Ironically, it is also with the mind that innocuous children transform into dictators – Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Sani Abacha and others could have equally been some pious clergymen preaching the message of peace and love instead being blood thirsty tyrants, but at some point in their lives, their minds interpreted an event(s) to suit their desire to demonstrate cruel power. The mind is the engine room that drives the world and each person possesses one. But individuals remain the chief pilots of the thoughts, emotions, will, drives and the energy that exudes from the mind. 

It will continue to remain an enigma within the conjecture of sociology, psychology, philosophy and religion if it is accepted that there are many other factors that influence the unpredictability of the human’s mind. It will always be a cause for debate if it is politics and power that makes politicians and rulers think that they are “God” and in so doing become inhuman, forgetting that blood has only one color and runs in the veins of everyone, great or small. There is no acceptable explanation as to why people who have a lot of money always want to have more. Why man progressively attaches so much value to money; why man is willing to do anything to amass wealth; why a person that has mansions sleeps in an oversized bed in a room by his or herself while their relatives just few meters away are clustered in shacks. A Nigerian proverb says, “Twenty children cannot be friends or grow together for twenty years.” The essence of this proverb is that as they grow, their minds create distinct and different pathways for them to follow. I bet that no person can recall the names of all of his or her classmates ten years after school. I say this to stress the fact that it is common for humans to flirt with the vanity of their mind. When people live in their minds and not in their hearts and conscience, the past is inconsequential and the present but a moment and not a stage, whereas, moving on in life as a natural course ought always to be a process that is not isolated from the past, because our future is a consequence of our past. The mind is the most dynamic machine, but its effectiveness depends on the consistency of the person. The airplane, computer, ship, motorcar and other inventions are the products of consistency more than just dynamism. The State of the Mind is not based on how many good thoughts and ideas that flashes through it every now and then, so is the ingenuity of an achiever not based on his or her ability to recall several good ideas. As a matter of fact, the easiest way for a person to become unproductive to his or herself and to society is to try to keep track of every idea that flashes through his or her mind. 

At the tender age of thirteen, Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa, popularly known as Ken Saro-Wiwa, got an idea. On the basis of the idea he decided that he would fight to uphold his indigenousness; he decided that in his life he would prove that to be an Ogoni does not amount to imbecility and failure, that he would fight to create a platform of equality for his people, that he would muster all the courage he could and fighting all odds to bring Ogoni from the dungeon, that he would end the man-on-man humiliation, that he would put a final full stop to the internal slavery suffered by the Ogoni people, and that he would enable his people, a minority African group to stop the wheel of imperialism.  He followed his mind as teenager while at Government College Umuahia as one of the only two Ogoni boys in the midst of the majority Igbos.

He followed the same mind in the 70s when he contested an election to enter the constituent assembly, with the hope to agitate for a revolutionary clause into the Nigerian constitution but was manipulated out. He went on to follow his mind and started the mobilization of his people in 1990, and finally in 1993, on the 4th of January, when the United Nations World Indigenous Day was declared, the Ogonis where the only group in Africa that turned out in their thousands to renounce the impact of colonialism.  Almost fourteen years after his brutal hanging with eight others Ogonis, the people whom he was killed for – including some of his former colleagues – have agreed to go back to the system that they rejected in 1993. They have agreed to go back to the Nigerian authorities and cap-in-hand, ask for a State – a state that would be called Ogoni State, as one of the administrative units of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. People who suffered persecution because of their dogged believe in minority and indigenous rights, environmental rights and total control of their God-given resources have suddenly subscribed to what the Nigerian system can offer them – a state.  Everything, including political liberation for the Ogonis or any other groups is a possibility or impossibility depending on the State of the Mind. If the Ogonis agitating for a state within Nigeria believes that the legitimacy of their indigenousness depends on the Nigerian nation-state then that is the State of their Mind or alternately their Mind for a State.  Those that believe that being Ogonis, they have always lived in an indigenous State and would not allow Nigeria to rob them of that inalienable right are also in a State of their Mind. The two may not actualize at the same time – one may very well take much longer than the other. But the test that separates reality from a figment of the imagination lies in the fruits which a State within the Nigerian federation will bear, as against the produce of an indigenous entity that fully develops its own endogenous capacities without depending on crumbs and leftovers from agents of imperialism.