THE POWER OF WORDS! PART II
We ended last week’s nugget, noting that ‘words are like seeds’ so we must be careful how we throw them at people.
For many people words have turned them into this ‘unfit failure or nobody’, that they’ve been called. For me it was different; as I battled with those words for many years knowing that while I was from “nowhere and unfit” (by her estimation), I was certainly heading somewhere, and fit for something. I remember crying the whole night and many days following. Then I resolved to turn the hurt and cries into “Success boosters”.
Whatever her words were intended for, (which was clearly not positive) they brought a paradigm shift to my life: caused me to view life differently; pushed me to press harder and built myself a status – a brand.
Well, while I wouldn’t say I’ve arrived yet (because I am still in the hands of the Refiner); I’ll certainly say I am proud of, and thankful to God for the woman I am becoming.
Perhaps as you read this nugget, you identify with a situation in which words have been used against you, and are having a heavy toll on you.
My question to you is:
What have you used those words for?
Is it to make you a better person; or does it bring out the negative in you and turn you into this bitter; hostile; angry failure of a person?
Words are powerful but you can purpose to turn those ‘lemons into a lemonade’ that many will later desire to have a sip of.
As you go this week, purpose in your heart to not let the words of people (especially the naysayers) define you; and remember –
“let no one look down on you” Titus 2:15 b (NRSV)
Don’t forget to smile coz it looks good on you.
God bless you.
Pst. Kuku
PST KUKU’S WEEKLY NUGGETS
LET’S END THE GAME OF HYPOCRISY!
At one time or the other I’m sure we’ve been in situations where we’ve had to play the game of pretending (aka hypocrisy) because we didn’t want to make someone look or feel bad. We could not say exactly how we feel about the person, so we end up behaving in classic hypocrisy:
We say the nicest things on the phone, or in the presence of the person but we actually despise the individual(s) wanting to have nothing to do with them, and say the most distasteful things behind their backs.
While there might be ‘justifiable’ reason(s) for not wanting anything to do with someone, the game of hypocrisy we resort to doesn’t make things any better.
Imagine if God were to treat us in exactly this same manner?
Afterwards, we have offended and continue to offend him; so He (unlike us) does have every right to be angry with us and not listen or answer to the calls we make to him in prayer.
So, as we go this week; if people have offended us, instead of acting hypocritically towards them, let’s make sure we express ourselves plainly so they know exactly what they’ve done and how you feel about them; maybe that will even cause them to realize their own wrongs, learn from that and not repeat them again.
Let us make it a practice of “bearing with one another and forgiving one another if anyone has a grievance against another. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive” Colossians 3:13 (CSB)
Don’t forget to smile coz it looks good on you.
God bless you.
Pst. Kuku
THE OSWALD HANCILES COLUMN
$100 Billion? No! Africa Must Fight for $2 Trillion
“My plea today: We know this will take trillions, not billions of dollars. We also know that countries burdened by debt simply cannot afford to go green. Here we need a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the private sector…To act with all dispatch and decisively, because time has quite literally run out” – Prince Charles, eldest son of Queen Elizabeth and heir to the British throne, at COP-26 in Glasgow, United Kingdom, November, 2021.
To me, one of the most profound speeches at COP-26 was that of Prince Charles’, excerpt of which I quote above. Prince Charles does not speak with Obama-esque brilliance, so his words barely got attention as it competed with the belligerent resonance of Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, and her finger-pointing soul-searching theatrics at COP-26. The “military-style campaign” Prince Charles challenged the world to go into in the same COP-26 hall where the British Prime Minister had invoked the image of 1960s Hollywood superstar, James Bond, with a “Doomsday Clock” ticking….ticking…
”one minute” to the end of the world scenario. In the 21st century, “this is not a movie”, but, as Boris Johnson said at COP-26, “a real digital clock ticking remorselessly to a detonation to end human life as we know it”. Would the world be energized into a military-style campaign against what Boris Johnson so appropriately called an “invisible and suffocating blanket” enemy – carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere by the industries and cars of the West? This is war! Mia Mottley intoned at COP-26: “What must we say to our people living on the frontline – in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Latin America, in the Pacific?”.
“African countries need at least $2.7 trillion for mitigation measures, and another $488 billion for adaptation to climatic change to be met in 2030, according to the estimates from Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) for adaptation to climate change”. (SOURCE: Africa Needs Over $3 Trillion to Mitigate Climate Change – allAfrica.com; 1st July, 2016; The NEW TIMES [Kigali]; by Emmanuel Ntirenganya). Will African countries get that “$2.7 trillion”? I ask for much more.
“$2 trillion annually for man-made Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation measures in Africa from the richest nations of the world. (And Reparations for the Protracted Holocaust of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Trans-Saharan Slave Trade)” – Oswald Hanciles. That, my mantra over the past three years; accentuating my call for a “Marshall Plan” in the magazine I was the co-founder and editor for, GREENLOVE, published in Liberia in 1989.
While ambitious Africans like us are calling for trillions of dollars for only Africa, the richest nations of the world have been refusing to even cough up one hundred billion dollars for ALL the developing world, even at COP-26. “Six years ago in Copenhagen, Hillary Clinton, United States Secretary of State (spouse to US President Bill Clinton; Democratic party presidential candidate in 2016), brought the moribund negotiations on a deal to slow climate change back from the dead with a single promise of $100 billion a year to help the world’s poor nations…..The world’s advanced industrial nations committed to ‘mobilizing jointly $100 billion a year by 2020, to address the needs of developing countries.’ But where’s the money?….
’Financing is the most challenging aspect of the whole deal,’ (said) Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change….’There is no credible road map to the $100 billion’….”(SOURCE: Getting to $100 Billion in Climate Change Aid – The New York Times [nytimes.com]; by Eduardo Porter; September 29, 2015).
COP-21, COP-22, COP-23, COP-24, COP-25, and COP-26….: the richest nations of the world have not come up with even the $100 billion being asked for. COP-26… and global temperatures risk rising to 2.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels – unleashing flooding, droughts, mass starvation, dehydration, wildfires, dramatically lower agricultural yields; conflicts and wars. Africa that has contributed less than 3% of noxious gases into the atmosphere to cause global warming and Climate Change would be worst hit. Africa desperately and urgently needs not billions of dollars, but, trillions of dollars. How do we get the $2 trillion annually I demand for Africa?
“Human beings were auctioned off like objects, paying zero attention to the miserable fate that these slaves had been conditioned into….The trans-Atlantic slave trade is one of the darkest periods in the history of humans. Starting as early as the mid-17th century, the slave trade grew into an extremely lucrative trade for the capitalists in the US and the UK. ….It was a period marked by the cruelty of the highest level. Africans were dehumanized and subjected to torture, deplorable conditions on the plantations, brutality and were inhumanely exploited…..Life on the plantations was designed to get the maximum output from a slave without giving that same slave an existence worthy of being called sane…”. (SOURCE: The Horrible Torture and Dehumanization of Slaves in Plantations | The African Exponent. By Takudzwa Hillary Chiwanza; March 29th, 2020).
In GREENLOVE magazine which I am co-founder for, and was Editor for, published in Liberia in 1989, I had Liberian cartoon genius, Ronnie Siakor, drew a cartoon of slaves emerging from the tablet in the hand of the Statue of Liberty in New York, United States, and grotesquely dangling from her sides – while a man was chopping off the base of the famous statue as if he was chopping down a tree in the tropical rainforests. In 1992 in Calabar, Cross River State, southeast Nigeria, I hatched the concept of the SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP. This fuse the THOUGHT of the Atlantic Slave Trade – the THOUGHT of greed; harshness; egoistic nature and egoism; insensitivity and sense of superiority –
with man-made Climate Change. In 1994, I started developing a project on the concept, linking it up with World Cup-1994. It was misunderstood; rudely aborted; and I nearly lost my life after about three months in intelligence and military cells in Nigeria. In 1996, with the financial and ‘image support’ of the Federal Government of Nigeria through their high commission in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I developed a video documentary linking the Atlantic Slave Trade, Climate Change, and this time, Olympics-1996. In September, 2019, the SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP Movement contracted Charlie Hafner’s FREETONG PLAYERS theatre group to have actors acting as kidnapped slaves during the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade to parade through the streets of Freetown….to the historic slave dungeons at the basement of the old Freetown City Council building, where they were symbolically freed by the Deputy Mayor of the Freetown City Council, Osman Koroma. Why do I keep on fusing this image of the Atlantic Slave Trade and man-made Climate Change?
Whereas there had been enslavement by powerful nations of weaker nations for millennia, the over three centuries of the Atlantic Slave Trade was the worst enslavement by man of other peoples. It was racial. It was the abuse of human beings to get them to work for free and make wealth for their oppressors; and the systematic bludgeoning of their minds. It was not only their bodies that were enslaved, but their minds. The Negroid slaves were made to feel inferior. And, the white slave merchants and slave masters over the centuries felt superior. This mindset though not so obvious…festers into the 21st century. Even as the human race is on the abyss of Armageddon, this feeling of RACIAL SUPERIORITY is so strong in the white races that they find it almost impossible to stimulate a situation where the Negroid people and non-white people would come close to being equal to them. What is worse than that is the INFERIORITY COMPLEX of Africans who cannot even begin to think to fight for their FREEDOM. It is to kindle contrition in the white man for the sins of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Trans-Saharan Slave Trade is what the SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP is partly about; and to set afire the need to fight for FREEDOM among Africans – a fight that must be with such slogans “FIGHT OR COMMIT MASS SUICIDE”. In the 1960s, United States Secretary of Treasury, Robert McNamara, said the developmental trajectory of Africa would mean that Africa would experience “immiseration that beggars the imagination”. If Africans don’t become environmental activists and stimulate local action like intense tree planting exercises, and stimulating significant financing from the West, nightmarish scenarios of nauseous deaths awaits Africans.
I need a few enlightened people of all races to join me – intellectuals and billionaires; media giants and sports stars. Climate Change is the continuum of the war on the Negriod African by the white races – it must be initially a psychological war; a war of imagination.
I pause,
Oswald Hanciles, The Guru
+232-76-757634
WhatsApp Number
Email Address: oehanciles@gmail.com
November 30, 2021
05:40 hours in Freetown, Sierra Leone
