DEAR readers, we serve you this delicious cucurbit from a Bayelsan, a Yenagoan, so called Stanley Sokari. It serves well the palate in this season of joyful pain and painful joy. Merry reading, as we keep at abeyance “Nigeria’s assignment with destiny” till next week:

A first gloss at the initial paragraphs of the master-piece, “Despairing Times,” of Monday, December 05, 2011, initiated a time-bound despair in my subconscious. Despair provoked by the presumption or assumption or both, that my revered columnist has chosen the path of the spiritual to propagate his ever-flowing doctrine according to (un)Saint Nigeria. Not that I have a deep-seated animosity for the spiritual to provoke such a despair; far from it. After all, man is tripartite: body, soul and spirit with the spirit asserting its omnipotence and superiority over the other two as endorsed by the holy book: God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship him in spirit and in truth. As rudimentary as my knowledge of logic can take, I can infer that if God is a spirit, and man is created in the image of God, then man is spirit.

Rather, I have my discomfort with an over-bearing spiritual orientation where ecclesiasticism overrules the academia, where ideas, concepts, principles and theories, the pillars of scientific discoveries, technological advancement and modernism, give way to the perceived potency of dictum, faith, dogma and raw belief, and where rationality and objectivity are scarce commodities in strategic problem abatement and control systems.

As I read the piece further, I also discovered an unusual deviation from the commonplace canonical tradition of the priests, imams, popes, bishops and general overseers to the world of learning, the intellectual worlds of the Aristotles, the Adam Smiths, the Karl Marxs and Edmund Burkes, not leaving behind our very own Wole Soyinkas, Eskor Toyos, the sprouting Romanus Egudus, Tony Afejukus, etc., etc. That was when it dawned on me that in spite of the preponderance of registers like priests, father, borderline catholic, confessions  in the text, which ordinarily designate spiritual allegiances, what I discovered was spiritualism intermixed with existentialism, where man is the centre of the universe, the grand architect of his fortunes/misfortunes and where life is a perpetual balancing of accounts – the credits and the debits, meant to be resolved by man’s actions and inactions on earth in order to become a conscious co-worker, close confidant or Personal Assistant (PA) to the supreme deity.

I also saw in the text strategic discourse management with the all-pervasive spiritual surreptitiously glide into the political. I was awaken by the thought that after all, the resort to the spiritual, underpinned by the overwhelming intellectual prowess of the columnist, is a sublime attention-grabbing opening gambit stylistically and artistically integrated into the text to dilute the intensity of the political and mitigate the cataclysmic elements therein. After all, within the context of the comatose Nigerian society experiencing a paralysis of the commanding heights of the economy, where unemployment and its by-product poverty is an anathema or anthem of some sorts, the spiritual has become the substructure, the base, with the economy assuming a superstructure position, in contradiction to the tenets of Karl Marx. The next thing I discovered as I read on was the issue of the caller from Bayelsa State. The efficacy of the f16 bomber, the precision of the laser directed intercontinental cruise missile and the utility of the Manoeuvring Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRV) are nothing compared to the efficacy, precision and timing of that call, coming at such despairing times in Bayelsa State. God bless the caller and God bless me for blessing the caller. God also bless the columnist for drawing attention to the caller which has triggered a corresponding blessing for the caller, the columnist and my humble self.

Like a trance, I find myself in the shoes of the caller and assume the inner workings of his mind. I then wondered why my revered columnist, a critic par excellence of the Nigerian genre and Grand Commander of the Order of Nigeria Problem (GCONP), can afford to be silent while the gladiators in the Bayelsa battlefield are engaged in a show of strength and battle of wits. I wondered what could have warranted such indifference from GCONP, whose objectivity and quasi-objectivity on every Nigerian issue is legendary. I say quasi-objectivity for two reasons. The first is informed by the unpredictability and non-deterministic nature of man, accentuated by the conflux of spacio-temporal parameters and situational disparities. Concerning the second reason, all I can say here, realizing that the subject-matter of this discourse is not an indulgence in philosophy, is inextricably tied to the infiltration of subjective biases in the exposition of some culture-sensitive national issues. I cannot repudiate these subjective biases because man is a cultural reality and his medium of establishing social roles and responsibilities which is language is contextualized by culture, hence a quest for zero-subjectivity in the analysis of social phenomena is directly proportional to a quest for utopian heights.

Back to my insistence on why my revered columnist cannot be allergic to the issues in Bayelsa State. For the benefit of the uninitiated in Bayelsa Affairs, the State represents a paradox of poverty in the midst of wealth, where the continued pillaging of this wealth, substituted by environmental degradation and castration of the entire eco-system necessitates an equitable violent response and resistance of cataclysmic proportions. The state has the highest per capital income in Nigeria. It is the only state with eight local government areas, the last state to be connected to the national grid (barely three years ago) and the only homogenous Ijaw state in the country. On the human front, Bayelsa State is the first state to produce an elected president in the entire south-south region and parades(ed) notable personalities like Isaac Adaka Boro of blessed memory, Professor E.J. Alagoa, Samson Siasia, Ben Murray Bruce and Timaya of the entertainment industry. The list is endless.

More fundamentally, while Bayelsa State is a microcosm of the hopes, aspirations and schizophrenia of the oppressed Ijaw people, fiscal rascality, brazen corruption and winner-takes-all pattern of political competition as demonstrated by the political class, have significantly arrested the people’s sustainable development. The political class under PDP (Papa Deceive Pikin) government has failed the people while T.B. Joshua, David Oyedepo, Enoch Adeboye, Primate Olabayo and other apostles of the Jehu consciousness have provided the needed panacea.

At the epicentre of these contradictions is the colossal presence of Governor Timipre Sylva and President Goodluck Jonathan, both sons of Bayelsa, one a GCFR and Commander of the brutal Nigeria’s armed forces and the other, commander of a considerable proportion of the militants. Indeed, a clash of the titans, we so label it. To what extent have these gladiators contributed to the present state of affairs in the state?. What are their calculations and likely moves to checkmate each other in this chess game of wits? On whose side are the people? Who shall eventually take the day and what hope for the already traumatized and impoverished people, whose destinies are to be decided by these actors?

While you would agree with me that these questions are genuine to an improved livelihood of the people of Bayelsa State, providing answers to them is a daunting task, worsened by the limitation of space in this discourse. This does not imply that I am fighting to run to fight another day. I am rather running to keep fighting, at least to lend credence to the fears of the Bayelsa caller and to re-ignite the apathetic stance of my revered columnist to the Bayelsa crisis which has become a crisis of the Nigerian state.”

Nigeria’s assignment with destiny resumes next week.

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written by Tanisha, January 21, 2012

It was a day of protests and Nigerians were on the streets protesting the fuel subsidy removal. I knew I would face traffic but I needed to reach the church that particular day for prayer. So, I made my way from Ikeja towards Ikotun-Egbe to The Synagogue, Church Of All Nations to meet with their prayer warriors. As I reached a certain place, I saw young people carrying placards, stopping cars along the way and fights were breaking out with the drivers.
Four protesters reached my vehicle. “Who gave you this fuel to travel?” “Where are you going?” “I’m going to church”, I replied the young man. “Church! If you dare say you are going to Redeemed, we will break your head!” They tried to open the door of my car. “You are the one that installed Badluck!” The shout circulated around the area and my vehicle was flooded with dozens of protestors, blowing my car and pressing their placards on my glass. “We saw the photo! Adeboye appointed GEJ! You caused this badluck! Go and ask Adeboye why he cursed our country?” “We will break your car!” I remembered that I had also seen the photo of Jonathan kneeling down in front of Adeboye while the pastor prayed a blessing over him. And I had also seen Jonathan attend his church again sometime late last year. “Adeboye prayed for badluck” “Send back to sender!” “Nigeria no be Egypt! Jonathan no be Pharaoh! Make he listen to the people!”
“Please o, I’m on my way to Synagogue.” “I’m going for prayers at the Synagogue.” “Synagogue? You are going to Synagogue? TB Joshua? The man that’s feeding our country? Na true president be this o! Please o, make you pass!” their leader said. “Leave the road”. “We go leave road for you but we’ll monitor you so you don’t pass Redeemed side.” “Hey! Make you go ask T.B. Joshua to pray to remove this man! Or ask him to prophesy. We know if he says it, it will come to pass!” Then, the protestors cleared the way and allowed me to pass smoothly. As I was passing, the previous shouts of anger turned to shouts of “Emmanuel!”
Surprised with what had just happened, I drove quietly through the protestors without any further trouble. My mind was racing. The country is protesting fuel prices and the name of RCCG is mentioned as the cause of the problem? Why should this be? Why has a house of God been named in a political dispute? True president be this? Truly, as I passed the Murtala Muhammed Airport, I remember that TB Joshua’s people were there even then, as he had been sending food there every day of the strike to take care of passengers stranded because of the strike. And he just sent rice to the North, to the South, to the East, as I had watched on Emmanuel TV. In fact, the whole country has been fed through his work of service to God. How many people in this country escaped hunger today because of bags of Emmanuel TV rice? And any time there is a problem, he is there to bring solution. I remember the Ikeja Bomb blast when he opened the doors of the church and he and his workers fed, clothed and housed thousands of people for weeks until they were well and could make their way home again. When the community transformer blew at Christmas time, he purchased and installed 2 new transformers and paid for the light himself! And when it comes to politics, it is from his altar he will call us to pray, come to God in humility and sincerity and come to each other in love.
In summary, I have learned that it is always better to spend more on others and less on ourselves. Giving is the beginning of blessing and peace. Was I not protected because of this pastor’s acts of giving? Let us therefore reach out in compassion and generosity to our fellow man and do the good we can to change the bad we see. It is not through political association but through giving we can accomplish peace for our nation. Emmanuel! God is with us.

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