone attended a workshop on collaboration.

At some point, somebody has to do the bloody work.

---

III. THE DOCTRINE OF WALKING ACROSS THE CORRIDOR

A trivial example that reveals a larger problem

I once encountered a piece of corporate wisdom that sounds wonderful when first spoken:

"People send emails to colleagues sitting just around the corner. Why don't they simply get up, walk across and talk to them?"

Everybody nods. Wonderful. Human interaction! Collaboration! Breaking down silos!

Except — stop applauding for a moment and actually think about it.

Suppose I need twenty pieces of information from four or five colleagues nearby. One is in a meeting. Another has gone for coffee. Another is on the phone. Why should I walk around hunting for each person, when I can send five concise emails and keep working while the answers come in?

That is not antisocial behaviour. That is asynchronous communication — one of the principal reasons information technology transformed the workplace. We spent tens of millions of dollars on computers, networks, and messaging systems precisely so that every exchange of information would not require two human beings to be physically present at the same moment.

Yet here comes the false corporate intellectual, telling us the enlightened thing to do is walk around the building looking for people. Why? Because collaboration.

Ten such interactions a day, even at thirty minutes each in interruption and searching, is five hours. Exaggerated, yes — but exaggeration exposes the absurdity.

When exactly am I supposed to work?

And a perfectly legitimate question: what if I don't particularly like the fellow? Must productive cooperation require friendship? Why can't two competent professionals exchange information efficiently, courteously, electronically — and then get on with their jobs?

---

IV. WHEN COLLABORATION BECOMES PERFORMANCE

Collaboration is good. Communication is good. Employee wellbeing is good. A healthy culture is good.

But almost every good thing has a point of diminishing returns.

• You can have so many meetings about collaboration that nobody has time to collaborate on actual work.
• You can spend so much time discussing communication that communication itself becomes an obstacle to execution.
• You can become so preoccupied with engagement that the organization forgets what employees were engaged to accomplish.

And when results deteriorate, what does the modern corporation often do? It reaches deeper into the alphabet soup:

A new initiative. A new acronym. A new task force. A new transformation programme. A new culture survey. A new consultancy. A new PowerPoint deck.

The organization keeps reorganizing the machinery around work because confronting the simpler possibility is uncomfortable:

Perhaps we have forgotten how to work.

---

V. THE POTTER

Forget Harvard Business School for five minutes. Forget McKinsey. Forget organizational psychology. Forget the PowerPoint presentation.

Go back to the potter.

Imagine a man making clay pots in an ancient village. What was his objective? To make good clay pots. Pots that didn't crack. Pots that held water. Pots so good that people travelled from neighbouring villages to buy them.

If he succeeded, perhaps he trained his son. Perhaps apprentices joined. Perhaps eventually he employed twenty people — and now we have the beginnings of an organization.

But its purpose remains beautifully clear: make excellent pots.

Everything else exists to support that objective. Training exists to make better pots. Hiring exists to find people capable of making better pots. Accounting tells us whether making the pots is profitable. Technology helps us make more or better pots. HR should help us attract, develop, and retain the people who make the pots.

The moment any supporting function begins believing it is the purpose of the enterprise — something has gone wrong.

---

VI. WHEN DID HR BECOME THE CORPORATE NANNY?

This is where the argument can easily be misunderstood.

I am not arguing against HR. I am certainly not arguing for brutal workplaces.

People are people. For as long as they keep returning every morning and giving an organization a substantial portion of their waking lives, that organization owes them more than a salary. They should be treated with dignity, heard, developed — not driven into the ground in pursuit of targets.

And the evidence is overwhelming: people who enjoy their work often contribute more than people who despise it. So employee wellbeing is not the enemy of productivity.

The question is one of balance:

• At what point did parts of HR move from helping people perform their jobs to becoming the nanny of the corporation?
• At what point did making people comfortable begin competing with making the organization effective?
• At what point did avoiding discomfort become more important than confronting poor performance?
• At what point did process become more important than outcome?

And, most importantly — at what point did we forget the pots?

---

VII. THE FALSE PROPHET AND THE FALSE CORPORATE INTELLECTUAL

The false prophet does not speak obvious nonsense. If he did, nobody would follow him. He says things that sound profound. He knows the vocabulary, the audience, when to lower his voice and when to shout — how to produce the emotional response that makes people believe something important has happened.

The false corporate intellectual operates the same way.

• The vocabulary is different.
• The microphone has become PowerPoint.
• The congregation has become the executive committee.
• The sermon has become the transformation initiative.

But the test should remain the same:

What happened afterwards? What became better, faster, cheaper, safer, more reliable? What did we build? What problem did we solve? What customer became happier? What employee became more capable? What value did we create?

If we cannot answer those questions, perhaps we should stop being impressed by the vocabulary.

---

BRING BACK THE WORK | Make Making Pots Great Again!

Organizations need culture. They need empathy, collaboration, excellent HR, people who understand human motivation.

But these things must orbit the purpose of the enterprise — not replace it.

The workplace should once again become a place where human beings bring their knowledge, experience, curiosity, craftsmanship and judgement together to accomplish something worthwhile.

A place where reputation follows contribution — rather than contribution being inferred from reputation.

A place where the quiet engineer who fixes the recurring problem matters as much as the executive who speaks beautifully about transformation.

A place where the person asking the clever question is eventually asked an equally important one:

What have you actually done?

Because ultimately every organization, no matter how sophisticated, is still that ancient workshop.

Somebody is making the pot.

Somebody is buying the pot.

And if the pot is no good, eventually all the corporate intellectualism in the world will not save the potter.

Never forget the pots.

Obi Akaraiwe | Don Kenobi 

#BigAgendaAfrica 

 

In Memory of Jason Arday: Work, Dignity, and the Search for Peace

There comes a point when people simply want peace. But peace should not mean surrender. It should mean reaching a place where you no longer need anyone's approval to breathe.

My First Thoughts

My first thoughts were simple:

At some point, enough is enough, and people just want peace.

Suicide, though… that weakens the argument.

Because peace should mean reaching a place where you no longer need anyone’s approval to BREATHE.

Rest in peace, Jason Arday.

#dk

Then I thought:

Obi, you know you have more to say about this. Why are you holding back?

And the truth is, I did.

So I took a deep breath, sat down, and wrote this:

What Did They Do With My Life?

One more time: at some point, enough is enough, and people just want peace.

I remember something from the years immediately after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, when the archives of the secret police were opened and ordinary people discovered that they had been watched for years. Files had been kept on them. Their movements had been recorded, their friends noted, their conversations documented, and the most ordinary details of their lives preserved by people apparently convinced that all this surveillance mattered.

One woman in Poland, after reading her file, reportedly reacted with something close to bewilderment. It contained years of utterly mundane observations: She left home at 9 a.m. carrying a red umbrella. She returned at noon. She took her dog out at 3 p.m. And on and on it went. Years of it.

Her response, as I remember it, amounted to:

If this was my life, what did they do with it?

Exactly.

Okay. That was my life. So what? How did following me around with notebooks save Communism? How did recording the colour of my umbrella advance the revolution?

There is something deeply disturbing about human beings becoming so consumed with another person that they begin documenting, judging, whispering, watching and interpreting everything that person does, as though the mere act of observing another human being somehow confers importance upon the observer.

Which brings me back to poor Jason Arday.

At Work You Meet All of Life's Rejects

I do not know his full story yet. I will. But something I read brought back a passage from Of Gods and Negroes, by Don Kenobi. I believe he was working for a multinational when he wrote it, and the passage appears to have grown directly out of his experiences in corporate life.

He wrote:

“At work you meet all of life’s rejects.”

Sounds totally opposite to all you always believed? Then listen more.

Here were life’s failures, contented to have a roof over their heads, fighting and jostling for favours, debasing themselves by kissing ass all day. And then, between the time they closed from work and resumed the next morning, they tried desperately to climb back up the self-esteem ladder.

So while it was apparently acceptable for the boss to look down on them, they tolerated no such nonsense from other members of society: slow drivers, people on the sidewalks and, of course, wives and children.

Society was thus made dangerous by the existence of these creatures who could be seen daily commuting to work in their all-too-flashy business suits. But don’t blame them too much. They are the working classes.

Everyone not born in a palace or sired by a king should become a member of the working classes at least once in the course of their lives. They should subsequently become employers of labour, even if the labour force consists only of themselves.

Not an easy proposition, but better than wasting your life kissing the agenda of a Board of Directors: faceless men and women you may never meet and, even if you did, probably would not enjoy being in the same room with.

I’ll paste a link to the entire chapter in the comments, if I remember.

But there you have it.

When the Noise Gets Inside You

There are some deeply unpleasant characters in our places of work, and anyone who has spent enough years inside a large organization knows the species: the gossiping, the backbiting, the petty jealousies, the pulling down, the deliberate “shortening” of the runway for talented people, the resentment of ambition, and the quiet determination to bring somebody down to size because he or she has committed the terrible offence of wanting to do great things, or simply wanting to do ordinary things better.

It is exhausting.

Imagine trying to work in an office while someone on the other side of the wall drills continuously into the concrete behind your head. You can tolerate it for a while. You can concentrate despite it. You can even learn to pretend that you no longer hear it. But day after day, year after year, eventually the noise gets inside you.

That, I think, is what people who have never experienced a genuinely toxic workplace sometimes fail to understand. It is rarely one spectacular incident. It is accumulation. A remark here. A whisper there. A deliberately obstructed opportunity. An unfair appraisal. Another little attempt to cut you down to size. Each individual incident appears survivable, even trivial, but eventually the drilling never stops.

And eventually the noise gets inside you.

Emotional Intelligence and the Corporate Courtier

Management science even has an accommodation for all this. We are admonished to move higher up the scale of “emotional intelligence,” and entire libraries have been written about how to manage your boss, manage your colleagues, read the room, control your reactions, make yourself agreeable and generally become sufficiently likeable to climb whatever ladder happens to be leaning against the corporate wall.

I found much of that disgusting from the start.

Nobody enters paid employment determined to be obnoxious, but neither should anyone have to accept obnoxious behaviour, surrender his personality or become a professional courtier simply to be liked enough to advance. 

There is something fundamentally wrong with an organizational culture in which the burden of adapting endlessly is placed upon the person being badly treated rather than upon the people doing the bad treating.

You should certainly learn tact. You should learn empathy. You should learn how other people think and how your behaviour affects them. Those are marks of maturity.

But there is a difference between emotional intelligence and emotional servitude.

There is a difference between learning to work with people and learning to perform for them.

And there is a difference between becoming a better human being and becoming whatever personality the organization happens to reward this year.

And Then There Is HR

And HR?

I sometimes think Human Resources may be one of the most spectacularly failed disciplines in modern organizational life.

If HR departments built skyscrapers the way some of them build organizations, nobody would be brave enough to rent office space in them.

I wrote about this some time ago and, rather than rack my brain trying to reconstruct the entire argument here, I will find that essay.

But the central problem remains: organizations routinely proclaim values that their actual systems contradict. They speak about innovation while punishing dissent. 

They celebrate initiative while rewarding conformity. They talk about psychological safety while allowing petty tyrants to flourish in middle management.

And then they wonder why talented people leave.

What If Steve Jobs Had Applied for the Job?

Consider two men who famously did not fit the corporate mould: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

I knew about Gates when he was still astonishingly young. Around 1994, he was about 38 years old and already worth billions. Jobs had been a cult figure among some of us much earlier.

I still remember my old buddy Eugene Ikpo, RIP, walking into my room while I was reading an old Newsweek magazine.

“My first car is in the last advert in that magazine,” he announced.

I flipped through to the back.

There it was.

A BMW 7 Series.

That was around 1984. Forty-two years ago.

This little detour is simply my way of saying that Steve Jobs was already a larger-than-life figure to some of us while we were still undergraduates. And neither Jobs nor Gates was famous for fitting comfortably into the personality template HR departments would later prescribe for the ideal employee.

Yes, they were entrepreneurs.

But why shouldn’t the head of IT Services think like an entrepreneur? Why shouldn’t the engineer, the accountant or the receptionist?

Entrepreneurs are relentlessly focused on results. Why should the people they employ be focused on anything less? Why should initiative, impatience with mediocrity, a desire to improve things and an unwillingness to accept “this is how we have always done it” become personality defects simply because the person displaying them happens to receive a salary?

Your Employer Does Not Own Your Soul

Back to the poor man.

If suicide is indeed what is being implied, then it merely adds tragedy to tragedy.

No job should become so large that our entire self-esteem becomes tied to it. No title, office, promotion, appraisal, boss or institution should acquire that much ownership over a human being.

Your employer pays for your labour. It does not purchase your soul.

There is probably no simple practical advice anyone can give another human being who has reached the end of his rope. But I remember a story I wrote when I was about 24. A young man, roughly my age at the time, looked at the trajectory of his life and decided:

I don't like where this is going.

So he returned to kindergarten.

Literally, in the story.

He decided to start again.

Starting Over Is Always an Option

That idea has remained with me all these years because starting over should always remain a serious proposition.

Never be afraid to start again when you no longer like the trajectory of your life. Start at 24. Start at 44. Start at 64. Start at 84 if God gives you the morning.

There is no law requiring you to continue travelling simply because you have already spent years on the wrong road.

We sometimes remain in miserable situations because leaving appears to invalidate everything that came before. Twenty years in a profession. Fifteen years in a company. Ten years building something that no longer gives us life. We think the years already invested have somehow purchased an obligation to invest the years still remaining.

They have not.

Your past explains how you arrived here. It does not dictate where you must go next.

Sometimes courage is persistence.

Sometimes courage is walking away.

Sometimes courage is admitting, without shame:

I don't like where this is going. I am starting again.

And Perhaps This Is Where Faith Enters the Room

Believe.

Keep believing.

For how long?

Well, how long were you promised that you might believe?

Exactly.

No promises were handed to any of us at birth. Perhaps all you were ever called to do was love God and love your neighbour. Perhaps there is more. Perhaps not. But that is always a good place from which to begin again.

There will be voices telling you that you cannot. There will be people laughing as you embark on the new journey, and others who will interpret your decision to start again as evidence that you failed the first time.

Keep your chin up.

If the voices become too loud, close your ears. Go for a walk. Listen to Gregorian chants. Pray. Sleep. Wake up the next morning and begin again.

Let the Cliff Give Way, But Don't Jump

And when you find yourself hanging from the cliff edge and your fingers can barely hold on anymore, hold on.

If something must give, let the cliff edge give way beneath your fingers.

But don't jump.

Trust that the Lord you believe in has spread a safety net somewhere beneath you.

And what if there is no safety net?

Then you still did not surrender yourself willingly to the abyss. You held on. You believed. You did everything you could.

And sometimes, for a human being, that is courage enough.

Obi Akaraiwe | Don Kenobi

#WhenEnoughIsEnough #WorkplaceCulture #ToxicWorkplace #HumanDignity #MentalWellbeing #StartingOver #Faith #Courage #JaysonArday #EmotionalIntelligence #CorporateCulture #CultureNotStructure