Only a Fool Bites the Hands that Feeds Him
Sadiq Aliyu Waziri
INFOMEDIA – The white man who first uttered this should have been given a Nobel Prize for it’s precision in it’s guidance towards the lands where gratitude and allegiance could be cultivated. But that is one perspective-another would show that the saying should be seen, especially in Nigeria, as a heresy.
So many have lived, for many years, by the saying: only a fool bites the hands that feed him. It might sound like a revelation or a rule prescribed by an oracle for it’s what might have been seen as a ‘heavyweight wisdom’, but this saying has cost Nigerians their voices, frustrations, and anger which should have been heard, seen, and felt respectively, by their supposed-leaders. Nigeria is depressed and Nigerians have cried out their dismay-but the mouthpieces have constantly refused to blare out, or to a better extent bite, for, to the mouthpieces and their flunkies, blaring out and biting have only been the works done by fools.
Whenever the discussions on the flimsiness, mediocrity, and mismanagement of resources by administrations pop up, the average civil servants, let alone those given political appointments would often opt to side with the administrations-no matter how bad it is. When the general public would suffer and cry out their suffering, the former group would feel what’s safer is to opt to be silent or support the administrations’ course at all cost. I have often heard them simply say they are civil servants, so they must not speak ill of the government-even if the government is the most faulty in the world’s history. Have these people exchanged their voices with the monies they collect?
Dr. Isa Ali Pantami, a long time ago, had aptly said that clerics, and of course almost everybody else, whenever given one or another political appointment, they lose their voices and become auxiliaries to the governments-what eventually would inevitably happen to him-Pantami.
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Rarely-very rarely, a few servants have stood up and raised their voices against vices in the runnings of the governments, voices that would eventually cost them their services.
A sect would say they were fools. My sect would say they served well. HRH Sanusi II of Kano has constantly been a good example in this regard. His speaking against peccably maculate governments has cost him two jobs that most, in those jobs, would have only thought of a dare that could have given them perpetual stay. Lest I forget to pinpoint that Sanusi II has not been the only victim. Refusing to put up with governments’ unfairness has cost Malam Aminu Daurawa, Malam Ibrahim Khalil, etc. their seats.
When would the clever realize he is only a trickster? In Maiduguri recently, farmers while on their farms were slain like game caught in the Stone Age. It had to be in the Stone Age and there couldn’t be worse. We have seen cliffs of the farmers’ obsequies and the pain and anger and fear felt are ineffably unspeakable. We can almost say people’s, inhabiting regions other than the bleeding Northeast’s, aside of the deep bleeding Northwest’s, terror is almost nothing.
The government is on thin ice with the people, yet the vast ‘chosen pets’ of the government would refuse to denounce its incapacitation, considering themselves lucky and so have to do everything possible to take their luck to their graves. This does raise eyebrows-no too simple and soft. These people’s decisions are heinously insane.
Awkward as it is, it is very foolish biting hands that feed you, but its more, being a brown-noser, when the hands do not feed everyone in the house enough and even send blows a milliom times more than they feed. From this viewpoint, the saying ‘only a fool bites the hands that feed him’ should be proclaimed null and void by every Nigerian-or those living by it should now know it is time to do the foolishness-and then those supporting them should impose on themselves the change because a fool is he whose voice cannot be heard the single morsel he’s given has blocked his throat. I must speak up and so will my unborn child.
Sadiq Aliyu Waziri
