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Source of our misfortune not confined to the number 13

THIRTEEN days from today, from any corner of the globe where there is evidence of life, the year 2012 will bid us goodbye. December 31 will mark both the celebration and gladness of being alive.

The inescapable awareness of being older will throb in every heart. The lasting question that the passing year will leave for the new year to answer, is whether we are wiser?

Relish the remaining 13 days of the year without the burden of misfortune of suspicion that strange convention has imposed on the number 13.

Delivering the 13th Annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture on September 12, Professor Ben Okri advanced the Hebrew meaning of the number 13 to be a lucky one to put troubled nerves at ease.

According to that meaning, Okri said, one stood for love and three, for unity. If this were to be the case, in the tapering days of the year 2012, there are definitely two wishes to post to the world.

May 2013 bring with it the love for humanity and unity for the truth.

As has become tradition, children born at the zero hour of midnight, to usher 2013 in, will be the subject for good news.

The acclaimed giving and receiving of life, between the mother and newborn, will be a joy to share with the world. From a distance, the happiness will be tempered by the knowledge that the world is not all things bright and beautiful to the children born into it.

It is in this very world, that legendary trumpeter Louis Armstrong painted the good picture of life in a song, which some children are thankfully born into luxury and others sadly into misery.

The fault does not rest in the fact that some children's daddies are rich and their mothers good-looking, but in an unchanging system where some are doomed to fail and others to thrive at birth.

In the mixed fortunes of such children, so is our world shaped.

It is a world that brings forth the kind of a fatally divided future.

In that fatal encounter, the love for humanity is lost and the unity for truth trampled upon, to do away with the innocence that an unchanging system perpetuates to make oppressors and the oppressed from the very darlings that were once the bundles of joy in the loving and caring hands of their mothers.

How does one explain the nuisance they later become to be the rogues, monsters, connivers, drunks and killers, and who live and die by adding to the miseries of the world?

And the source of the world's misfortune is not the dreaded number 13.

It begins with one allowing life to be lived without care.

Failure to care breeds a cold-blooded world as if people have ice in their veins. They have lost their souls to be human.

Neither do they have hearts for compassion nor minds to think to imagine a better tomorrow for their children and children's children.

Dumb or smart, children are born into such an inhumane world system to acquire, transfer and unleash its brutal ways. Children learn from what they see elders do.

When no thought is spared for tomorrow, they too develop the urge to live for now. And if power were to come their way, they will behave no less than muggers who smash and grab all that they can lay their hands on.

May the remaining 13 lucky days of 2012 favour the world with exemplary leadership that will make children grow to turn the world's misfortune around.

- This article was first published in the printed newspaper on 18 December 2012

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