Silence is not emptiness; it is architecture. It builds where words collapse. It is a sculptor that chisels meaning out of voids and a lens that peers into the chambers of the heart, dragging the hidden noise of adversaries into the open. To the shallow, it looks like weakness; to the discerning, it is a fortress. Silence burns without flame. It sets fire on the mountains of envy and unsettles the jealousy with its still heat.
The philosophers understood this long before us. Wittgenstein declared that when words stumble, silence ascends the throne. Pascal lamented that humanity’s deepest unrest is its inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Thoreau, in the woods, discovered that solitude was a more faithful companion than crowded company. From the East came a whisper through Taoist thought: silence is the reservoir of strength, a force that outlives noise. These are not mere reflections but embers of truth and fragments of fire that point to a reality speech cannot contain.
Scripture too sings this hidden music. David held his tongue before the wicked and transformed silence into a shield. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” This is no coward’s retreat but strategic warfare, for silence can be a weapon in the hands of God. Sometimes the Almighty disarms the enemy not by thundering back but by silencing lying lips, rendering them powerless before the stillness of His people. Silence ties the adversary’s hands in unseen chains.
Politics, that noisy theater of ambition, has also bowed to silence. Richard Nixon captured the imagination of America’s “Silent Majority,” and with that phrase, he turned voicelessness into thunder at the ballot box. Angela Merkel, in her long chancellorship, cultivated a style her critics mocked as merkeln; deliberate delay, calculated quiet. Yet it was this very stillness that steadied Europe through storms, proving that sometimes the weight of what is unsaid carries more power than speeches.
In Delta State State Nigeria, silence has become a strategy of its own. Senator Ovie Omo-Agege, Deputy Senate President of the 9th Republic, has often allowed restraint to do his talking. In moments when adversaries braced for his words, he offered none. His quiet has become a riddle, unsettling rivals and forcing them to second-guess his moves. Observers have since noted how his pauses, his deliberate timing, have altered the rhythm of political contest in Delta State. Even his opponents have betrayed unease, as silence itself is a sword raised against them. Politics thrives on noise and instant reaction, but when one man refuses to be hurried, he becomes the measure of the field.
Thus silence is not a retreat but concentration. It is thundered with the mouth shut, causing the mountain to tremble. In the personal life, scripture, politics, silence stands as judge and sentinel; weighing words before they are spoken, weighing adversaries before they are answered.
To master silence is to master a language few dare to learn. It is not for the restless or the cowardly, but for the disciplined who understand that sometimes the loudest voice is the one that chooses not to speak.
Senator Ovie Omo-Agege has mastered this science. The propaganda of the MORE agenda and antagonists of the EDGE agenda need a course on this strategy. Application fee is free but the cost of tuition is louder than silence
