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Open sore,
indeed
By McNezer Fasehun
In one of his letters to the
junior apostle Timothy, St. Paul wrote that all scriptures were given by
the inspiration of God and that they are profitable for teaching, for
reproof, for instructions in righteousness, that the man of God may be
thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
Incidentally some of the major
violators of the Lord�s injunctions in the scriptures are people who were
either given scriptural names by their parents or had acquired it out of
religious mimetics. This often makes me wonder why some of my born-again
brethren have consistently paid undue attention to washing the outer part
of the cup while the inside is full of filth and dirt. They behave very
true to the type cast by our Lord Jesus Christ who upraided the Pharisees,
Sadducees and the Sanhedrins of his time for being whited sepulchres, very
fine, beautiful and charming outside but, inside, they are full of dead
men�s bones. Again, this is why I am hardly impressed by brethren (and
sistren, to borrow from Bob Marley) who
are apt to change their names from Awogbemi to Jesugbemi, Oguntade to
Oluwatade, Sangodaisi to Oluwadaisi, et cetera, et cetera, when in their
lives and worldviews those transpositions and transmorphisms hardly amount
to a refined attitude to life.
Abram and Ibrahim in both the
Bible and
the Quran
mean the same name. The Bible says God changed the name of
Abram to Abraham because he wanted him to be conferred with the honour of
being the father of nations. One would have thought that those who go by
that name as adherents of either faiths would be staunch promoters of
nations� ideals. In fact, when there was an argument between Abraham and
his kindred, Lot, in the Bible over who took what portion of a land, the
Biblical Abraham deferred to his kin by allowing him to choose first. But
that was not the case in Nigeria. The one who bears such name in Nigeria�s
political firmament had dribbled his nation over several elections, and by
the time he had ruled obstinately for eight years, he only stepped aside
waiting in the wings to step in another election in subsequent years. And
that after annulling an election that was supposed to be the freest and
the fairest in Nigeria�s history. Whereas the first Abraham in the Bible
had faithfully surrendered his only son on the request of his God, our own
father Abraham� is doing everything possible to come back as Nigeria�s
next president. Not one inch of his ambition would be
surrendered.
However, when you look at case
of the foregoing against the ambition of one (St.) Paul Biya of Cameroun,
the former�s inordinate ambition would pale into insignificance. In the
history of Cameroun, and over the space of time that spanned the
partitioning of Africa, Paul Biya has ruled the country for good
twenty-two years. One must be objective to concede to the fact that the
country, by my own estimation had not been as badly managed as some of her
neighbouring countries, including the giant of Africa herself. My wife
had, sometimes ago, taken some Nigerian products, like detergent to the
country and had come back with tales of how effective and incorruptible
the country�s gendarmes had handled their immigrations and customs and
excise affairs.
Why would Paul Biya feel that
without him Cameroun would not be properly governed? Actually, I am not an
apostle of change qua change. Change must occur only when there are very
reliable alternatives. In fact when a nation is blessed with visionary
leaders, who, in their own respective worlds, are philosopher kings, whose
method of engineering a nation�s soul is one of idyllic rulership like the
Western Region of Nigeria was once blessed with one icon called Jeremiah
Obafemi Awolowo, one would expect that kind of prophetic Jeremiah to
continue to hold the reins of office for as long as he did so in
conformity with the dictates of his God, whose injunction is that the only
way we can say that we love Him, whom we can not see is to love men, whom
we can see!
Whereas the Biblical Paul was
prolific in addressing the problems of the early church by standing out as
the apostle sent to redeem the heathens from supposedly accursed
segregation, our own apostle Paul Biya has forgotten the apostolic
injunctions of St. Paul that the grace of God which brings salvation has
appeared to all men, teaching us that denying all ungodliness and worldly
lust, we should live soberly and righteously, even in this present
world.
Nevertheless, there is a poser
for the African intelligentsia with respect to their sensitization of the
African leaders. And Professor Wole Soyinka has an answer to offer this
generation, here.
Wole Soyinka, Africa�s first
Nobel Laureate in Literature, has written so much on the issue of
leadership on this continent. Some of his philosophically political plays
like A Play Of Giants, Opera Wonyosi Child
Internationale, King
Baabu, even
The Lion and The Jewel have all woken us up to the
predilections of the African man hence leadership, to appropriate offices
as personal estates. His very rambunctious treatise Open sore of A
Continent has gone further down to tell us in prose terms, the disease of
sit-tight dictatorship that has plagued the African continent for some
decades now.
The poser for the African
intelligentsia is that, how much efforts do the professors make to
inculcate some great literary thinkings into the school curriculum of our
children? I remember very vividly that Kenneth Kaunda�s Zambia Shall Be
Free coupled
with the songs of Bob Marley on Zimbabwe and Sonny Okosuns� Papa�s Land,
had helped in no small measure in sensitizing the African child to the
need to liberate fellow Africans from the shackles of racial segregation
in South Africa and which had made Nelson Mandela one of the issues of the
twentieth century. Shouldn�t we endeavour to make sure plays like Opera
Wonyosi,
King Baabu, Play of
Giants and
even Chinua Achebe�s Arrow of God be made a compulsory read in
our General Studies at the undergraduate level, so we begin to see how
old-fashioned Africa�s past leaders� attitudes were?
Tune in into any station on
your television sets today and you will never find the African child
busying himself in laboratories inventing technological skills. When they
sit the President or the First Lady down in any event the only thing he or
she is entertained with is dance, dance, dance and dance of all sorts!
Other than the legacy of the Afrikaans in the wake of South Africa�s
desegregation, one wonders whether any African country is making effort to
showcase its home-made automobile to the outside world, in this
century.
Other countries are developing
crafts for excursion into space, yet we are here, dancing!
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