When a human being is motivated to subscribe energies towards betterment through printed matter, he builds on two presumptions: first that he has something to share with the reading public for mutual growth and evolution in a certain direction. Second, that readers of this work will someday examine his thoughts as set down on paper and perhaps use them.
The work we have before this assembly will succeed in both objectives on account of helpful circumstances entirely outside the influence of the author of the work. He spoke just before Nature built radiations that nudged President Goodluck Jonathan into approving convocation of another National Conference. For that reason, this work should be an inviolable companion of all those who desire(d) to speak for any group at that National Conference.
The author may appear an innocuous priest to casual social acquaintance. He is certainly not. He is a Socrates seething with energy within the cassock he wears. He is loaded with foresight and charm which he sometimes fails to communicate because he is burning within on account of the humungous travesties that his generation is experiencing on the national plain from incompetent and insensate leadership.
He was liberal enough as a Catholic cleric, to look at Gaddafi with a sympathetic eye for suggesting that there should be division of the country into religious camps. He sees pangs of pain on account of our disparate nationalities held as one nation on account of alien intrusion into our lands. He sees little unity in attitudes of leaders of the First Republic, especially with intrigues with which Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe, both translated without fulfilment, provided unwholesome leadership that has polarised our populace down south. He looked sharply at our neighbours in the South South zone and saw negative psychology of affiliation distancing us from them. He thought a great deal of Ikemba Nnewi, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, and his charisma and leadership of Ndigbo. I hold a different view from him there, but that is a matter for another event.
He thinks the Nigeria/Biafra War was caused by national inconsistency of leadership. I think differently. The nation has not yet had a leader. Whatever our differences, this humble statured thinker and philosopher spoke from his soul. He was almost choked with venom as he spewed out data on our trajectory as a nation and almost failed to communicate simply for the not-too-sophisticated readership which technology has increasingly created for us.
His statements in this work are carved in marble. Events of the past few months have given him the title of a Minstrel in Priestly Garb. Those who make light matter of his larva do so out of poor insight, short vision or plain lethargy about their environment and the rumblings underpinning a nation that is failing.
But for the National Conference, now firmly on the cards, an unpreventable implosion could have laid waste our land due to our poor responses to history of pretence and ethnic bigotry which have stultified efforts at positive leadership.
I salute the author and recommend his work to all prospects for National Conference in Nigeria if they hope to change our outlook for the better with True Federalism as an imperative alternative.
Thank you for listening to me.
• This piece was written a few months before the National Conference of 2014
