All humanbeing love success, and pray to be spared of failure in life.But not every failure is bad.There are times when failure in a venture turns out to be in the better interest of him who fails.

Those who are conversant with Ifa literature of the yoruba people in Nigeria will recall the story of a palace clown who tried to win the affection of the King,his master and failed.Nothing he ever did seemed to turn out right and no matter how hard he tried,rejection and abuses were all he got.In those acient by gone days it was the custom for the people to sacrifice a human being once in a year to appease the gods of their land and it was the duty of the king to produce the sacrificial lamb.When the time came, one year,the king presented to his people this particular clown of his.But the manner of the killing of the victim was prescribed by tradition.He was to be put in a canoe on a big river near the town and left to be carried away by the drift and current of the river.

In previous years,the victim did not last long before he met his death.The canoe might capsize;he might be snapped up by the jaws of acrocodile;he might simply die of exhaustion and hunger.But in this particular year the canoe get swept on to a town where a King had just died .Ther people had congregated on the river bank ,in anticipation of the arrival of thier new king which the oracle have instructed would appear inan open canoe careering down the river.They therefore on sighting him,rushedinto the water,grabed the frightened man and to his astonishment,crowned King!That is an Ifa story and perhaps we might dismiss as amere fiction.But the story of Mr George Price of British Honduras is not fiction.

Mr Price in his youth,wanted to be a priest.He entered a seminary and studied hard but he kept failing his examinations.Eventually he was sent out.He then went into politics during the year of independence struggle of his country.He rose to the top in the hierachy of his party and when the British granted self-government to his country,he became the first Prime Minister!He had failed in serving a small segment of his nation only to succeed in serving the whole.

Another amusing example of the success of failuire is that of Christopher Columbus who set out on the quest for western passage to India.The commission which he took from the King of Portugal was to find just that;and,in that sense,the mission had failed.But the dicovery of the Americas was the the greatest of all the maritime acheivement of the last Four hundred years and the one with the most far reaching significance for mankind as we all know today.

Also far from being fiction,is the story of would be passenger who epitomised the saying"In every disappointment there is always a blessing" and were indeed disappointed at the last moment and could not secure a berth in the famous ocean liner,SS Titanic on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in April 1912.And true to her name,then,she was Titanic.Several American and Britsh millionaire scrabbled to get ticket for this wonderful ship maiden voyage and those who are turned down,even though they offered to pay double,the scheduled price thought themselves very unlucky.But after dinner on the15th April 1912 when the ship was half way across the atlantic,the ship was struck by an iceberg and three hours later it sank carrying down with her One thousand,five hundred and three men and women;who five days before had rejoiced on their success in securing berths in the unsinkable Titanic when those who missed the boat thought it was a matter of regret.

These are instances in which the phenomenon of success arising out of, or because of failure is exhibited in a glaring manner in the lives of certain people but in the life of every one of us,if we cared to look closely enough,there must have been an episode or two when we were glad that we had indeed failed to achieve what we sought after,seeing what providence had eventually planned for us.We can therefore share the sentiment expressed by Shakespeare in Anthony and Cleopatra,when he says"We ignorant of ourselves,beg often of our own harms,which the wise powers deny us for our own good;So we find profit by losing of our prayers.