Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has differentiated between joy and happiness, making use of his prison experience during the regime of General Sani Abacha to drive home the point.
He said true happiness could only be achieved with total submission to the will of God, while one could have joy even in the midst of difficult or unfavourable situations.
Obasanjo, while delivering a keynote address at a Public Symposium to mark the 50th anniversary of the Bible Society of Nigeria, on Monday said: “When I was in prison, I had joy inside me daily and never was there a dull, sad, sorrowing or dark moment. I was always bubbling, active, teaching and preaching to other prisoners.
“I realize that it was not happiness; it was joy which I derived from finding the presence of God, though I was in incarceration. It would be abnormal almost to the point of insanity to say that one is in prison and one is happy.”
At the event which held at the MUSON Centre, Lagos, Obasanjo added: “although I was incarcerated but I still had His joy within me. I did not deserve to be in jail and after my release, I went to great friends, family members including the Alake of Egba Land and I would tell them, Elewon n kii yin (meaning a prisoner is greeting you),” Vanguard reported.
He drew inferences from the lives of great historical figures like Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, the Biblical Cain and Abel story, and intellectual works of Aristotle, to back up his assertion that personal achievement was not a true guaranty of true happiness.
He said: “I have come to realize that happiness may not encapsulate all the human desires…man does a lot of bizarre things and makes great acquisitions and possessions in the hope of making himself happy, invariably to no avail.”
Furthermore, Obasanjo drew a line between peace and happiness, stating that having peace was not the same as having happiness.
“One may have peace and not have happiness. And one may have relative peace around himself without peace inside himself. In the same token, one may have peace around him and yet be unhappy,” he said.
He added that man has been unhappy because he has been looking at the wrong places for happiness, instead of concentrating his attention on the one true God who could really make one happy.
Leave a Reply