Having to choose to become a priest is not an easy thing, - not even funny. To live the priesthood is quite an experience in sacrifice and in committal service. Every contrary insinuation is quite an imponderable. On this basis, and to celebrate my Fifteenth Priestly Anniversary in a manner that is in tune with my convictions about the priesthood, I have reflected deeply on the pastoral, evangelical and reconciliatory actions of Fr. Carl Kabat and found it to be in tandem with the demands that are upon priests and leaders of the Christian population in Nigeria especially at the face of this unreasonable and unjustifiable massacre of our Christian brothers in the North.
At a time many people are using their lives, talents,
resources, connections, influences and religion in one total bet for the
destruction or annihilation of nations, vast areas of environments and
multitudes of peoples and are contented being addressed to as terrorists and
militants, Fr. Carl Kabat’s action < http://ncronline.org/news/peace/kansas-city-priest-arrested-after-breaking-nuclear-weapons-facility > deserves
total commendation and is as well, worthy of emulation.
General Patrick Owoye Azazi, former N.S.A made real efforts
– a suicidal one for that matter – to evolve a fulcrum for action against
terrorism and then threw it back to his younger brother, Mr Goodluck Jonathan
to act upon. Really there was a Mr. Jonathan but was there actually a leader?
Despite the different approaches to the Azazi hiccup, the fact that a General
is not given to many words is instructive for those who have wallowed in
culpable ignorance for too long. And because it is about politics of the brand
played by PDP, this veritable anti-terrorist measure was snatched from
Jonathan’s hands and has been turned against Nigerians. Whether or not Azazi
opened his mouth so wide in an unprofessional manner is a statement which
facticity must be compelled to pass through the scrutiny provided by the
evaluated judgment of a London-based risk adviser, Eurasia Group before it can
be established as true or false. According to The News Magazine (The News,
July 09, 2012, Vol. 39, No. 01, p15), the Eurasia Group had said:
“Jonathan’s inability to respond
effectively or articulate a credible strategy reinforces the growing perception
of a deep leadership void in Abuja.…..militarization of the region and strict
curfews have only had limited effect, and huge (military) spending outlays 2012
offer little hope for a credible boarder strategy.”
Last
Sunday, I took out time to stand in front of our beautiful Cathedral, Christ
the King Cathedral, Asa Road Aba, Abia State, Nigeria to watch thousands of
people troop out of the Church on their way home after the usual Sunday Masses,
while others settled down to their weekly meetings – in peace. But do we really
possess the kind of peace, security and joy I saw these people display last
Sunday? Do we really, when our Christian brethren and fellow countrymen are
being massacred in the North, or isn’t it too costly a presumption on our part
that we must keep President Goodluck Jonathan in power at such a huge cost despite
all warnings even from the Blessed Virgin Mary? Follow me to < http://evurulobi.hubpages.com/hub/NIGERIATHE-INAUGURATION-OF-A-SATANIC-PRESIDENCY
>
Many of today’s terrorists are found hiding in places that
are said to resent them most, and appear to be very comfortable in the midst of
people reckoned as their confessed enemies. The
most deadly terrorist is first of all that party, or governor, or legislator,
or civil servant, or pastor, or imam, or judge whose conscience died very long
ago and never returned to life to the extent that one can close one’s eyes and
comfortably, or so one thinks, steal #300b meant for the rebuilding of Benin -
Ore Road, defraud old men and women who had labored under sun and rain all
their lives to the tune of #4b and yet still intimidate them with incumbency,
or decide to look the other way when billions of dollars budgeted for capital
projects are being siphoned from the national treasury by one’s fellow party
men and would have to go the length of destabilizing the entire machinery of
the National Assembly so as to oil the highly discredited wheel of a mischievous
political party. It is in the attempt to
defend or hide these illegalities that imbeciles are recruited and armed.
Boko Haram is an
extension - a deadly extension of our failure - both as individuals, as
groups and as a nation. It is the externalization of the greed- greed for
blood, power and wealth by our leaders - both political and religious. This is
the real reason why the so-called experience, expertise and loaded connections
of Colonel Sambo Dasuki, the newly appointed National Security Adviser, is
impotent and already dead on arrival. If it is true that he is well connected,
then he is as well linked to terrorists. Surely the picture of a green snake in
a green grass does not in anyway capture the essence of a greener pasture. This
is rightly so because peace and security are basic ingredients that are
necessarily implied in the greener pasture experience.
If Pastor Ayo
Oritsejafor’s recourse to the U.S. Congress is not to be regarded as an outing
in hypocrisy, propaganda and debauchery then he must take time out to go to the North to apologize to General
Muhammadu Buhari whose mandate had been consistently stolen (2003 and 2007, and
also in 2011 where PDP had to depend on Oritsejafor’s CAN to superimpose
illegalities), and yet he had had to depend on legitimate means to pursue a cause
in social justice, freedom and electoral victory. After this he should now pay
a solidarity visit to Pastor Tunde Bakare, and must be humble about this. For,
as the Holy Writ said “where there is no visioner, the people perish”. Pastor Tunde
Bakare is a visioner on mission but whose visionary inputs are threatened by
greed and betrayal from those who should know better. By creed and by conduct,
it is appearing that General Buhari is a better Christian - even if an
anonymous one (apologies to Karl Rahner) than the President of the Christian
Association of Nigeria, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor.
Terrorists have always lived under a cover – religion,
institutions, etc, and have unsuspectingly worked hard to upgrade such
institutions by the use of propaganda and blackmail and betrayal to instruments
of mass destruction. And as terrorist templates are put in place and working
almost always unaided, gullible citizens of different nations and owners of
institutions have watched, albeit hopelessly and helplessly, as the vision and
mission of the founding fathers of their religion, institutions and nations are
hijacked, subverted and ostentatiously replaced with uncanny idioms hiding
behind the cover of attractive slogans like democracy, freedom, foreign policy
and progress. The ability to buy a cover for their nefarious actions, more than
the massive deployment of funds to the purchase of weapons of mass destruction
is the reason for the huge success recorded by terrorists in their evil
expedition in genocide.
Today, terrorists are putting propaganda and advertisement
strategies to a selfish end that lampoons the responsibility and accountability
consciousness of religious, institutional, national and individual actors. Infiltrations,
pretentious collaboration and leakages are factors which terrorists employ to
dispossess others of and hijack ownerships of private establishments,
institutions and even national governments. Thus hijacked, they are built into
a formidable terrorist enclaves or nuclear tanks. And not to be concerned about
this misnomer in human and institutional development is, more than the menace
of Boko Haram, the Al-Queada, Taliban, etc, the meaning of a culpable ignorance
about an ongoing war in every nook and cranny of the globe. That people are
dispossessed of their hard earned wealth and reputation, thrown out of jobs,
families and marriages into the streets to be crushed by reckless drivers who
have no regard for traffic rules and are finally buried in shallow graves which
our highways are presently due to the impact of corruption, surely does say
much about the ravaging incidence of an asymmetrical warfare which cannot in
all honesty be separated from, but must have to be seen as the more dangerous
arm of the Boko Haram insurgency. Americans cannot fight this war for us. The
terrorism that is ravaging the Nigerian landscape is the weapon of mass
destruction – a nuclear weapon- which People’s Democratic Party, PDP has built in
the hearts and minds of all her members and first grade supporters, and PDP
does not pretend on the fact that she wants the status quo maintained.
Besides, the soul of a nation is the conscience of her own
people. And as such, when that conscience is murdered or compromised at the
altars of spurious alliance or allegiance, automatically that nation is dead.
Again, I believe that nuclear weapons or instruments of mass destruction are
not ferried from across seas and oceans into the abodes and hideouts of
terrorists and militants, but that they are instead, first and foremost, a
branded product of a dead conscience whose power dissolves the whole man and
reduces him to a mere tissue of chronic imbecility.
We
are fools and clowns for God and humanity's sake. Over 2,500 American soldiers
have died because of nuclear weapons in the past several years in Iraq. I
remember Eisenhower who said that every weapon that is made is a theft from the
poor. The only condemnation of Vatican II was that nuclear weapons are a crime
against humanity and are to be condemned unreservedly. — Carl
Kabat, OMI
I
wholeheartedly commend FR. CARL KABAT and nominate him for the Noble Peace
Prize Award. And in appreciation of his works as a priest, I dedicate this
piece to him. What he is doing over there in the U. S. remains an option that
is yet to be exploited to its fullest here in Nigeria. In this regard, my heart
equally goes out in prayer and appreciation to those anti-terrorist and
anti-corruption hardliners with whom I have come to learn some ropes in social
justice struggles and freedom fighting: General Muhammadu Buhari, Pastor Tunde
Bakare (Glory be to God he opened up on the $50,000 dollar gift, otherwise a
Bakaregate would have been in the cooler waiting for its own time), Yinka
Odumakin, Joe-Okei Odumakin, Prof. Wole Soyinka, Prof. Pat Utomi, Chief Mike
Ahamba, Mr Bayo Onanuga of The News,
Tony Momoh, Mr Ayodele Akinkuotu of TELL,
Sir Celestine Omehia, Mr Anayochukwu Agbo of TELL, to mention but a few. To my hidden collaborators in the
person of Chief Mathew Olusegun Obasanjo, Okey Ndibe, and, singularly, Mr
Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo, I
say “courage”. "Peacemaking”, says
Fr Carl Kabat, “is not an optional commitment. It is a requirement of faith. We
are called to be peacemakers ... by our Lord Jesus."
The truth is that those who, in honesty and out of a perceived
sense of responsibility, wholeheartedly subscribed to Jonathan’s presidency have
failed woefully, and are being made to relinquish their positions to political
clowns. Do we begin to talk about the crisis that is currently rocking APGA,
the huge disappointments that are recorded by the constitutional reform
agitators, or what?
As global warming continues to eat-up the humus soil that
holds the tap-roots of our common humanity in a ferocious manner and as it
presumably undertakes to bring the ravaging flames (not rays) of a
once-upon-a-time friendly sun closer to us in a way very much unsolicited,
strong benefactors and benefactresses for environmental safety, for example,
the GreenPeace Initiative, are not
saying every leave that grows on a tree trunk or every grass in the field must
be coated with thick green oily paints. This is not the way to make our
environment green neither is it the proper way to restore what we have taken
out of nature. For every tree cut down, we can plant nine more, and then exercise
much restraint in activities that has got to do with bush burning and
deforestation. But what has one got in terms of restitution for one precious
human life cut down in a trajectory output of violence, corruption and
terrorism?
Though exceptionally generous and unique its own way, nature
also does make a lot of inescapable demands upon each and everyone of us. These
demands are exhaustively captured and summarily concretized in terms of
responsibility and accountability. Responsibility and accountability are a
condition for the harmonization of the multifarious networks of actions,
interactions, relationships, events and the intractable episodes of reciprocity
that are found in nature. Whether our involvements in and with nature are
governed by a belief in God, or a curiosity of some sort (for example, the Big
Barn Theory), or by some attitudes of evolution, our record books in
responsibility and accountability must, of necessity, have a column reserved
for the value that is placed upon human life, and the virtues of truth, justice
and freedom. To that extent these items of extreme value and virtues find
reflection in our individual and collective lives respectfully, to that extent
we are human beings, otherwise people must be made to understand that beasts
and vultures do also wear clothes and are found to occupy beautiful mansions in
Government Reserved Areas (G.R.A).
One can, to an extent grasp the contents of global
morality but that of a global conscience seems quite a ruse, or one that
evaporates when confronted sternly by the foreign policy of many independent
nations and institutions whose roots are well grounded in political realism of
the extreme type with all its inherent factors of terrorism, violence,
corruption and general moral relativism except if there is a unifying and a
binding factor to it. This is the reason why it has to be noted that only
Nigerians, not the U.S, hold the key to their own growth and development.
What then could be
the unifying and binding factor of a global conscience? This is exactly what is
captured in the Global Ethic Project. The idea of a global ethic is becoming
more compelling and quite inescapable, but this would require the collaborative
efforts of the United Nations to sell through. However, that of a National
Ethic is a silent but obtrusive revolutionary power at our fingertips. This is
the significance of the SACRED DEED (Visit <http://revfrkennethevurulobi.blogspot.com/2012/06/professor-hans-kuhn-and-global-ethic.html >).
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