SPEAKING PROVERBS THROUGH HIS CAMERA

You may  have heard the song of the proverbial "Mogudu" who is  a victim of some double tragedy as a social agent of environmental sanitation .

" When the elephant, the grandfather of the jungle died , it was Mogudu who ate it up ; When the lion itself, being the king of the jungle died , it was Mogudu that made a good delicacy of the flesh-eating lion ; 

The hyena of the green savanna, with its insatiable appetite for preys did not die without Mogudu eating it up completely. 

But when Mogudu himself died, he found no one who in the jungle or in the forest is ready to make a meal of him."

You may also have heard that the journalist , in the business of ensuring good governance and equity, ensures that he afflicts the comforted while comforting the afflicted. 

But sometimes, if not oftentimes, the journalist ends up being a victim of double tragedy of afflictions from both sides of the deal.

He is neither comforted in his critical moment by the afflicted whose cause he had taken up in afflicting the comforted while ending up at the the receiving end of a double blow of affliction from the comforted who turns around to take his pound of flesh on the journalist for inflicting him in the name of fighting on the side of the afflicted.

As guardians of public morality, we as journalists must endeavour to uphold the sanitization of our standards, especially over the way people pay empty graveyard oration in the guise of celebrating the dead , lest we ourselves become the proverbial teacher of morality who speaks like angels but lives like mere mortals.

To professional journalists and photo journalists as well as friends of Adefunpe Ojeyemi who have since his demise come up with worthy tributes and believe that he deserved to be immortalised , I would want you all to contact me through this phone number 08166493287 with a view to rubbing minds together ( in camera) on issues concerning plans to uphold his ideals. 

When I was meditating over his death recently, what came to me as a source  of consolation was the Biblical voice of King David as contained in God's message for His Saints in Psalm 116:15

" Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His Saint."

What does this mean  ?

The saint is wonderfully made ( Psalm 139:14) ; in death as in his living , he has not dissolved from God's presence (Psalm 139:7) because precious is the thought of God for him ( Psalm 139:17) Hence his memory is blessed ( Proverb 10:7) as he is being led in the way of everlasting ( Psalm 139:23)

 It therefore behoves on us , the living , to immortalize his saint by allowing Baba Oje's good work to continue as this is one of the portions by which we can fulfill the book through which in the sight of God, the death of his saint is precious. 

 Commenting on what it means for the death of saints to be precious in the sight of God, the pioneering Vice Chancellor of Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomosho, Professor Olusegun Oke , remarked:

"If the saints cling to the earth like the seeds of corn to its cob, they would just stay for ever and rot, whereas if they died, especially when the ovation is loudest, they would then bear hundreds of seeds as in case of Jesus. This is how they can be remembered. This is how they had committed acts that have moved the church forward."

OLALERE FAGBOLA