HELP FROM BEYOND THE BORDERS?
In his
interview book “Salt of the Earth” (with Peter Seewald) which he authored as a
cardinal, Benedict XVI identified the tension between Islam and the West, and
went ahead to assert that the re-awakening of the Islamic consciousness can, to
a reasonable extent be appreciated as a reprieve in the face of deep moral
contradictions of the West and of its internal helplessness. But addressing a
group of moderate Muslims in Cologne, Germany , during his visit on August 20,
2005 and at the face of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S few years earlier,
Benedict XVI stated thus:
“Those who
instigate and plan these attacks evidently wish to poison our relations, making
use of all means, including religion, to oppose every attempt to build a
peaceful, fair and serene life together”.
Such concerns as these, not only the formula for power acquisition, political
and economic enrichment, must go to color our approach to the Islamic community
in Nigeria, and aid us in the formulation of both foreign and internal policies
that will not be a slave to the dictatorship of relativism. In other words, the
neglect of the real democratic challenges and the education which the Christian
South owes the Muslim North in favor of a narrow parochialism, insipid
plutocracy and executive rascality constitute a major flaw in our approach to
Islamic fundamentalism and violence in Nigeria. And if the reports by the
Wikileaks are anything to go by, then the wild flames of Islamic fundamentalism
and global terrorism are being reformed in the womb of time and converted into
arsenals of justice against “infidels” who have hijacked the machinery of
government. The balkanization of the Nigerian state is not and cannot be
acceptable to the World Union which employs Islamic violence to maintain its
hold on the Niger Delta oil wells. And some sworn members of this dragon are
from the South-South and South-East respectively, and have been used to
infiltrate government and national institutions. Their loyalty is final and
decisive. An attempt to divide Nigeria is therefore an experiment in
somalization/ burundisation of the most bizarre type. Indeed, those who have
never known the pain of war do not know the value of peace. Here lies the
horror and the fatalism associated with Satanism and atheism in the 21st
century world of nuclear warheads.
On a more practical note, if Islam values rationality and peace - and it is a
huge indictment and an embarrassment if the opposite is correct – then
our Islamic brethren must appreciate the inescapable fact that a country of
free people cannot fold its hands and watch the humiliation of her own citizens
but must guarantee equal rights for all, Christians and Muslims alike. That
some blocks are still standing in the Niger Delta is because the Niger Delta
struggle holds both foreign and constitutional values for Nigeria, and this
called for caution. But what significance, one may ask, does the Boko Haram
sect hold for Nigeria save a helpless confession of the need for formal
education – a confession that is a gross indictment on the Nigerian educational
sector and the monumental corruption that has rocked the officials of the
Nigerian state both high and low, ecclesiastical and secular. One of the ways
out of the Boko Haran terrorist bazaar is for the Federal Ministry of Education
and Internal Affairs, in conjunction with all the governors of the Northern
State and the Nigerian Police, to affect a massive arrest of Muslim Youths who
have an inclination to fundamentalism and aversion to Western education and
send them to the classroom, even if they have to study in chains because it is
all the more risky to allow Nigeria be ruled by incurable lunatics.
A more matured and rewarding
approach to Islamic fundamentalism must therefore begin by an unpretentious
re-discovery of the new face of communism as the real source and the greatest
sponsor of violence and extremism, not only in Islam as demonstrated by Boko
Haram, Ai-Qaeda, Al-Jezeera and their crude methods, but also in the more
dangerous amorphous subversions and inversions which go to define in a very
substantial manner the dominant character of the communist ideology, and which
have successfully worked out an effective method of invasion and corruption of
national governments and institutions, including ecclesiastical institutions
like the Knighthood. An authentic Christian effort against global terrorism,
violence and extremism that is not the equivalent of an intolerable attack
against God and humanity, as exemplified by Boko Haram, Ai-Quaeda, etc, must
relate and cannot fail to relate sincerely to this new reality in global
experience.
The
courageous battle which the Blessed John Paul II launched against communism
must be brought to its resolute conclusion. It started with the pulling down of
the structures of oppression and the dismantling of the apparatus of flamboyant
experimentations in Satanism. This was its regional significance.
Now the next
phase is not about the material looting and plundering of the enemy’s fortune,
even if this seems to be the attraction to the allies or that the cost of war
must be put into consideration. Neither is it about a cowardly flight jaundiced
survivalism. It is instead about a bold attempt to rescue the original faith –
the Catholic Faith and its other great manifestations or non-negligible
occurrences in other religions from the invading arsenals of global Satanism.
This itself constitutes the greatest challenge to the New Evangelization and to
Ecumenism, and as well points the way to freedom, growth, development, security
and peace both nationally, regionally and globally. This is what Prof Hans Kuhn
has devoted his time and energy doing as the founder and president of Global
Ethic Foundation in Switzerland. This is equally the significance of the SACRED
DEED over and above that of the SATANIC CODE. The Church must not shy away from
this responsibility for faith. To do so is to help Satanists put the war
against communism in the reverse gear.
The U.S.
Foreign Service willingly donated itself as an instrument of warfare against
communism, and this offered no mean attraction to the late polish pontiff Pope
John Paul II. But that this generosity was discovered to, after several years,
have been colored by a culture of relativism is a factor which did much to
arouse the suspicion of conservative Islam which at that time was economically,
and politically affiliated to the former communist bloc. This affinity held
special security significance, for Islam as it battled the “infidels” and the
dictatorship of Western civilization, thus sharpening Islam’s appetite for
violence. As the communist pillars collapsed under the weight of their own
contradictions, and in this way shattered the old satanic haven which these
pillars signified, global Satanism re-negotiated its security in the hands of
fundamentalist Islam and Freemason. Today, either ways, or hiding behind
religion, Satanism has thrown off the cloak of communism which it originally
wore with the pride of an ostrich, and has made its way back to the
center-stage of world diplomacy. Before Islam and the mutilated self-expression
which Boko Haram is trying had to ascribe to it, the Vatican is the only real
enemy to communism. Consciously or consciously, the church is still battling
communism in a world scale.
John Paul II had honest intentions for convening the multi-faith summit in
1986, one of which being an open and practical concern for the unity of faiths
as one of the most potent weapons against the communist resurgence and global
atheism. As if he anticipated this subversive character of the communist
scourge, the events at the world scene have not escaped this insightful
experimentation in the Ecumenical field. However, the inauguration of the World
Union, its subsequent institutionalization in the form of
One-Heaven-Organization, its mystical codification in the Satanic-Code and its
practical manifestation in the form of political parties, national governments,
world institutions, e.t.c. – all these are the new face of a more dangerous
amorphous communism that has been substantively built into a major component
and has assumed the dominant factor of World Diplomacy.
THE COST OF RE-ELECTING DR. GOODLUCK
EBELE JONATHAN: GOVERNMENT –BY – GUNS.
“‘How relevant is the decree at a period
of non-emergency? How does one know what is a crime under the decree? How can
its possible abuses be avoided? Are Nigerians completely helpless under the
situation?”
This was how the Newswatch Magazine painted a
masterly portrait of the questions raised by the obnoxious military decree 2 of
1984 in its editorial of July 31, 1989 (Vol. 10 No. 5 p10).
The original decree enacted by the Muammadu Buhari-led military
government on February 31, 1984 but backdated to December 31, 1983 was adopted
by the Ibrahim Babangida as amended. Decree No 2 had stipulated thus:
“No suit or other legal proceedings shall be against any person for
anything done or intended to be done in pursuance of this decree”.
Then it went further to suspend Chapter IV of the Constitution Of the
Federal Republic of Nigeria by stating thus:
“any question,
whether any provision thereof (i.e. of chapter iv of the Constitution) has been
or is been or would be contravened by anything done or proposed to be done in the
pursuance of this decree shall not be inquired into by any court of law and
accordingly sections 219 and 259 of that constitution shall not apply in
relation to any such question”.
Muhammadu Buhari’s Decree No 2 was one swift act of impunity and
highhandedness generally associated with military dictatorships all over. But
Buhari did not pretend about his mission in government and the method he
adopted in pursuit of the set objectives.
Instructively it suffices to mention that,in retrospect, in Muhammadu Buhari
is found a repository of that type of loneliness associated with a runner whose
resolve and goodwill crashed under the cruel weight of dubious capitalizations
engineered by conspirators. It happened to Bola Ige few years back. And except
for the interventionist strategy evolved on the platform of nationalism,
patriotism and social justice activism, it could have happened to Wole Soyinka
and Tam David West. However, unlike the heroic ordeals which these notable
nationalists suffered, Buhari’s ouster as a military dictator by Ibrahim
Babangida in a counter coup is HIS (Buhari’s) tragedy, not Nigeria’s.
But the discovery of the
existence of a deliberate and influential effort to have the value of
citizenship of victims reduced to the status of mere remarks made by a veterinary doctor on the hospital folder of a mad
cow is worrisome.
There is a strong link – an iron wire correlation, if you like –
between this attempt at centrifugal reductionism of responsible citizenship and
the terrorism, corruption and executive rascality that constitute the
distinguishing marks of a PDP led government.
All these have coalesced, either by design or accident, in the
administration of President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. And to continue to be
deceived further that the systemic decay of the machinery of government will
not obliterate totally whatever goodwill that accrue to the person of Dr.
Goodluck Ebele Jonathan from Nigerians signifies a perfidious attempt to draw up
a more cruel agenda in tyranny for a new Jonathanian administration and in this
way return the nation back to the throes of military dictatorship.
The cluelessness about the direction of governance owing to ineptitude
leadership which has remained largely unchecked in the personal habits of Mr.
President has further widened the abyss between the government and the people.
Today, it is no longer about the obnoxious Decree No 2 of 1984.
Instead, it is about the guile and bluff employed to oil the discredited wheels
of a mischievous political party and the perpetual erectile dysfunction it has
inflicted on the innocent rider of its wobbling horse chart making fertility
less an attraction, and more of a burden.
The strong arm ruler – every strongarm ruler - has a consistent
pattern of disarmament ordained and sealed against patriots, nationalists, true
democrats, freedom fighters and social justice activists. Using corruption and
terrorism as willing instruments, and drawing unreservedly from a support
garnered from paranoid political parties, he rides the tiger against individual
human consciences, national interests of supreme importance and established
principles of order and discipline.
In Africa, inflicting further bouts of pneumonia on the opposition,
labor and civil society groups and then threaten them with an outbreak of
kwashiorkor disease is one favorite method the Emperor employs to just continue
having his/her laugh and riding rough-shod over the gullible electorate. This
cruel experiment on raw power is what it takes to reduce responsible
citizenship to an “anthill” and the national treasury toa honeycomb for the emperor
and his cronies alone.
Okey Ndibe is correct. With the crop of leaders Nigeria churns out on
daily basis, Nigerian citizenship has been reduced to ant-hood.
The Ekiti State drama, for instance comes into clear view. With an
admixture of pregnant admiration and cultivated cynicism – cynicism because of
some necessary fatal presumptions one is compelled to make about the Nigerian
electorate – many did watch Fayemi shoot himself severally on the leg in the
course of the patriotic exercise of his office as a civil servant employed by
the people of Ekiti State. Instructively, Kayode Fayemi did not lose his bid
for re-election because he failed to do a grass root mobilization of the
electorate. Rather the electorate caught severe pneumonia as the strong man
factor in Nigerian politics unveiled its appalling credentials and violently
asserted its preferred method of ascension to power. Kayode Fayemi is a
self-appointed heretic, a frustrated schismatic and a desperate apostate in the
adroit power–worship mentality and personality-cult saga that dictate the pace
of our national life and engagements. His undying conditions about June 12,
1983 presidential election considered to be the most freest and fairest
election in African history and popularly acclaimed to have been won by Moshood
Abiola but which was annulled by the Ibrahim Babangida’s administration and the
inescapable conclusions thrown up by June 12 itself cost him the gubernatorial
seat during the just concluded election in the Ekiti State. Fayemi possessed
all the credentials and exhausted every necessary avenue which the electoral
challenges presented on the road back to the gubernatorial seat of Ekiti State.
But ambushed by the kind of terrorism and brigand that inextricably court the
P.D.P disposition, every decent contender to any electoral office in Nigeria is
bound to end up in a cul-de-sac. And to concede defeat appears to be the only
viable alternative. Fayemi is a victim of his own impeccable convictions
about the people as the authentic repository of sovereignty and the
legitimizing factor of authority through the exercise of electoral choice and
their electoral bequest of power to those they have anointed. His failure in is
a brutal and an unjustifiable indictment on the elite class, labor and civil
society groups. It is the people’s failure, or our own tragedy as a nation. It
is as delicate as it is unceasingly disturbing for emerging democratic mindsets
and goes to illuminate the dangerous
abyss that had been created over the past decades by ineptitude leadership
between traditional robust morality and genuine literate minds on the one side
and - on the other side - the rest of
the Nigerian populace, in the majority,
who have been religiously short-changed, literarily brain washed,
politically intimidated and coerced into
accepting the fact that pecuniary gains, even when trapped in the brackets of
moral bankruptcy and advertised at the expense of enlightenment, hold they key
to progress and security in today’s democratic Nigeria.Paradoxically, in
conceding defeat and returning inviolate to his immediate constituency – the
committee of patriots – Fayemi is a hero in his own write. The determination to
win does not foreclose the people’s anticipation for social peace and progress.
Rather the expectation for peace and progress are necessarily embedded in the
notion of electoral civility.
ANTHOOD CITIZENSHIP AND THE NEED FOR AN
INTERVENTION.
How does one
explain “anthood” as a paradigm of national identity to one’s
colleagues, peers and friends from other countries? And what tangible excuses
can one project as the reason for its coming to be and the sustaining factors
thereof?
From Ghana
through South Africa to the Far East, Europe and America, it is evidently clear
that ineptitude leadership and executive rascality have played out a big
assault on Nigeria’s citizenship potentials, and it is a whole lot of
exasperation and shame having to be forced to go through the full hog of the
entire rot.
While some sense
of collective amnesia compels us to share the blames, failures, embarrassments,
defeat and shame of our nation, resoluteness is the character of every genuine
effort founded on the platform of democratic ideals and egalitarian ethos which
promises to alter this arrangement in administrative bankruptcy.
Wanted,
therefore, is a kind of national ethic together with a disinterested translator
of this ethic into purposeful action in national development, peace and
security at the bequest of functional and operative laws. Surely neither Dr. Goodluck
Ebele Jonathan nor the P.D.P-led government is equal to this task.
Getting to read,
with great admiration and paralyzing reflective sympathy, the biographical
notes and unpretentious citations about Wole Soyinka and the landmark
contributions he has made to the development of global debates, the evolution
of national consciousness and individual destinies; getting to lay these side by side with the nationalist zeal
that still burns in young minds like Chimamada Adichie; and returning back to
the drawing table to weigh everything in the crucibles provided by corruption
and by the Boko Haram brand of terrorism that have gripped government, the
religions and national institutions leaves one with nauseating satisfaction
about the absence of a meeting place for
all actors in the liberation struggle,
both those in and those outside
politics.
Beyond this, the
personal yearnings and experiences of Kolo Omotoso and Odia Ofeimun, when
viewed through the spectacle of the disagreements between OkeyNdibe and
Archbishop Mathew Hassan Kukah on structure alone during the 80th
birthday celebration of Noble Lauret Wole Soyinka underscore the need we all
have for a moderator who must not define his competence or ability in terms of
divine omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience.
A good majority
of the Nigerian populace is overwhelmed at the cost of rethinking citizenship,
rebuilding nationhood and advertizing commitments.
Today, the
religious have proved to be powerful actors in national politics albeit in many
ways so painful and negative. Among the three most widely practiced religions –
Islam, Christianity and Traditional Religion – a new inquisition has become a
strong attraction. This destructive face which the religions present to
national consciousness must be confronted headlong and eschewed in favor of
inspired and legitimized understanding, reconciliation, cooperation and peace
which they hold.
Conceding that
initiatives of inter religious dialogue and cooperation have grown over the
past decades is a verity with a capacity for positive results in the renewed
search for answers to the ugly questions of fanaticism. But this does not
permit that one remains unaware of the hot demand for a new paradigm of action,
response and relationships which must take into consideration new actors on the
national and international scenes respectively. This realization carries in
itself both ethical and political dimensions.
Thank providence
for Wole Soyinka and Tam David–West. But why Muhammadu Buhari?
Incurable
optimism and radical creative ingenuity are the two legs donated by integrity
with which authentic leadership walks tall on the hall of fame and honor. This entitlement is real the progenitor of
this other walk - steady, gentle and purposeful trek on the path of growth,
development, justice, peace and security.
While realist
theorists of power may contend for a new fission of untapped energies as the
preferred driver of populist will through continental forests of administrative
decay en-route to versatile democratic effusions, idealist theorists are wont
to argue that an alternative master plan which defines progress in terms of
confluence of interests and compromise of wills is more to be desired than a
re-activation of the Buhari brouhaha. Both sides have one problem in common.
They forget that, in the face of the Boko Haram scourge, and with an array of
retired military henchmen on the political sidelines with a lot of stinking
naira notes to throw about indiscriminately, a military questionnaire which
tasks such new energies has the capacity to uncover the helplessness and
hopelessness of the present crop of political technocrats and in this way open
the civilian boarders to dangerous antecedents in the government by gun-drama.
This is exactly the point where Nigeria has come to with regard to Goodluck Ebele
Jonathan’s administration.
A coup–detact is blinking like a twilight star
somewhere in the Nigeria horizon.
Disregarding, the
alluring temptations which provincialism throws up for fanatical results, and a
principled stand distancing one from
other notions of sectarian equilibrium
will help to conjure up the prototypes of Wole Soyinka, Tam David – West
and Muhammadu Buhari today as constituting a trilogy in the leadership
discourse about Nigeria.
No room is given
here and none must be given for cosmetic maneuvers by merchants of ugly
despotism at the expense of our nascent democracy and the efforts at
demilitarization.
Confronting the
abysmal subversion, diversion and distrust of power and erasing the intransigent
language and behaviors that herald them and drive the propaganda of our
vanities demands a unity of like attitudes and seminal commitments.
A national ethic
is therefore the roadmap to peace and violent free resolution for all actors
giving the stubborn conviction that a violent revolution is either a failed
revolution or no revolution at all because it gives everything including tested
values, traditions and institutions over to wild flames in one inexcusable
frenzy of madness and arrant vengefulness.
CROSSING THE
DIVIDE
About a year ago - perhaps in anticipation of the gubernatorial
election in Ekiti State this year – Kayode Fayemi wrote:
“In one sense June 12 debacle can be
summed as a struggle over Nigeria - whether it was in the bowels of a bankrupt
military establishment or whether it lay with the people.
The coalescence of desperate civil
society actors and political players of various shades under the umbrella of a
broad pro-democracy movement sought to answer that question in favour of the
people.
The unyielding message of the
pro-democracy movement was that sovereignty belonged with the people not with a
military cabal.
Only the people, the authentic repository
of popular will- could legitimize authority through the exercise of electoral
choice and their democratic bequest of power to those they have anointed. These
were some of the issues that were thrown up by the June 12 debacle.
But it is far from accurate to depict
Nigerians as being so bound by provincialism that they cannot but vote along
ethnic and confessional lines. This is simply false.
This is the dynamic that made June 12
possible to envisage a time when political discourse will be much more framed
around ideology than identity, and candidates will be judged with much more by
how they intend to address the practical challenges of life. Politicians will
have to run on the platform of practicalities not the theatrics or sentiments
of feigning identification with the electorate at a primordial level.
Residual distrust of power feeds apathy,
disinterest and cynical disengagement.
The people distrust their government, but
not enough to actively check them and avert excess of power. Rather they
distrust them so much that they desert the state and many simply do not care
enough about the public realm. This indifference is dangerous for democracy.
Democratic institutions cannot survive or
be strengthened in a climate of antipathy nor can politicians long retain their
legitimacy under such circumstances.
If the price of a free society is eternal
vigilance, then apathy will carry a severe penalty for our republic. (The News
Magazine, July 2013, Vol. 40 No 25 PP49-51).
For an average Ekiti voter, Fayemi typifies a powerful preacher whose
sermon, though lengthy, come with much erudition and inspiration but lacks the
requisite capacity to place a kind of demand or action that is proudly
Nigerian. Simply put it lacks action.
Distastefully, it is noteworthy that the reason why PDP won Ekiti
election is the same reason why Islam is being re-designed to accommodate
terrorism, and Christianity is being reduced to a concatenation of lies and
deceit.
OnomeOsifo-Whiskey compared Nigeria under the crushing weight of Decree
2 during the Ibrahim Babangida’s administration to Soviet Union under Joseph
Stalin especially in reference to the gulag - that vast, cold, hunted
wilderness that otherwise was Soviet Union’s evil empire of prisons and labor
camps under Joseph Stalin. In a classical style that was a characteristic
demand upon all members of the editorial crew of Dele Giwa’s Newswatch,
Osifo-Whiskey, in a Preface to Cover
titled, “Riding the Tiger”, held the beast by the jugular, even as it clawed aimlessly
on the midair, to expose and alert the
sleeping Nigerian populace on the criminal uses to which a decree could be put
by a power–drunk leader and the crude
methods he employs in his effort to quench his thirst for power. Osifo-Whiskey
wrote:
“There yet are societies in today’s world
in which men see power only in absolute categories.
For them power is real when it is
undiluted, when it is a handy tool for liquidating all oppositions. When it is
the one simple but most potent formula for playing God without being encumbered
by God’s infinite humanness, love and goodness. Very often power-mongers of
this ilk anchor their rule on ambitious social programmes that command the most
praise-worthy credentials. Their visions are an ideal blue print for patriotism
and national greatness.
Yet the strong man’s world is an
unnatural edifice, its good intentions notwithstanding. This is because there
is only one vision to his dreamland: his very own. But the society over which
he struggles to stamp his authority is a community of men. Men are men when
they are themselves, when they are different, when they dream their dreams,
when they think, when they have convictions for which they are proud to make a
supreme sacrifice. To have a society without such men perhaps is an essential
basis of the strongman’s power calculation.
The dilemma that emerges traps the
dictator into a historic naivety. If it is an aspect of nature that men in
society must think and have a will of their own, so reasons the man of absolute
power, both society and power must be tamed. A blood-and-iron policy
complemented by a rigid police state will be sure pathfinder to the ideal state
where peace and stability reign. In Stalin’s time, millions were physically and
spiritually wasted to gratify one man’s ego in the mistaken belief that through
this course the god of a greater tomorrow would be appeased. But the police
state is not a monolith as most of its eager creators are wont to believe. From
all directions a thousand arrows are shot every minute at its ironically
man-protected fortress. One reason for this is that men will resist having
their individual universe shattered.
…..in keeping a vocal public under his
thumb he (the strongman) rides a tiger. This is where the ultimate danger lies
for both society and its strong-arm ruler. If the police state be effective as
those who conceive it wish the society catches cold whenever the leviathan
sneezes. While a cowed population is
submissive and peaceful it lacks the interplay of freedom and intellectual
inquiry from which the great ideas that make society take a real leap forward
sprout….
If this prospect be added to one of
poverty and great social privation which are common to stagnant societies, then
there is very little the citizen looses in either withdrawing his loyalty or…”
If Osifo-Whiskey’s was an alerting lamentation on the recriminations
that the strong-arm ruler calls forth from the strong room of governance pursuant
to the actualization of his crooked ambition, Adebayo William’s ‘Loneliness of a Runner’ was a prophetic echo
warning other social justice activists and freedom fighters that Dele Giwa, not
the then late Martins Olupo, was
freedom’s free advertising guru who dropped dead at the event of Newswatch’s encounter with
Ibrahim Babangida, head of the then military junta on November 12, 1985, and
that his death was the reason for which the proposed interview with Babangida
was shifted to the afternoon of Friday November 22, 1985 at 3 O’Clock - the
hour of Divine Mercy. It was as if on that faithful Friday afternoon a murderer
extracted mercy from his victim in a very humorous way and afterwards sent him
to the beyond of his life. It is doubtful whether those seasoned intellectuals ever
noticed that one of them - their Editor-in-Chief and leader, together with the
Newswatch mission statement- never came back to No 62 Oregun Road, Ikeja Lagos.
If ever he did later on, it was as a lonely twinkling star on the sky of a hot
Good Friday afternoon which disappeared sooner than it appeared.William
observed thus:
“For our ravaged national psyche one
hundred days are enough for a regime to show whether it will compound our
misery or ameliorate our anguish. In a hundred days military breeches have been
known to come unhinged: and in hundred days civil trousers have come crashing
on the ankles, revealing our emperors in all their mass nudity. By the
hundredth days of the last civilian regime the political horoscope was already
with impending disaster. And despite the ascetic piousness and dead pan
demeanor, by the hundredth day of the last military regime, we all know that
once again, Nigeria has exchanged monkey for baboon.
The magic of it all is that time has
refused to play ball with the chicanery of our leaders.
On a superficial level, there may be
something peevish, even profoundly perverse, about this new found fixation on historical
milestone by a nation whose erstwhile political leadership has shown exemplary
contempt for history and posterity yet this fixation is indeed nothing but an
index of our growing vulnerability as a nation and our collective anxiety about
the state of the country.
Counting days for leaders is a universal
phenomenon. Arthur M. Schlesinger counted the number of days that John Kennedy
spent in the White House and then titled his magisterial survey of that
glorious era a thousand days. In a thousand days, Kennedy held America and the
rest of the world spellbound by the sheer magic of his personality and the
daring and originality of his vision.Kennedy brought back grace and adventure
to an American bitterly frustrated and badly divided (by the) soporific
redundancy of the Eisenhower years.
….as we have hinted, one can glimpse
behind the infectious smiles and easy going charms, the loneliness of the long
distance runner. The question is not whether he can last but how long and how
well. A thousand days and more. Nobody knows……, one thing is clear ……..we have
for the first time in our history the closest thing to a genuinely ‘imperial
presidency’ in the same way in which Kennedy’s was and Ronald Reagan is”.
OdiaOfeimun offers a hand of rescue here. In a lecture titled “Awolowo and the Politics of the Next Stage”
which he delivered in 2006 during the Chief Awolowo Memorial Lecture in Osun
State, Ofeimun identified a common ground for action between an Islamic
humanist and a Christian democrat. He wrote:
“I really do not think that it is fair to
be objective, or non – partisan about Awolowo. The unvarnished truth is that it
is not possible, if you are a Nigerian, to escape Awolowo’s influence.
Inter-subjectively, and from the standpoint of public interest, no matter how
defined, it is arguable that even at his most dogmatic, or because of it,
Awolowo tackled fundamental problems of political and social theory with
creativity that speaks to contemporary issues with the freshness of new
knowledge.
If, like me, you believe that our history
did not begin when the colonizers came on the scene, you may as well go as far
back as the writings of Shehu Abdulahi, one of the insiders of the Jihad in
order to measure the significance of some progressive political thinking on our
natural culture. It may surprise the parochial minded to see Abdulahi and
Awolowo being linked with this tradition. But there is between them so much
coincidence (not necessarily agreement) on the most fundamental issues covering
the mode of recruitment, discipline and accountability of leaders, education of
the masses, federalism, social welfare, good governance and even economic
development and national question. These are the core issues that form what
could be called the Awolowo territory. In this territory, the writings of the
20th century religious leaders, if read without the jaundice of
ethnic and religious bigotry, may be seen as advance guard for what the secular
political thinker of the 20th century would write….. If you live in
a country where the best things that the political mind has thought were never
allowed to become the norm, you would need no special explanation for why those
interested in creating an enduring tradition are always in trouble. This is
especially the case when the untried roads consistently prove to be the answers
to the problems that society faces. In our case, there is indeed a radical
progressive tradition that has not been allowed to register in our national
affairs from pre-colonial times to our so-called post-colonial era.
The bad deal in showing the coincidence
of emphasis between the views of Abdulahi and Awolowo is that even in the days
when Sharia is viewed by some as a basis for a major distancing of one part of
the country from another, the practical import of Awolowo’s ideas, ideas that
are very strongly influenced by a Christian outlook, reveal affinities that
point to a common future irrespective of the religious position occupied by
citizens.
Seriously, I will recommend that the two
be read together by anyone who is interested in plumbing to the roots of a
radical progressive tradition in our part of the world.
(The News Magazine, April 24, 2006, Vol
26 No. 15. pp 62 – 64).
THE NATIONAL ETHIC
IMPERATIVE.
The effort or
struggle to occupy a space or be accommodated within the schemes or platforms
provided for the appreciation and management of multitudes of interests, even
as this general framework constitutes the defining factor and overriding input
of organized and progressive society, may not locally exhaust the very contents
of politics, but surely, it does allay the anxiety associated with the attempt
to discern the real meaning of political action.
As it is always
the case in every struggle, tensions are generated, re-alignments become
inevitable, violent eruptions tend to usurp the place of dialogue and issues
formerly considered as settled become once more targets of rash reviews,
leading, as it were, to the evolution of a new kind of identity that is at once
volatile and amorphous. And except when it is expertly managed, a volatile and
an amorphous identity typifies, I am persuaded to believe, a very sore spot in
evolutionary history and tragic moment in the course of human development.
All possible
explanations for the seeming change in the behavior, whether of contracts,
agreements or treaties, necessarily become, all of a sudden, confiscating, and
characteristically irredentist when they imperil human development and when
they attempt to disable the organic factors that make this development
possible. Asymmetric religious contracts, especially ones in which the name of
God is evoked, must always necessarily permit that their terms, behaviors and
destination pass through the prisms of religious freedom and be accommodated in
a referential framework of faith and justice. The neglect by religious bodies
and secular institutions to come to terms with this antidote of institutional
organization (or behavior) has created a crisis of identity too volatile and
amorphous that has taken the religions and some secular societies away from the
path of growth and development and pushed them to the border line of fascism
where the different faiths and internal or foreign policies of sovereign
nations or global institutions are now depicted as fossils of irredentism and
globalized artworks of antique monadism. This is the fatalism that is
threatening to eclipse the Nigerian political arrangement under the leadership
of President GoodluckEbele Jonathan.
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 Green
Peace 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
two more, and then exercise much restraint in activities that have 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 inexorable
demands upon each and every one 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 respectively, 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 roam the streets
disguised as rejects of the society or occupants of 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?
Hans Kuhn, a Swiss theology professor, was one of the most
controversial catholic clerics of the last century whose works and influence
cut across and strongly permeated the many projects of human development, peace
and security as these affect the world religions.
On September 1993 in Chicago, U.S.A., at a conference of “Paliament of
World Religions” convoked at his instance, Kuhn attempted a “Declaration for a
Global Ethic” and went ahead to outline its principles and its urgency. He
founded the Global Ethic Foundation – a Non-Governmental Organization – and had
it dedicated to this cause.
Vigorously, I had sought to work or partner with Kuhn in furtherance
of his vision for a global ethic because I quite agree with him, in his own
words, that:
•
There cannot be a
new global order without a new global ethic.
•
It is a
fundamental demand that every human being be treated humanely.
•
That there are
irrevocable directives which a global ethic spells out, and these include:
•
Commitment to a
culture of non-violence and respect for life.
•
Commitment to a
culture of solidarity and a just economic order.
•
Commitment to a
culture of tolerance and of truthfulness.
•
Commitment to a
culture of equal rights and partnership between men and women.
•
A transformation
of consciousness.
It was not possible to access the opportunity of a partnership with
Kuhn. In my last correspondence with him in late 2008, and later, in a
conversation over the telephone, Kuhn told me his efforts were then
concentrating in putting his memoirs into their final shape as age was no
longer on his side. Nevertheless, I have made strenuous efforts to follow the
developments in Kuhn’s Global Ethic Project for past a decade and have found
them satisfactorily expedient.
A global religion
must be an innovation of a kind – one that cannot be called Christian, Islamic,
Judaistic, Hinduistic or Shintoistic. Except if it is allowed to be syncretic,
a global religion, for now, is a thing of the distant future; otherwise it is
the divesting of authentic religious beliefs and practices. Kuhn’s vision of a
Global Ethic is not a prisoner to syncretism so long as a global ecumenical
body is the subject of the evolution and profession of a global faith. But a
global ecumenical body must also be a union of other general ecumenical bodies
because for, for instance, for Christianity to be adequately represented, it
must require that the different Christian denominations constitute one
ecumenical body, the same for Islam, Hindu, etc. And it is only their uniform
endorsement for a global religious action that can establish the validity of
such a declaration. Professor Hans Kuhn understands this challenge to its
fullest. But it will be so much an invitation to disaster, chaos and syncretism
if Prof Hans Kuhn’s appreciation of this challenge fails to include an
understanding about the impossibility of a World Ecumenical body of all
religions or refuses to doubt its resilience. The idea of a World Religion
encompassing all faiths, whether this is a direct consequence of a need for a
global ethic that is very urgent and critical or one which is a very remote
implication, is highly quixotic.
Yet, the quest
for a global ethic has grown beyond the religions and has become more assertive
and seems quite inevitable. But its application would require some strong
inputs from the United Nations Organization. While Kuhn has sold this idea in a
wholesale to the United Nations, it needs to be observed that faith is
different from ideology. And if this is true, then a global ideology cannot
usurp the place of faith or duplicate it for whatever reasons.
It was Fulton J.
Sheen who authoritatively asserted that many who belong to the Church does not
belong to God but that the many who belong to God are not inside the Church.
Following from here, Karl Rahnerwould go further to distinguish between
Christian Pagans (deceitful people who hide under the cloak of Christianity)
and Pagan Christians (people who are honest in the pursuit of their day-to-day
engagements and encounters of life through obedience to a living conscience
whether they profess the Christian faith or not); between Juridical Membership
of the Church (all those who have acquired juridical status in the Church
through baptism whether they are sincere or not) and non-Juridical Membership
of the Church (those whom he referred to as“Anonymous Christians”).
In his book
“Foundations of Christian Faith”, Rahner successfully developed a Theological
Anthropology where he authoritatively asserted that every individual human
person is fundamentally constituted at the very depths of his existence by the
very Being of God whether this particular individual person is aware of
this or not, whether he admits this or not. And that faith and the resultant
action is just a thematic manifestation or the concretization of that which is
inherent in the nature of every human person. Therefore, every form of
authentic religious belief is a consequent evolutionary imperative of human
nature - in time - though conscious or unconscious efforts may be, and is often
made, to stifle this, or delay it, or deny it completely. Here is found the
real meaning of atheism, agnosticism or skepticism.
But according tp
Karl Rahner, in the midst of all others, the official faith of the Church is
the ultimate and most purest confession ever made and ever will be made. In
Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the human person discovers and grasps in concrete terms
and in freedom that which he has ever known to be real; that which is lodged in
the very depths of his own very being as an individual human person; that which
he has always yearned to touch, to feel and to embrace but cannot because,
though a spirit, he as a human being is drawn down by the event of his material
body and by space and time but God himself is an absolute, unbounded Mystery.
In encountering Jesus Christ of Nazareth, man discovers, embraces and
lives in constant tangible communion with that God who has always presented
himself initially in man’s experience as inescapable, absolute defining,
unifying and underlying factor of all that exists and as that which is the
answer to this question about man himself as well as an answer to all other
questions. Thus, while Jesus Christ is the shape, form or size – that is, the
real identity and the only one - which God can take and which He has already
taken, and therefore, no other identity or concrete manifestation of God is
possible except in Jesus Christ of Nazareth even though one can admit some rays
of the being of God in other places or persons, the Eucharist is the final
irrevocable condition of God who is Jesus Christ and the logical conclusion of
God’s gift of himself to man in the person and actions of Jesus Christ of
Nazareth. So, according to Karl Rahner, God is not the Deus Absconditus (the
God who created the universe and then latter ran away) or the Undiscovered
Unknown (that which cannot be known and remains unknowable as presumed by many
skeptics and agnostics), but the Discovered Unknown (that which has been made
known, seen, heard, touched and experienced but yet remains a transcendent
absolute mystery not fully and exhaustibly given to human experience or
understanding). God is Immanuel. Therefore, for Karl Rahner, even though
God is unknowable, inconceivable, unfathomable, untouchable and a transcendent
absolute Mystery (or in its technical terms, the Immanent Trinity). He is also, one and at the same time, the God
that is now known/knowable, touched/touchable, discovered but yet in an
inexhaustible manner (Economic Trinity).
The Immanent
Trinity is, one and at the same time, the Economic Trinity, and the Economic
Trinity is one and at the same time, the Immanent Trinity.
Karl Rahner took
this course so as to provide some additional bricks that will serve to hold
historical objectivism, and in this way prepare this foundational ground of the
Christian faith to be able to withstand the hostility and devastating arsenals
of an age of relativism, scientificism, technologism, terrorism, corruption and
atheism.
The other side
saw Karl Rahner tilting towards what has been considered as a misplaced
sympathy for non-Christian believers, agnostics and atheists. Here, Rahner
disputes and regards as cruel the view that the overwhelming mass of people who
are not only non-Catholics but also non-Christians, both those before and after
Christ, are unquestionably and in principle excluded from the actualization of
their lives and condemned to eternal damnation. Rahner strongly maintains that
a greater number of Christians, more than those we know to be expressly
professed, have remained anonymous because of the conditions and circumstances
into which they are born or in which they have inevitably found themselves.
Thus, for him, anyone who does not say in his heart “there is no God (like the
fool in the Bible) but testifies to him by the radical acceptance of his being
is a believer, irrespective of what he states in his conceptual, theoretical and
religious reflection. Therefore, the
faith of an anonymous Christian, in deed and in truth, can be present in an
implicit form whereby he undertakes and lives the duty of each day in the quite
sincerity of patience, in devotion to his material duties and in the love of
neighbor. It is just as highly probable,
in the words of Karl Rahner, that there should be Christians without knowing it
as that there should be “Theists” without knowing it. Anonymous Christianity
does not however include anyone who, in his basic decision, were really to deny and to
reject his being ordered to God, who were to place himself decisively in
opposition to his own concrete being by living a worthless and unfulfilled existence. It refers only to someone who gives - even if
it be ever so confusedly – the glory to God and who has let himself be taken
hold of by this grace.Rahner is convinced that human thought–patterns may not
be able to absorb this classification immediately for the very reason that its
structure is not always immediately perceptible or, that it lacks a directly
perceptible structure and is merely a transitional state whose meaning and
definition can be seen in the light of the finished product, that is, when such
a one becomes a member of the Church in its existential and fullest sense.
There is every reason to dwell on this conviction especially if we come to
realize that every being is always characterized by its final aim whether he
recognizes it as such or not. The anonymous Christians are “believers on the
other side” or of “the other sheep”.
Through my investigations, both as a theologian and international
affair analyst, I have come to discover that responsible citizenship and
authenticity in the practice of the different faiths by the adherents of the
world religions are two inescapable demands that create the required gateway to
a functional global ethic as well as the exit door to its unforeseen
pretensions. This is because very method of application (for such an
ethic) is fraught with a lot of difficulties.For instance, in the view of James
Madison, even though human nature makes internal and external controls on
government necessary, it will take obedient angels to build and run a perfect
government. Down through history, peoples have suffered the evils of unjust,
oppressive government – whether their own government or that of another nation.
American leaders took this issue into account in devising the over 200-year-old
American Constitution. Yet even this “best effort” of human self-government has
its problems. Human nature has not changed. The age-old problems of greed,
self-interest, corruption, strife and petty hates remain inherent in the
administration of any form of human government.
A global ethic must therefore show itself an obtrusive practical force
of humanity providing the impetus for and adequate policing of every action,
individually or collectively. It is the generating principle of every action
and, at the same time, the primal policing agent of that action. It is the
force that bonds national citizenship and belief (faith or ideology), power and
rights, freedom and responsibility; and it must be seen to have the capacity to
generate this power from within itself, not by some external influence.
A global ethic subscribed and applied to the life of a country
automatically translates to a national ethic. Consequently, it becomes the
generating principle of every constitutional action and, at the same time, its
inner policing agent. With this application humanity acts and rules itself.
A National Ethic
is a silent but obtrusive revolutionary power at our fingertips, and for
reasons that are as cogent as they are grave. This is what the Sacred Deed is
all about.
The Sacred Deed
has the Holy See, Ecumenical and Interfaith Models respectively which are
considered imperative.Terrorists have always lived under a cover – religion, institutions,
etc, and have unsuspectingly worked hard to upgrade such institutions by the
use of propaganda, 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 real owners of institutions have
watched, albeit helplessly, as the vision and mission of the founding fathers
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, these are built into 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.
At this material
time when such poisonous gas and scandalous delicacies as terrorism,
corruption, dictatorship, Satanism and conspiracy are on the menu of many African
leaders, including those in the religious fields, one cannot help taking the
risk of raising the critical question of obedience in Nigeria especially in its
relation to freedom. And that this is a theological question has made those of
us from this corner look discredited and highly frustrated considering the
overbearing influence of malignant clericalism and pretentious collaboration
inherent in the system that gave birth to us. From the platform of Islam, the
issue goes beyond acknowledging the fact that lack of education breeds a
primitive mindset that is akin to imbecility especially when the factors at
play are clandestine religious indoctrinations.
That a cabal has fed fat on both sides of the divide is the
explanation for terrorism. For Nigeria to win the war on terror, painstaking
efforts must be made to locate the exact
homeland of the Boko Haram sect. And in nowhere is it located than in that
individual where the human conscience is found to be dead and buried; in that
group or organization that considers the murder of the human conscience a
condition for the success of its vision and mission.
The general
overview, I am persuaded to believe, is that terrorism is a branded product of
a dead conscience whose power intoxicates its progenitors and dissolves the
whole of their humanity reducing it to a mere tissue of chronic imbecility.
The true picture
is that, using a subverted form of Hegelian Dialectics, the Peoples’ Democratic
Party posits a thesis, an anti-theses and works towards a pre-determined goal
as the synthesis, without minding the violence, terrorism and corruption
generated and the genocidal effects inflicted on the psyche of the general
populace. The authentic evolutionary process which the Hegelian dialectics
feeds on is not a product of gross manipulation, but a natural antecedent bred
by all the factors at play.
It is a growing
concern that the Somali/Burundi experience may be replicated here in Nigeria.
Whatever is the source of this fear and the facts that go to support it are given
enough flesh and blood by the “NIGERIA 2015 PROJECT”. The clash that is set to
take place between PDP’s commitment to terrorism and corruption and the resolve
of the Nigerian people to defend their votes has the capacity to make the
Somali/Burundi experience a child’s play for Nigeria as a country and her
teeming population that are fully worn out and exhausted but yet appear ever
determined in this long and hazardous trek to the frontiers of liberty.
CONCLUSION.
For every authentic Christian, catholic or non-catholic, who
appreciates the power of love and education, the episode of Acts 8:6 ff. about
Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch will always continue to hold undying
convictions about Life, about God and about the power of the great commission
to evangelize the world. It commands the
highest appeal to those engaged in authentic missionary action in the world
today especially as this relates to countries with considerable Muslim
population.
Nigerians must be made to understand that the year 2015 does not exist
for them as a country except in the manner of Burundi/Somali. And that except
if they take their destiny into their own hands, the remnants that survive the
Boko Haram insurgency will constitute a sizeable population of refugees from
Africa. This is because a whole lot of Christian minorities from the South
Southern part of Nigeria and South Eastern parts of the country have been used
as bargaining slots in questionable deals that are alleged to have the official
stamp of the United Nations organization (U.N.O.) and the Organization of
Islamic Countries (O.I.C.).
As a priest who is very well aware of the significance of and
unreservedly subscribed to constituted authorities both in the Church and in
the State, my part in this theatre of absurdity is becoming very tetchy to me
personally but the imperiling questions have refused to go away. I am ordained
for this people – all God’s children. That is why I am being addressed as
‘father” by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. As a father, nothing can shut my
mouth when my children are dying.
I do not believe that the “NIGERIA 2015 PROJECT” is anybody’s
property. I neither insinuate nor subscribe to the fact that the names
contained therein and the interests it is ordained to serve have any direct or
indirect semblance, links or connections – real or imagined – with people,
places or institutions in real life. They do not exist. They are “no-bodies”,
“no-thing.” Let us just rest on this assumption, or rather assumption and leave
it at that.
Quite frankly they raise the embarrassment stakes to an intolerable
height, and instigate that harmless fireworks produced by a joker on the
entertainment platform be given over and compelled to pass through hardcore
legal crucibles. But it suffices to mention that with other parts of the
“NIGERIA 2015 PROJECTS” scattered across the length and breadth of most
Nigerian cities, or hidden away in the secret archives of some institutions and
organizations, such crude methods of selection and preservation of the favored
species are at their different phases or stages of implementations against
unsuspecting humanity-lumps perceived as unjust aggressors and the outcasts of
society.