Call her a quintessential fleur de lis: Flower of the Lilly – and you certainly will not be far from right. To put it succinctly, you will rather be hitting the nail right on the head
Call her still, a charmer,stunner, goddess – I mean goddess of beauty.I could almost exhaust every available item in the oceanic bouquet of the literary lexicon but not only will they not be enough – but indeed recede far enough, from vivifying her in her elemental pulchritude and regal gracioso.
The very first time I would caught sight of her, even from the spatial distance of the media,her beauty sparkled like a blazing Klieglight – evoking a gripping incarnationary resurgence of beauty legends in the regal tapestry of Queenhood, as in the mould of Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Helen of Troy, Leticia of Spain, Elizabeth of York among others.
The history of regal Queenhood is replete with quite more than a few – not just Queens, but remarkably beautiful ones for that matter, whose regal beauty are merely meretriciously skin-deep at best – and nothing beyond the gaudy skin surface – investing their regal status and divinely endowed beauty to wreak havoc of disastrously unmitigated proportion.
But Naomi Silekunola, a born Queen,Divinely annointed, ever before her marriage to the incumbent Ooni on the regal throne of ancient Ile-Ife, is unique in her own sphere – elementaly bred of an entirely different mould.
Her beauty essentially transcends beyond gaudy trivia of the physical – deeper into the subliminal depth of the divine soul.Though, there be more than a thousand and one beauties over there,but there’s something unique about queen Naomi.Her beauty strikes me as something simply out of this world,bordering on the ethereal.To put it simply,her beauty is Heavenly.Divine!
A perfect exemplar of inner beauty – beauty from the very depth of the soul – in her is a beauty that beautifies not only her – but reciprocally sparkles to beautify anything – anyone – in affinal propinquity within her field of presence.Here therefore lies her unique cutting edge.
Hold it! Her beauty of intellect;yet eloquence;stagger in their uncanny genius .It’s amazing watching this gracious lady in interactive interface at diverse medium of discourse – dialogue,colloquy etcetera – in her masterly linguistic usage of English and particularly her unalloyed outpouring in her primeval native Yoruba – particularly unusual in this age, even amongst the elders nowadays,talk-less of her tender age bracket.As a disciple of Jesus it’s something of a marvel,beholding her fanatical piety for the Lord.
A rare gem of that unique mould could well have buried herself in the inner closet of her comfort luxuriating in the radiance of her exotic beauty and the obsessive cares of this world; but the subliminal beauty of her soul,driving her visionary propensity for humanity, will simply not let her be.
In unusual times like this, that even the rich do cry;an era of everyone unto himself and God for us all;era of anomie:of “to your tent oh Israel”;era of self-seeking politicians especially the so-called honourables,feasting on the blood of the people, with apathetic aloofness to their plight, safe for the beggarly less-than-pittance often deceptively flaunted to vaporise over the thin air, ever before handing over to the battered,pauperised and miserly lots of hunger-ravaged constituents – this delectable rare pearl of beauty, would refuse to let go on the familiar line of least resistance.
Therefore spurred by a humanitarian sense of fellow feeling, this exemplary humanitarian icon, rather than reclining in the cosy comfort of her home,cavorting with fellow upper-crust elites, would rather opt to identify in affinal empathy with the poor, by deciding to treat them enmasse to bounties of Christmas goodies.
Year-in-Year-Out, this had been her ever-recurring pattern of humanitarian superfetation of the poor and needy. Over those years,the events had often fared unscathed, with minimum hitch, if at all.
However, this time around,as she retired to her phrontistery (thinking corner)in cogitation for this year’s edition, I could see her disturbingly sombre, immersed in graver empathy than ever before, for the cup-full of sorrows and woes of the poor, spilling over and over attaining an all-time-high in the gaunting wretch of abysmal enfamishment progressively assailing these unfortunate flotsam and jetsam of the society,grossly marginalised, and grossly despised hewers of wood and drawers of water – and therefore decidedly opted on the spur of that sentiment to negotiate a little up-scale to fete a higher number of five thousands children for this year.
As it would turn out, the very fateful D-Day, supposedly slated for the special moment of conviviality; her eudamonic gestures to beam smiles on the faces of the under-privileged poor, an obviously well-intentioned gesture, dramatically turned out an infernal feast of the demorgogon;like a feast in Domdaniel,a mythical hall under the sea,inhabited by a sorcerer and his disciples – despatching thirty innocent souls mostly tender-aged innocent children to their untimely graves!
Tenebrific pall cast a sardonic spell,as sepulchral gloom writ large,ensconced the landscape,for a funereal feast of the fiends.Lachrymal canticles of the mass of wailing bereaved and the body of sympathisers overwhelmed the space. Ibadanland have never had it so bad,baring the episodic ogre of political killings of the past.
For these unfortunate lots of the bereaved,I shudder to contemplate the experiential buffetings, they are eternally fated to contend with;the hellish pit and the eternal echo of mournful dirge,for-ever dancing in their awry heart.
The nightmare becomes particularly more horrifying and unfortunate,as we imagine in agitated moments of mournful self interrogation,what these unfortunate lots of children would have become in life, had they not languished in their premature grave;the excruciating toils and cares on them by their intensely agonised parents,geared at the cherished vision that their passionately beloved children must become somebody in life, until the great ripper,the almighty leveller obtrusively crept in to put paid to it all,riding on the beguiling wing of a stampede.
To be sure, the unfortunate plight of the hosts of unlucky parents whose lovely children were fated to die in the tragic stampede is a province we better not unnecessarily belabour ourselves in thematic elaboration in view of the essay in futility inevitably awaiting any attempt to vivify it in its sufficiently apt portraiture
As for our beloved sister, and daughter,the quintessential mother,a living Angel on earth,whose love for humanity, particularly the tender-heart child, borders on amazing monomaniac obsession,I do not know whether perhaps,it might amount to an exaggeration, should I posit from a sincere inner prompting,that she bears the greatest burden, exceedingly far above others,which by extension ranks her as the number one casualty to emerge from the ashes of that unfortunate episode.
This of course is apparently so, on the logic that while each of the constituent unit of the bereaved only had the burden of their deceased relation to contend with,our beloved Queen Naomi,carries the burden of all – the collective burden of the entire hosts of juvenile voyagers who exited the corporeality of earthly existence for a prematurely hushed abdication to the other-worldly realm of the heavenly.Not just that, she carries the burden of the collective body of the bereaved and the harrowing pains inflicted by reason of the dramatic abdication of their beloved children,who tragically bade bye on that memorable sad day
Could you imagine such a rare gem, obsessively so love-struck for children, a mother among mothers,a benevolent humanitarian icon,whose joy reciprocally hinges on giving joy unto others.It was this impulse that inspired her sublime gesture at that moment of tragedy – sacrificing her precious time, resources and comfort.In the end,her sublime sacrificial immolation for the same under-privileged hapless poor, eventually turned out the tragic burden she was unfortunately fated to carry for ever.
Wounds might heal, but how do you heal the blight of trauma – of such an unimaginable monstrous proportion forging such a deeply entrenched gorge on the psyche.
Of course, how does a beautiful soul, a passionately spirited purveyor of joy to others, contend with the ever recurring burden of memory, starring in increasingly recurring reminder of an episode at which she “mid-wifed”even though unwittingly, the tragic death of thirty innocent souls, mostly children for which she has a most passionate soft- spot.
Let’s assume that Queen Naomi Silekunola,was never even remanded in preventive penal immurement in the first instance – let’s project still – on a hypothetical wild fancy conjecture,that the state, from that point; eventually proceeds to decorate her with the highest honor in the land at a later time – they certainly will still not be enough to wish away the chimeric grotesqueness of that ugly experience.The choicest balm from the exotic East will never heal it.They wreak an excruciating yoke on her effeminate delicate conscience.The yoke is simply too draconian for her lean neck,and even her tender age,of merely thirty-one.This is why her continued remand,and any attempt to subject her to trial and possibly sentenced to the gulag would be amounting to an over-kill.
It is true that she felt grossly short of the onus of strategic anticipation in terms of the tumultuous turn out of invitees and the need for swift pro-active security countermeasures, of which failure to put in place, lamentably culminated in the fatal break of stampede – yet it would still not be too much to enter a plea for mercy in cognitive grasp of certain limitations,ignorance or is it naivety? – which her feminine gender might naturally impose – for which an illuminating input of counsel very likely from extraneous male sources,who naturally should be more sensitive to things of that nature; could have availed to save the day.
More-over, she probably may have been deluded in the light of precedents of successive past experiences of the same festive treat, successfully lasting the distance, unencumbered by crises of any hue – forgetting the progressively accelerating woes of the poor, and the accordingly aggravated sense of desperation even with every passing day,and every passing week and month,let alone a vast space of one whole year, since the conduct of the last humanitarian exercise.
She therefore erred; as surely need be admitted,in the inability to factor in – well in advance – the aggravated peak of frustration, and gradual sweep of desperation hitherto mounting over the days; months and the years,only to mature into an abhorrently insane depth – for existential survival – ultimately hitting the shattering rock of stampede in which a host of thirty human beings perished like chickens!
The plea for mercy becomes more particularly compelling
when viewed from the spectrum of the uninspiring,callous and incompetent leadership,which in the light of our comparative cutting edge competency, have thrown up the jinxed systemic dysfunction of the peculiar Nigerian experience which unfortunately despatched the unfortunate dead to their premature departure
On the fore-going, we need not overly elaborate beyond the particularly telling example of the humanitarian ministry, a supposedly strategic and immensely pivotal livewire and indeed the institutional cornerstone for the attainment of visionary people-centered welfarism of the government of the day, discovered as recently unveiled,amidst a monumental cesspool of corruption.Please note that the fore-going does not necessarily cast any aspersion on the person of the incumbent president who had assiduously immersed himself in the emergency task of redeeming the nation from the socio-economic tumult in which it had hitherto been immersed,by mediocre leadership of the past.
Indeed in a clime devoid of the labyrinthine rudderlessness of leadership, but rather leadership with the visionary competency to fix it right, fine minds in the moulds of Queen Naomi, would not have been under the compelling constraint to fill in the monumental people-centric void of mis-governance grossly derelict of the fundamentally primal concern for the poor.
Even at that, had there been more labourers in the humanitarian vineyard, as in the mould of this exemplary Queen of our time,holding forte in the vacchic zone of government’s neglect,delirifacient dive-to-death stampede of such monstrously tragic proportion would certainly have been far from it.
It is against this background that it becomes apposite to plead with every passion I can muster, that Queen Naomi Silekunola , the exemplary humanitarian model and pace-setter, be not “hanged” either in judicial penal immurement or in myopic public estimation parading the obscene heresy of the ritual theory.Remember that on July 3rd,1990,when a staggering 1426 number of pilgrims died in a stampede in Mecca,there was no crocodilean canticles bemoaning the theory of ritual.
If of a necessity she need be hanged, then that would – in due consonance with balanced sense of justice – demand that successive leaders straddling the course of political governance, dating back from the independence era, must compulsively be lined on the column to face the music
Top echelon customs officials superintending over the distribution of palliative bags of rice at the Customs House,Lagos in which seven people equally lost their lives, would also need to go for it.Ditto,the Immigration officials in charge of affairs when similar stampede occured during the Immigration employment screening exercise for prospective employees; in which not less than seven people lost their lives; coupled with equally unfortunate tragedies at the Catholic Church Abuja and Okija,in which a good number of people equally died.They also must of necessity face the gallow
Our darling sister and beloved daughter deserves every compassion we could shower on her.Nothing must touch her.Nothing must also touch her host, Alhaji Hamzat Oriyomi, for his kind gesture in bringing his position to bear for the general public good.
*Kola Johnson Is A Writer And Journalist.
