Whilst Rome is burning.
Cornelius Hamelberg
It’s true, something is rotten in the state of Denmark and Rome is burning. Check it out:
Nigeria: Political storm warning
Everyone’s talking about it and about Nigeria’s other problems, some of them inherited by the Goodluck Jonathan administration. , other’s of that administration’s own making and exacerbation.
At stake: the source of some of the hack writers and the establishment apologists’ remuneration and rewards. Who is willing to bite the hand that’s feeding him?
In Diaspora Sweden, in the country’s main morning paper, this Friday our attention was once again brought - unpleasantly - to what is still being most reported about Nigeria and this time it’s that
Boko Haram has kidnapped 185 women and children
In that his latest acceptance speech, addressing the nation, Goodluck Jonathan said it: “I believe that together as a people and with God on our side, we shall defeat terror and emerge an even stronger nation”
Ogbeni Bob Dylan:
“Now there’s spiritual warfare and flesh and blood breaking down
Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground”
With God on our side who is on the terrorists’ side? If only President Goodluck Jonathan could be brave enough to put it straight like George W. Bush: “Either you're with us, or you are with the terrorists”
Except that in Nigeria that kind of assertion has the potential of being twisted to mean that it’s the Muslims that are the terrorists and thereby cause further polarization especially because the Nigerian military is guilty of having massacred so many Nigerian Muslim civilians who are not at all terrorists.
And secondly of course, the other question: Can God be on the side of corruption etc etc etc?
They say that “God is everywhere” which explains why even Barack Obama, His Holiness Pope Francis 1, the Archbishop of Canterbury; the highest ecclesiasts of the various Orthodox communities have not been going to pray in Jerusalem and to the banks of the Jordan River on pilgrimage, as frequently as President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria, to seek his blessings there.
One explanation of the frequency of Goodluck Jonathan’s pilgrimages is predicated on speculation that in their heart of hearts some of the politicians believe that the Almighty has left Nigeria is supposedly everywhere, everywhere else but not in Nigeria.
However, in my view the Almighty has not left Nigeria ...
A Nigerian philosophy professor in a polemical bent of mind has queried this costly even though private pilgrimage enterprise, with Goodluck Jonathan and entourage of pilgrims praying on the banks of the Jordan River, in this rhetorical fashion:
“This is interesting. Don't they have rivers in Bayelsa State where the President can go with other Nigerians to pray? Or don't we have better rivers in Nigeria where the President and fellow Nigerians can go and pray? What is so special about river Jordan in Israel that attracted the President to abandon his high office at this material time to waste Public taxpayers' money in Israel? How many times have we seen the Prime Minister or President of Israel come to Nigeria for such a frivolous jamboree? I cannot imagine our President will go to a dirty river in Israel when we have better rivers in Nigeria.”
Now this is a fact coming up: If my man Muhammadu Buhari had been frequenting Mecca as much as some of the good-for-nothing rascals are frequenting other holy sites, then people like Ikhide R. Ikheloa would be beside themselves, foaming in the mouth, railing, ranting and raving about “bigotry” and “Muslim fundamentalism”.
Abi ai lie?
During my first three months in Nigeria, I spent a lot of time with Pakistanis and the remainder of my wonderful days was with Indians - my immediate neighbour Mr. Prasad & wife and son Bapu who became my son’s best friend and playmate, they were Telugu, from Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh – my later neighbours Drs Chaco from Kerala, and my occasional visits to Maths Professor Bajpai (he wrote a book on mathematics every year) ...
For the 1983 elections in Nigeria, some political heavyweight hopefuls travelled as far as India to seek blessings, charms, talismans and assurances from some of India’s holy men ( and holy women) there, not least of all from Lakshmi
Things get so bad, that it's said to be sometimes possible – or it could again be mere speculation and suspicion that there are those among us who if the d-evil were to be offering political power in the manner in which he supposedly tempted Jesus of Nazareth , they would willing submit - would bow down and worship him if they thought that would guarantee their winning an election. From the pages of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, for those in the quest of perfection, the money temptation of course remains constant – as that rich young man was to learn from the lips of Jesus son of Mary – in spite of fulfilling the 613 commandments by which a Jew is sanctified, if it’s perfection that he was after then he should dispose of his wealth entirely, sell everything he had and turn the proceeds over to the poor and then go follow Jesus. As to most wealthy men of that generation that was a very high price to pay for perfection and so St. Mathew tells us “But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions”.
Contemporary generations, even those who are going on endless pilgrimage to the Holy Land can learn and repeat by rote and by mouth that “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to go to heaven”, but who gives a damn and who doesn’t want to be rich – and to be so rich that he stinks? Corruption? As the song says, the man “would beg, borrow, and steal, to pay his bills”
And the preachers, especially the rich Nigerian preachers
like to pontificate and preach about corruption, the evils of money, and love quoting
(according
to Matthew)
In Nigeria the poor enter politics to get rich and the rich enter politics to get richer. Others go into preaching as a profession, not only to transport themselves and their flocks (their souls) to heaven. Ah, the trials of Brother Jero are many. Only a few sincere, honourable men like Olusegun Obasanjo now studying theology ardently, “in order to serve God better”
Whilst Rome is burning the seriousness of gravity has now shifted to Tinubu and not the commander- in-Chief and his wonderful administration. Commander-in-chief has not been accused of corruption, and if he has, only in a sort of abstract way, no startling facts yet and neither he nor those close to him have been charged with anything concrete or brought to book, to face the music or to dance to it.
I am disturbed by a term which has cropped up in the anti-Tinubu diatribe , “Yoruba thinkers” as a very distinct category - like “Greek philosophers”. It sounds more like a blanket not so abstract category such as the blanket term “Nigerian corruption” which hopefully excludes people like the Chief Justice and the minister of trade and industry and all other members of Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet , although as Bayo Amos just pointed out, “one does not have to be in government to be corrupt, to have corrupt access to state resources”
From Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “ In My Father’s House” I ( Yoruba man) learned that thought is not necessarily tribal, or racial or ethnic . In sum, limited to time (historic) yes, and place “geographic) yes, ergo cogito sum and so I conclude with certain knowledge that for a surety given the diversity and spread of the Yoruba people , “Yoruba thinkers” are not under the control of monolithic ethnic interests . So, the wielder of that term “Yoruba thinkers” in that specific context had better say, “some Yoruba thinkers” – after all the very articulate Wole Soyinka is a Yoruba thinker who in the past has been at variance with other Yoruba thinkers on a whole range of political and other existential issues as has Abiola Irele and in another breath Pius Adesanmi also a flexible one. In response to the question swirling around “Buhari, a man that treated Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Tai Solarin and Obafemi Awolowo, great icons of Nigeria like wretched criminals in a gulag.” My counter question elicits elucidation about uniformity in Yoruba thinking and the question is:
Where was Buhari’s number two man Tunde Idiagbon, a Yoruba man, when all this was happening?