Diamonds in Disability

Copyright© 2005 Kenneth Yali Diouf

All rights reserved. No part of this book should be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or      mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage retrieval system without written permission of the publishers.

ISBN: 978 - 2901- 04 - 0

Published in the Federal Republic of Nigeria by High Calling Outreach Publications, Port Harcourt. High Calling Outreach Publications is the publishing arm of the High Calling          Outreach, a literature evangelism ministry which distributes Christian literature and garners support  for battered women, abused widows and the destitute.

High Calling Outreach Publications

4, Ndashi Street, D-Line, Port Harcourt.

E-mail: highcallingoutreach@yahoo.co.uk

Phone: 08023648834

Author’s contact address:

Kenneth Yali Diouf

E-mail: gospeloperations@yahoo.com

Phone: 08057149258 (Text Message)

www.workersforjesus.com/dfi/s-215.htm

Dedication

     God

     Dr. Andrew Jackson Foster

          (The Father Of Deaf Education In Nigeria And             Africa)

     Chief Israel I.N. Ohia (Port Harcourt)

     Pastor Christopher Briggs (Port Harcourt)

     Dr. Steve Ogan (Port Harcourt)

     Pastor Joshua Gyang (Jos)

     Pastor Uche Nwode G.G. Promise (Enugu)

     Evangelist Emmanuel Ogbonna (Aba)

     Uncle Sunday Kassim Raufu (Ibadan)

     People With Varied Disabilities

Acknowledgements

As our book goes out to the public, we are deeply obliged to acknowledge the contribution of outstanding individuals whose involvement with the deaf has so encouraged us as to culminate into the production of this little book.

Sir (Dr.) Peter Odili: the Executive Governor of Rivers State, whose administration has been making impressive moves with the view of  improving the conditions of disabled people in the State. The magnanimity  of the Governor has given many disabled people in the State reason to smile and look forward to a brighter future.

Dr. & Mrs. Steve Ogan: we thank God for the openness and generosity of the couple in welcoming the hearing-impaired into their home at great personal cost to themselves notwithstanding the risks and trials involved. Dr. Steve Ogan proofread and edited the book before providing the necessary encouragement toward its publication.

Chief Israel I.N. Ohia and Pastor Christopher Briggs: the two are elders with great understanding. Their availability, kindness and fatherly attitude coupled with practical concern for the hearing-impaired have sustained us to survive tough times and to continue on a minor scale our Christian religious activities among the deaf.

The Nigerian Press: tabloids such as The Punch, The Guardian, Daily Sun, The Champion, The Vanguard and The National Tide have taken special care to cover issues relating to the disabled community. Clippings from these tabloids have greatly aided in no small measure to bring into full-blown spotlight some of the problems of the handicapped.

Deaf Individuals: who are too numerous to mention here, who are interesting, well-informed and observant, provided us with valuable detailed information over the years on the potentials, strengths, weaknesses and failures of our deaf community.

The Nigeria Police Force: it has on several occasions helped to guarantee the safety and safe return back home of stolen deaf girls when certain leaders and concerned deaf persons in the deaf community reported to them cases of girls snatched from homes and schools, and forced to labour in the begging industry.

Gallaudet University (U.S.A.): Darrick Nicholas (Media Coordinator) allowed us to reprint a news release about Dr. Andrew Jackson Foster, the famed educator of the deaf African in the twentieth century.

You wrote this book! Every one of you is an author!

We pray that God Almighty will bless you all in Jesus’ name.

Kenneth Yali Diouf, July 2005

Preface

I do not remember exactly where and when I first sat down to start writing this book. But I do recall that I did a great deal of writing and rewriting of this book in Warri (Delta State, Nigeria) between March and August 2000. It was also here that the manuscript was first typeset.

The inspiration to write came during my itinerant evangelistic trips among the deaf in the Niger Delta. The inspiration has its background, partly, in my concentrated reading and study of one of my pet magazines, namely, the Christian Women Mirror magazine of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry. In this material and others from the same ministry, there is a lot of high-powered information and teachings on child training and the discipleship of youths. The writers occasionally focused on the disabled. I read reports of people with disabilities in other lands that did stunning things because of their environments’ positive attitudes toward them as peculiar children/youths.

My eyes were opened and directed now to look more closely at the disabled people among us. I was predisposed to observe and listen more attentively to them. Truly, I began to see and to hear of a great deal of wretchedness and neglect. This was in sharp contrast to the privileges disabled persons enjoyed in developed countries. Then I also saw reports in our media about the confinement of the disabled in our land. And as I moved from place to place and associated with deaf people in camp meetings, social gatherings, homes, and schools in Abia, Anambra, Bayelsa, Delta, Edo, Enugu, and Rivers States I became aware of their numerous problems. There were tales of oppression, victims of rape, divorcees, and attempts on their lives by ritual killers, rejection of parental authority, and absence of constituency in the Government to defend this people and protect their rights.

One is then led to understand that somebody or a group of people somewhere have failed to do what ought to be done to guide and properly disciple deaf youths. Preaching the gospel to them is not enough since that alone cannot assuage their frustrations and lack of guidance; there must be a sustained and relentless corresponding participation from parents, Government, and Churches to save these youths from the myriads of tragedies confronting them. The situation is quite heart breaking.

We woke up several years ago in the Niger Delta to see the phenomenon of the begging industry thriving after being imported from outside the region. This evil industry has deepened the predicament of many deaf youths. Hundreds of them got caught in the fearsome and potentially destructive net in search of solutions to their unbearable problems.

We thought it is necessary to efficiently document part of the development in a book so leaders of the disabled community, social workers, parents and Deaf Churches could get the real picture of the dangers to which the disabled are exposed. In writing we have, on purpose, talked about the aggravation of the state of affairs by the deaf themselves. (We have no sacred cows!) It is worth noting that not every significant and attention-grabbing issue negatively affecting the deaf in our community has been discussed here. The scope of a greater percentage of our observations and reports is set in the Niger Delta. There may be other more critical issues in the lives of the deaf in other parts of the Federation. Somebody else will do well to come out with an informative and sensitizing book on such issues. There will never be any development and meaningful changes in any community of people unless information about needs, problems, and pathetic plight of that community is documented and divulged. Unless that is done there can be no vision for strategic and tactical action for effecting positive change.

The Preamble to the United Nations Charter

“We the people of the United Nations determined

To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our life time has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

To establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

To promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends

To practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neigbhours, and

To unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and

To ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed forces shall not be used, save in the common interest, and

To employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.

Accordingly our respective governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations”.

Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa is credited with drafting the preamble.

I

LIFE FOR THE DEAF IN NIGERIA

“The word ‘Corruption’ has become a household word that is not only mentioned but practised at different levels by people in the society as if it is normal.  Some have come to believe that we cannot exist without corruption; it is a way of life.  Others feel that it is the condition that has necessitated the practice, which though bad, cannot be helped.

“Suffice it to say that the origin of corruption is as old as creation (Genesis 3) when Eve’s mind was poisoned, corrupted and she fell into the trap. Ever since we have continued to read about the practice of corruption in the Bible, the Word of God. It is, however, condemned throughout the scriptures as a sin.  There is no country in the world that is not corrupt. The only difference being in the magnitude.  Unfortunately research has shown that Nigeria is rated as the second most corrupt (now third after Haiti and Bangladesh as at October 2004) country in the world. What a pity! This is a disgrace.  We need to return to God, repent and change our attitudes.  Don’t be quick at pointing accusing fingers at others. Are you ‘pure’ or ‘blameless’ in your ways? How many times have you kept mute when you were supposed to speak out on a situation you were a witness to? Church leaders have compromised their stand. Why? Partly because some of them, if not most, are stakeholders in the practice of corruption.

“The government’s determination to fight corruption must be supported by all.  The strategy to fight corruption should be encompassing to include education in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. Awareness campaigns that will correct our values positively should be mounted. Religious leaders, particularly the clergy, need to constantly preach against this vice in churches and gatherings if we are to move forward, and to redeem our lost image”(Christian Rural and Urban Development Association of Nigeria. January-March 2004 Newsletter).

Nigeria is a regional power in the West African sub-region. The nation is also referred to as the Giant of Africa because of the awesome abundant human and natural resources with which God has endowed her.  Nigeria wields political and economic power as well as great moral influence, not only in the West African sub-region, but also in the whole of Africa. In various disciplines, Nigeria has over the years carved herself an enviable niche. This is obvious in the fields of international sports, academics and belief in and promotion of the Christian faith so much so, that a recent survey declared Nigerians to be the most religious people in the world. In the twilight of Nigeria’s imminent walk into the limelight (we believe Nigeria will by and by become a titanic power to reckon with, taking a grandiose leadership role in the world), we know and accept that Nigeria is reputedly the third most corrupt nation on the face of the earth after Haiti and Bangladesh. But this negative characteristic and dark portrayal of Nigeria should not be so exaggerated as to project a bleak picture, which suggests that there is no good in the country.  Good abounds; good exists in this great country in spite of localized religious riots, tribal and/or ethnic conflicts, rising tide of insecurity, widespread fraud / defalcation/embezzlement, and other forms of debilitating social ills in both low and high places that blight the name of this country. There are good God-fearing, honest, and kind men and women; generous and respectable godly youths and children in Nigeria.

Then there is a growing teeming population of a particular group of people found in every nook and cranny of the political entity.   This particular group of people can be categorized or compartmentalized as follows:

The frustrated. The disappointed. The cheated. The ignoramus. The smart and enterprising. The educated. The brilliant. The aspiring. The outcast. The hopeless. The tortured and oppressed. But who are these people that make up this particular group of humans? Well, they are the deaf people of Nigeria. And if a great number of them should be called by any other name, it would appear as if they all carry one and the same identical label: BELEAGUERED! Beleaguered in a nation that is the second (now third) most corrupt in the world. They are beleaguered in terms of lack of adequate educational opportunities. They are besieged in terms of denial of fairness in the area of healthy, respectful, and good attitude toward all in day-to-day social interaction. At times they are limited in terms of courage to aspire to greater heights because of poor self-image and timidity. Many deaf youths breed and maintain the mentality that although they are in the world, it is not theirs to explore, conquer, and enjoy. We think things are this way because of the repressive activities of hearing people who fear forceful, aggressive, and brilliant deaf people would one day occupy better and higher positions to the end that they (hearing counterpart) become subjects of deaf persons. There are stories about the denial of opportunities to the deaf that should rightly be theirs. They are taken and dashed against the flinty rock of societal repression. They are then wounded or crushed psychologically, cowed into timidity through oppression and neglect.

The Deaf: An Untapped Human Resource

Nigeria possesses an incredible wealth of promising and intelligent deaf people. Unfortunately, they are incapacitated to the end that they are unable to realize their full potentials, courtesy of mediocre attitude of both society and Federal and State Governments towards them. It is then inevitable for them to wake up one day and begin to smart under gnawing pain that their dreams have not been actualized. They find themselves and their potentials wasted and rotten in a country that should have meticulously taken judicious notice of their usefulness and ability to amount to anything so as to add to the purported greatness of their country. A Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka (a literary icon, to be precise) once coined the phrase  “wasted generation”. He was making reference at the manner in which this generation of young people is not guided by way of yielding the dividends of potentials lying untapped in them. Many deaf people in Nigeria fall into this dismal picture. “The 1991 census conducted by the National Population Commission put the number of deaf and dumb people at 194,135. These statistics confirm that the deaf and dumb constitute nearly half or well over 45% of all disabled persons in this country. With their numerical strength and visibility, the expectation is that the three tiers of government would exploit and harness their creative potentials for socio-economic and intellectual progress.” Sadly, there has not been any resolute move on the part of the Government to take advantage of the power of the deaf.

Consequently, it is grievous but not surprising to see a sizeable number of intelligent and brilliant young Nigerian deaf men and women taking to a shameful way of life that includes begging for money in streets, in business centres, and in Government offices. Some are involved in high-risk professional prostitution. Others float pretentious phantom organizations on stationary with the sole aim of extorting funds from the Government and certain unsuspecting industrial companies---just to survive because the harsh frustration is too much to bear.  Of course, those among the deaf people with frustrated and impaired morale have no choice but to engage in questionable activities and fake representations that would yield them no mean gains. The phenomenon has become a legitimate way of life and source of income for which the law does not arrest them, and for which they feel now qualms in public and in the light of abundant opportunities for decent living.  This is the grip of the spectre of corruption on many Nigerian deaf youths. These are a beleaguered people!

 The proneness to corruption and waywardness of some of our deaf youths is fanned to blazing embers in their immediate homes because of the sad way they are treated there. In many homes where one or two children happen to be deaf, the parents usually do not understand the great difficulties associated with deafness and its effect on those that are affected by it. They don’t seem to understand that a deaf child or youth is simply different from a normal child either psychologically or otherwise. Parents and relations often do not perceive that peculiar children/youths require special attention, special consideration, special handling, means and needs if he or she is to become a functioning and well-adjusted member of the family and society at large. This defect in perception has spawned the proliferation of misconception and prejudice against the deaf in some homes.  The impediment in perception and the failure to find and apply the necessary measures for the effective training of the deaf are one of the major causes behind the apparent lack of moral and spiritual training in the lives of many deaf youths.  Many of these youths carry intractable characters and dispositions. So they are abandoned to themselves, rejected---and cursed! They are judged as useless, demonized, and difficult.  Elsewhere they are outrightly discriminated against in their immediate families. While their normal siblings are given the best education, the unfortunate deaf ones are given a slipshod raw deal---oppressed and burdened with many chores in the home, and placed in public schools for the deaf where the teachers lack sterling commitment, and the educational resources specially suited to their condition are not available.  Some deaf people are thought to be incapable of learning. 

 Fruitful result-oriented seminars and workshops on orientation toward deafness and the deaf on a regular basis are unheard of in the country. If they are heard of, they are sporadic. And even if they are there, what drastic measures have they initiated to defend the rights and persons of the deaf?

At the end of the day, the deaf that don’t feel loved, appreciated and understood unconditionally at home eventually run away to struggle on their own. Majority of runaway deaf boys and girls seek and join deaf groups living in rented brothels and hostels. Here they live together like “refugees from war zones”.

These “refugee camps” do not solve any problem; they worsen matters. For they become centres or hotbeds of bloody fights and noisy quarrels as they provoke one another and prey on one another to the utter shock and consternation of hostel and brothel owners. Miserable deaf girls in search of warm love get pregnant here and deliver babies, only to abandon them in order to escape battering. Moreover the “dwelling camps” are turned into centres for the consolidation and expansion of the begging business. Ideas are hatched and groomed here for the mastering of the art of seduction and stealing of naïve (teenage) deaf girls.

Dipsomania and illicit enjoyment of sex hold sway over their souls. Sex and begging are their means of survival for years on end. Poor deaf youths. Who will love them? Who will understand them? Who will rescue them?

In some homes where parents cannot, or have deliberately chosen not to, pay for the furtherance of the education of their deaf daughters they jealously keep them at home year after year for fear that the girls would be spoilt and sexually abused. This way many deaf girls, and even deaf boys, remain locked up at home till they have grown into ripe adults. Then they come out into the world with tiny residual recollection of sign language, or with none at all. Worse still, they emerge thorough illiterates, not knowing anything beyond their own names, which they can scribble on paper or recognize when written by someone else. Others have no knowledge of the first six letters of the alphabet. For others the literacy level drops sharply, causing them to have a hard time trying to read or write a letter. Many towns have (residential) schools for the deaf, but a great number of parents and guardians are not aware that such schools exist. The ignorance is the result of the poor publicity these schools enjoy in print and electronic media. 

The good news is that there are homes where deaf people are greatly loved and respected and provided for by their parents and relations.  Opportunities are created or sought for them to improve their education and economic life. These privileged deaf people are either self-employed or are in the employ of private companies and the Government. They turn out to pay back in the same coin what had been invested in them---they provide in cash and kind to the development and maintenance of their parents, sisters and brothers’ economic, moral and spiritual lives. Their moral standards and level of self–discipline are remarkably high and admirable. Some of these respectable deaf individuals have an enviable regard for the Bible and are regular at weekly church services. Some deaf persons have been instrumental in turning some, if not all, of their family members to God. After the deaf persons heard of God and Christ, they repented of their evil deeds and desired that their family members would repent. God rewarded the witness with positive results, and one or two members of the family would enter the service of God.   Moreover, they have their own families.

Biased Allegations and Prejudices against the Deaf

Now let us see what society’s attitude toward the deaf is. They allege that:

“They are useless”.

“They cannot learn”.

“They are sexually immoral”.

“They are stupid”.

“They are beggars, lazy and irrational”.

“They are difficult to handle, especially the uneducated ones”.

“They have no minds of their own.”

The above quotations are only a few of the labels used to stigmatize the deaf in our society. More often than not the incriminating remarks are exaggerated and unfairly applied. It once used to be thought that the deaf cannot be educated---taught to read and write because of being deprived of their hearing sense.  But the advent of western missionaries/educators in the twentieth century changed all this mindset, and Governments took up the issue of Deaf Education by embarking on projects geared toward making education available to the deaf.

Yet utmost respect for the persons of the deaf has not pervaded the whole of society in spite of the visibility of the grace of education in their lives. Every society has its bad elements. So does the world or society of the deaf. It is rather puzzling to society how deaf persons who apparently seem to pass for innocuous humans could exhibit certain dreadful and scandalous moral flaws hitherto thought not to be a constituent part of their character. Society has become unduly prejudiced against the deaf as a result, to some extent, and taken their prejudices out of proportion. They now hold that the deaf are all squarely alike in character content and very much prone to display in their comportment one or several of the above quotations at the slightest opportunity. In some places they are under constant suspicious and surreptitious surveillance.

Some hearing persons have thought that marriage to a deaf person may not present many of the difficulties and impossible crises they meet with when sharing lives with non-deaf partners. So they entertain great expectations of smooth matrimonial life, not fully realizing that there are sure necessary adjustments to make since deaf people too exhibit character flaws, just like normal people.  Well, deafness or any other disability does not annihilate or reduce the explosion of a deaf or disabled person’s true colours.

On account of being taken for individuals without minds of their own, as stupid, irrational, society has criminally shown what it is: an oppressor of the deaf. There are those in our society to whom deaf people are not human beings or are lesser humans to be exploited sexually and used for economic gains. We have countless instances of deaf girls being lured into places by non-deaf persons, and then raped. And since they do not have a viable organization and no lawyers forbidding the abuse of deaf persons, they hardly get justice. Many of our deaf girls carry deep festering emotional wounds, and are yoked with illegitimate children.

The inheritances due to deaf persons after the death of a parent are taken away or denied them. This cruel attitude has set many of them on the precipice of economic hardships and moral debauchery. There are few instances of where their rights are defended and protected and implemented by their relations. Quite often the general decay in the world of the deaf here is the immediate reflection of the general society. They are not listened to. They are thought to have no human right except to be available for society to enrich itself at their expense, and for society to wake up one day and call them names. “But society is the criminal, not the individual, the vicarious victim – despite what they allege against him” (Professor Tekena Tamuno, a Nigerian historian).

The Deaf and the Blazing Torch of Education

It is practically impossible to speak of the education of the deaf in Nigeria and Africa as a whole without mentioning Dr. Andrew Jackson Foster. So the campaign for the promotion of the education of the deaf in Nigeria dates back to the 1960s.  Late Dr. Andrew Jackson Foster, a black American missionary who was reputed to have brought American Sign Language to Africa, first pioneered it. He came to Africa as both missionary and educator of the deaf.  Records have it that, through practical example, he was the brain behind persuading State Governments to include the deaf in their countries’ education system.  Dr. Andrew Foster set a very practical example for his host African countries by establishing schools for the deaf here and there in Africa.

I here attach excerpts from a pamphlet written by him (with brief history from an information brochure). The contents of the pamphlet are still as relevant and applicable as when delivered as a keynote address at the 7^th World Congress of the Deaf, Washington, D.C., July 31^st to August 8^th, 1975. The only exception is that statistics have more than doubled now.

“A young black American first heard about the spiritual and educational needs of the deaf in Africa from a Jamaican missionary. A few years later he read an article in the January 1948 American Annals for the Deaf titled: SCHOOLS FOR THE DEAF IN THE WORLD. It listed only 10 schools in North and South Africa, but no schools in between. He was deeply challenged. He realized that in order to reach the deaf with the gospel of Jesus Christ, a basic education and an effective means of communication were necessary.

“In 1956, he founded the Christian Mission for the Deaf Africans in Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A. (The name was later modified to Christian Mission for the Deaf, and the home office moved to Flint, Michigan.) As he sent inquiries to Liberia, Ghana, and Nigeria, he learnt of a movement that was beginning in Lagos.

“The next year he launched two schools in Ghana and in 1960 he began a third in Ibadan in western Nigeria. Two others followed at Kaduna and Nsukka in 1965 in northern and eastern Nigeria respectively. Both were closed during the disturbance (civil war) in 1967. After the war the Nsukka School merged with Government School in Enugu. And in 1974, the Ibadan Mission School for the Deaf merged with what is now the Ibadan School for the Deaf in the  Sango Area of the city.

“This pioneer of the (first) three Deaf Schools in Nigeria had long felt the need for a Christian Centre for the Deaf. This centre was to provide for not only spiritual, social and recreational gatherings, but was to also serve as a Bible Institute for the deaf and a field base for the Christian Mission for the Deaf. In 1972, the Lord God provided for the present premises at Onireke---Ibadan.

“Before acquiring the Centre, the Mission launched a church in Yaba---Lagos, and an annual camp held mostly at the Nigerian Youth Camp. Bible meetings as well as an annual camp in conjunction with Scripture Union were eventually organized in the East…Since 1976 the Centre has served as a base for training new teachers for the deaf from French speaking African countries…

“By ‘far corner’ I mean ‘West Africa’. Though American by birth and formal training, nearly all 18 years of my professional experience has been in Africa putting into practice the principles of ‘full citizenship for all deaf people’. As missionaries, my wife and I have had the privilege of pioneering educational and Christian work among the deaf in Ghana and Nigeria…Many educational problems confront the deaf in Africa.

THE PROBLEM OF INADEQUATE SCHOOLS

“Undoubtedly, the greatest social problem of school-age deaf children in developing countries is the fact that most are not in school. Special provisions are simply insufficient in some areas and wholly lacking in others… Population-wise, let us focus on one of Africa’s 40-plus countries, perhaps Nigeria, the most populous. Of the 70 million people (now 120,000.000 plus) probably 70,000 (currently there are more than 190,000 that) are profoundly deaf, based upon the more or less universal ratio of one deaf person per 1,000 populations. Suppose a third are school age. View them against the approximately 500 (now thousands) students presently attending the (now more than) five residential schools. The magnitude of this social problem could be readily seen. As for Nigeria, this picture may soon change with the country’s new compulsory primary school law and oil revenue…

“What can be done now? Perhaps the first thought that crosses your mind is the establishment of more day classes in sizeable cities and boarding institutions in strategic locations. Ideal suggestions. They should be encouraged! But practical applications may be limited. Ordinary schools, to which units for the deaf are attached, are perpetually struggling for more space. Special day and residential schools, especially the latter, are slow to develop as well as expensive to build and operate---economic factors which may not be so attractive to Governments and voluntary organizations. I am wondering why schools for deaf children cannot be more simple and inexpensive in design and construction, yet sturdy. Funds could go further towards providing additional facilities.

THE PROBLEM OF SPECIAL PERSONNEL

“Closely linked with special facilities are, of course, special personnel, particularly teachers and heads of programs. Fortunately, their number is increasing in Africa, especially with the establishment of training centres in Ghana and Nigeria. Also minimum qualifications of teachers are being raised from the 6^th to the 10^th and 12^th grade levels. Yet the supply in relation to the need is dismally low…”

Ever since Nigeria has produced a sizeable number of educated deaf persons. The deaf are fairly well represented in Nigeria’s education system; they have primary and secondary schools specifically set up for them, with Federal Colleges for the provision of Special Education. The best-known Special Education College in western Nigeria is the Federal College of Education (Special) in Oyo (Oyo State). Hundreds of deaf and non-deaf persons have graduated from this college to become teachers of deaf people. The universities of Ibadan (Oyo State) and Jos (Plateau State) provide Special Education course, and promote with committed urgency the inalienable right of the education of the deaf and other disabled persons. Western Nigeria is the breeding ground of Deaf Intelligentsia. For quantitatively and qualitatively they possess the polishing touches of education in greater measure than their counterparts in the South, East, and North.

Majority of the most useful deaf people with better brains have acquired their tertiary education either at Oyo or in Ibadan or have had a brush with that zone. The Christian Centre for the Deaf (established by Dr. Andrew Foster) has provided rehabilitation, reorientation and spiritual training to the deaf. But still the deaf in Nigeria need political and economic as well as spiritual liberation if they are to prove their mettle. If this should happen, it will have a positive spillover effect on the entire African continent. The emancipation will reverberate from coast to coast. They seem grim set to show what they can do and become if given the chance and opportunity.

What has been provided so far in terms of education is minimal compared to what the deaf envisage should be the necessary facilities really needed to reach the Utopian height education-wise or otherwise. Inadequacy of infrastructure for the deaf, slipshod attitude of society have severely marginalized them. Therefore we have a mighty army of unemployed deaf poor youths. In the throes and heat of frustration most have no choice but to resort to begging. They are a people with impaired morale that compels them to survive by fraudulent and phony representations that yield them no mean profits.

Well, they cannot help it. Society and Government have failed in their duty to the deaf in Africa’s most populous nation. There are very few boarding primary schools in Nigeria sponsored by State Governments. But facilities and logistics given by Governments for use by the deaf in these schools are looted and embezzled by the staff. This leaves the deaf impoverished in more ways than one. It is therefore a normal thing to see a typical deaf youth who is only semi-literate after about 12 years of primary and secondary schools attendance. He or she cannot write simple sentences neither in his own language nor in English language to express his or her thoughts dearly. Courtesy, negligence of some uncommitted teachers, some of whom do not even have good knowledge of sign language.

There are instances of deaf students making assaults on their teachers on grounds that the latter are loot what the Government sends as “welfare packages” to their schools for their use. Intellectual darkness and gross ignorance about many things are some of the problems of deaf youths in Nigeria. The consequence of this is that we have a proliferation of a begging industry. Begging Syndicates exist in some towns. Educated and intelligent deaf men who have [stolen] deaf girls in their employ run some of these criminal bodies.

Future of the Deaf in Nigeria

Succinctly, the future of the deaf in Nigeria is bleak and dismal. They have no social crusaders to campaign for the promotion of preventive and legislative measures to forestall the activities of forces that are out to ravage their collective welfare in a nation where they deserve to be heard and seen and respected. The awareness of their causes and interests are at present at very low ebb. They are relegated to the background or given only minimal attention in Government sports councils in spite of their display of outstanding performance in football, athletics, and badminton, etc. For it seems that society sees more or looks more at their auricular disability and its related problems than their abilities and performance! And since corruption is widely practised by many deaf youths and adults they are partly architects of their own ruin and retrogression. Their future stability is liable to great discomfort. With the current rapid proliferation of fraudulent Begging Syndicates that are tarnishing even the good image of self-employed and respectable deaf women and men, and spoiling their opportunities for better things, we assume it won’t augur well for the deaf in the nearest future. Loss of credibility and trust in the deaf to amount to much is escalating. What a beleaguered people!

Deaf Intelligentsia in Nigeria and abroad can only tackle efficiently and effectively the challenges and threats posed by the infamous Begging Syndicates if the virtue of honesty and integrity will reign supreme in the Deaf Intelligentsia in Nigeria to unite and develop means to combat the putrid odour and damage spread by this infamy. Deaf Intelligentsia should as well campaign for legislation in Federal and State Government offices to put in effect laws and by-laws that would promote the overall interest of the deaf, legislate against oppression, repression, and raw deals.

The dangerous tentacles of notorious Begging Syndicates have penetrated homes and Government schools. They specialize in taking away or stealing deaf girls from these noble institutions and initiating them into the begging life. Naïve deaf girls fall for the baits of promises of grand financial rewards if they should use their feminine charms to yield some specified daily quota of funds for their “masters” or “slave masters”. It is reported by impeccable eyewitnesses that some men have as many as ten or fifteen stolen deaf girls in their devilish industry. We are even informed that when some leaders of the begging industry are tired of some of these girls, they sell them to other syndicate kingpins desirous to have their services.  These activities leave in their wake distraught parents who have awakened to the blistering shock of their daughters’ sudden disappearance. Caring and loving parents and relations of deaf girls are seen coming to Deaf Churches and Deaf Schools in hot tears with photographs of their missing children, and appealing for help from whomever could help recuperate their dear children. Certain parents have had to pay someone to go and fetch their children in faraway States. The rescued runaway/stolen deaf girls at times come back with pregnancies, which are often aborted. More deaf girls disappear in the Niger Delta than in any other part of the Federation

In the course of carrying out their infamous activities, these beautiful young girls are inevitably exposed to sexual harassments, ritual killers, human traffickers, etc. In the event of failing to produce the stipulated daily quota of funds, these unfortunate deaf girls must pay for this default in the form of (punitive) sexual hard labour. Some girls have perished here, having lost their lives in brothels and hostels for commercial sex workers. Few managed to escape the strangulating net of the inland human trafficking racketeers and return home to narrate tales of woe. Deaf girls have been trafficked from one city to the other and got so stranded in strange cities that they do not know how to find their way back home. They are successfully used to beg. Some of these deaf girls are foreigners. The Punch (a Nigerian newspaper) reported on Thursday, August 16, 2001 how the “ Abia State Government has expatriated two deaf Cameroonian girls who were used by some Nigerian business men for prostitution and begging. The State Commissioner for Sports and Social Development stated this while briefing the press on Tuesday in Umuahia (Abia State Capital). He said two destitute persons had been repatriated to Akwa Ibom and Kogi States, while ten of such persons had been sent to Amudo in Bende Local Government Area of the State pending proper determination of their State of origin.”   

“By what pretensions and protestations of love, and all its powerful charms, promises of marriage, assurance of secrecy and reward, is many a virgin brought to sell her virtue, and honour, and peace, and soul, and all to a base traitor” (Matthew Henry, English Bible Commentator.)

Other escapees continue the begging independently across the country with boys they have chosen to move around with. Some have traversed the Nigerian border to go as far as Senegal, Mali, Niger, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, and where not in the West African sub-region, simply to beg for money. Some of these girls are such inveterate beggars that no amount of persuasive reasoning and logic can succeed in making them change their minds and abandon the dirty job and return home to their parents. One of them told us that she was caught in the crossfire of the civil war that shook Cote d’Ivoire some months ago. Luckily she succeeded in finding her way back to her dear native land.

There was a time deaf people did not practise the act of cohabitation. But of late this ugly phenomenon has become common and widespread among unenlightened, unguided, poor and frustrated deaf youths who feel rejected and abandoned by not so considerate and understanding a society that cares less about their welfare. The phenomenon of cohabitation has spoilt forever the expectation and joy of some loving parents who have hoped to see their deaf youths getting married one day.

Cohabitation has pitched deaf young men against parents of [stolen] deaf girls, who, more often than not, side with their “husbands” to stand against their own parents so that the “union” would not be dissolved. But experience has shown that the union is loveless, devoid of sterling commitment and liable to complete failure, sometimes after children have been born to the illegitimate union. There are instances of the deaf youths’ parents overlooking the shame of cohabitation once children arrive. They come for the babies to look after or craftily take away when either the father or mother does not show interest in them.

Then an old toothless granny would at least forget the depression and loneliness of her old age once she has a grandchild or grandbaby to dandle, kiss, hug and lavish care on before answering the appointment with the grave. Hitherto close-knit family members have suddenly turned into enemies, crafty and hypocritical toward each other over issues relating to the custody of the babies. The arrival of the babies truly has engendered family feuds. The situation is like a cup full of the unsavoury juice of bitterness and joy mixed together. Many other indescribable miseries have accompanied the cohabitation system. Is this the curse associated with cohabitation? The cohabitation syndrome is an obvious characteristic of the deaf in several Niger Delta States, particularly the riverine States. When will society and the Church help them to build legitimate unions?

A most unfortunate thing is the deaf lady who becomes most wretched victim in the event of the collapse of the cohabitation system. Not knowing what to do or where to turn, they will fling themselves into the arms of an apparently sympathetic and more caring fellow that shows up. Or whom they thought would love and be true to them. Again children arrive only for ditching to occur all over again. We have deaf women in permanent divorced state bringing up several children of different biological fathers.

We are led to wonder if the deaf youths in Nigeria are really Nigerians because their native land has so neglected them that all they have to export is the begging business. We are told that there are not as many deaf beggars in other West African countries as we have it here. Intelligence informs us that their deaf hosts overseas are now being taught to see the “dignity” in begging.

In the light of this opprobrium it is imperative for Deaf Intelligentsia at home and abroad to unite to overthrow the forces gathering momentum to militate against the collective future of their women and girls. (The ugly activities of the begging predators have made some regional deaf groups be on high alert. They are mounting formidable vigilance and defence around innocent deaf girls in their towns, protecting them from predatory elements of the Begging Syndicates. In Deaf Churches girls are being warned and admonished against begging monsters.)

 Emancipation, economic freedom, liberation, and deliverance from backwardness at the political, economic, intellectual and spiritual levels are what good and godly Nigerian deaf people should seek to achieve.

Nigeria National Association of the Deaf:

A Frustrated Organization?

There is a national association of the deaf. This association has been in existence for more than twenty-nine years. It has branch offices or representatives in almost all States of the Nigerian Federation. But for various reasons the organization could not establish useful infrastructures and measures that would have prevented the current general deadlock in which many deaf people in Nigeria find themselves. Since it is one association found in an environment infested and blighted with corruption it has suffered from frustration. Consequently the hydra-headed obstruction to performance has done damage to great projects some well-meaning members of the body have sought to carry out. Commendable visions and tentative moves toward implementation of such goals could hardly survive under the heat of frustration, which has strangulated or starved to death great long-range projects. When will there be a decisive reshuffle that will demote the corruption ghost and overcome frustration?

Despite what many deaf youths see as the failure of the national association there are individuals that are grateful to the body. It has played laudable roles in legitimately helping them avert unemployment and untold hardship in some ways in some places. The national association of the deaf is still capable of great political and social operations on behalf of the deaf if the crippling agents of corruption are definitely sacked or diplomatically resisted. Sampled out statements coming from voices within the body throw light on the virtue of credibility and seriousness that can be found in the national body. A representative of the Kwara State branch of the association made such selected statements at the 15th Annual General Meeting in Ado- Ekiti State of Nigeria. The speech opened with: “ an achievement is a clothing to cover the nakedness of any Government rule” or “specifically elected executives as ours today” and that “no achievement can excel the capability and resources of its achiever”. Highlighted in the speech are:

1.         Education as the highest priority: career counselling for educational placement, which has brought about admission of most of their members into the Federal College of Education (Special) Oyo, Kwara Polytechnic and Technical College.

2.         Maintenance of discipline and school standards in conjunction with the school authorities of the Kwara State School for the Handicapped.

3.          Full support and encouragement for members in marital issues.

4.         Sponsorship to vocational skill acquisition: carpentry and type writing.

5.         Renovation/repair works done in collaboration with the National Headquarters of the Kwara State School for the Handicapped.

And contained in the speech delivered by the Niger State branch was the news that although the association is not a political organization, they had made efforts to form a political (State) Association of the Deaf which later registered and merged with United Nigeria Democratic Party (UNDP).

This is why Miss Euphrasia Mbewe (Women’s Co-ordinator of the South African Federation of the Disabled) admonishes that Deaf Associations should ensure that they steer clear of “social injustice” from within the house

The organization, from the time of its inception, has summoned and held tens of Annual General Meetings at the national and State levels with grants from governments and private companies for the purpose. But these have not taken the association and the deaf in general to any worthwhile height. Many reasons account for this trouble. One of them, as we hear, is Government’s poor/ inadequate response. So there could not be much impact made for good on the lives of deaf youths who have attended meeting in droves in the Federal Capital Territory and in State Capitals. The deaf are crying out. The deaf people howl in pain. “The national association has failed to fight disinterestedly for our interests. We are intolerably disappointed!” They allege that disunity, hypocrisy, pretence, lack of accountability and integrity on the part of the national and State leaders have weakened and rendered the body ineffective.

The people are watching to see when this sleeping lazy giant will stop snoring, wake up, and become imaginative and aggressively creative for the sake of its thirsty beleaguered subjects.  We are getting wind of imminent visionary separate bodies. Perhaps they will salvage the jeopardized destiny of the deaf. Something serious must be shaping up. Who knows?

The Deaf and the Blazing Torch of the Gospel

The Christian Mission for the Deaf in Ibadan (Nigeria) spearheaded the issue of the evangelization of the deaf on a wider scale. The mission introduced the Bible to the deaf in western Nigeria and established Deaf Churches here and there. It has over the years sponsored deaf persons to Bible Colleges and Seminaries for the continued expansion of the work of Deaf Evangelism. Since its inception more than thirty-five years ago the mission organization has held Christian national camp meetings or retreats and conferences for the spiritual and moral growth of the deaf.  It has played a very impressive major role in the integration of deaf persons in the wider society in western Nigeria and elsewhere. It is still working today. Many of the products of this mission organization are useful and productive deaf persons in society. Their enhanced moral standards and spirituality have enabled them to be stable family men and women. Others are deaf pastors, evangelists and preachers. Their religious activities are touching, changing, and saving lives.  Deaf persons who were once trainees or members of the Christian Mission for the Deaf are today among the frontline evangelists and preachers of the gospel in the deaf community in Nigeria. They are continuing where late Dr. Andrew Jackson Foster left off.

A sizeable number of hearing Churches are incorporating the deaf in their fellowships across the land and taking care of their spiritual needs. They are, just to mention a few:

Deeper Life Bible Church  

Apostolic Faith Church

Independent Baptist Church

Assemblies of God (Nigeria)

Gallaudet University (U.S.A.) Honours Andrew Jackson Foster

(Dr. Andrew Jackson Foster is the first deaf African American to graduate from Gallaudet University. Seventeen years after his death the University planned to immortalize him and his work among the deaf in Africa).

AUDITORIUM WILL CARRY

MONIKER OF FAMED EDUCATOR

“(WASHINGTON) Dr. Andrew Jackson Foster, the father of deaf education in Africa, dedicated his life to the betterment of the deaf and hard of hearing community worldwide. This October, a renovated facility at his alma mater will reopen donning his name.

“During its homecoming, Gallaudet University will unveil the newly renovated Andrew J. Foster Auditorium during a dedication ceremony, scheduled for 4 p.m., Friday, Oct. 22. During the ceremony, organizers will also unveil a bust of the educator, recently donated to the university by the National Black Deaf Advocates.

“Foster, in 1954 becoming the first African American to graduate from Gallaudet College, worked toward achieving his childhood dream of establishing schools for deaf students. Between 1957 and 1987, he established 31 schools and two centers in 13 African countries and a similar number of Sunday Schools/Bible meetings/Churches. The educator died in a plane crash in 1987.

“Gallaudet’s homecoming will take place Oct.22-23, 2004. Festivities will include various alumni reunion activities, sporting events and an Emeritus Club gala honoring those who attended the university 50 years ago. The class of 1954 - Foster’s graduating class - will receive special recognition…”(Reprinted with permission from Darrick Nicholas, Media Relations Coordinator, Gallaudet University.)    

Conclusion and Recommendation

A generation of deaf girls is growing with very slim chances of receiving good quality sound education that might assist them to win against the harsh realities of chaotic modern life. They will be fiercely eluded by functional literacy.  They will risk becoming economic liabilities. They will be militated against by the forces of evil and oppression operating to overthrow and remove the fibres of high moral standards that have been known to be the bedrocks of strong and healthy individuals and societies. Their future hangs precariously in the balance. Theirs is a virulent steep descent into wholesale misery. This is because there is a dehumanizing rot in some parts of the deaf community in Nigeria.

But the future of deaf people in Nigeria is dependent on their social and economic empowerment, integration and emancipation. We need to be soundly educated and trained as we grow up, so we can take our destinies in our own hands. Public schools for the deaf should be empowered and equipped with proficient and diligent staff. Non-Governmental Organizations with educational programs for the deaf should be encouraged and supported with relevant resources to enable them to render excellent services to the deaf in rural and urban areas.  We think that we should not be daunted by the challenges when we look at how we can achieve our aims but rather we should focus on what we can accomplish by taking action now!

II

LIFE IS AN EXCITING BUSINESS

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others---Helen Adam Keller, deaf-blind woman

It is when we take special interest in others that we come to know them better, understand their problems and how these affect them generally. Interest in others helps us to know them better so that we are never too quick to pass unjust and unkind judgment over them; we avoid damaging criticism and cruel censorship.

We can only be interested in others when we are ready and willing to live for them and share our lives with them in selfless service. Considerate disposition combined with real interest in a person leads our steps toward judging righteous judgment (John 7:24). The spirit of tolerance, forbearance, fairness and equity guarantees our safe standing in that virtue of judging righteously.

Many people among us do live, and have lived, their lives for others and have consequently come up with pieces of write-ups about the peculiar problems of the ones they sacrificed themselves for; or they have invented and initiated means of promoting the general welfare of the helpless.

Miss Barbara Head is credited with making this observation about deafness; she got some insight into it. She observes: “Deafness, however great or small, is a cage of loneliness. A feeling of sadness, of being left out – unknown to others. It is a language all of its own, unique in its garbled sounds. Hearing is like a distorted radio or a tape playing backward in a cassette recorder. It is a hurt feeling when everyone laughed at the joke except you. Deafness is weeping, crying in frustration to understand a voice, and straining to see the lips move – the interpreter to ears. Deafness is exhaustion from intense listening. It is a battle from beginning to end, a struggle that is not noticed because there is nothing to see.”

Mere Interest in a Little Deaf Girl Builds

Gallaudet University

“Dr. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was credited with bringing sign language for the deaf to the United States from France. The college for the deaf in Washington bears his name. It was his interest in a little deaf girl who lived in New England that led Dr. Gallaudet to go to England so that he could learn the sign language for the deaf. Later in Paris he met Abbe Sigard, Head of the French school for the deaf. This school had been formed in 1755 by Abbe De L’epec, inventor of the signs used in France.

“Dr. Gallaudet came back to New England and brought with him an educated deaf young man, Laurent Clere. In 1817, they founded a school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A. . Subsequently the schools for the deaf have been established in most States and day schools are conducted in many large cities.

“In most of our large cities the deaf have a clubroom where they meet to play games. Films of silent pictures are often provided by the city recreation department. Sometimes they dance using the clapping of hands to keep time.

“The deaf are of all religious beliefs but because of the small number in any denomination they usually attend the same church. There a special Sunday School programme is provided and hearing person interprets the lesson – and later the sermon – into the sign language.

“The deaf sometimes need hearing friends who can interpret for the doctor in case of illness or to help them obtain employment. It is imperative that they have the help of an interpreter in legal matters. Some concentrated study will enable one to learn the basic symbols.

“Deaf children may enter most state schools at the age of six (6) years and may remain until the age of twenty-one. Vocational and academic education is provided in such schools. It is hard for a parent to see a six-year-old leave home for a residential school, so this is an opportunity for Christian friends to be kind.

“Whether you live in a city, a small town or the country, you can probably find some deaf person who would appreciate your friendship and reading material. In case of sickness or sorrow, visits are specially appreciated by deaf people. Always take a pad and pencil and you will receive hearty replies to your questions. With permission you might mark your deaf friend’s Bible.

“Ninety percent of deaf parents have hearing children. These can be enrolled in Sunday School classes and may be the means of reaching parents with the gospel.

“The deaf are mentioned many times in the Bible. In Exodus 4:11, we read that God created the deaf ear as well as that which can hear. In Leviticus 19:14, God warned His people that they should ‘not curse the deaf’ and in Isaiah 29:18 this promise is found, ‘In that day the deaf shall hear the words of the book.’

“When Jesus came, He ‘made the deaf to hear’ (Mark 7:37) – Can we be less interested in the deaf than was our Lord?” ---Mrs. William Jones.

Treasure Ridden Ground Worth Mining

 It was probably in the last three or two centuries that greater awareness of the world of the handicapped shot into lime light. It gripped the attention of the whole world and commanded spectacular awe and respect. The facts that enacted this display of awe and respect have indeed been certain undreamed-of characteristics and potentials in the lives of all categories of handicapped persons. Ripples and shock waves ran through the global human nerves. The pervasion of the shock waves was such, in its stunning effect, that the whole human race could not, or cannot, help chorusing that nothing like this has ever been seen (Matthew 9:33).

The study of history of the distant past does not offer a vintage point, it seems, from which we can deduce the type of treatment meted out to the disabled, at least in secular history. In the Old Testament of the Bible, we learn that God gave laws to His people as to what their attitude toward the poor and disabled ought to be. But the people neglected these laws and deprived the poor and helpless of their privileges and opportunities. This cruel phenomenon is still with us today; history is being repeated on a regular basis.

The negligence of the handicapped became the order of the day, and there was no way for them to get out of their perplexing situation. Negligence ruled supreme. No one had the answer to their dilemma. Things went on like this until Jesus appeared on the scene to stand against the tide. Here is one example: One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years…he (Jesus) asked him “Do you want to get well?” “Sir”, the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes ahead of me (John 5:5 – 7).

Jesus healed the man and he walked out of his desperate state of deprivation into unlimited opportunities and privileges in life. He could probably have squared up shoulder with people that once overlooked him and failed to give him considerate attention. God may have given the means of healing and liberating the handicapped to us, but our nonchallant attitude deprives them of their blessings. We by-pass them and leave them to whine in their agony.

It pays to care for people. Jesus’ healing love toward the handicapped and diseased has gradually taught mankind to learn to care for them and fight for their rights. The care being given to HIV/AIDS victims today is a case in point. Jesus initiated a noble ministry. It is now our turn to allow this noble task to blossom by being willing to take the baton of care from the hands of Jesus. Some worthy men and women have taken this baton and done wonderfully in the lives of the handicapped. For by the end of the twentieth century this disinterested care reached a remarkable climax and peak. Dr Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet’s mere interest in a little deaf girl led to the foundation of the world’s only university for the deaf in the United States of America

People discovered that the world of the handicapped is a lucrative terrain worth mining or exploring, not for the generation of funds but for the discovery of the astonishing potentials and capabilities and wonders hidden in the handicapped human person. A handicap does not terminate the usefulness and abilities of deformed people. We have a biased tendency to brand the deformed as one done for, i.e. that all hope is lost for them.  But this is a dangerous error. A little care to save a man from the crippling effects of sin or to alleviate the pains of natural handicap to the fullest degree possible will yield handsome results.

Jesus did not use the crippled man to make money or raise funds for selfish ends. No, He healed the man, meeting a very basic need. What did Jesus reap from that cure? In the healed disabled man, there lay great advertising and publicity capabilities. He went abroad and published Jesus’ ministry of healing and power to save from sin, thus beginning to live a life of usefulness. He began to fulfill the purposes for which God created him. There are great economic, political, social and spiritual virtues and capabilities in the disabled. Lift them up with just a little care.

Salvaged Blind Man Displays Unusual Valour

Another instance of the hidden usefulness of the deformed is found in the story of the man born blind. We have it recorded in John 9:1-38. After Jesus healed him, there came out of the man a daring boldness before the determined persecutors of Jesus. He also became a preacher of the truth about God. He believed and so he worshipped Jesus.

Prior to his liberation from the darkness of blindness, we have no record that he displayed these qualities. As long as he remained blind, he had nothing to give God and society: he never worshiped God nor preached to hardened sinners. But the care and love of Jesus drew the best out of the man. Some disabilities are there to undo their  victims and doom them to a life of perpetual uselessness unless a touch of care on our part deals a blow to it to liberate the victims.

Jesus’ act of kindness caused a controversy between Him and the religious leaders of His day. The latter became incensed with jealousy. So the man who had benefited from the kindness came under interrogation. To Jesus’ enemies he replied with such proud and confident courage. He said, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see” (John 9:25).

He was glad about his recovery of his precious sight. It astonished him. His delight was unlimited. And it seemed he spoke in such a way as to enjoin these critics to rejoice with him and turn away from the evil of entertaining burning jealousy against Jesus. He had no time whatever to engage in gossip and persecution, nor had he time to harbour suspicion whether Jesus did use God or Satan’s power to heal him. Nor did he question Jesus as to His origin. He simply accepted what was given. He made himself no man’s judge. What a remarkable character! What a noble ministry of liberation!

He instantly rose above the common unkind practice of the crowd that is usually prone to defamation, slander and criticism. The Bible does not give us the name of this blind man Jesus healed. But the Bible shows us that he was born again. In the course of the controversy, he rebuked the religious leaders. He sought to knock sense into them in order even to show them their stubbornness in refusing to be reasonable. “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to be his disciples, too?” (John 9:27). He too became a God-appointed preacher. He preached to spiritually blind religious leaders. He continued, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (John 9:30–33). To some extent, the man became a defender of Jesus of Nazareth. This is an aspect of the work of God being made manifest in him at the right time in the right place. His blindness had now served its purpose. But why did things about the life of the blind man change so quickly? The answer is simple: Jesus cared. Jesus touched him with the brush of care. Will you care?

One thing we must believe and be sure of: that when our arrogant and insensitive leaders (religious or political) have become or are wicked and impenitent, God will take the initiative to look for replacement. God will find reliable and trustworthy replacement among the despised and scum of society like this poor blind beggar. If our leaders are incorrigible and corrupt serpents and you want or wish for a change in the nation’s political or spiritual life, then you should go and work among the disabled. Through your care, God will raise up leaders from among them. Isn’t this marvellous and exciting? Any wonder the Bible informs that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly…and the despised…to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before him” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29).

 When the disciple of Jesus saw the blind man sitting and begging, they suspected that either this man or his parents had sinned. In their eyes this was why he was born blind, and they asked Jesus a question to that effect. But how could one that was not yet born have sinned to deserve congenital blindness? People suspected sin and the devil as the immediate causes of his visual handicap; but Jesus saw and taught otherwise. (Sin and the devil are not always the causes of disability in our society.) Christ taught that the man was born blind so that the works of God could be made manifest in him. In commenting on the funny question of the disciples, someone commented that their inquiry was:

1.    Uncharitably censorious.

2.    Unnecessarily curious.

The commentator went further to explain what we need to see before jumping to conclusion and unwarranted harmful curiosity. He remarked that:

1.  The attributes of God might be made manifest in him: his justice in making sinful man liable to such grievous calamities; his ordinary power and goodness in supporting a poor man under such a grievous and tedious affliction, especially that his extraordinary power and goodness might be manifest in curing him. The difficulties of Providence, otherwise unaccountable, may be resolved into this ---God intends in them to show himself, to declare his glory, to make himself to be taken notice of. Those who regard him not in the ordinary course of things are sometimes alarmed by things extraordinary.

2.  The counsel of God concerning the Redeemer might be manifested in him. He was born blind that our Lord Jesus might have the honour, and might therein prove himself sent of God to be the true light to the world. Thus the fall of man was permitted, and the blindness that followed it, that the works of God might be manifested in opening the eyes of the blind. It is now a great while since this man was born blind, and yet it never appeared till now why he was so. The intentions of Providence commonly do not appear till a great while after the event, perhaps many years after. The sentences of Providence are sometimes long, and you must read a great way before you can apprehend the sense of them.

And soon it will be obvious to the whole world why you are deaf or blind or crippled. That day people who deride you or scoff at you because of your physical disability will be silenced and be ashamed of themselves. They shall bite their fingers in remorse when the glory of God is revealed through you. That very day they shall despise themselves for taking advantage of your handicap to enhance and promote their economic lives or privileges while you remain poor. They will swallow their groundless bitter prejudices: haven’t they said that it is a demon or an unnatural sin that brought about your disability? And haven’t they said that it is because God cursed you that you are deaf or blind or crippled?  They will stop whispering about you in your immediate presence. Their malicious gestures intended to defame your character and rob you will boomerang on that very special day. You have your special day. The sun of your victory is beginning to rise in the horizon. Don’t you see it, dear comrades in disability?

Beneath the façade of handicap lies inexhaustible mine of moral and spiritual virtues that we so much need these days. If we want our decaying society to survive and be refurbished, let us note that there is a field to work in. It is the field of the handicapped. They have salt and light to give us provided we take care of them.

The manifestations of capabilities in the handicapped teach us that human beings with any type of defect or deformity cannot be treated as inferiors no matter the nature and level of their disability and its effect on their intellect, social compatibility, morality and spirituality. They are retrievable. In the wisdom and economy of God, no man is unusable as far as he can be retrieved. “For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building” (I Corinthians 3:9).

Freedom Publicity Dins From Ex-Maniac:

Good News In Decapolis

In the fifth and eighth chapters of the gospels of Mark and Luke respectively, a captivating scene involving a maniac emerges. The details of the scene as seen in the Holy Bible can hardly afford to be ignored. It authoritatively demands our utmost attention before dazing us with wonder. The location of the scene is the country of Gadara (a city six miles South East of Sea of Galilee) in Decapolis in East Manasseh in the Land of Israel. (By the time of Jesus’ life on earth the Roman Empire had conquered Israel so that now Decapolis had become a Roman Province embracing parts of Syria and Palestine.)

  Life now hardly was disturbed by nature or man-induced crises. At least so it seemed on the surface. Everybody probably had nothing any more to worry about, especially as we see how the people of Gadara (Gadarenes) had given up on an uncontrollable fierce maniac. The Gadarenes had a bad time once when the maniac sprang up from among them and often rocked the ship (not gently but violently) of the prized serenity and peace of the land.

The unnamed maniac, the Bible reveals, had thousands of demons (a legion) living in him, hence the violent fits, tantrums and jerks of restlessness and self-destruction. To check the threat to the communal serenity of the country, the people brought fetters and chains and tied the man with them in hope of subduing him. Unfortunately, their dynamic exertions, propelled by the energy of hope amidst chaos, were ruined or wasted. The fettered man, probably in a split second, would break off the fetters and chains to pieces to the utter indescribable amazement of the whole citizenry. The deranged man’s notorious exploits had reached so high a dimension that “neither could any man tame him” (Mark 5:4).

Providentially it seemed that people sighed in relief when the demonized maniac left the town and found home in the mountains and among tombs. He was nude. But then woe betide any person who had dared to venture in his territories of unnatural solitude. For the Bible says that he was “exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way” (Matthew 8:28): he “was driven of the devil into the wilderness” (Luke 8:29).

What occupation absorbed his precious time in this wilderness? The devil saddled him with the addictive habit of crying (perhaps howling and barking) and cutting himself with stones night and day. We do not doubt that at midnight the maniacal noise made by the man echoed back and forth incessantly while people slept. He denied them the mandatory profound night sleep that usually accompanied hours of hard work in the day. He tortured them with his horrendous howls. Some might have more than double padlocked or barricaded their doors for fear that while the citizenry slumbered the notorious maniac would take advantage of the quiet night and storm town to smash doors and destroy lives. Did children whine, shaking in fright as they heard the cries? We are not in doubt about that. Did dogs guarding homes bark in response to maniacal disturbance? They sure did. And what of night watchmen? They did more than double their customary vigilance. In fact, everybody was on high alert.

To most people this man had no future, his irredeemable plight having led the people to so conclude. His parents and relations rued their monumental loss of potential offspring who would have been a source of great joy and blessing to the entire family, community and province---if he had not been taken captive by the infernal forces of Satan’s evil kingdom. The ounce of sympathy from friends of the family had been no less weighty and no less profusely inundating

While the machinery of finite human rescue operations burnt their last drop of fuel and rumbled to a dismal stop, the machinery of infinite divine rescue operations was switched on. And they began advancing in the form of the person of Jesus Christ who “arrived at the country of the Gadarenes” (Luke 8:26) by ship and “went forth to land” (Luke 8:27).

At the time Jesus arrived, the anonymous maniacal fellow was in the tombs and mountains as usual. So Luke reported. Luke tells that “there met him out of the city a certain man, which had devils long time” (Luke 8:27). The devils had mocked all human efforts that sought to subdue the man with fetters and chains. But as soon as these very scornful and fierce devils saw the formidable irresistible divine hit squad (Jesus & Co), they shuddered even before the divine assault missiles hit them. They trembled. They begged for mild treatment at the hands of Jesus. They solicited General Jesus Christ to send them into pigs. At a blast of a single command, the evil spirits, by the thousands, filed out of their victim in crazy rush. They made themselves unsolicited guests of a great herd of swine whom they incited and thrust into the deep sea nearby and killed them.

The unprecedented development created such a stir of astonishment that people fled and went to town to report what had just transpired between Jesus and the devils. They also expostulated at length on the improvement brought upon the maniac so suddenly. He had been out of his mind for years, and he didn’t know it until after he had undergone a thorough spiritual surgery at the hands of Jesus of Nazareth. He was now clothed and in his right mind. Then in gratitude, he wanted to follow his divine benefactor---to be with him, and be his disciple. But Jesus commissioned the ex-maniacal and ex-nude man to return to his own house, to his friends and tell them how great things God had done for him and how God had had compassion on him. He sure experienced a fantastic social reunion after a protracted fellowship with devils.

And “he…. began to publish.” It is unthinkable how a man who had been so wretched could now become a volunteering publicity agent. His was one of the latest and exquisite publicities in town at the time. In the hectic bubbles of gratitude, the ex-maniac might have employed the most fitting and accurate publicity stunts to describe his fortunate transition from the misery of insanity to the pinnacle of sanity, peace, joy, hope and eternal redemption. The descriptive adjectives employed to portray Jesus and the work of deliverance in glowing terms compelled attention. The vehemently feverish publicity dins rattled melodiously “in Decapolis” (Mark 5:20) or “throughout the whole city” (Luke 8:39), and “all men did marvel” (Mk 5:20). The force of the dins of that publicity dazed his family members and friends who had earlier sorrowed over his former condition and who could now hardly bring themselves to believe that this dear fellow was the former maniac. The surprise was simply too much, “for when God turned again the captivity of Zion (the maniac), we were like men that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing; then said they among the nations, The Lord hath done great things for them” (Psalm 126:1).

Now imagine what a better society we would have if every one of us is careful to aid the disabled to rise above their deplorable handicaps. Our cities will incessantly reverberate with the dins of joyous publicity and testimony of salvation from this special group of people---not to their advantage alone, but very much to God’s. Then relentless crave for more money and more material things will no longer be crucial priorities as it is nowadays. Today devils are mocking us as they parade themselves in insane persons in our homes, streets, on principal roads, in market places, and in Church premises. Some of these insane neighbours cause motor accidents or get killed by speeding vehicles. And we have no power to drive out these evil spirits. Yet we shout, “Praise the Lord!” in Church. And some of our preachers make us delirious (spiritually dull) with prosperity and financial success messages while wickedness multiplies daily. Repentance messages are now rare.

Deafness and disabilities are instances of captivity. They threaten to impose damaging limitations and setbacks that should not be there. We can counter the threats with the weapon of compassion and service. God chose not to remove the disabilities of Helen Keller and Fanny Crosby. But the compassion of God working through immediate neighbours warded off the thousands of ills that should have invaded their lives and rendered them useless to God and humanity. If we do not care, special group of people become a nuisance.

May God heal the disabled He wants to heal. And may God help us to care for those handicap or reproach He will not remove. Amen.

The Danger of Harbouring Apathy

The manifestations of astonishing qualities in the disabled have propelled the invention/creation of welfare promoting opportunities for the handicapped globally. Out of the hopelessness of apparently hopeless disabled persons have come the most glowing sparks and unquenchable torches of hope and aspirations for thousands, if not millions, of non-disabled people who have sunk into the pit of despair at the slightest difficulty or discouragement. But in comparison to the tangible sorry state of a disabled fellow man, a small problem or difficulty is but a hardly visible fraction. Yet with astonishing quickness and ease small problems overthrow many able-bodied. Too many become victims of circumstances; they are buried by them. The Bible says such “… are ……entangled therein and overcome” (II Peter 2:20). But who will help lift these people, many of whom are committing suicide like Alexander Ogbaji a sacked bank worker. Our cities and towns are replete with men, women and children wounded and felled by deadly arrows of ill fate engineered by nature and man. Helen Keller lamented: “Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all--- the apathy of human beings.”

In the world today, there is a scarcity of care. The well of care in human beings is dried up. Loving care and concern is what everybody needs and is looking for. The poor need care. The rich thirst for love and care. The helpless orphans pant for it. The handicapped lust for it with desperate acuteness. Widows cry for it day after day. Prisoners want to be visited. Single ladies that have been jilted more than twice want to hear you say that the sweet twitter of early morning birds is just for them to keep hoping again for that ideal partner. The poor that sit in the streets slavering under rain and hot sunlight not only want your dirty crumpled bank notes; but they also want to see you smile at them. Then they will understand that you do not despise their condition to which nature has condemned them.

After all, what is care? A caring smile; a handsome praise; words of encouragement and comfort; an act of kindness; a melodious how-are-you? a carefully planned visit; what-is-your-name? Have-a-nice-day wish; giving gifts to cheer the down-trodden and mourners; expressing congratulation to preachers, civil servants, pastors, mothers and fathers for jobs well done; telling the weak and timid how much we value them; admonishing the guilty child or adult; preaching the gospel to all and sundry, etc.

One of the most dangerous evils in human beings is apathy (lack of interest). Its scarcity has played a great role in the proliferation of wretchedness and evil in the world. Apathy has sent countless souls to hell. Apathy is a crime. Human laws tend to leave it unpunished, but God will punish apathy in whomever it is found. We shall reap what we sow. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asked God.  In response God cursed him! You may be next.  Let us beware of not caring.

One of the powerful things that show no situation in life is irreparable or hopeless is the dilemma of the handicapped or their world. With bold and infallible emphasis, we hold that this is true. The disability world is one of the finest teachers in nature. In terms of prospects of hope, it is rich, notwithstanding the fact that it bristles with great and shocking suffering and difficulties.

It is a supernatural library worth consulting if you are in search of gems to set up as beacons in your desperate struggle to maintain hope no matter your situation. But we cannot be privileged to enjoy the contributions of the disabled if we neglect caring enough for them. God cares about the world of the disabled…He demands just a little care from you. If you determine to care, then you will know that God “works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” (Ephesians 1:11).

God’s general purpose and goal through the stream of human history has been to preserve hope for mankind. In the book of Judges in the Bible, we read the account of an interesting event. It revolved around Jephthah and his daughter. He made a reckless vow, which eventually sent him a bolt of most grievous hopelessness. It was a hard blow indeed, so much that he exclaimed, “Oh! My daughter! You have made me miserable and wretched, because I have made a vow to the Lord that I cannot break” (Judges 11:1-40).

Clearly all hope was lost for him; he was condemned to miss his daughter. But then a dialogue ensued between him and her. She saw the desperate situation and its long-range effects, but she cared enough to encourage her father to keep his oath. Hope came afloat for Jephthah. He had the strength now to release his daughter to God.  If Jephthah’s daughter had not cared enough to speak, he would not have been set on the path of receiving the blessings, God promises to give any one “who keeps his oath even when it hurts” (Psalm 15:4-5).

There is hope because God is always at work and fighting for us that we should not let go of hope. He wants to use you and me to fight battles with Him so that the beacon of hope everywhere will be held high up for inspiration. The discouraged will rise up once more, the depressed will be inflated with hope and the weak and timid will become lively and vivacious giants to do exploits. We should, on behalf of our neighbours and ourselves, join the Lord in battle. “Be strong and let us fight bravely for our people and the cities of our God. The Lord will do what is good in his sight” (2 Samuel 10:12).

God is forever working for us to remain bubbling with hopeful vibrancy as long as we are alive on planet earth. He unfurls the banner of hope for all mankind. This is why the Bible says that “anyone who is among the living has hope---even a live dog is better than a dead lion” (Ecclesiastes 9: 4). God is fighting battles. He wants us to be His allies through faith in Jesus Christ, who brought the hope of eternal life to humanity. We stand the danger of damnation if we join the ungodly to destroy hope and peace or if we refuse to give a helping hand to the hopeless and the perishing. “And Jehu the son of Hanani the seer went out to meet him, and said to King Jehoshaphat, Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the Lord? Therefore is wrath upon thee from before the Lord (2 Chronicles 19:2).

‘Curse Meroz;’ said the angel of the Lord. ‘Curse its people bitterly because they did not come to help the Lord, to help the Lord against the mighty’” (Judges 5:23). If there were no serious evil in the act of ungodly partnership, then God would not have kept His bountiful store of mercy and love aside and resort to pronouncing wrath and cursing respectively on the individual and community mentioned above. Where do you invest your life, time, talents, financial resources and energy? Are these great resources at your disposal handed over to the devil to foment mischief and unleash devastating strings of woes on people? Is your misuse of God-given resources deepening the misery of the less privileged among us or lessening the burden of their grievous yoke? Jesus said that a greater love has no man than that he lay down his life for his friends… to better the base lot of his friends in order to bring some inestimable blessing within easy reach. 

God is a God of hope (Romans 15:13). There is no desperate situation in the Bible and in contemporary times that God has abandoned as too wretched to deserve His attention. Thomas Hardy tells us that there is great strength in hope. The hope of God brought us Jesus Christ. The strength of the hope of God conquered the devil on the cross of Calvary. So “… tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God…(Matthew 21:31)…he (Jesus) too shared in their (our) humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

Mr. Alexander Ogbaji Loses Little Money and Cell Phone to Thieves:

He Commits Suicide

It has come to our notice that the phrase “I want to die” is a common refrain in our modern society. It echoes back and forth across the whole world, but the frequency of this dismal refrain is more strident in Europe and America than in Africa. In these first two continents the stridency of the wretched echoes is usually matched or consummated with corresponding termination of life. The level of suicide is in proportion to the high level of the wish to die in those lands. It is tragically too alarming. We read from one source that six teenagers terminate their own lives (or commit suicide) daily in the United States of America alone. Another source reveals that “every 40 seconds someone somewhere in the world kills themselves…every three seconds, someone tries to, but does not succeed”. Then eight (8) reasons are enumerated why people commit suicide.

1.    Feelings of failure …not being able to do something as well as you want to, or your family expect you.

2.    Feeling that you do not matter, that no one loves you.

3.    Losing the friendship of a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife.

4.    The death of a person who was very close to you.

5.    Sexual or physical abuse, rape or other problems. You may feel you cannot talk to someone else about these things, so you hide them in your mind.

6.    Feeling guilty about something you have done.

7.    Money problem or debt.

8.    Alcohol or drug can work in your mind and make it seem easier to die.

The 21^st century has recorded a horrifying spate of precious lives lost to the putrid cesspool of suicide. Modern people are intellectually rich, full of knowledge. But it is sad that we appear devoid of powers of endurance and moral visions when we face certain problems we think we cannot surmount. We see ourselves stuck in a rut and then we transport ourselves into the shameful hall of suicide only to create more problems than solutions despite our overloaded heads. We leave behind unanswered questions and endanger the future of our siblings through our self-inflicted untimely exit. On Friday, 6^th November 2004, the news were broken in the Daily Sun newspaper that one able-bodied Alexander Ogbaji of Benue State committed suicide. The news ran that he lost his banking job in an ongoing staff rationalization in Kano State. He returned to his native State and tried to set up a business centre. But before he began business operations he took up casual jobs to earn money and cater for his expectant wife. During one of these rounds of casual jobs, he fell into the hands of thieves who snatched his money and cell phone. The man cried and nobody could comfort him. He was overwhelmed with grief and the evil ghost of suicide beaconed to him and seduced him into its hall of dark infamy. There he was done for: he hanged himself in the night following that encounter with men of the underworld. He was found hanging behind a bank in Makurdi, after working for 20 years in a bank in Kano State.

Poor 34-year-old Alexander should have taken a clue from biblical Lazarus who had not thought of inching his way toward the hall of suicide despite his most wretched existence. He waited for his time of death and passed into a well-deserved glorious eternity. Alexander Ogbaji’s inglorious entry into the infamous hall of suicide came barely one week after a Makurdi-based businessman hanged himself inside his room.

The list could be longer. It is worth noting that most people committing suicide for the above reasons are not handicapped people. We do not hear of disabled people killing themselves for any of the above reasons, not even because of their disabilities which make life hard, indeed very hard, for many of them here in our land. At least so things appear to be as far as the scope of our knowledge and observation is concerned. In no country do they rank highest among the suicides often reported in our daily and international media. Most of them have two, three or more of these crises we have enumerated. But they do not weaken them to the point of causing them to terminate their own lives. For no matter what their difficulties, they still possess the will to live on and keep hoping.

It appears as if the disabilities they have had to overcome and cope with are responsible for developing in them a stronger capacity for endurance and resilience. So this enviable developed capacity is put to good effect in other areas of their lives when crises strike. They feel the impact of shocks; but they soon absorb and overcome them. And as they weather crises, they draw experience and self-preservation tactics and strategies to cushion and/or ward off threats. Many deaf people suffer from neglect and poverty, depression and stress, rejection, and slander. But none of these things lead them to see suicide as the best alternative. They would wish to die, and verbally express it, but the person listening (who of course happens to be disabled) would say something constructive to the contrary so the deaf person would forget about killing himself or herself.

Our conclusion is that people with deformities and physical impairments have special wealth of patience and optimism. Many of their easily discouraged hearing or normal counterpart who contemplate suicide had better learn something about patience by watching the disabled in their school of affliction and endurance. What is your answer if you would hear someone ask you this question: “Did you know that the suicide rate is highest among the rich?” Your answer will be no if you have not read/heard about great and rich men taking their own lives. If there is a rich man somewhere now who is planning suicide because he is unhappy or miserable, we appeal to him to have grace enough in his heart to reconsider his decision and pause. Then let him go down a typical roadside in our cities and watch the happy and cheerful poor ill-clad and hungry deformed beggars. The rich man will notice that though their physical misery is great, they do not plan suicide.

The triumph of the human spirit depends on faith. Dr. Randal said, “Faith has inspired every truly great career that has blessed the world. Faith has made possible every great institution that has enriched the life of humanity. It is faith that lifts man above the level of brute and makes him master over the physical world. The master key to success in every realm of human life is faith.” We must therefore combine care and faith to bring hope to others – the unfortunate, the crippled, the blind, the deaf, etc. Faith generates hope. Faith generates love. The combination of faith, hope and love gives us a “cord of three strands” which “is not easily broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12, 1 Corinthians 13:13). So let us learn to care. God cares, so must we.

III

THE NECESSITY OF UNITY, INTER-RELATIONSHIP AND INTER-DEPENDENCE

After the death of Joshua, the Israelites asked the Lord, “Who will be the first to go up and fight for us against the Canaanites?”

The Lord answered, “Judah is to go; I have given the land into their hands.”

Then the men of Judah said to the Simeonites their brothers, “Come up with us into the territory allocated to us, to fight against the Canaanites. We in turn will go with you into yours.” So the Simeonites went with them.

Joab said, “If the Arameans are too strong for you then you are to come to rescue me, but if the Ammonites are too strong for you, then I will come to rescue you…”(2 Samuel 10:11).

Ingredients of Survival and Triumph

Survival and triumph are basically hinged on the elements of faith, hope and love. That is, faith in what we want to do; hope that we shall have something good and basically beneficial coming out of that initiative of faith; and love that others will receive and enjoy comfort and security from what we are giving ourselves to. The Bible says that the greatest of these elements or virtues is love. It is because Christ loved, had faith and hope, that He survived all of Satan’s temptations and onslaught, and eventually triumphed, atoning for the sins of the whole world. We cannot survive and triumph in life with out this trio – love, hope and faith.

God raises the banner of hope and keep it hoisted. God causes hope to rise from anywhere, from among any group of people, tribe, race or nation. The world litters with the discouraged, the depressed, the paralyzed, the oppressed, the poor, helpless, tormented and tortured. We have those that look normal, but they too need hope because they live upside down lives. For all God gave Jesus Christ as the only beacon of hope of salvation and real success in the true sense of the word.

The Misery of the Isolated Rich and Famous

We know millionaires, brilliant bosses, men of fame and position who lamented their hopelessness notwithstanding their enormous wealth and fortune. They never lived in unity and interdependence either with God or man. If they had listened to Christ and used their fortune and wealth to benefit the widows, orphans, and disabled of their time, they would have had a more melodious refrain to sing at end of their lives. Let us hear what some of these famed wealthy people croaked out in the shame of their misery at last.

Jay Gould (American millionaire) had an enormous fortune. When dying, he said, “I suppose I am the most miserable man on earth."

William Tweed became the brilliant boss of Tammany Hall and ruled New York City. He said, “My life has been a failure in everything.”

Voltaire was an infidel of the most pronounced type. He wrote, “I wish I had never been born.”

Lord Beaconsfield enjoyed more than his share of fame and position. He wrote, “Youth is a mistake, manhood a struggle, old age a regret.”

Lord Bryon lived a life of ease and pleasure. He wrote, “The worm, the canker and grief are mine alone.”

Thomas Wolfe (novelist), at the end of his life, concluded, “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”

We can never in our wildest imagination assume that God gave wealth to this piteous bunch of men because he wanted them to end up so dismally. The truth, however, is that they had reneged on both divine and natural principles, which if applied, would have spared them unbearable grief. The principles of living in unity and inter-relationship with all categories of human beings are one of the prescribed divine panaceas for us to have really happy existence. There is no difference what position one occupies. We are not created to acquire positions and wealth and then retire on islands of isolation or seclusion. Nor have we been programmed from creation to groom ourselves into intellectual or spiritual giants for our sole self-arrogated enjoyment. But whatever we have got is meant for us to use for the general good. We shall incur no loss as we are made to believe we would. If we would but be caring God will reveal many things we do not yet know and have never had the capability of envisioning. “God has purposes concerning us, which He has not yet unfolded. Therefore each day grows sacred in wondering expectation” (Philips Brooks). But many of us miss it pure and simple like Jay Gould & Co.

Faith, hope and love provide the ground work for unity and inter-relationship among human beings. And the instrumentality of certain ones among us becomes the avenue through which God will work wonderfully among and through us. Then He will let us know that it through unity and inter-relationship that “he raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heaps; he seats them with princes, with the princes of their people. He settles the barren woman in her home as a happy mother of many children (Psalm 113:7-9). The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down” (Psalm 145:14).

Crucial Survival Strategies

Unity, inter-relationship and inter-dependence are imperative in human society at large. They are as necessary as air, the want of which will turn the entire earth into a mass physical grave. And the earth becomes a moral and spiritual grave when inter-dependence and inter-relationship are lacking.

The application of reciprocal dependence and relationship will continue to keep people to serve one another to sustain human life. The crucial importance and necessity of inter-dependence and inter-relationship is clearly portrayed in marriage. Here we understand that these virtues are a basic component of man. He needs them. A man needs his woman to meet certain basic needs and vice versa. Where the application of these noble elements is balanced and healthy, we have a wholesome and perfect home (1 Corinthians 11:11, 7:3-4).

Outside the home, we cannot do away with the principles of unity, inter-dependence and inter-relationship, because these elements or virtues are inscribed in our very nature. We cannot erase them nor escape from them. Martin Luther Junior saw this, and he was prompted to remark, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”.

If unity, relationship and dependence among ourselves are not of any importance to us, we would not have any need of neighbours, friends, sisters, brothers, teachers, the next tribes and even neighbouring countries. Interaction and inter-dependence occupy a unique prominent position in our lives like food and water and air. Whosoever we may be, we cannot live apart from others. Exclusivism is deadly in more ways than one; it leads to uselessness.

To further explain our point of the key role inter-dependence and inter-relationship play, let us move to another biblical passage throwing in more light. It reads thus: “The body is a unit, through it is made up of many parts, and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body – whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Now the body is not made up of one part but many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body… But in fact God has arranged the parts of the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honourable we treat with special honour. And the parts that are un-presentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given honour to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it, if one part honoured, every part rejoices with it” (1 Corinthians 12:12 – 26).

Analogically, human society is a unit, though it is made up of many parts--- races, tribes, clans, etc. Besides there are languages, dialects, cultures, and customs. And there are the disabled: the deaf, the blind and other categories of people with varied abilities but denied and deprived access by society, leading to their handicapping conditions. These parts of society are many, varied and different from each other. Yet their differences do not diminish or annul their roles and usefulness. Instead, their differences reinforce our need of them, because they have something to contribute toward the development, maintenance, sustenance, preservation and renovation of human society. But these unexplored contributions are only practically helpful on the platform of unity, properly coordinated inter-relationship. This is “so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. But in fact God has arranged the parts… every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.

There is much to learn from the illustration of the human body. Unity among human beings cannot just come about; it has to be desired, planned and created in faith and love – and hope of better results or rewards. Then there can be usefulness. The foundation of inter-relationship must rest on the solid time tested rocks of love and faith before there can be fruitfulness through inter-dependence. Fellowship opens the way for us to discover the wealth inherent in inter-dependence, and to see our desperate need of it. This is why the eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And I cannot say to you, “I do not need you”.

In the illustration of the human body, we see only co-operation and co-ordination. To each part of the body God assigned its function and role, so that what the foot can do, the hand cannot do, and what the eyes can do, the sense of smell cannot perform, and what the ear does the heart cannot perform. Members of the body must be varied in physical make-up, role and function if there ought to be a body, able to exist, live, grow, remain healthy and accomplish the purposes of God on earth and in eternity.

We have said that the human body is a unit with many parts, each part having a special place, position and role. In the same way, God arranged the existence and placement of the deaf in our midst for reasons we cannot easily fathom until we know the mind of God about them. The deaf and other disabled men and women are an essential part of human society no matter how insignificant they may appear. Their handicap has something to offer to the general well being of humanity. There is always something good that comes from their handicap to benefit the handicapped person himself.

Spiritual Benefits make up for Loss of “External Vision”

Fanny Crosby (1820–1915), the blind minstrel, made a thought-provoking remark about her blindness. She enthused, “I believe the greatest blessing that the Creator ever bestowed on me was when He permitted my external vision to be closed. He consecrated me for the work for which He created me. I have never known what it is to see, and therefore I cannot realize my personal loss. But I have had the most remarkable dreams. I have seen the prettiest eyes, the most beautiful faces, and the most remarkable landscapes. The loss of sight has been no loss to me”. How could a blind woman say she had seen remarkable landscapes unless God had planned her condition so she could say something timely to the world? How could such a one still have remarkable dreams when she did not have physical eyes? Whom did she dream for? She might have dreamt for the entire human race to discover from her that purportedly tragic physical losses are nurseries for the cultivation of some stunning virtues.   Qualities developed under the stigma and dilemma of handicap can well serve as preservatives, antidotes, antiseptics and panaceas for renovation of a sin-diseased world that persistently threatens to function or run upside down, contrary to the designs, purposes and intents of God.

Fanny Crosby, the blind minstrel, wrote more than eight thousand (8,000) songs, we are informed. Over the years, million of Christians pilgrims on life’s weary way have been cheered by her songs, indeed, her songs acted as antiseptics and antidotes on the wounded souls of the discouraged, the disappointed, the lost and forlorn. Her achievements as a handicapped (blind) person clearly show that the disabled are important to society. They have a mission to accomplish. Let us not ignore them. “Fanny Crosby achieved more in life than many able-bodied men and women of her time. Supposed to be succoured by others, instead, she became a ‘succourer of many’ (Romans 16:2) caught in life’s troubled sea” (Deeper Life Magazine).

Hymns like Safe in the Arms of Jesus; Near the Cross; Rescue the Perishing; Draw Me Nearer---were all written by this blind woman. One of the most trying challenges in life is physical handicap. You never know what it is like to carry a disability until you have one. It is like a fire that tests metal; it is fiery, rough, rude and very devastating at times. But it is here for our good because unusual stamina and ingenuity sprout out of it. Naturally, in the face of challenging physical handicaps and difficulties, the human mentality awfully tends to get twisted and prone to misconceptions, crooked ideologies and ideas. Common sense instantly becomes an enemy. We go to the extent of praying prayers of depression that never move God. We despair and think that we can go no further and insult ourselves by self-negation and self-pity. And Joshua said, “Ah, sovereign Lord, why did you ever bring this people across the Jordan to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us? If only we had been content to stay on the other side of the Jordan!” (Joshua 7:7).

God help us! May we have grace to despair neither because of our personal handicaps nor that of others. Usually, with God good comes out of unpleasant circumstances. This is commonly taught and preached in Christendom. However lack of vision or short-sightedness tempts us to regard a handicapped person as “less honourable” and “unpresentable” in society. But reason and duty demand that we treat them with “special modesty”.

Hidden Treasure of Power in the Poor and Despised

No deaf or any other handicapped person is unimportant. Much as they cannot be regarded as insignificant, they are equally not useless. (In the last chapter of this book you will read a surprising brief account of how a cripple saved village women from being raped during the bloody Civil War!)  The importance and usefulness of any person in our society is well shown in the Bible. It reads as follows, “ I also saw under the sun this example of wisdom that greatly impressed me.  There was once a small city with only a few people in it. And a powerful king came against it, surrounded it and built huge siege works against it. Now there lived in that city a man poor but wise, and he saved the city by his wisdom… (Ecclesiastes 9:13 – 15).

This is what the Lord says – the Redeemer and Holy One of Israel -- to him who was despised and abhorred by the nation…” Kings will see you and rise up, princes will see you and bow down, because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.... Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited” (Isaiah 49:7,9; Romans 12:15,16).

We personalize the above scriptures as we understand that God enjoins us to develop the virtue of inter-relationship and inter-dependence, and to share our lives with others, be they able–bodied or otherwise, poor or rich, educated or uneducated and to see that the despised, poor, abhorred  who appear insignificant are really important. These very people are the ones that ought to be treated with special honour. (When God was sending Jesus to this world, He thought and said that men would reverence my son. But men turned out to despise, abhor and reject Christ. But Jesus became the greatest man that ever lived and the sole redeemer of mankind from the slavery of sin). These are vital to society. Our neglect of them will play an important role in the speedy deterioration of society in morals and general growth. The negligence of the deaf and the less privileged threatens the healthy throbbing of the heart of society. We ought to give them more attention than we do celebrities, dignitaries and heroes with perfect bodies. A community, state or nation that relegates its disabled people to the background through sheer negligence, indifference, discrimination and marginalization is tying a millstone around its own neck and attracting cataclysmic disaster. This is because it is failing to tap a potential mine of succour and rescue and productivity.

 Here come Sodom and Gomorrah to mind. We are very familiar with the records of the shocking iniquity imputed against these cities. But a journey further into the Bible unveils that the sin of homosexuality was not the only thing that stood against them before God and men. The prophet Ezekiel discloses another side of their characters. “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen” (Ezekiel 16:49-50). Sodom relegated the needy and poor ones to a wretched background in spite of the fact that Sodom and Gomorrah were wealthy cities.  So God destroyed them. In contemporary times, we are not only guilty of senseless indifference toward the poor, but many of us are guilty of diverting resources that should have been used to develop the handicapped. Or we have sacrificed these on the altars of the gods of football, expensive burial and reburial ceremonies, extravagant wedding ceremonies and other forms of grandiose projects that only whet our pride. We forget that God places the less privileged in our society. They occupy a place in the heart of God. None is useless. For them to grow and be useful and fruitful, we need to give them the opportunity to partake of the milk of our abundant resources and the milk of the benefits of inter-dependence. We should not leave them to themselves because they must depend on their able-bodied counterpart to survive and overcome their handicap. In the process of discharging our duty to them, of course, we shall certainly incur extra expenses in terms of time, money and self-sacrifice. Our patience too will be highly tested, and we may as well suffer grievous disappointments and losses. But the subsequent remunerations will far outweigh the losses, hurt feelings and extra expenses.

Reject Your Misconceptions Now

There is nothing, I think, that does more harm to the general welfare of the deaf here than misplaced prejudices and misconceptions. There are many people who believe that the deaf are possessed with evil spirits on one hand, and cursed by God on the other hand. Some of these people, if not all, hold these aberrant views because in the Bible they read how Jesus Christ dealt with cases of deafness, blindness and dumbness caused by evil spirits. So wherever they see deafness, they suspect demonic mischief. Their conclusion is rash, misinformed and established on the dangerous grounds of inadequate understanding and perception. We believe that there are spirits that cause deafness and dumbness. But you cannot just immediately say that all deaf persons have devils. A great majority of deaf people in this country function as normal citizens. Many of them even have better education and morality than their normal hearing counterpart. We have many pastors among them. We know and understand all too well that total or partial loss of hearing can and do have medical causes. Accidents and natural illnesses do cause them. They can be tackled and brought under control, if not, completely wiped out.

The belief runs that God cursed the deaf. Those who hold this belief are not really sufficiently balanced in their understanding of God. They cannot produce tangible proof as to why God has cursed the deaf. They do not even know God, because if they do, they will be wise enough to be honest with themselves and open their eyes to see the good God is doing in and through the lives of the deaf. If deafness is a curse from God, why does God Himself in the Holy Bible warn us not to curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind? Please see Leviticus 19:14. God has earlier revealed in the Holy Writ that He is the one that makes the deaf, the dumb, the blind and the seeing. See Exodus 4:11.

Peddling the Deaf–Are–Cursed–By–God lie is an affront to God. It is as well a defamation of the persons of the deaf anywhere; moreover, it is an insult and smack in the face of those who work hard to improve the living conditions of the deaf by giving of their personal resources and appealing to others to do likewise. God places the deaf among us. It is a strategic and meaningful placement. There can be no denying the fact that we incur a curse or a blessing ourselves depending on how we treat them or what we say about them. In dealing with the deaf and dumb, there is need to exercise caution and guard against prejudices and harmful misconceptions.

The aberrant belief has tempted many educated and religious people in high offices to manipulate, discriminate against and deceive deaf persons in order to achieve wicked purposes. The deaf are used for economic gains. Damn it all! Is it because they are easy preys to societal ill-usage that you think they are cursed? Or is it because of their idiosyncrasies that you abet such an erroneous belief? Do I hear someone say that legendary Helen Keller’s dual handicap is a curse from God? Or a case of demonic activity? She rose victorious over her tragedy. The world continues to reel with astonishment at the knowledge of the awareness that hope should never be lost in the face of any human tragedy. She attributed her epic victory to God—the God you think has cursed the deaf. The deaf still shine today through God.

Of late we have become aware of a new school of thought among even some of our deaf youths. They are alleging that their deafness is not from God, but from the devil. We are afraid this dangerous view will assume an intolerable and devastating toll. An ignorant society may have fed them this intolerable lie. So some of them get taken to see witch doctors, sorcerers and occultists in their queer dark cells where through weird incantations and incisions on their bodies evil spirits get unlimited access and accommodation into their lives— much to their undoing. The occultists promise much and perform nothing while perniciously fleecing ignorant parents of their hard earned currencies. Soon after, in some quarters, society would scream, “They are demonized!” Who demonized them? “Society is the criminal, not the vicarious victim,” said a Nigerian historian. Another man said, “The [deaf] children are the worse for it”.

IV

THE INEVITABILITY OF PURPOSE AND DESTINY

When Fanny Crosby and Helen Keller (the blind-deaf woman) made their appearance on the stage of life with their blindness and deafness, they must have appeared as embarrassing dilemmas, enigmatic problems, and baffling jigsaw puzzles. But respect for their human persons and the willingness of able-bodied people to enter their lives paved the path for the tapping of the potentials that God had stored up in them. They overcame their tragedies, and extra-ordinary abilities issued from both women. They built up, directly or indirectly, able-bodied men and women to greatness and triumph.

Crosby and Keller became what they were because some individuals lived their lives for them. On the basis of our helplessness in the face of the handicaps of blindness and deafness we might be tempted to view Keller and Crosby as less honourable and unpresentable and good-for-nothing. But God who never sent a human being on earth without a definite mission to accomplish stepped up to give both women greater honour. We should note that God helped these women because certain people cared and undertook to handle them carefully and patiently. For their disabilities became opportunities for certain people to practise Christian service. “But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honour to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other” (1 Corinthians 12:24 – 25). In this issue, sincere mutuality transcends race, tribe and geographical boundaries because all men have the same blood. The concrete truism of this fact was vividly captured in a statement attributed to Martin King Jnr. (1929—1968) who said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

The people of Sodom did not take care of the poor and needy. They abandoned them to suffer terribly in their poverty and the pain of un-met basic needs. Their grim mien amounted to tearing the single garment of destiny to shreds to suit their wicked designs and ends. They cut asunder the inescapable network of mutuality, and set it to function in such a manner that it turned out to be an affront to the law and justice of God. He lost no time in destroying them. They paid dearly for their failure to groom themselves in all-encompassing mutuality.  The ill-fated people of Sodom must be indeed so callous that they were not by one iota moved by the plight of their weak ones. But Martin Luther further states, “Whatever affects one directly affects the other indirectly”.

Ill-fated Sodom never suspected once that their negligence of the poor and needy would one day have its repercussion on them. Ironically, they became poorer than the poor and needier than the needy when God dealt with them. The poverty of the poor and the wretchedness of the needy affected them. Their material and spiritual losses were tremendous, far outweighing the afflictions their carelessness induced on the helpless. We cannot escape a similar ill usage by the strokes of divine justice if we take liberty at ignoring people and situations we might have had reason to sense God is concerned about. And the desperate condition of a brother or sister we close our eyes on will naturally turn out to be our lot in due time. Ill-fated Sodom, if they had feared God and used their abundance to lift the poor, would have laid up treasures for themselves in heaven. Alas, they are now eternally poor.

If the disabled in our midst suffer as a result of our indifference, we shall also suffer one trouble or the other. We may feign ignorance of their plight. We may pretend that we do not have the resources for their succour. We may succeed in convincing people that we are not in a position to help in any way. We may want to make people believe we have not been served any notice of Awareness Program relating to the need for their development. There are huge volumes of trivial excuses handed out to shun gracious succour to the weak, needy and hurting. “If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay each person according to what he has done?” (Proverbs 24: 12).

And if they are honoured, the able-bodied section of society shall rejoice with them. Whatever their lot, whether nature-induced or man-inflicted, we share it. We cannot avoid it. Since we cannot avoid sharing in the plight of the disabled, we should determine to seek awareness through which to enter their lives and help them become what they ought to be. They need our assistance no matter the state of their handicap and the unpleasant characteristics that go with it. Giving them “a raw deal in our society” will not augur well for us as individuals and a nation.

Everywhere we look today, we find that many people with varied disabilities live mean life-styles of fraud and fakery. Their moral and spiritual lives are full of profound darkness. Educationally, the backwardness in them is painfully appalling in spite of the availability of colleges and higher institutions of learning in the country---the reason being that they suffer marginalization and are half satiated recipients of peanut grants. The phenomenon is most tragic among the hearing impaired. Consequently the deaf are reputed to be the group with the highest illiteracy level in the community of people with varied disabilities. Few among them are fortunate to acquire well-balanced literacy.

Discrimination and rejection and marginalization are daily dealt to the deaf through irrational prejudices entertained against them. This attitude tempts us to neglect them so that by and by they become a liability and a burden instead of blessing to the nation. The culture of entertaining venomous prejudices against the deaf and the other handicapped people is social cancer. We have now begun to hear screaming newspaper headlines that widows are now fighting churches, and that jail break recently rocked the foundation of the Umuahia Prison in Abia State, Nigeria. Excerpts from the Daily Sun newspapers are as follows: “A source told Daily Sun that the jailbreak may have occurred as a result of neglect and ill-treatment to the inmates by the prison authorities…The source said that the inmates had alleged that the welfare officers had colluded with the cooks and other officials to sell the food meant for them (the prisoners) to their relations who in turn cook the food and now come to sell to some privileged inmates…The source also said that the nefarious activities of the prison officials got to a climax last Sunday when a Christian organization from Enugu visited the prison with some tablets of soaps, tissue papers and other items for the use of the inmates but which those awaiting trial  were denied of sharing from to their anger and hence the plot to break jail.”  The jailbreak bid sparked by neglect had left one inmate dead and five others beaten to a state of coma.  God is taking note of the trend. Retribution is certain.

We stand to gain much in time and eternity for our investment in the disabled. The presence of poisonous weeds of unrest and disorientation in the lives of people with varied disabilities become a social and spiritual menace. The weeds have grown and matured enough to threaten the possibility of the cultivation of anything good from their lives. Some have closed themselves against God because of societal cruelty. Many have become experts in thievery, ruthless in hooliganism and violence, senseless in bestiality and rebellion, reckless and shameless in prostitution, adultery and abortion. They have mastered the art of choosing to live purposeless and unproductive lives, revelling in indecision, obstinacy and the non-development of the reading culture among themselves. And since our schools have not produced intellectuals from among deaf youths by way of developing the reading culture, they are attracted to the video and computer games, the television, the satellite cable and the Internet   With hopelessness branding them in every aspect of their lives as a result of being unaided, we have often had to admit that, to our chagrin, the deaf people of this generation do not have a good future.

A farm that is well taken care of produces beautiful crops. Well-groomed children become the pillars of their communities and a blessing to the nation and the world. Children are like tender plants. Well nurtured, they yield good fruits as useful citizens. So it is with the handicapped. “Land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God” (Hebrews 6:7).

With the withdrawal of the rain of care and the sap of inter-dependence and inter-relationship from the lives of the deaf, we cannot expect them to be useful to us all on their own. They require “extra care, extra love, and a special knowledge of their precious worth to us and to Almighty God. They will need to be accepted or appreciated” (Debby Hill). Inter-dependence and inter-relationship are imperative survival strategies. We have no victory without these. This is why even a man like Moses saw the need for Hobab, the son of Ruel (his father-in-law), to accompany  them to the  promised land of Canaan. Moses wanted that Hobab to be their eyes.

“Now Moses said to Hobab son of Ruel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in- law, ‘We are setting out for the place about which the Lord said, “I will give it to you” . Come with us and we will treat you well, for the Lord has promised good things to Israel”… You know where we should camp in the desert, and you can be our eyes. If you come with us, we will share with you whatever good things the Lord gives us’ ” (Numbers 10:29, 31,32).

On the other hand, when the principles and virtues of inter-dependence and inter-relationship are not applied, the danger of ultimate extinction begins to trail our survival. In the absence of these virtues, of course, there will be a false sense of peace, comfort, relaxation and absence of suspicion on a temporary basis. But this unsuspected false sense of security is the treacherous forerunner of looming disaster and death. Complacency and isolation do not help humanity. We need to penetrate each other’s lives. Otherwise see what the Bible shows threatens to overpower us if we think we can do without others or if others can do without us. “…And [they] went on to Laish, against a peaceful and unsuspecting people. They attacked them with the sword and burned down their city. There was no one to rescue them because they lived a long way from Sidon and had no relationship with anyone else. The city was in a valley near Beth-Rehob (Judges 18:27 – 28).

Majority of handicapped people, the deaf particularly, are living in valleys and not in the plains of clear vision and better opportunities and advancement. In valleys of helplessness and isolation, they are too weak to rescue themselves. Danger and perdition hover over them. But who will go down into the valley to bring them up? God has said that every valley shall be filled in (Luke 3:5) Oh yes, provided we allow ourselves to become instrument in the hands of God to effect that in-filling.

People Involved in Fanny Crosby’s Life

“Alexander Van Alystne (A blind music teacher at the New York Institute for the Blind). He met and married Fanny Crosby in 1858. Thereafter, they lived together for the next forty-four years before his death. Their union produced a baby girl, their only child. Unfortunately the baby did not live long enough to console her parents. She died in her infancy.

“Glover Cleveland( The former superintendent of New York Institute for the Blind). He helped Fanny Crosby copy out some of her poems. Many years later he became the President of the United States of America. In fact, he it was who opened the way for Fanny Crosby to visit the Congress where most of the congressmen broke down in tears as she read out her poems.

“Granny Crosby(A grandmother). Fanny lived together with her for many years; she wielded, unarguably the greatest influence on Fanny Crosby’s life. Besides assisting Fanny to memorize many books of the Bible like Psalms, Proverbs, Ruth, etc., she helped her discover nature in a way that no blind had ever done. By painting in Fanny Crosby’s fecund mind a graphic description of shapes and colours she brought nature home to the blind lady. So proficient was Fanny in these nature studies that she could ‘tell the difference among various birds’, by their calls and ‘which was which’ among flowers by merely touching and smelling them…Today the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the lame are all over the place. How do you treat them? Yesterday was the turn of Alexander Van Alystne, Grover Cleveland and Granny Crosby. Today it is your turn to show the handicapped that you care” (Deeper Life Magazine).

The Mentally Retarded/ Disturbed Woman in Helen Keller’s Life

“At the turn of the 20^th century there was an asylum in the suburb of Boston which dealt with severely mentally retarded and disturbed individuals. One of the patients was a girl who was simply called Little Annie. She was totally unresponsive to others in the asylum. The staff tried everything they could to help her, yet without success. Finally, she was confined to a cell in the basement of the asylum and given up for hopeless.

“But a beautiful Christian woman worked in the asylum, and she believed that everyone of God’s creatures need love, concern and care. So she decided to spend her lunch hours in front of Little Annie’s cell, reading to her and praying that God would free her from her prison of silence. Day after day, the Christian woman came to Little Annie’s door and read, but the little girl made no response. Months went by. The woman tried to talk to Little Annie, but it was like talking to an empty cell. She brought little tokens of food for the girl, but they were never received.

“Then one day a brownie (small square of chocolate cake with nuts) was missing from the plate which the caring woman retrieved from Little Annie’s cell. Encouraged, she continued to read to her and pray for her. Eventually the girl began to answer the woman through the bars of the cell. Soon the woman convinced the doctors that Little Annie needed a second chance at treatment. They brought her up from the basement and continued to work with her. Within two years, Little Annie was told she could leave the asylum and enjoy a normal life.

“But she chose not to leave. She was so grateful for the love and attention she was given by the dedicated Christian woman that she decided to stay and love as she had been loved. So Little Annie stayed on at the institution to work with other patients who were suffering as she had suffered.

“Nearly half a century later the Queen of England held a special ceremony to honour one of America’s most inspiring women, Helen Keller. When asked to what she would attribute her success at overcoming the dual handicap of blindness and deafness, Helen Keller replied, ‘If it had not been for Ann Sullivan (Little Annie), I would not have been here today.’

“Ann Sullivan who tenaciously loved and believed in an incorrigible blind and deaf girl was Little Annie. Because one selfless Christian woman in the dungeon of an insane asylum believed that a hopeless girl needed God’s love, the world received the marvellous gift of Helen Keller.

“What does it take to be that kind of Christian? What is needed to move us beyond our inconsequential selfish, fleshly pursuits to deeds of loving service to God and others? What was the essence of Christian maturity, which motivated Ann Sullivan’s benefactress to such a significant ministry?

“First, it requires a firm grasp of (your) identity in Christ – You cannot love like Jesus until you accept the reality that since you are in Christ, His divine nature constitutes your core essence.

“Second, you must begin to crucify daily the old sin-stained flesh and walk in accordance with who you are: A child of God whose spirit is filled with God’s Spirit.” (Culled from the book Victory Over The Darkness, 1990, by Neil T. Anderson of Freedom in Christ Ministries, U. S. A.).

The investment of unique love in Little Annie was of such remarkable profundity. Rigorous trials, difficulties and temptation to give up attended that investment of love. But the spirit of perseverance that was applied eventually yielded great dividends far beyond our wildest imagination to conceive. And that was when a retrieved Little Annie, in turn, invested love in a purportedly hopeless blind-deaf girl.

If a fact finding research were to be conducted and information garnered from the archives, we would have an overwhelming record of thousands of able-bodied people whose hopelessness and harsh situations had been revolutionized by the majestic epic triumph of Helen Keller over her dual handicap. Love and care invested in the handicapped produces chain reactions. These become militant and aggressive forces to defeat the powers of darkness in the lives of the disabled themselves and their able-bodied counterparts who will find much inspiration and comfort from the naturally deformed. “Charles Steinmentz was deformed at birth. He became an electrical inventor. He died in 1923.” What if he had not been cared for as such?

It is high time we stopped mistreating, cheating, misusing and rejecting the handicapped. It is imperative we change our attitude toward them now. They are fountains of hope. They are retrievable and conditionable.  The vital milk and sap of inter-dependence to which they have right should be maintained and judiciously doled out to them in due season so they can become, as we say, the man/woman for his/her time.

It stands foremost daily in our minds that we need emancipation from the throes of economic, social and political uncertainties. So we strive to go to any length to develop huge business and industrial empires to guarantee economic safety, and to fabricate sophisticated political networks to ensure smooth and impeccable governance. But the whole struggle is false. It is a huge lie because in the process we trample down the poor and needy. The gains of the struggle are stockpiled in the storehouses of selfish ambition, greed and self-centredness and nepotism. The end product of the struggle is economic sabotage, political suicide, and social unrest. Otherwise, why should there be need for God to blare out that we “let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream” (Amos 5:24)? Everywhere in the world we see the need for all people to be emancipated from entrenched selfishness, which is the bedrock of all the evils in the world. We cannot hope for better things when we have not conquered our selfishness and indifference to the plight of miserable wretched neighbours. The real struggle of life is the conquest that seeks to bring self under our feet. We need people who will set up Faith Empires, Love Empires, and Hope Empires. Consequently we shall have better economic, political and social systems. Properly incorporating the handicapped in our systems ensures our security.

Selfless people are a rare commodity in every nation on earth. We say we have faith in God, but our life-styles do not often match with our profession of that faith. We believe in God, but many of us do not believe in sacrificing ourselves unreservedly for the handicapped. We have a terrible and destructive dearth of selfless people in our world. This dearth is to the detriment of our own welfare. This dearth is the product of our tendency to prefer the advancement of self to self-sacrificial living on behalf of the miserable forlorn people among us.

The Arson of Increasing Selfishness…

The Apostle Paul in the Bible cast an investigative and prying look over the religious professors of his day to find self-sacrificial people busy advancing Christianity and the interests of others. To his utter dismay, he found only one. The shock of the realization of the rarity of such people might have prompted him to pen these few words in grand eulogy of a certain individual among a Christian group of his day. He wrote, “I have no one else like him, who takes a genuine interest in your welfare. For every one looks out for his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 2:20 – 21). In one journal of the German Evangelical Alliance we came across a lamentation by one Christian entrepreneur deploring the increasing selfishness of women and men. He states, “More and more people just want to make as much money as possible in the easiest possible way. Consequently this unhealthy pursuit and excessive self-centred consideration has resulted in the violation of human rights,” even while the first ‘World Disability’ report says that there are “500 million handicapped worldwide” and that “handicapped women suffer ‘worst violation of human rights’ ”(Source: Information Service of the German Evangelical Alliance, English Edition, Number 19---October 6, 1998; Number 20---December 16, 1998).

The spirit of covetousness and hoarding was what plunged Sodom into negligence of responsibility toward the poor and needy. They violated human rights. The people of Sodom did not care “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small” as enjoined upon humanity in the preamble to the United Nations Charter. They abandoned the poor and needy (the deaf, the blind, the lame, the crippled, the jobless, the illiterate, the orphans, the widows, the oppressed and down-trodden, etc.) The people of Sodom (Ezekiel 16:49–50) truly did ride tall in the flamboyancy of prosperity, the glamour of easy life sponsored by abundance of goods, and the deceitful glitter of non-challance and complacency.

Did it go well with them in the end? No. It augured ill with them. It took their careless attitude to rush them down the precipice of destruction.“… Therefore I did away with them as you have seen!” God said. Of course, many of our individual, communal, and even national catastrophes and disasters are the direct outcome of our poor attitude toward the less privileged. But we do not realize it at all. Peter Beyerhaus, a German missiologist, has said that God makes himself known in many horrific events. He goes on to warn against disregard for God’s commandments and criticized Church leaders for failing to talk about God’s judgment in the light of “dramatic moral corruption”.  It is hard to believe that the slightest whisk of negligence lashed out at the poor and needy can attract so much total and stupendous devastation. God help the nations! Selfishness is a bloodthirsty sword. It is destructive both ways. The person who wields this sword suffers the greatest casualty. The other person who receives the thrusts of this weapon is a helpless victim on whose side God is sure to stand. He will recover.

…And the Fall of the Mighty

All we need to do---and that is not hard---to help God to destroy us is to adorn ourselves with the garment of selfishness. The core character of selfishness is disregard for both God and man. The plague of armed robbers, political instability, cracks and rifts in the structure of social cohesion and mutuality and tolerance, horrendous fear of the future, nudging anxiety in homes, the tremors of restlessness produced by lack of inner peace, etc.---all these things have as causative factors the bad treatment (attitude) meted out to the poor and needy. Let us beware. “In those days it was not safe to travel about, for all the inhabitants of the lands were in great turmoil…because God was troubling them with every kind of distress” (2 Chronicles 15:5-6). The parallel of the just quoted scripture was vividly laid down on the pages of a local newspaper. The newspaper report looked like, or it indeed is, a graphic illustration of what it means to be troubled by God with every kind of distress in the land. Here runs the report:

“In what could be regarded as a return to the Dark Ages, Nigerians are waking up to the grim reality of unpleasant turn of events in the country as lives and properly are no longer safe. Men of the underworld have returned with a ferocious anger against hapless citizenry. And the consequence has been most horrendous and terrific on the victims. Their activities have left in their wake tears, blood and sorrow. Many families have had unpleasant experiences to relate of their encounter with armed bandits, whose mode of operation has assumed a brazen and daring proportion.

“The citizenry are beginning to be in a quandary as disillusionment seems to be setting into the consciousness. In the process they are asking whether the present government could ensure and guarantee their safety. This is as a result of the complete take-over of the country by hoodlums prowling on hapless Nigerians with impunity and complete disregard of whatever is left of the law enforcement agents.

“Statistics of armed attacks across the country between January and May 2000 is simply unbelievable.

v    Up north, for six consecutive days in the month of January hoodlums reportedly laid siege to the Jos—Maiduguri highway, maiming and killing innocent travellers in the process.

v    Ditto for the month of February, as bandits attacked up to four vehicles near Jakarta, along the same route, killing a popular motor dealer. That same month, robbers struck again, killing five fishermen travelling in a truck from Birnin Kebbi to Lake Chad.

v    The month of March and April proved more bloody as bandits went more berserk. Kwara State became the hot spot as hoodlums turned the Ilorin—-Amupo and Ilorin— Onu-Aran-Egbe highways into a death trap, in most cases blocking the high way with logs of wood. Unsuspecting motorists often ran into them and got dispossessed of their valuables.

v    It seems, however, that it is the turn of Lagosians to witness the fury of armed robbery (banditry), which became widespread and alarming in May. Residents of many districts and streets have in the past few weeks suffered…”(Source: The Punch Newspaper, Wednesday, 7^th June 2000).

These hoodlums who trouble us are poor and needy. This is the reason they have become scorpions and wolves preying on the rich and wealthy. They make their assaults on notable people. This scourge of armed robbery will jostle us out of selfishness and insensitivity to help the poor and needy. Otherwise, we are undone! We are repeating the deadly mistake of Sodom and many of our wealth/rich but arrogant and unconcerned overfed neighbours are perishing. The paper continues the reel-off of the dismal chain of events.

“Giving a psychological perspective to the rise in crime wave, a professor of psychology with the University of Lagos gave varied reasons as being responsible for the phenomenon, one of which he attributed to the lack of employment opportunities for the teeming youth roaming the streets doing nothing. Also the culture of violence, which Nigerians had been subjected to over a long period of military rule, was equally cited as causative factor.

“‘This development has unwittingly imbued in Nigerians violent attitude to their fellow beings,’ the University don posits. Solution to the menace, according to the professor lies in Government making life more comfortable to the citizenry, through the provision of an enabling environment through which people could realize their full potentials and enjoy good things of life… An attorney based in Lagos has hard knocks for the Obasanjo Government. Scoring the Government low, he wondered why a government which is supposed to make life better goes ahead to increase the price of petroleum products which already has sent prices of virtually everything in the country far beyond the reach of the down-trodden in the society”.

Disasters and catastrophes are still here with us today. They are: landslides, earthquakes, ethnic clashes, ghastly motor accidents, armed bandits, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, assassinations, terrorist bomb explosions, etc. All these are doing away with people. Since this is the case, let us wake up, live godly lives and help the downtrodden, the deaf and the other handicapped people – and pray-hearty prayers of repentance. “When famine or plague comes to the land, or blight or mildew, locusts or grasshoppers, or when enemies besiege them in any of their cities, whatever disaster or disease may come, and when a prayer of plea is made by any…each one aware of his afflictions and pains, and spreading out his hands toward this temple – then hear from heaven, your dwelling place. Forgive…Teach them the right way to live, so that they may fear you and walk in your ways all the time they live in the land… (2 Chronicles 6:28-31, 27). We need to ask God to teach us the right way to live if we know that our conscience reproves us often as to the type of lifestyle we live. The biblical prodigal son’s conscience was his policeman that eventually persuaded him to think of what to do to change his lifestyle. He yielded to the prodding of his merciful and gentle policeman and he made a timely u-turn to spare himself disaster.

V

THERE ARE REMEDIES IN MAN’S HANDS

It usually takes the instrumentality of man to rescue man from bad situations in life. That is to say, God uses man to help man. It is said that God has already entrusted the solution to our problems to our neighbours to hand over to us. Our neighbours can choose to minister faithfully or to betray the sacred trust through selfishness. Their  betrayal of that trust is what arouses the wrath of God and speeds the outpouring of His judgment as in the case of Sodom.

There are remedies in man’s hands, even in your hands. So in the book of Proverbs in the Bible it is enjoined on us not to withhold good from those who deserve it, when it is in our power to do it. We are as well exhorted not to procrastinate carrying out a good deed when we now have it. This is why Jesus (the Creator of heaven and earth) shared in our humanity in order to save us. “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—-that is, the devil—-and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death… and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—-even death on a cross (Hebrews 2:14 – 15; Philippians 2:8). Jesus had to become a man in order to set man free from the prison of the devil. Without that there would have been no hope of salvation and eternity with God for man. The remedy in His hand He gave out to save many, that is, his own life.

Physical disability is not something a man deliberately sets out to buy at the market and attach to his person. Naturally disability is not a welcome “commodity”—–and can never be. Naturally too each of us would revolt at the idea of going to the nearest shop or supermarket to “buy a physical disability” if it is purchasable or on sale. Disability is not a prayer product as far as we human beings are concerned. Is disability something given in answer to prayer? We cannot always say no. It is said that God answers our prayers in His own way. In answering, He may choose to inflict a disability in order to carry out His purposes, though we may not perceive it. “For God does speak – now one way, now another – though man may not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night…Or a man may be chastened on a bed of pain…”(Job 33: 14 –19).

No man has ever prayed that he would become disabled some day. Even if the end for praying to be given a disability were attractive in terms of material benefits and some kind of favour, it would take more than mere human courage to be able to pray that kind of prayer. A man would rather commit suicide and finish it all than ask God for a disability and live with it the rest of his life. Disability is repulsive, of course, because it is a school of difficulty, perhaps lifelong difficulty. And we naturally recoil and revolt at the thought of going through hardship. Disability is not a welcome “commodity”. People can go to any length to pronounce curses and cast spells with malicious intent of inflicting disability on their foes. But no one wants disability for himself. God in His sovereignty chooses who should become disabled. Now since God allows physical handicap, we wonder why the handicapped are the victims of crude deceit, slander, neglect, oppression, exploitation and misrepresentation in our society.

Ziba’s Lies Were Meant to Undo Mephibosheth

There was a handicapped man named Mephibosheth in the Bible who suffered neglect, exploitation and slander. The man God appointed to be the remedy in his life actually turned out to be a millstone around his neck and curse on him. Mephibosheth did not become crippled by personal choice. Man inflicted the handicap on him and gave him a niche in the gauntlet of disability. This is how he became disabled. “And Jonathan, Saul’s son, had a son that was lame in his feet. He was five years old when the tidings came of Saul and Jonathan out of Jezereel, and his nurse took him up, and fled, that he fell and became lame. And his name was Mephibosheth” (1 Samuel 4:4).

The above account has spiritual meanings. Yet a further look will set before us its social and moral relevance. Disability cannot be prophesied. It can strike any time. Anybody could become disabled suddenly one way or the other. Mephibosheth was five years when he became crippled. Fanny Crosby became blind shortly after her birth. Deef Ludwig Van Beethoven turned deaf while playing and composing music. (It was reported that Beethoven’s best songs were written and sung by him after he lost his hearing.) Helen Keller lost both eyes and ears before she was two years of age. Any disability God has not chosen to heal is good.  The very existence of that disability heralds the advent   of a package of the surprise, wonder, grace and mercy from the Lord encapsulated in the person bearing the disability.

A covenant of friendship had grown and been put in effect between David and Jonathan. The benefits and privileges of that covenant were to be extended to their descendants after them. The nurse of Mephibosheth was taking flight when bad news struck and danger loomed. The flight landed    Mephibosheth (now crippled or lame) somewhere in        Lo-debar. (Lo-debar means “Place of no pasture” in the Hebrew language. See 2 Samuel 9:4). It took the responsible and considerate remembrance on the part of King David of the covenant he had established with Jonathan to locate the whereabouts of Mephibosheth.

We do not know what Lo-debar is like as to its moral, spiritual and socio-political climates. But from the meaning of Lo-debar, we understand that it is not an ideal environment for the wholesome development of persons of the like of   Mephibosheth—-a handicapped lad. At Lo-debar, Mephibosheth lived far from the family estate and David’s court. Away in Lo-debar, the lame man lived in the house of one Makir, an apparently wealthy philanthropist or benefactor who later became David’s aid (2 Samuel 17:27–29). There, we believe, the lame lad enjoyed material and physical comfort. Notwithstanding that, his situation still needed more remedying, because the “place of no pasture” was not the right place for him. He deserved better things, which God had already provided for him. He needed a change of environment so that the benefits of that covenant could come within easy reach of him. What a great privilege! Covenants do not die. They have lives all their own. As such they strive no matter the times or circumstances to blossom and bear fruit according to their nature.  It was this spirit of the covenant between David and Jonathan that now moved. And so:

David asked, “Is there anyone still left of the house of Saul to whom I can show kindness for Jonathan’s sake?”

Now there was a servant of Saul’s household named Ziba, and the King asked him, “Are you Ziba?”

“Your servant”, he replied.

The King asked, “Is there no one left of the house of Saul to whom I can show God’s kindness?”

Ziba answered the King, “There is still a son of Jonathan; he is crippled in both feet”.

“Where is he?” the King asked.

Ziba answered, “He is at the house of Makir son of Ammiel in Lo-debar.”

So King David had him brought from Lo-debar, from the house of Makir son of Ammiel. When Mephibosheth son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, came to David, he bowed down to pay him honour.

David said, “Mephibosheth!”

“Your servant”, he replied.

“Don’t be afraid,” David said to him, “for I will surely show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan. I will restore to you all the land that belonged to your grandfather Saul, and you will always eat at my table.”

Mephibosheth bowed down and said, “What is your servant that you should notice a dead dog like me?”

Then the King summoned Ziba, Saul’s servant, and said to him, “I have given your master’s grandson everything that belongs to Saul and his family. You and your sons and your servants are to farm the land for him and bring in the crops, so that your master’s grandson may be provided for. And Mephibosheth, grandson of your master, will always eat at my table”. (Now Ziba had fifteen sons and twenty servants.)

Then Ziba said to the King, “Your servants will do whatever my Lord the King commands his servants to do.” So Mephibosheth ate at David’s table like one of the King’s sons.

Mephibosheth had a young son named Mica and all the members of Ziba’s household were servants of Mephibosheth. And Mephibosheth lived in Jerusalem because he always ate at the King’s table and he was crippled in both feet” (2 Samuel 9:1–13).

Rural, rural-urban and urban societies teem with deaf people living in the houses of the Makirs of our day in modern day Lo-debars (places of no pasture). They may be well provided for physically and materially, but they are actually not still enjoying real pasture. What about the spiritual privileges of knowing Jesus Christ the Saviour? What about the prestigious opportunities of being educationally favoured, granted political positions, social acceptance in the wider society? God has something for the deaf and their comrades in disability.

The King’s question rang out, “Where is he?” after he was informed about the existence of one Mephibosheth. The King’s consciousness that wherever Mephibosheth might be was actually the wrong place must have prompted the question to ring out with metallic din. He knew the lame man was not within the confines of the David-Jonathan covenant. Ziba answered the question. He served as a unique link between the King and Mephibosheth the handicapped son of Jonathan. We who are privileged enough in this life ought to serve as a link between God and the disabled, and between the general public and this group of people for the sake of their spiritual, educational and social welfare. We can serve as remedial links unless we choose to reject all thoughts of service.

Ziba knew the exact location of Mephibosheth. He was probably the only one who knew; and perhaps, too, he knew the overall situation of the lad, as a servant of the household of Saul. There are many of us who know where the disabled are located. But are we ready to provide information about them when question regarding their locations are asked? Are we equally ready to provide additional information with the aim of securing better opportunities for them from their own families, the Government and Churches?

God equips man with the remedy for man’s welfare. We should allow the Lord Jesus to use us as remedial links between Him and the handicapped. When we assume this remedial position, we help in bringing them to the Great Banquet of King Jesus---so that they too like us (the King’s sons) might eat the Bread of Life (John 6:33–51) at the King’s table while God moves to scheme further developmental programs for them.

From our experiences we have observed that many disabled people have no access to certain things that ought rightly to be theirs. Many things account for this. The lack of faithful human instrumentality is one of the destructive factors responsible for the wretchedness of many deaf persons and their associates in disability.

The misfortune of being uneducated both domestically and academically has distanced them in more ways than one from their rights. At times, the non-acquisition of academic ornaments is orchestrated by the deafness, which has made the victim to be given up for hopeless. For human beings have seemed to possess an inherent tendency to oppress and despise those weakened by a disability. Patrick Johnstone, author of Operation World, notes, “There are 120 million blind or deaf children---most whom will never receive special help.”

Man is man’s remedy, people say. But these days the spirit of covetousness, cupidity and increasing social indiscipline and indifference has destroyed the future of many helpless people. Indifference heats up the cauldron of human suffering one million times over; it creates darkness and blood. None but God could describe the extent of the evil of the indifference of Sodom and Gomorrah when they failed to help the poor and needy. The way God swooped down on them was in proportion to the seriousness of their carelessness. Their indifference created a sword of Damocles. Otherwise, why should God react so violently? God is cruel when we are cruelly indifferent.

In 2 Samuel 19: 24-28, we see an interesting development. It deserves our attention, because it projects before us a picture of the woes of the disabled in a cruel society. When King David was fleeing from Absalom the coup-plotter, his entire household followed him except for the ten concubines. By way of royal decree based on a covenant, Mephibosheth had become a member of the royal family. As such, he was supposed to join in the hectic escapade. But he missed the train of fugitives. The occasion for flight, though turbulent, was a prestigious opportunity that no doubt would have given  Mephibosheth a heightened sense of belonging, self-worth and a sounder self-image as he saw himself moving with a king. In the beginning, when the person and interests of  Mephibosheth became the subject of royal concern, we were happy and hopeful for his sake. King David gave him unlimited opportunities and prestige in the course of the dialogue between King David and Ziba, the servant. But our dream of a good future for Mephibosheth was suddenly dashed before we knew what was happening. What could we do? What happened or what went wrong? Foundations of a soundly established covenant came under the attacks of manipulative deceit and covetousness.  Here, we observe that the foundations of the structure of the “human rights” or privileges of Mephibosheth began to be destroyed. What a shock! We never suspected that Ziba could be guilty of crafty machinations.

Ziba was entrusted with a material for the good foundation of the overall well-being of the disabled man. But the structure that began to rise was not in healthy consonance with the nature of the foundation. We see the picture of a man in disarray, distress, confusion and anxiety. Mephibosheth became sick in mind and soul. We cannot unravel the reason that made Ziba to become negligent, unfaithful and indifferent. He reneged on his promise of commitment to the sacred trust. We do not know why he did what he did. But we know that both Governments and Churches are behaving like Ziba today. In their political speeches and religious preaching they promise heaven on earth for the less privileged and the disabled. But soon they renege on their pledges and throw the less privileged and the disabled into confusion and the cauldron of disappointment. Some of them will later contemptuously ask: “What can the deaf do?” This accounts for the horrible wretchedness of the disabled in our land.

But the preamble to the United Nations charter says: “To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights: in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women…” And the Holy Bible says: “Administer true justice, show mercy and compassion to one another” (Zechariah 7:9).

Perhaps prejudice or temptation to look down on Mephibosheth because of his disability or shame of having to take care of the interests of the disabled man or sense of loss of respectability and reputation some way or other could have led Ziba into infidelity. (There are communities or tribes who see disability as a social disgrace and stigma. Some women slaughter their deformed babies or dump them in gutters and on refuse heaps. Some parents of disabled children hide them in the villages. In some homes normal children are taught not to develop close association or interaction with people with varied disability. It is, therefore, not strange to see such youths breed and maintain an unkind attitude toward the physically deformed on no justifiable grounds. These grow up to belong to the category of youths of the type that mocked bald-headed Elisha in the Holy Bible. Some are sold for ritual purposes to high profile occultists. Some deaf and dumb ladies are kidnapped by married men, impregnated and locked up in strange homes to serve as concubines and house helps.) Could this type of mind-set have tempted Ziba into becoming an irresponsible crook?

It also seemed that Ziba changed because of the great wealth of Mephibosheth and he saw an opportunity to enhance his personal economic life and that of his children. The perceived opportunity lured Ziba to conceive false allegations against the disabled man. The King had assigned to Ziba the responsibility of seeing to the safety and development of the interests of Mephibosheth. But he removed ancient landmarks. “Do not remove an ancient boundary stone or encroach on the fields of the fatherless, for their defender is strong, he will take up their case against you” (Proverbs 23:10-11). And he went beyond the boundary of that assignment to take care of something else, which was not called for. He transgressed. Otherwise King David would not have asked, “Where is your master’s grandson?” (2 Samuel 16:3). To this inquiry, Ziba answered, “He is staying in Jerusalem, because he thinks, ‘Today the house of Israel will give me back my grandfather’s kingdom’. ”

How did Ziba know what the poor man was thinking? Mephibosheth had earlier called himself a dead dog (2 Samuel 9:8) after bowing down before the King. He had known, under the sting of painful embarrassment and in all sincerity and humility, that the descendants of his grandfather (Saul) deserved nothing but death from King David (2 Samuel 19:28), for Saul the grandfather of the boy had made himself obnoxious to this God-anointed King. He had had the highest sense of gratitude for the honour of having a place among those who sat at the King’s table. The attitude of Mephibosheth showed us who he was. He was humble and self-effacing and saw his own unworthiness. But Ziba lied! He lied against him by saying that Mephibosheth was a traitor with hidden political ambitions (2 Samuel 16:1-4).

When King David heard this, he gave all Mephiboseth’s property to Ziba. The confiscation of property appeared to be a calculated move to nib Mephibosheth’s alleged political ambition in the bud. But how could a helpless cripple and a fatherless and self-abasing Mephibosheth groom himself for the throne of Israel?

In 2 Samuel 19:24 – 30, Ziba was exposed. He was the traitor, not Mephibosheth as we hear the latter’s side of the story. He claimed Ziba had betrayed him, presumably by taking his donkey so he, a cripple, could not follow David! The appearance of Mephibosheth (2 Samuel 19:24) was more convincing, showing that he was not entertaining grandiose political dreams. If he had political ambition or reckless adventure, he would have gathered around himself questionable characters and adventurers---the types that rallied round Theudas (Acts 5:36), Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37), Absalom (2 Samuel 15:1-12), Jephthah (Judges 11:1-3), and Jeroboam (2 Chronicles 13:6-7) to carry out riots, coups and military adventures.

Mephibosheth explained that he had been both betrayed and slandered. This was a true accusation, for Ziba’s conduct smacked of treachery and defamation of character! These were the cancer that destroyed the foundation of the dignity and heritage of the cripple. Ziba’s conduct created a smoke screen that made it difficult for the King to sift the truth from the chaff of lies. The King erred in his rendering of judgment and ordered the division of Saul’s estate. Ziba was wrong, a terrible traitor indeed. He knew that he was not an heir and that all belonged to the cripple. Yet he did not hold himself back from encroaching on the inherited estate of Mephibosheth the crippled fatherless. Summing up, let us state again, Ziba lied!

In contemporary times, there are numerous cases of disabled people becoming the victims of prejudices, embezzlement, greed, ill treatment and wanton discrimination. This destructive attitude is perpetrated by employers, teachers, and friends and sometimes even by parents. Could this be the attitude of Ziba when he so behaved as to get access to the riches of Mephibosheth (2 Samuel 16:4)? In the employment market, it becomes hard or nearly impossible at times for deaf people to be gainfully employed in spite of the fact they (the deaf) possess excellent academic credentials, smart intelligence, vibrant spirit of determination and doggedness, and multiple talents.  Or do you think they are good only to use and defraud? The kinds of Ziba are still among us today; and they are the ones who rob and calumniate the poor. They use sweet words to make their prospective preys fall to their baits. On Monday, 19^th October 2004, we were informed from the Internet that a deaf woman was deceived through scam mail and robbed in this our global village: “Just last week, a deaf woman in a country in Europe asked me for her help. She replied to a similar situation (scam mail). She was invited to a conference in Africa and sent money for the hotel. But it was all a scam. She lost a lot of money. I am trying to help her find a way to report this to someone in authority” (Deaf Friends International, U.S.A.).

Is deafness or any other type of disability a contagious disease? Does disability constitute a threat to the development of a company or institution? Does it reduce performance in an industrial set up? Or is it a stain on society? But disability is no threat to anybody and anything. This is because “blatant discriminatory practices do not make for unity, not to talk of peace and stability!” (Ben Gbulie) For not taking the poor and needy into account in the normal routine of daily life, the people of Sodom lost peace and stability! They lost their politics, economics and their lives.

Therefore, disability that some people in society carry is a remedial panacea because those who carefully and devotedly take care of the handicapped bless themselves, derive joy and love from that care. They give themselves peace, stability and unity in every way and in everything. But neglect invites catastrophes. Great and irreparable losses are incurred. We may not suffer losses like these two cities because of neglect on this side of eternity, but chaos and uncertainty and distress will plague our Government and economy. Nigeria is the prime African country where deaf persons are known to run away from home in droves to take to a life of shameful and unwarranted begging. When confronted, they allege discrimination and rejection from their immediate families.

Intentional Genocide Stalks the Disabled

The world is under severe stress due to the stranglehold of the current harsh financial and economic climates. The economies of nations are tottering. The uncertainty of possible recovery of the global economy from rhythmic malaise is very taut at the moment. It threatens to snap as the situation worsens, thus prolonging the stay of the ghost of painful anxiety that has been hovering over many families. While the ugly climate won’t abate even with the most expert solutions proffered by economists, the desire for more money grows thicker and darker by the day.

The development causes unnatural escalation of tension in families to the end that family members betray the innocent blood of their own blood relatives. The insane betrayal exercise is executed in the name of fetching a release from economic bottleneck or economic trauma. This is why some parents sell their infant children and youths for various purposes. Grown daughters are weaned from their educational pursuits and sold to agents of the racket of the prostitution industry and carried to lands unknown. Silly fathers send their school age sons to hawk kerosene and sliced pineapple and papaw in the streets of our cities at the expense of the education these ambitious and virile boys desperately crave for. This is an intolerable betrayal of innocent blood; it is catastrophic sabotage of the manhood in these boys. For one day soon they will find themselves dull-witted illiterates and unable to aspire to any sort of leadership positions in a world so much in need of real men.

The economic tension engenders unreasonable bitterness in the breast of whole communities. Anybody anywhere just could become a prey, the disabled especially inclusive.   This is in view of the state of inelegance which their disabilities impose on them, and which tend to make them economically and socially dependent when they lack education or training that might assist them to merit firm positioning on the high lands of infinite privileges. Such want exposes them to enigmatic methodical annihilation currently stalking the blood of innocent persons labelled unprofitable.

 In our civilized world pregnancies get clinically aborted and old people are injected with fatal drugs and disposed of. Even disabled people are experiencing the nightmarish voyage through the dark hall of planned pogrom. Fox Television News blared in the morning of Thursday, 9^th December 2004 that “a Tennessee (U.S.A.) couple and their teen-age daughter were indicted for first-degree murder, and accused of starving a disabled relative to death”--—probably for economic reason and abject contempt for his/her person.

Intentional annihilation of disabled people is not a 21^st century invention. It is an age long culture----a culture that emanated from some pagan nation and gradually gained acceptance in the whole self-styled enlightened world. It is accepted and cherished hypothetically in many developing countries, though the acceptance is yet to be balanced with practical application. It is bidding its time.

For the time being these developing environments do not see any reason why they should wipe out their disabled people. They know the many reasons why in developed countries some people justify the annihilation of the physically imperfect. These developing people think and say that it is wrong to do away with this particular group of people. But they themselves will soon find a reason why they must follow suit. A world that has become a global village will eventually espouse one identical godless culture in every way.

­Enigmatic methodical annihilation of disabled people was alive and well during the time that ominous dark clouds gathered over Europe to loose the Second World War upon mankind. Adolf Hitler, the evil brain behind that terrible costly war, practised the art of totally destroying disabled persons. Hitler or Nazis loved the theories of evolution and “eugenics”, which Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton, both English men, spearheaded respectively. (Eugenics is defined as “a supposedly scientific effort to propagate the best genes and eliminate lesser ones”).

Hitler’s racist public policy had these twin theories as its groundwork, apart from his ambition for world domination. So he once stated “a higher race subjects to itself a lower race… a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right.” His reason having been seriously impaired by the senseless evolution and eugenics jargon, he made Germans to see themselves as the superior race in all of Europe. He mocked God and His Ten Commandments. He moved ahead with his army to start getting rid of what he saw as the lower races. He sterilized and killed people with mental and physical disabilities. That wicked man had Ernst Rudin as his Director of Eugenics Sterilization; Rudin authored the article titled Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need.

Someone has said: “Hitler and his armies lie buried, but his thoughts are echoed in some surprising places---not just by skinheads and confused youths but by leaders in education and public policy who are eager to dismantle Christian civilization”. In our land the news media do not yet break news that there is indiscriminate annihilation of disabled people. But with the domineering influence of western cultural imperialism, which teaches that there are no moral absolutes, and promotes liberal legislation and relativism, the lives of the disabled in our land are already on the annihilation line. All that is required is imperialist cultural brainwashing by which people will be made to see reason that it is folly to waste time, energy, and other useful resources on the disabled.

As a disabled person, you have already been marked as not the best of humans but as a lesser human. You need watch over yourself and those handicapped youths in our special schools and immediate environments. Enigmatic genocidal poisoning, slave-like treatment, degradation, and methodical starvation stalk you and them. When you begin to notice mysterious disappearances of handicapped persons, you should raise a great alarm.

In the Vanguard newspaper of Thursday, 6th January 2005, we found two provisions of the Oputa Panel report making it binding on us to grasp the indispensable sense of responsibility for the security of our immediate neighbours whatever their condition in this life.   

The Oputa Panel

Volume Five: Reparation, Restitution and Compensation

1.              Provision 75: …It is hoped that our society will realize that, as St. Francis of Assisi is quoted as having said, at the sight of every less fortunate person, we must always say, “There goes I but for the grace of God!” This is what is referred to as metaphysical guilt, following Karl Jasper’s articulation of the concept.

2.              Provision 76: Such an attitude or categorical imperative will instill in us a sense of concern for one another’s welfare and security.

And so at the sight of a beautiful (uneducated) deaf lady, for instance, who is perceived as defenceless, weak, less fortunate and devoid of human worth on account of her disability, men would not see her as a ready made object for personal sexual gratification. Neither would they scheme to make her an unwilling member of the sex industry that is the mainstay of the black economy found in some dark corners of our land. But men should see such prospective victim of their egregious scheming and industry as a human being deserving our utmost respect and love as a creature of God who, in His infinite providence, has placed the disability on her. This is why a deaf lady once wrote to me from the depths of her soul and said, “Disability does not make us lesser mortals”. She had been an uncompensated victim!

VI

THE VOICE OF DISABILITY

In Africa serious concern for the disabled is at very low ebb. Perhaps this ebb rises at its highest here. This state of things has created a proliferation of the spectre of the non-provision of equal rights in all aspects of life. Where such rights or facilities exist, the provision is insufficient. The regularity of the insufficiency is the factor behind the minimal development of all the classes of handicapped citizens. In the end, we have a society that bulges with balloons of uncared for deaf people and other disabled persons who barely pass for useful human beings. Society shamefully belches, regurgitates and reeks with uncared-for less privileged disabled people.  And gradually they are now reaching a point of being a liability and wastage. They have become a liability and a never-do-well. But that is actually what God said they are not. God’s point of view is that “…You deprive the poor of justice!” (Amos 5:12), and sensitive individuals like Professor Tekena Tamuno in our midst say, “Society is the criminal, not the oppressed individual---the vicarious victim despite what they allege against him!”

Institutionalized systematic selfishness of both Governments and Churches as well as of private corporations is the mother of the inadequate development of the disabled. They (the disabled) are forever left to want more. And unable to find more to satisfy themselves, they plunge into degrading infamy and come out fatally wounded in body, soul and spirit. They search for satisfaction in drugs, Indian hemp, prostitution, cultism, fraud and shameful begging. The display of this spectacle is a political and social disgrace!

Africa is home to the many countries being of late called developing countries. Development is indeed taking place in many aspects of the lives of the people of these nations. But the disabled sector is not recording ideal development and progress in relation to the pace of the assumed general growth of their respective countries. An extract from the Nigerian Guardian Newspaper gives us a glimpse of the frustrated disabled sector in a country (Nigeria!) listed among developing countries. The glimpse sets before us something like a scene of the Dark Ages in which the disabled are languishing at this time of the dawn of the 21^st Century.

DISABLED CANVASS NEW LEGISLATION FOR MEMBERS’ INTEREST

“The tempo of activities in the political, social, economic and Government levels have been going on with the disabled seemingly confined to the sidelines even when they can equally make enough contribution to the country’s growth if well supported.

“To reverse this trend, the less fortunate citizens are asking for a new legislation to cater for their peculiar circumstances and enable them to contribute to the development of the country.

“Dr. Chika Samuel Okonkwo, Chairman, Human Rights Disabled (Advocacy), in a statement…observed that even though Nigeria should be thankful to God for having reached the promised land following the installment of democracy, which many well-meaning Nigerians made possible, there were still millions of nationals, who, for no fault of theirs, could not be part of the current turn of events. ‘In this dreamland, there are voices of some minorities crying for liberation from the age long bondage. They are the disabled – deaf, the dumb, the mentally retarded, the blind and other physically challenged. They are represented in all groups, but not represented in any party or in any parliament. They have no constituency…’

“Mr. Okonkwo, a medical practitioner…and a disabled, argued that no country that was sensitive to the welfare of its citizens could afford to ignore such a number of people or abandon them to their fate, to struggle among able-bodied men and women. He, therefore, appealed that cognizance be taken of this group…and laws made that would lift them out of their present problems of grappling with the daily struggles with other members of the society… He said the disabled should not only be recognized as having rights, but such rights should be endorsed by legislation. According to him, ‘Disability is a reality. It is nothing to be ashamed of. It could be anybody. Disabled people are a large minority within the minorities.’ He added, ‘Their rights as endangered species must be guaranteed either in the constitution or an Act of the Disabled Rights.’

“Asked the type of legislation he would want for the disabled, he told the Guardian that there was, for instance, no legal guarantee for the education, health care and other social welfare services for them, adding that though they were willing most of them could not compete favourably with other members of the society in this regard. ‘Look at all the public buildings in the country. All of them were built without thinking about the disabled. For somebody in the wheel chair, how can such a person cope? In other countries, there are legislations indicating the facilities that must be available in public buildings for this category of the members of the society,’ he said.” (Source: The Guardian Newspaper, 16 July 1999).

Four Motherless Babies to a Bed in an Orphanage

On Sunday, 20^th January 2002, we picked up the Sunday Vanguard newspaper and sat down to embark on what we imagined would be a solacing moment when we would have digested some pleasant social news, particularly one bordering on the welfare of the poor and the disabled.

It should have to be news of strategic arrest of armed robbers.  It should have to be winds of the triumphant exploits of N.D.L.E.A. (National Drug Law and Enforcement Agency) foiling the import and export of harmful drugs through the Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos or through any of the seeming porous ports of the land. The news should as well have to be that of Churches crusading against idol worship, human sacrifices in shrines in so-called civilized 21^st century, injustice, and preaching repentance.  News of the Federal Road Safety Commission monitoring the indiscipline of motorists on the highway really would cheer us up. (At least we would be privileged not to die untimely deaths in any avoidable road mishaps.)  And news of striking doctors and nurses calling off their industrial action would send us pushing our fists in the air in joyous flurry of anticipation of good care to the sick again.

But as would be expected, human expectations are always short-lived or disappointed abruptly as time ticks by.  For it was like seeing thousands little multicolour stars before our eyes in a daze on the forty-fifth page of that 20^th January 2002 Sunday Vanguard newspaper. One Revered (Mrs.) George was interviewed on the issue of adoption.  She bared her mind freely about other issues that revolved around the attitude of the Churches and the Government toward the poor in our society.  The caption that punched us hard on the nose was: “GOVERNMENT, CHURCHES DON’T CARE FOR THE POOR”.

We reeled in bewilderment and sprang to our feet and banged the table.  Amidst our flurry of disappointment, we nevertheless gathered sufficient inner strength to read on though we knew that the remaining dose of news would be too bitter to take.  We read on, pouting in annoyance.

Sunday Vanguard: Do you think that adoption will be popular among Christians that believe God is able to give them children?

Reverend (Mrs.) Dele George (Founder/President of Strong Tower Mission):  The problem we have in Christendom is that we do not know how to work in love.  To adopt a child (abandoned/orphaned baby) is a great sacrifice that a Christian will make in the sense that, instead of keeping all the money, clothes, food for myself alone, let me take a child and nourish same for God.

Sunday Vanguard:  How much support do you receive from church organizations for the orphanage?

Reverend (Mrs.) Dele George: I can count on my fingertips the Churches that have actually supported us The Household of God Fellowship, Fountain of Life Church, The Guiding Light Assembly and The Redeemed Evangelical Mission.  The rest of them, their members visit but not the Church themselves in the sense that the Church leaders have not really gone out of their way to identify with us… Where do the Churches go? Little Saints orphanage is one of the Christian orphanages that we have in Lagos, and if I don’t see much of them (churches), I wonder where else they go.  We have prostitutes, beggars and the disabled lying in our streets and I ask myself, ‘Where are the Churches?  Are there no people that God has given the vision to rehabilitate drug addicts, disabled and the blind?’ So I would like the present-day Church to accompany their word with work…

Sunday Vanguard:  And what of the Government?

Reverend (Mrs.) Dele George: We have never got any assistance from Government.  Never! Apart from when the wife of Lagos State Governor, Mrs. Tinubu, visited and donated some money to the orphanage. We are not even happy with Government’s response to what we are doing. When we wanted to start this building, we wrote to them that we needed a land because we wanted the children to have space to play. We did not want to use the present orphanage because, already, we have three buildings in this particular compound. So, I wanted somewhere else where we can have plenty of room for them to move around. I wrote to them. Not once did they acknowledge my letter. This was during Brigadier General Buba Marwa’s tenure. So at the end of the day, we just decided that rather than the children sleeping three or four to a bed, let’s continue with the building and that’s how we got to build this house. But I remember that land was donated to (a) foreigner for the same purpose by the Government. So, I can’t understand why we Nigerians are doing something so laudable and yet Government cannot identify with us and give us land for the orphanage…

The Reverend’s words end here. But we are left to wonder why the people’s Government ignored their appeal for land to the advantage of a foreigner whose appeal enjoyed immediacy of response. Eagle-eyed observations have taught us that one of the things a people should be careful to fear is their own Government. It is established to be a servant of the people, but it is unfortunate occasions are many when this body has been the undoing of the people, leading them into slavery and ruin.

We live in a country where the complex nature and practices of full-blown corruption and full-fledged tribalism and senseless religious ambition have greatly aided the ruin and destruction of the less privileged and the great population of deaf people and their disabled associates. You wake up one day with a noble dream that you are committing yourself to improve the condition of children in the slums and ghettos (of our great cities) where Government bulldozers are demolishing the shanties and hangars of the poor pregnant and nursing mothers, and little children who can barely afford to attend elementary school; their stomachs are almost empty all day. Then you begin to make your voice heard. But there are some people always there (because of the fiercely ingrained culture of corruption) who would not trust you. You may use all the available publicity stunts and persuasive soul-stirring speech to sell your vision. Response would still be amazingly mediocre. It usually follows that while you are advertising your aims and goals with the ardour of zeal provided by your vision, many have already decided that you are corrupt. The unfortunate decision is to the detriment of the poor and the diversified class of disabled indigenes. (But it is not just everybody that is of a dubious character in a society reputed to be very corrupt.) For the support you are supposed to enjoy for the emancipation of the socially abused is subtly restricted or altogether ignored for the fear that if a big chunk of aid were given you, you would transfer it down the drain of your personal savings account. This is the mentality that the inbred culture of corruption has incurably consolidated in the psyche of many citizens. So we find no solution to the problem of the disabled and their comrades in poverty and primitive backwardness in the 21^st century.

And if your secular vision for the promotion of the poor does not tally with the “Our-God-Given-Vision” of some Christian Pentecostal denominations, by the end of the day you must begin to pack up your ardent vision. You go with it as if condemned to perish with it in fiery disappointment. Meanwhile the plight of the wretched citizens under the blanket of woes of diversified want runs out of control or beyond our capacity to ward off. Yet Churches will continue to grow rich. And the distresses of orphaned and abandoned babies prickle the eyes of God. The Church at times does not help the poor because they fear “lest we waste God’s money!” Churches grow rich and subsequently feel respectable and socially acceptable while the need for love and grace of the kind of half-sized Simon Birch are carefully shelved. It is no wonder that a sorry sight in our nation is that on Sundays the poor troop to Church premises and wait for the services to be over before they begin to ask for alms from the saints driving posh cars, jeeps, and adorned in expensive apparels. Why should the poor besiege Churches on Sundays to beg for money instead of asking the Christians, “What must I do to be saved?” The deadness of the Church and her opulence send the wrong message to the poor. They are not interested in the gospel. And if the “saints” do not give them alms in the immediate premises of the Church the poor are likely to get incurably offended and hardened. 

Who would not be able to imagine how God really felt as He saw one certain Reverend Russell bluntly inform him, “Simon, you do not belong here.” Who is Simon Birch? Let us introduce him and his social dilemma to you. We are quoting from the Family Altar devotional book of September----October 2004.

Half-Sized Simon Birch Seeks Grace in Church:

Reverend Russell Mocks Him

“Through thick glasses Simon Birth sees a world that’s blind to him. A wooden sidecar coupled to a friend’s bike allows him to ride through a town that mocks him. He hobbles when he walks. Average-sized people look over him and overlook him. At 12 years of age, he is half the size of his best friend, Joe. In his own words, Simon Birch is ‘extra, extra small.’ He’s too small to ride a bicycle, too small to hit a baseball. Still, Simon believes God has a special plan for a ‘wrong-sized’ boy like him. Simon attends Church to bolster his faith. His Sunday school teacher cannot bear him and begs the pastor to ‘get rid of that child’. After Simon ruins the Christmas play, Rev. Russell bluntly informs him, ‘Simon, you do not belong here’.

“Simon is searching. He comes to Church and Sunday school looking for a word from God. He longs to have his faith validated. He hopes Church will be the place where joy breaks into his dismal world. Simon comes to Church looking for grace. But sadly he doesn’t find it. Simon experiences a common problem. Grace can be hard to find in the Church. Many who come looking for grace do not find it. As in the case of Simon Birch, grace often wears camouflage in Church. What can we do to make our Church and ourselves people of grace?”

In our society, as elsewhere in the world, you get psychologically humiliated, intimidated, and crippled by contempt because of physical deformities. A wide range of varied slighting remarks on account of your disability does damage to your moral stamina and sense of human worth. Your inward drives, aspirations and anticipations receive psychological decapitation. Then you can at times no longer wish to groom hope, determination and courage and commitment to a worthwhile cause you think and believe will launch you and others into the skies. You are disabled and you have dreams; but your projects as a disabled fellow baffle and shock with disbelief the minds of those standing along the broad wide road to tear you to pieces with scathing sneers. You are tempted to conclude that even God has rejected you and excluded you from His people. And you will tell yourself that God is the exclusive reserve of the usual Church crowd, which fails to notice you and your disability.   Why, they have concluded in their dementia that your disability has sold you off---diminishing or taking away from your humanity. They shun you; they do not want to give you jobs. These people believe you do not deserve the best education. In your presence they entertain strange fears and suspicions; they feel uncomfortable. And even the Church goes to the extent of saying that “God has not given us any word regarding you.” Was it God who instructed the Church crowd to look over and then overlook Simon Birch in Europe?

Simon’s misfortune at the hands of Reverend Russell is reminiscent of Bartimaeus whom the crowd that followed Jesus attempted to repress and hinder from coming to Jesus. Bartimaeus was a blind beggar. But he had two very sharp ears as he sat begging by the wayside . The noise of Jesus’ passage particularly attracted his attention, and he inquired to know what it all meant. The crowd relayed the right information to him and he immediately realized that the opportunity for the termination of his blindness was now available. He shouted, begging Jesus to have mercy on him. But the same crowd that professedly followed Jesus constituted themselves into a barrier to the blind man’s move to seize his opportunity for deliverance and brighter days.

The crowd shouted at him (rebuked him, charged him) to hold his peace. “Why, what evil has he done?” even Pontius Pilate would ask (Luke 23:22). Many people in that crowd had been delivered of evil spirits, diseases and sicknesses. How come they endeavoured to block him from benefiting from this windfall of opportunity? Thankfully Jesus took notice of the treatment to which the blind man was subjected and responded to his appeal. Jesus didn’t step aside to go up to the man by shoving the crowd aside. Jesus stood still! He commanded him to be called or be brought (Mark 10:49; Luke 18:40). Whom did Jesus command to bring or call Bartimaeus? Well, Jesus commanded the same erring crowd. Thus doing, the Lord Jesus taught each individual, each professed follower of His today (by extended analogy) to treat the blind, the deaf and their deformed associates with responsible deference.

The command went out from Jesus. They crowd changed their attitude. Then the crowd turned to Bartimaeus and chanted, “Be of good comfort, rise, he is calling you” (Mark 10:49). Thenceforth he was no more a blind beggar. “He received his sight” (Luke 18:43) and became a follower of Jesus, glorifying God.

Such is the situation in which many deaf youths of the Niger Delta find themselves. So it is inevitable that the cruel sword of Damocles should have a destructive field day in the lives of our dear deaf youths. The sword of Damocles takes advantage of sorely frustrated expectations to hack them and condemn them to wide range backwardness. It capitalizes on the rejection of appeals from concerned people struggling to save our disabled people to expose them to poverty and colossal monumental moral perils.

On the wall of a nursery and primary school in Warri (Delta State) we read an interesting inscription. It is as follows:  “IF EDUCATION IS EXPENSIVE, TRY IGNORANCE”. Now it appears that because of hopes submerged in the raging sea of frustration, many deaf youths have chosen to live in ignorance despite its attendant hazards. Unwittingly, a frightening majority has lost what sense there is in the need to acquire education. They have become a people hanged on the grim gallows of ignorance---thrown in the shackles of want, intellectual disability and spiritual darkness. An uncaring society is a cauldron of psychological and moral arson. There are not (enough) social engineers specially trained to harness the power dormant in the deaf.

In the Treasure Base of the Nation (Rivers State) we do not have more than seven deaf persons of Rivers State origin in the civil service of the State Government at present. It is not that they are not educated. Of course, they attended primary and secondary schools. But they came out as less than half-baked because of school understaffing. So there is no treasure in them. They have not been to school yet even though for more than a decade they have worn very beautiful uniforms to attend elementary and secondary school classes. Treasure seeds have not been sown in them enough for them to metamorphose into real human treasure, which is far more valuable than petroleum treasures of which their home State boasts. Amidst the inexhaustible deposits of oil under their feet they have nothing. They have acquired a federal reputation (among deaf persons of other States) for being rough and tough---and lacking in understanding. These unfortunate citizens have not chosen in their early lives to become what they are known to be today. But they have not been served what should have gone into making the difference in their lives.  We have said that at present there are not more than seven deaf persons of Rivers State origin in the employ of the State Government.  But in almost all the other States of the Nigerian Federation, many deaf people have reason to be proud of their own selves and their respective home States because they hold offices.

“The Rivers State Government believes in the youths as the leaders of tomorrow. Our commitment to education as an investment with long range benefits to the people and the State is irrevocable.” So said the Governor of Rivers State, Dr. Peter Odili. The youths clapped their hands in delight that this noble utterance emanated from the Governor of the Treasure Base of the Nation. We trust that this promissory statement will become a concrete reality, particularly in the lives of the deaf youths since the State is yet to produce scholarly youths from among this special group of people. We desire to see more than renovation works carried out on our school buildings. We want to see a revolution in classroom discipline and teacher commitment that will catapult deaf youths into becoming intellectual giants, thus getting rid of the opprobrium of being intellectually retarded.

The deaf women of Rivers, Delta, Cross River, Akwa Ibom and Bayelsa States are already strategically poised to suffer potential wholesale degradation and wretched existence unless the Church, the Government and humanitarian agencies take note of them.  The snares and attractions of prostitution, the begging industry, and spiritual dryness are stalking them. There are some in private employ as well as in self-employment ventures that will successfully ride against the tides and stand out as role models for those likely to get swayed.  And it is doubtful if majority of them would get legitimately married and establish their own lasting homes.  (Of course, married deaf persons or deaf couples are not a common social garland, for they are rather scarce in the Niger Delta.) The snares of prostitution and the glitters of the begging industry have proliferated and taken on a bold front through the aid provided by the inability of many of the youths to fiercely pursue their education in higher institutions. Poverty is one immediate cause of discontinued educational pursuits. Dysfunctional semi-literacy that seems to have been carefully groomed in their primary and secondary classes through poor academic discipline has strategically tied them to the stakes of disorientation and lost destiny.  It is an imperilled people groping in the dark

When will their lives promise us something in the Land of Promise (Akwa Ibom State)?  What will the Glory of All Lands (Bayelsa State) inculcate in them so that we can be proud of them?  When will Canaan City (Cross River State) flow with milk and honey for them to have their equal share? What exquisite training will The Big Heart (Delta State) provide them so that they get big hearts indeed?

Crippled Gentleman Alabi Saved Village Women From Rape:

He ends up a Victim of Community Ingratitude

We have earlier said that inheritances or dues accruing to the disabled are at times denied them from within their immediate families after the death of a parent. And Helen Keller led us to ponder on what she termed “the apathy of human beings”. Now here is a 50-year-old cripple voicing the pathetic allegation that his community owes him unpaid dues. God certainly used his pitiable condition and his claim to being the “husband” of certain women in a village during the Civil War to save them from being ravished by soldiers. His smart claim served as an effective bridle that brought under control, without a gunshot being fired by him, from the powerful sexual libido of angry and war-weary troops. The lamentation of the poor man was recounted in a local newspaper in Port Harcourt some years ago.

“Mr. Alabi, 50, and a cripple, singled-handedly saved his people and village, Ula-Upata near Ahoada from the smoking guns and wrath of invading Federal Troops during the Civil War.

“How he got a unit of unruly and oppressive soldiers punished and redeployed from the village, and, how in spite of all he did that saved many a woman or wife from being raped in the name of ‘capture’, and many a man or husband from being shot as a rebel, the community up till date has not had the courtesy to say even a verbal ‘thank-you’.

“Rather, the people even denied him his due share of community meat donated by soldiers on the ground that he did not pay income tax! ‘What about individuals! Some of the men whose wives I had claimed as mine to save them from the sex-hungry soldiers while they themselves were around find it very difficult to even greet me. I even had to wrench greetings from them and their wives,’ Alabi recounts. ‘The less I talked about the ingratitude and neglect I suffered, and am still suffering, from the community in general, the better. I shall forever remain grateful to God for choosing me, a totally helpless cripple, to teach a very useful lesson on human relations but which lesson Ula-Upata has chosen not to learn. That nobody, nothing He (God) created in this world is useless. Nobody, not even a cripple like Gentleman Alabi, should be treated with scorn. Everybody must be given his due.’

“That is a lesson Ula-Upata, and indeed, the society at large may do well to learn if the world is to move forward.” 

Soibi: Deaf and Dumb Managing Director/ Skilled Electrician

“Soibi Dickson Johnny Oruobu , in spite of being deaf, dumb and disabled in one leg, has successfully, through sheer determination, set up a source of livelihood not only for himself but for other disabled too.

“The Nigerian Soibi Oruobu from Old Bakana, Rivers State, schooled at Wesley School for the Deaf (1970---1974, Lagos) and at Federal Government Trade Centre (1974--- 1980,Yaba, Lagos) from where he graduated as an electrician. But getting a job was a problem as nobody was willing to trust him. When all efforts failed to get him regular employment, Soibi opted for petty odd jobs. Fixing of faulty installation here, repairing faulty electric fan or iron there. Even these odd jobs were not easy to come by. People just didn’t fancy the idea of hiring an electrician they couldn’t even communicate with.

“ ‘To instill some measure of confidence into my potential customers, I would show them my certificates obtained at the Trade Centre, Yaba,’ recalled Mr. Soibi ‘Even then, they always felt I couldn’t do the jobs, so they would first test me and I always would come out best. They thereafter believed in my ability and began giving me jobs.’

“On his return to Port Harcourt later, Soibi faced even greater problem of acceptance. The only organization that tried him out was the Nigerian Ports Authority (N.P.A.) He also got one or two jobs at Abonnema Wharf. Tired of hanging about, Soibi decided to take the plunge, he scratched and scratched his pocket to set up a company: Soibi Electrical Company.

“Every Kobo he earned went into buying one tool or other for the workshop. ‘With the workshop, I now have a place to which I could refer people and handle their jobs’, he said. Gradually, his efficiency and honesty began to win for him the confidence and patronage of hitherto doubting customers… When Soibi is not out hunting for jobs, he is working on one. From that scratch, Soibi [has] managed to take his company to such a level that he could afford to take on trainees…. all of them were also …deaf and dumb.

“Because of his handicap, Soibi obviously competes favourably with other contractors. But he believes that if he could adequately equip his workshop, ‘I will be in a better position to compete with them my disability not withstanding. That was why I applied to the State Government, parastatals and some philanthropic individuals for aid or repayable loan. But up till now, they haven’t even replied to our applications.  With such loan and well-equipped workshop I can train more handicapped people. In fact, apart from the loan, the only other help I need from the Government is to set up a workshop for the deaf and dumb people (both young and old) in the State. Nobody cares for them…’

“The philanthropic activities of former Governor Adeleye’s wife, Mrs. Jane Adeleye was not lost on Soibi…Her support, he informed her, for the less fortunate ‘is what has given people like me the hope to struggle harder’…Naturally you are bound to wonder how a team of deaf and dumb electricians can handle such jobs. But then you need to watch Soibi and his boys at work whether in their workshops or say, at 6, I. B. Johnson Street, where the company is currently wiring up a three–storey building on contract.

“Mr. Soibi should know better. For he is the current chairman of the Rivers State Association for the Deaf. He spoke of how some members of his association were frustrated… ‘They get maliciously teased about their handicap. They get underpaid even where they did as much work as their non-disabled counterparts.’ Many members who had thought that through the association they would be able to wrest some form of assistance or other from the Government had developed cold feet. So the association decided to encourage as many as can afford it to go to school first, get something doing to keep body and soul together… ‘It will take time, but we have no choice. Besides, we have to start from somewhere.’

“In times of low spirits and difficulties many (deaf people) have drawn inspiration from people of outstanding achievements and exemplary character. From whom does the Managing Director draw his inspirations?

“‘From myself’, he replied simply! Explaining, Mr. Soibi said: ‘I look inward for the inspiration I need. I just commence or tell myself that I can do or achieve a certain thing or objective. I go all out for it…’ (Culled from The National Tide, Rivers State-based Newspaper).

Soibi Oruobu Commends Odili On Empowerment

“It will take time, but we have no choice,” Soibi said some years ago while granting an interview to The National Tide Newspaper on the deplorable condition of the hearing impaired community.

What would take time? Well, he meant empowerment pregnant with opportunities for great change. As a consequence, these people had to submit to the no-choice verdict imposed on them by past regimes condemning them to perpetual waiting. Under this verdict they were expected to stubbornly dare to anticipate the advent of a magnanimous government if they were to be liberated.

The stubborn anticipation, under the weight and checks of the no-choice verdict, yielded handsome and amazing rewards. The cumbersome verdict began to be eased when hard won democracy took over control of the land in the long run. Then the piteous conditions of many disabled people received a face-lift in the State. One of such unprecedented face-lifts was shown rising in the horizon by one local newspaper:

“The chairman of the Rivers State chapter of the Nigeria National Association of the Deaf  (NNAD), Mr. Soibi Oruobu, has commended the executive governor  of Rivers State, Sir (Dr.) Peter Odili , for approving the sum of five hundred thousand naira (500,000) for him to  equip his electrical materials store situated at  No. 47 Sangana Street, Port Harcourt.

“Oruobu… who made the commendation in a statement issued in Port Harcourt on Monday and made available to newsmen said that few months ago, he had written to Governor Peter Odili, requesting for assistance to set up his electrical equipment shop. Few weeks after, he continued, he was informed  by the office of the Deputy Speaker, Rivers State House of Assembly, Hon. Tonye Harry, that the governor had approved the sum of N500,000 for the purchase of the electrical equipment for his business. The materials were later presented to him, he said.

“The  Rivers NNAD chairman thanked the governor for being solicitous for his welfare, and urged him to also extend the gesture to other less privileged and  disabled persons  in the  State so as to make them self-reliant and responsible citizens…

“Oruobu, who is also the Managing Director of Soibi Electrical Company, noted that most his members are ready to contribute positively toward the economic growth of the State if given the right encouragement and prayed to God to give the governor King Solomon’s wisdom to pilot the affairs of the State. He had earlier thanked Hon. Harry for his  assistance and support”(Culled from The Hard Truth [Equity and Justice] newspaper, May 26—June 1, 2005).

We may be tempted to assume that the problems mentioned in this book are peculiar to the deaf people in this country. But on no account should it be held to be so. Even in developed countries like Canada, Great Britain and the United States of America, deaf persons do not always fare well. The deaf in those lands may be better off educationally and industrially as we are being told. But are they all free from the common ill treatments, oppressions and disrespect that disability tends to attract? Many of us desire to go there to realize our dreams and aspirations that have been battered here at home. Some of us who are there now tell us that despite our seeming woes here, we are still better off in Africa. Really? They even advise us to forget about our ambition to make it to those lands. The following statement taken from the Internet shocked us terribly to the marrow when we first read it. We were dumb-founded particularly because here in Africa we are always told the disabled in developed nations enjoy unhindered equal opportunity and social integration alongside their counterparts. “Many of the problems you mentioned in your e-mail to us are the same problems that we have here in the United States. We have people who use deaf people as slaves—giving them only a small percentage of the money that they collect to live on… Deaf people who have a hard time reading even simple English, etc.” (Culled from the Internet; Monday, 26^th November 2001).

Bad governance, it is remarked, is the bane of Africa. Alas! This bane has affected the disabled for decades. Africa is still the Dark Continent (as the Europeans used to say) because we have neglected this large minority of disabled people among the minorities. Among disabled women are hard working ones. Of course, the women of Africa are the most diligent, the most patient and the most industrious in the world. What wise country will not explore the spirit of patience, diligence and industry among the womenfolk? But Africa’s disabled women enjoy less than what nature has in store for them. Hence the desperate cry---

Give Deaf Women a Chance to Contribute

“Given a chance, deaf women’s contribution to society equals that of any other group of people. However, in our world deaf women are facing discrimination and even their basic rights are violated,” says Miss Euphrasia Mbewe, Women’s Coordinator of the Southern African Federation of the Disabled (SAFOD) and a WFD (World Federation of the Deaf) experts on Deaf Women’s issues.)

“At its next congress the WFD should pass a strong resolution to strengthen the status of deaf women”, she points out and calls for the governments to involve deaf women in their programmes.

WFD News: You work as Women’s Coordinator for the Southern African countries. How do you describe the situation and status of the deaf there?

Miss Mbewe: In my experience it is far below that of the other groups of people. The main reason is that deaf women do not have access to information, their illiteracy is high, and the decision makers and the general public know hardly anything about the cause of deaf women. Even though Associations of the Deaf exist in the area, they often do not have an efficient organization, which would run special programmes for deaf women. However, I would like to say that I admire the Zambia National Association of the Deaf (ZNAD), which included women’s issues already in its organizational structure, and has established programmes for them.

WFD News: Could you give our readers any concrete examples about the violation of deaf women’s rights?

Miss Mbewe: Compared with non-deaf women, deaf women run a greater risk to get sexually abused. It is clear that any sexual activity that a deaf woman does not want to get involved in is an act of sexual violence against her. It may even happen that an abuser tries to convince a deaf woman that he is doing her a favour because no man would like to have sex with a deaf woman. Moreover, a man can first take advantage of a deaf woman sexually and even have one child or more with her, and then leave the woman alone with the children. Such men play the game we call ‘hit and run’. This is human degradation, abuse and violation of deaf women’s human rights. Being beaten and assaulted is another violation of human rights. The criminal law is meant to protect a person against such acts. However, there are not sufficient mechanisms to bring these violations into the daylight and in the focus of an open discussion, to make an end to such deeds. In addition, in most cases deaf women do not have opportunities to take these cases before the court. I also consider it a violation of deaf women’ rights if a pregnant deaf woman is, according to Eugenic Health Laws, forced to undergo prenatal tests in order to ensure that she would not give birth to a disabled baby. Deaf women should have the right not to know and also say ‘yes’ to having a disabled baby. This right is definitely not a reality in many countries I know.

WFD News: What about deaf women’s access to education, their employment opportunities, participation in decision-making and role in the family?

Miss Mbewe: Deaf women’s educational opportunities are far worse than any other group’s opportunities. The reasons are general ignorance about the potential of deaf people and prevailing negative attitudes towards deaf people, especially deaf women, which both prevent deaf women from obtaining an education that could enhance their lives. Legislation or statements, which aim to guarantee equal access to education for all groups of people, are either ignored or not implemented at all. Deaf people, particularly deaf women, are often the first group that is left without educational opportunities.

Although many laws, labour standards and conventions call for equal employment opportunities and equal wages for all, deaf women certainly find it particularly difficult to find a job due to lack of education and training. Deaf women are also discriminated against at the labour market because of their deafness. I see no reason or arguments why the majority of deaf women should not be totally integrated in the decision making process. Given the chance, they would have the potential to make a contribution to the development of society, and do on equal standard with any hearing individual or any deaf man. It is vital for deaf women to have access to education and training and be accepted as equal partners in the decision making. We need equal fifty–fifty representation in the decision-making. We need equal fifty-fifty representation in the decision-making and we should not let deaf men say that division of work between men and women cannot be changed because a man cannot perform the duties a woman has been doing so far. The old days are gone when a woman’s role was to work in the kitchen.

WFD News: Which measures, in your opinion should be taken in order to promote the situation of deaf women within Deaf Associations and by the WFD (World Federation of the Deaf) both regionally and internationally?

Miss Mbewe: First of all, the deaf organizations, both regional and international…should recognize the issue of deaf women already in their constitutions or status. I would like to propose that the President of the organization is a man; at least the Vice President’s office should be reserved for a deaf woman by constitution. The issue of constitutional guarantee is to ensure that no social injustice would emerge in our organizations in the work for equal rights, justice, and better future.

WFD News:          What is your message to Government authorities regarding the situation of deaf women?

Miss Mbewe: This is a very important question. Government authorities throughout the world should recognize the needs of deaf women and integrate them in programmes sponsored by governments. There is great need for such special programmes for deaf women that would involve them already in the planning and implementation process. This would remarkably increase the participation of deaf women in society. A particularly important issue is the training in sign language interpreters and making their services accessible to deaf women. Only by using interpreters can deaf people have barrier free communication with their hearing partners in co-operation. In any society sign language interpreter services are a necessity in providing equal access and opportunities for deaf people. I would like to point out that governments all over the world should review their country’s constitution and legislation and amend them if they discriminate against deaf women or do not recognize their human and societal rights…

WFD News: Give us a brief description of your work as Women’s Coordinator in the SAFOD region.

Miss Mbewe: My work involves participation in the planning and implementation of development programmes. Such programmes include: giving training in leadership and advocacy skills, legislation process, and lobbying and organizational development. One of the important issues in development is the establishment of educational programmes. My administrative duties comprise drafting reports and other documents. I also submit reports on regular basis for funders and participate in monitoring projects and try to find potential funding sources. I also serve as a liaison and consultant for representatives of national member organizations and try to promote their women’s programmes. I do my best to coordinate the efforts of disabled women in this region and help them to keep in touch with one another. When requested, I represent SAFOD (Southern African Federation of the Disabled) and the interest of the disabled women at women’s conference and workshops both locally and internationally.

WFD News: What do you regard as the greatest achievement in your work so far?

Miss Mbewe: Talking about achievement, I have managed to open the door for other deaf people. The societies should make the most of deaf people’s potentials and abilities. The above I would like to say to all deaf people in general. Moreover, I am working in a hearing world but I have managed to secure the services of a personal sign language interpreter. Sign language is the key to an accessible and barrier free environment for deaf people…I would like to encourage all deaf people to join hands, and to get united as deaf community. Learn and work for the deaf cause and development of the status and situation of deaf people all over the world…     

Guarding against Civil War in the House

Civil war or internal split in the disabled community in our land (and else where in the world) is no recent news. In fact, it is as old as civilization. Such war has broken and destroyed relevant and vital fabrics of communal cohesion that would otherwise have enjoyed gradual consolidation over the years to produce a dynamic united disabled community in the 21^st century. Corruption, misunderstanding, intolerance, jealousy and sporadic cultivated crops of injustices in the house fuel the internal war. In-house squabbles and evil machinations have endangered even marriages and annihilated significant courtships. Great business and organizational prospects have been shattered. Even the lives of unborn babies have got caught in the civil war cross-fire and put in harm’s way: fetuses have eventually ended up in the abortion drain, even in our land, having never seen the light of day.

We here recount two instances of endangered fetuses. One took place in western Nigeria. The deaf girl at the centre of the first case was a student who was impregnated within the walls of residential hallowed grounds by residents within those walls. The emergence of the pregnancy threw the community into strong shock and grievous panic. In order to save the good name of the consecrated grounds and avert public infamy, abortion, with its related concealment antics, was seen as the way out of the problem. But the goodness of nature would not so easily acquiesce to the destruction of innocent lives. So it raised certain figures within the house to oppose the ugly option. There was a split: pro-life light bearers versus pro-abortion cruel death carriers. Both warring parties were deaf, with one or two non-deaf elements on the side of the lifesavers. 

The internal ideological clash in the house led to the arousal of a lot of thick dust and rubbles for several hours. Meanwhile the lives of the fetuses as well as that of the girl hung in the balance. Unfortunately the pro-life light bearers lost the civil war to the agents of death, and the poor deaf female student was ferried to a hospital where twin fetuses were ripped off from her womb----thus branding her soul with perpetual deep-seated guilt.  

The dreaded public scandal, however, came to stay, aggravated by the slaughter of two precious twin fetuses God would have been glad to see on the face of the earth notwithstanding the illegitimacy of their conception. There then followed angry protests, discord and bitter disappointment in the house.

The other case also had at its centre a deaf and dumb girl: she was not a student, but a thorough illiterate with very little sign language for self-expression. The scene, this time, was set in southeastern Nigeria. Here the fear and honour of God was allowed to prevail over human convenience or the perverted will of man.

She was caught in the net of a begging company and employed to fetch funds for her “General Manager” who turned out to be a deaf man. When she got pregnant in the process of raising funds, he took her to a hospital to abort the pregnancy, and paid the fees. Unknown to him, he had stumbled into a brick wall.

The medical doctor of that hospital was one of the most upright and God-fearing men in our land. He pretended that he would grant the wicked man’s desire.  Instead he kept the deaf girl in one of the wards of his hospital, gave her antenatal care and fed her well. Days passed and the job was not done. It was then that information reached one of the Deaf Churches in town. The deaf pastor of the Deaf Church quickly commissioned two of his workers to rush to the hospital to see the doctor. The poor illiterate deaf girl was released to the Church, along with the abortion fees and the pastor’s workers preached to the girl’s “General Manager” to repent before God. When the rogue saw his victim helplessly slip from his hands, he threatened to call the police to deal with the medical doctor, who challenged him to carry out his threat…. 

Incendiary meteors of tribalism have burned the bonding cords of inter-tribal mutuality, marriages and cooperation in many areas. Selfish ambition has jeopardized and suffocated collective initiatives and corporate welfare. And favouritism has demolished foundational moral ligaments and fibres in the structure of the house only to promote unnecessary and avoidable evils.

Unless we allow sanity to prevail in the house, the upcoming generation of deaf youths and associated disabled citizens will inherit nothing but the rubbles of confusion, disorientation, and a sorry dearth of positive role models to emulate and eulogize. For quite often youths have become eager spectators of the unhealthy trend perpetrated by their adult leaders. It should surprise none if they should rise someday to contribute, in their own rights, to the festering internal decay and disintegration.

A house divided against itself cannot stand! Any wonder that Miss Euphrasia Nbekwe of the Southern African Federation of the Deaf has warned against injustices and other associated ills in the house.

There is no civil war without instant terminal casualties. And our land has such tragic and pathetic cases. One of such cases is found in the Niger Delta region. During a bout of misunderstanding in 2003 which later degenerated into premeditated thirst for revenge, a deaf youth on a revenge mission was stabbed and violently murdered in Port Harcourt City (Rivers State) by a fellow deaf youth. The assailant, who acted in self-defence, is presently serving a jail term in the State Prison House.

And over a year after that incident, The Champion newspaper of Saturday, September 25, 2004 included in its news menu the following information taken from a foreign tabloid:

Blind Man Kills Deaf Man

“A blind man was jailed for eight (8) years for killing a deaf man by slashing his throat because he was enraged by the noise coming from his stereo and television.

“George Gerard Goeldner, 49, pleaded guilty in the Brisbane (Australia) Supreme court for the manslaughter of Francis John Butcher, 54, on January 4, 2002.

“Both men lived at the Aid For The Blind Complex at Fairfield on Brisbane’s Southside. Prosecutor Michael Bryne said the men’s units were 20 metres apart and Goeldner had made numerous complaints to management about the noise from Butcher’s unit.

“Mr. Bryne said Mr. Butcher had been given head phones but wasn’t using them because they were uncomfortable in the extreme summer heat.

“Goeldner is 90 percent blind and Mr. Butcher was profoundly deaf, and had worked as a city based charity collector for the Aid For The Blind Association for decades.

“Mr. Bryne said Goeldner snapped when he heard Mr. Butcher at the administration office telling staff he intended to have a good weekend, believing this meant he would be making a lot of noise.

Goeldner rushed out with a serrated kitchen knife and saw Mr. Butcher at the letter boxes and put it to his throat. He claimed Mr. Butcher who had prosthetic limb and depended on crutches slipped from his grasp and his throat was slashed after he could no longer support his weight…”

DHL International (Nigeria) Limited:

Misplaced Assumption Disgraces Deaf Man

On Monday, September 13, 2004 a powerful earthquake measuring a frightening degree on the Richter scale horrified the quiet people of Ogunnaike Street in Ikeja, Lagos. Never in the history of the low profile street had it once been predicted that someday a prestigious company it accommodates would one day be the epicenter of a global earthquake.

It is not a physical earthquake as such, but rather a grave deliberate distortion of judgment induced by prejudice. The effects of that ecological disquiet or moral slur could only be appreciated in terms of the emotional upheavals and psychological turmoil it inflicted on a deaf man.

We have observed that despite the visible polishing grace and respectability conferred by academic education on the lives of deaf persons in this country, respect for their persons has not pervaded society. We hinged our claim on tangible facts---that there are reputable places where they are looked upon with suspicion without prior information on their identity or character content. There is hardly a corner in our land where they are not all   held up as professional beggars. It is interestingly appalling that even a venerated prestigious company of the calibre of DHL has succeeded in disgracing its good name by entertaining a hasty and offensive assumption about a hearing impaired man in its official premises in Lagos, the Centre of Excellence.

The dramatic incident that began the tremors and earth shaking moral slur was captured by the Daily Sun newspaper of Friday, 12^th of November 2004.We quote verbatim from the Daily Sun, the King of Tabloids:

“The deaf community is up in arms against DHL International (Nigeria) Limited. They are even mobilizing the global deaf world to take up the battle cry against the company, which allegedly humiliated a member of their community.

“As Mr. Bello Bala, a hearing impaired man and Executive Director of Deaf Rehabilitation Foundation, told the story to Daily Sun, he got the humiliation of his life on Monday, September 13, 2004 at the hands of Mr. Theodore Halim, the General Manager in charge of the Ogunnaike Street, Ikeja office of DHL.

“Bala said he had gone to DHL office to submit his application for a British visa through the Drop Box option being implemented by the courier company on behalf of the High Commission. Through an interpreter he narrated his experiences.

“‘On Friday, September 10, 2004, I went to the Ogunnaike Street, Ikeja office of DHL to submit my application for a British visa through the Drop Box. When I got there in the afternoon, the security people at the gate said that submission of applications had closed for the day. They told me to come back on Monday to submit my application.

“‘On Monday, September 13, I left my house very early. I got to the DHL office by 4:30a.m. By that time 35 people had already put their names on the list. I was number 36. At 7:00a.m, they started admitting people into the compound. People were being called in groups of five. After a long time, when I thought that it should have reached my turn, my name was not called. So, I went to the people calling the names to enquire. It was then that I observed the list had been changed. The names of people who did not even show up as early as I did had been added to the list. Even more annoying was the fact that my own name was completely removed from the list.

“‘Just as I was protesting against this, Mr. Theodore Halim, who I later found out is the General Manager, walked out of his office to find out what was the cause of the problem. I went to him and complained about what his staff did. He asked them to give him the two lists. After checking, he saw that actually the lists were not the same. And names had been added to the second list. Although I did not clearly hear what he discussed with his staff, I naturally expected him to rectify the problem. Instead he allowed them to continue announcing the names on the second list. I protested further about this injustice. But when he learnt that I am a deaf person, he quickly put N50.00 (less than US $1) into my hand and ordered his security to rush me out of the premises.

“‘It was for me a great humiliation. It is so painful to me that a fellow Nigerian would treat me in this manner, whereas a foreigner and General Manager of Unitrust Insurance with head office at Ajose Street, Victoria Island, treated me differently. Not only did he warmly welcome me to his office, he took time to explain their service in writing to us (as we could not communicate verbally). This shows the level of his understanding of the problems of disabled people especially as practised in developed countries of the world.’

“Bala further revealed that in October 2003, he addressed the conference of the British Deaf Community in London where he had the opportunity to highlight the problems and discriminations that disabled people face. He noted that the discriminatory attitude shown by Mr. Halim against him stemmed from the fact that he is deaf.

“‘It is a reflection of our unjust society whereby thousand within our deaf community are affected and taken advantage of because they are powerless to act in their own defence,’ Bala lamented.

“Attempts by Daily Sun to obtain a reaction from the company were frustrated by its officials, particularly one Mrs. Adorah Dozie Chukwuma, who took the reported through rigmarole.”

God has often used the people of the lower class or the disabled to expose the dangerous weaknesses and real character of those who regard themselves as the cream of society or Very Important Persons (VIPs). In the Holy Bible it took the instrumentality of a doorkeeper, namely Mordecai, to unearth the entrenched murderous dispositions of Haman, an influential political leader. He was a proud man who would not sleep because a mean doorkeeper refused to do him obeisance. Bloated with extreme rage against the poor fellow for what he perceived as rebellion, he schemed to murder him by hanging on a gallows. Fortunately, divine intervention reversed the bloody scheme and Haman ended up being hanged on his own gallows with strident repercussions in eternity.

Very important individuals and corporate entities are on the road to extinction and ruin for their extreme contempt of the poor and disabled. Sodom and Gomorrah are cases in point!

Conclusion

There is no community of people in the world that does not, at one time or the other, come under threats from some brutish neighbour with a bloated sense of self bent on harassing them by way of exploitation, intimidation, abuse and making of unreasonable demands on them. This observable fact has been with man from time immemorial. In the archives of the history of man, we see people contending with tyrants and fiends to save their necks from: communism, despotism, fascism, imperialism, Nazism, nepotism, racism, terrorism, and tribalism. These 9 wicked tools of tyranny have one mother, namely, egoism. There is hardly a corner in the earth where the stings of one or two of these malevolent offspring of egoism have not been felt. The handicapped too have those that prey on them to subjugate them to mean treatment as if they were dogs. What term can we coin to connote the act of marginalization and discrimination against the disabled? What are they going to do with the things done unjustly against them?

Zig Ziglar, the American motivational speaker says that “it is not what happens to you that determines how far you go in life; it is what you do with what happens to you.”

In the 11^th chapter of 1^st Samuel in the Holy Bible we see one Nahash from the land of Ammon coming to carry out an unprovoked aggression against the people of the land of Jabesh-gilead in Israel. The threatened people immediately requested to go into a treaty of peace and promised to be under servitude to the proud aggressor. The people did not understand the reason for this wanton antagonism, and neither did they have the wisdom to think of ways to ward off this stupid assault on their freedom. They simply thought that what had happened was an irrevocable decision of fate. So Nahash, encouraged by the idiocy of this fearful and weak people, replied, “I will make a treaty with you only on the condition that I gouge out the right eyes of everyone of you and so bring disgrace on all Israel”. This expensive imperious demand from Nahash now made the defenceless people reconsider their tactless promise to go into the risky treaty. They begged to be given 7 days to look for a liberator to deliver them from tyrannical subjugation, and they promised, “If no one comes to rescue us, we will surrender to you.” Fortunately, they found a rescuer or a typical social crusader and activist in the person of Saul, their leader. The leader heard the distressed people weep for their lives after hearing the terms of surrender to the lawless assailant. Saul resolved to take the initiative on behalf of his subjects in order to save their lives and destiny. God backed up the liberating initiative and the bully was bruised and crushed, and the people and their leader had a great celebration before God across the whole land.

The powers of darkness, in the form of discrimination, marginalization, injected false sense of political irrelevance, have gained ground in and upon the deaf community to inflict such damage as to make deliverance impossible for many of our deaf youths. Darkness breaks loose upon a people when it is given place. Darkness strikes root when it is not resisted, and when it is looked upon with cold passivity as if it doesn’t contain a single atom of destruction. The surest and easiest way for the prevalence of the powers of darkness lies in the failure to assume that salvaging responsibility on behalf of a people. If responsibility is spurned, then our irresponsibility will be visited upon us in the form of numerous ills from various quarters.   

The innumerable woes stalking innocent deaf youths have their foundation, partly, in the default or negligence of sacrificial and accountable leadership by those they look up to for guidance. The bane of Nigerian deaf youths is the absence of creative and compassionate leadership. If this is not the case, why then are we at the mercy of a society that has a knack for discrimination in all its ramifications?   

We have not had the courage, despite our consciousness of the steady rise of the Berlin Wall of discrimination against us, to resolutely groom ourselves into bold and sensitive advocating crusaders for the defence of the less privileged deaf youths in the tangled web of societal abuse. A people that fail to creatively fight off retrogression and stagnation induced by injustice must bear the harrowing long-range consequences of their inaction. The pen, we are told over and over again, is mightier than the sword. Here is a tiny but irresistible weapon majority of educated and knowledgeable deaf people in our land do not use to launch efficacious missiles to destroy the monuments of discrimination and neglect of the handicapped. J.F. Kennedy, a one time American president, stated, “There are risks and costs to a program of action; but they are better than the risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”

Society must be educated, by demonstration and theory, to see the absolute value and utility of the handicapped to social and political progress under God. The handicapped, on their part, must realize that it is not until they rise to fight through fair and cogent non-violent means that evil elements in society would stop preying and looking down on them. And it is not until they assume responsibility for themselves, where possible and crucial, by using the light they have, that society would realize they too have rights and cannot be treated as second-class citizens in a free democratic regime their votes and prayers helped to establish.

Inaction and indifference breeds decay and cowardice; and cowardice plagues a community with a drought of visionary optimistic leadership. The fate of such a community is better imagined: “…This is a people plundered and looted, all of them trapped in pits and hidden away in prisons. They have become plunder, with no one to rescue them; they have been made loot, with no one to say, ‘Send them back’ ”(Isaiah 42:22). Isaiah’s prophetic utterance re-echoes summarily from the mouths of hundreds of deaf youths across the Niger Delta through the single sentence, “Nobody comes to help us.” They howl in the pillories of illiteracy. They scream while in the pits of the begging industry, which wearies their souls. They squeal from the prisons of broken dreams and lost destiny.
 

Where are the liberators?