By Michael BUSH
It is human nature to allow especially overfamiliarity hinder one’s sense of appreciation. The failure is so generic nobody is left to cast the first stone. Everyone, living or dead, at some point of their lives, took someone or something for granted. And, paid the price one way or the other.
Who does not take another for granted? Who has never taken virtue for granted? Not me, not you, not any other. Taking for granted takes all to tango.
For instance: take education, take friendship, take God, take leadership, take relationship, take time, take whatever and whoever. Across board, horizontally and vertically, without any exception whatsoever, taking for granted has been a constant. Teachers have been taken for granted, for far too long that it no longer matters who is recruited as a teacher nor how the person does the job. Ditto the authorities and ditto pupils and students: everyone has been or is being served.
Taking for granted is a vicious cycle. It is like what Nigerians call do me, I do you. Or, see finish. A monthly take-home-pay that takes no worker home nor lasts a week let alone a month coupled with horrendous work environment and conditions, and poor work ethics occasioned of course by monumentally low morale complete with mass failure in examination all connive to paint a picture of education and its players being taken for granted.
In the process, education suffers. So too, stakeholders; so too, society. The result is that in spite of and despite the fortune government at all levels claims to have spent on the sector, return on investment is zero -all round. Go to public universities and colleges and primary schools in Nigeria and see firsthand the rot, or rather the shame that they call infrastructure.
All one sees are run-down campuses, offices and classrooms. It is also quite palpable the poor pay even professors at the bar get for all that sacrifice. In fact, it is a miracle that our education sector -especially the tertiary subsector- is still standing and working; if it is. And, just so you know, that’s the greatest danger with taking for granted.
The flag of performance or productivity flies at half-mast but because something is going on, nobody bothers to find out what the challenge is nor how it can be fixed. Taking for granted is like saying anyhow, anyhow, push on. Really, that is where our country is at the moment. We take it for granted that no matter what we do or don’t do, “Nigeria go survive.”
We also take friends and friendship for granted. That is a mild way to describe the uncanny mannerisms of betraying or exploiting friends or friendship. A so-called friend who conveniently forgets or ignores or refuses to help or secretly hates or tells tales about their friend is taking them and friendship for granted. The consequences for such a one are unspeakable.
A friend in power is a friend lost, they say. But, that ought not to be. A friend lost to power was never a friend; at best, may be only a frenemy. They must ruminate on their future out of power, which shall happen willy nilly, plus including in that same future the scenario of the friend ignored becoming the new kid on the block.
Nature is so smart, some of these vengeance are served dead cold. You garbage in evil, evil garbages out to you. You treat friends and friendship like trash because you suddenly found yourself among the upper echelon to the extent you neither pick nor return their calls. Later, when newfound friends milk you dry and reject both your calls and friendship since you no longer have money nor power, to whom shall you cry?
Enter God, the-most-taken-for-granted. Who does not or did not take Him for granted, at some point? Take the miracle of sleeping and waking up. Most of us think it is a given, a right.
Most of us think health is not wealth. We would rather we had money instead of good health. We take freedom too for granted. Even the ability to breathe, or to eat, or to walk is too expensive not to thank God daily for.
Some of you have raised the bar of taking for granted all the way to unfathomable heights. For instance, to the point that you now say or think God does not exist. Or, that what He cannot do does not exist. Sssh, don’t be emotional: think it out.
God cannot kill, cannot lie, cannot steal. Yet, some have taken Him for granted so much and for so long that they now dress Him up in borrowed robes. The Ugandan proverb, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there, aptly captures the tragedy happening within Christendom. So-called Christians elect to follow God outside Christ and, little wonder, they end up in idol worship, in the occult, in prosperity gospel, in spiritism, in superstition, etc.
Another stratum that has suffered untold beating in the hands of taking for granted is leadership. As alluded to under education, the people have been most unkind to those in government. We elect them for four years but turn against them six months down the road. As soon as the half a year honeymoon is over, we become enemies to the same human architecture we ought to support to give us a better life.
We curse them at every turn, publicly and privately; eg., T-pain, whatever that means. We refuse to pay something as common as tax yet we blame government for not keeping their own part of the bargain. By calling them stingy while praising their colleagues to high heavens, we pressure government personalities we are close to into corruption to feed our greed but turn around to abuse them for doing nothing throughout their tenure. When would we ever stand from start to finish by a leader or leaders we had chosen?
Furthermore, many successors treat predecessors like unknown quantities until they themselves join the club and the beat goes on. Why would an incumbent treat a predecessor with disdain, even if they came from different fronts? One hears stories of incumbent chief execs not picking or returning calls of predecessors and wonders if these people fear God even a little. The thing about taking calls or people for granted is that one fine day, you shall need them.
Zimbabweans -like Ibibio people of Nigeria- have a proverb that no matter how far an eagle flies up the sky, it will definitely come down (to look for food). No matter how long you stay in money, in office, in power, one fine day, monkey would go to the market and not return. As Nigeriens like to stylishly put it, the same sun that melts the wax hardens the clay. Or, you may add one Nigerian proverb in the mix: he who goes to sleep with an itching anus wakes up with smelly fingers.
Still on leadership, it is also imperative to flip the page and speak more truth to power. Leaders who take their people for granted, deceiving them, dividing and ruling them, generally playing to the gallery should know there is an expiry date. If you play God as a councillor or supervisor, it means you don’t want to be chairman; as a lawmaker or executive council member, you don’t want to be governor; as a judge, you don’t want to be chief judge or chief justice; as a governor, you don’t want to be president and as a president, you don’t want to enjoy retirement. Zambians say that it is only a stupid cow that rejoices at the prospects of being taken to a beautiful abattoir.
About time we came now to the business of relationship which, well, was somehow implied in the foregoing. A spouse who takes their spouse for granted should not wonder why Nelson Mandela’s people insist that the anus doesn’t teach the mouth the sweetness of food. A child who takes own parent(s) for granted should ask Ibibios and Guineans why a child can play with mother’s breasts, but not with father’s testicles. As for business and sundry partners who are fond of taking their partners for granted, the Ibibios and Ugandans have a message they should hear, namely that the madman, who throws a stone into a crowded market, forgets that his own mother could be hit by his madness.
Then, there is time. No sane person toys with time. But, you and I know too many people who take time for granted. They make hay only while it rains.
It’s especially so in politics Nigeriana. Our politicians like to complexify otherwise simple issues. They prefer longer routes which lead nowhere and to nothing. They sleep when they should work and run overtime during injury time.
At this juncture, to round off this half, all of us must remember never to take even a fool or a vice for granted. The Kenyan proverb, when a man is stung by a bee he does not destroy all beehives, is particularly, contextually pertinent. At the end, both the one who always takes for granted and the other who is always taken for granted must imbibe the lesson embedded in an Ethiopian proverb that the man who marries a beautiful woman, and the farmer who grows corn by the roadside have the same problem. Being taken for granted and taking others for granted confer a certain power that should itself never be taken for granted.
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