Now I know why I have not been writing so frequently! There is regularly a clash of thoughts in my mind for having to write about something and speak about something else, and when the writing and the speaking need to happen on the same day, it’s tough. Today for example, I had made up my mind that I will write about “Freedom”, but in a few hours from now as well, I will be with the GTBank training school to talk about “Personal Effectiveness and Life Mastery”, then tomorrow morning I’m sharing a platform with Great Leaders (Rev Sam Adeyemi, Mrs. Ibukun Awosika, Pastor Ben Akabueze and Mazi Sam Ohunabunwa) to talk about “Character in Career and Business” (9th May, 10am – Daystar, 71 Oregun Road, Kudirat Abiola Way). As soon as I’m done from there, I head for another seminar where I speak about Financial Freedom and share a business opportunity (9th May, 2pm&4pm -Generis Solutions, 3rd Floor Oluwatobi House, 71 Allen Avenue, Ikeja), as soon as that is done, I begin to put finishing touches to my presentation for Good Tidings Bible Church, Abuja on Wednesday on “Entrepreneurship” (13th May, 5:30pm –Â Good Tidings Bible Church International, Kingdom Centre Plot 125 Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Way, After Julius Berger Headquarters, Utako, Abuja). Then I have a number of other seminars in Abuja, come back to lagos for another one on the weekend and start finalizing my preparations to head for Malaysia.
Thinking about all that needs to go on today, and then tomorrow is sufficient to create a writers block. Mixed with that also is my desire to really make a comment about the Ekiti Re-Run fiasco! If I however write too many thoughts in one post, I can get accused of being desultory. This worries me, but I guess like today’s topic, I simply need to set myself free of the encumberances created by expectations and standards, and speak from my heart, exactly the way the words flow :). I’ll try to stick to the topic of freedom, while I use the key things I must express myself on as examples. Let’s together see what is capable of building up.
I’ll like to look at freedom from the angle of what a mechanic, a tailor or a vulcanizer apprentice strives to get. I marvel at how the uneducated set themselves goals to serve for 5ys to get knowledge and then become free, while educated graduates labour for knowledge for years only to spend the best days of their lives in a vicious cycle. Does it not show more sense in the artisans than our educated selves? They set themselves goals, in 5yrs, I want to learn enough not to go and work in another cage of self expression, but to become FREE! While we set goals, goals that are not so serious to us that we may never hold ourselves to -To learn for 5-10yrs (in the good universities, it takes time – GREAT IFE!?), and then to go out and learn for another 3-40yrs!Â
First of all, are you free? Do you have plans to be? Or do you live by the sloppy definition of freedom that defines freedom as the ability maximize the space withing your harness? You know why the artisan does this and many of us don’t? I’ll tell you, it’s because naturally, outside our education, we all love to be free! Our education somehow conditions us to follow the crowd, to do what everybody else is doing, and we have offered our lives to serve lesser causes in exchange for different colours of collars – blue, white, green!
1. Freedom is not given
“In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved” -Franklin D. Roosevelt
Well if you are thinking let me do what I’m doing well, in time I will be free, you are either kidding yourself or fooling yourserlf. Someone ones told me a humorous perspective about assumption and thought. “Thought he farted, but shitted on himself :)” Stop thinking or assuming that freedom is in your pathway it is not! People become free – to pursue their true purpose and identity or even become financially free by deliberately striving to achieve it!
Kilometer long queues suddenly surged back into reality in Nigeria, Lagos feels bad, but hasn’t seen anything. Go up north and see people queuing for days. We didn’t know we were enjoying some levels of freedom until somehow we are losing it. Did the queues of the past simply dissappear because we waited long enough or because leadership did something about it? Â Is someone pressing a reset button on Nigeria or do we need to wake some people up?
2. Freedom is better than slavery no matter the adjectives
“I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery” Â -Author Unknown
Stop giving yourself comforting excuses for changing what you know you ought to change. No true unconditioned soul relishes the thought of working within confines forever. Just like the bird in the cage wishes to fly, and the gorrila in the zoo longs for the forest, so does the soul of a man seek for it’s place. The place of every man is not in the company of mediocres nor in the crowd of average. When you find your place your generation will celebrate you. If God intended that we all stay at the same level doing similar things, he would simply have created us the same way, creation would have been easy, same template – mass produce!Â
Ekiti Re-run for example simply drops my arms, what we have seen for me is a sample of what the self appointed leaders have in stock for us in 2011. If we can stomach this open show of shame, we’ll probably not even be able to notice perversion in processes on the national scale. I’m certain the argument that won the day, was, let’s settle for peace with slavery at the expense of liberty with danger. Let’s bury values and ideals in the grave of self interest. Slavery is never going to be better than freedom no matter the adjectives! As leaders of Nigeria’s future – which already started yesterday, we must position ourselves and work the system to favor true liberty and justice.
3. The Free also Err
“Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err” Â -Mahatma Gandhi
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying a Job is good or bad, I’m only saying that the way to get the most of life and to engage life is to set a goal for yourself of when your freedom will be. If you don’t set it, it will be set for you. They may allow you to hang around till 74 (hmmmm), if beyond the value you once added, there is some aesthetics you bring to the table with your nice blend of grey hair and perhaps some endorsement that your gender and age can give to the process.Â
My Name is  Akinyemi, Deolu Akinyemi, I am from the Future, I am a freedom fighter and I believe in the emergence of a New Nigeria!
