MOHBAD WAS MY UNKNOWN BROTHER

MOHBAD WAS MY UNKNOWN BROTHER

Mohbad has been trending in the past couple of days and I wondered why? As I read comments after comments, I realised that Mohbad was my unknown brother and as he laid dead something lay dead in me too. Too bad I didn’t know him while he lived, I couldn’t even say I have heard his music. But his death is a different matter. This was a boy who saw tomorrow, the boy with hope and natural talent and elegance, he may be unpolished but he was real. Who refers to himself as “Mohbad” if not someone with a clear sense of himself and a calculated acceptance of the grave responsibility he accepts to shape the course of his own life?

In Ilerioluwa Oladimeji A!oba I find myself saying Mohbad, it is not just a name again, but a wake-up call. Are you not bad? You, reading this piece! What are you doing about it? Are you still going to go through life blaming others, or life?  Will you wake up and change the course of your life? Josie has gone, he cannot anticipate any hope from God again, for him, Ilerioluwa is ended. Mohbad is our national tragedy. His death is our death, though we know it not. When a human being dies, something dies in all of us, when a person dies with his hopes unfulfilled, cut off from life by those around him, the site will fester to consume even more. It is true that no one dies before his ti me or without God knowing, but why would a fellow human being succumb to be an instrument of destruction and pain? We have descended so low because the evil is in us.

What could a 27-year-old boy do to warrant his death? But then “one’s enemies are those of one’s household.“  In one of the videos I saw, I heard him lamenting that he trusted the people around him. No wonder Garima Soni remarks that “betrayal is the result of too much trust “.  Yes, we should trust people, otherwise life is a hell, but then we must also watch the people we trust. Treachery has been with humanity for a long time. Et tu Brute! Was Caesar’s dying cry, but the dagger that took his life was held by a friend. Friends become enemies and that’s why we have to watch our back. Colleagues assaulted Mohbad, he found no help, no guidance, life was harsh, he contemplated suicide. He wanted to live his own life, longed to roam free, to enjoy life but others wanted him to compromise his desires and love. They wanted him to do their bidding. When he revolted, he became a marked man, a dead man walking. Live you own Life and let others live, twenty children cannot play together for twenty years. 

Mohbad has become a metaphor for life in Nigeria, true freedom is elusive. You must compromise, you must submit to others, you cannot go it all by yourself. Living in this climate is a brutish life, a return to the state of nature. Mohbad's wife says such a life was not worth living. She said, he had too many pains, he lived in fear, he fought everywhere he went, he was never happy.“ That graphic picture describes not just Mohbad, Ilerioluwa, but many of us and our so called friends are the architects of our pains. This is exactly what operates in many places in Nigeria. Who will save us? From where would help come from? Society could not protect Mohbad, no wonder many continue to die needlessly while society looks on. Isn’t this the fear that drove another musician to sing “to ba je aje ni iya yin, aje ni iya temi na! Meaning, if you rely on your mother who is a witch, I am equally assured of the protection of my mother, because she is also a witch. And so, the battle rages on and young ones are cut off in their prime. Another lady begs that mothers of artists must join the coven!  What a shame! If all of us go through life brandishing witchcraft totems, what decent life is there to enjoy? 

For far too long, we have queried the behind the scene activities of many celebrities, actors and musicians alike. We know politicians have no friends but interest and betrayal is a portent tool of their trade. Must it be so for the rest of us? Mohbad may have been on the path to greatness, but notoriety also was lurking around. In his world, regrettably, he was not alone and there are many others like him begging discreetly to be redeemed from the stranglehold of bullying, oppression and conformist managers. I am yet to grasp the content of the name Mohbad, but I suspect it was the product of his attempt to save face, to project himself  as strong-willed and not a weakling. In the end, Mohbad died helpless and abandoned. We, as a society must change course, all the accolades and concerns now being expressed were long overdue. If only we can find out the other enslaved souls gasping for breath and protect them and mentor then to respectable grestness, then Mohbad, wouldn’t have died in vain. But then isn’t it true that “ti a ba ku tan la ndere, eniyan o suwon laaye, that is, we become heroes only in death, alive, we are worthless! “ Mohbad, who is next?