IN his article: "The bitter truth about the Igbo", Femi Fani-Kayode spectacularly exhibited his ignorance, narrow-mindedness, xenophobia and a penchant for lying.
The three part article is a shameless convulsion of Nigerian history, brazenly, skewed against the Igbo. It is tendentious rubbish, just a piece of trash that should be consigned to the dustbin.
The first part of his article, a rambling outburst on who owns Lagos, is some nonsensical rhapsody. He wrote, “Lagos and the South-West are the land and the patrimony of the Yoruba and we will not allow anyone, no matter how fond of them we may be, to take it away from us or share it with us in the name of being nice, patriotism, one Nigeria or anything else.”
At some other point, he wrote, “One Nigeria, yes, but no one should spit in our faces or covet our land, our treasure, our success, our history, our virtues, our being and our heritage and attempt to claim those for themselves simply because we took them in on a rainy day.”
These are emotional hyperboles that make no sense. Who wants to take Lagos and the South-West from the Yoruba? Who is spitting in the Yoruba face and poised to dispossess them of their “treasure, success, history, virtues, being and heritage?” Secondly, if the Yoruba can live, work and invest in other parts of Nigeria, that is, “share” other parts of Nigeria with their indigenous owners, why would Nigerians from other ethnic groups not be able to live, work and invest in Lagos and South-West.
He falsely stated that the Igbo introduced tribalism into Southern Nigerian politics with the speeches made by Charles Onyeama in 1945 and by Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1948 to the Igbo State Union in which they said that with time, “the Igbo will dominate Nigeria and lead Africa”.
He also lied that it was the Igbo “We own everything”, “We must have everything” and “We must control everything” that led to the alienation of “the Yoruba from them and the establishment of the Action Group (AG) in April 1951.
Ethnic blustering in pre-independent Nigeria was not limited to Igbo politicians. Ahmadu Bello and Obafemi Awolowo were known to have blurted some ethnic and religious bluffs. Interestingly, these periodic ethnic bombasts did not deepen or widen the tribal fault lines. And Nigerians, at least, Southern Nigerians remained politically indifferent to tribe, as they mostly revered and admired Nnamdi Azikiwe, the great Zik of Africa and the leader of the National Council for Nigeria & Cameroons (NCNC). Not surprisingly, in the election to the Western Region House of Assembly in December 1951, the Yoruba voted overwhelming for the NCNC. The NCNC, an Igbo dominated political party, defeated the Awolowo led political party, Action Group, in the Yoruba region. Was that not a powerful proof that politics in Southern Nigeria, and even, Nigerian, as of then, was detribalised and that the Yoruba were not estranged from the Igbo?
With that electoral victory, Nnamdi Azikiwe was to be the Premier of the Western Region. To forestall the emergence of a democratically elected Igbo as the Premier of the Yoruba region, Obafemi Awolowo, in a monumental act of tribalism, engineered a cross carpet and stole the premiership of the Western Region from Azikiwe. It was that Awolowo’s tribal-motivated political sleight of the hand that introduced tribalism in Nigerian politics. Up till that point, the dream of the Nigerian founding fathers that any Nigerian, irrespective of his ethnicity, can contest political office, win elections and serve in any part of the country was still alive. It was Obafemi Awolowo who killed that dream.
Femi Fani-Kayode rightly stated that the Yoruba “were producing lawyers, doctors, accountants and university graduates, at least three generations, before the Igbo”. According to him, the Yoruba produced their first university graduate in1875 and the Igbo produced their first in 1935. But it is barefaced falsehood to write that “and they (the Igbo) have been trying to catch up with us (Yoruba) ever since” Less than twenty years after the Igbo produced their first graduates, they caught up with the Yoruba and overtook them in business and the professions, and the Yoruba joined some other ethnic groups of Nigeria in whining and whimpering over “Igbo domination”. Essentially, by 1966, the Igbo held sway over Nigeria with their disproportionate representation in all the key areas of the Nigerian public and social life.
An Igbo dominated group of army majors (four Igbo and one Yoruba) carried out the first coup in Nigeria. But the coup was not in any way a tribal coup. The majors were actuated by an idealistic, but somewhat warped, vision for Nigeria and driven by their ill-disgested dosage of socialist doctrines. Fascinatingly, and also, attesting to the non- tribal character of the coup, the coup plotters were ideologically sympathetic to Obafemi Awolowo, who was, then, after being convicted of treasonable felony, wasting away in jail. According to some apocryphal sources, their plans included releasing Awolowo from jail and installing him as the prime minister of Nigeria.
That, as the dust settled, three of the most important Hausa/Fulani leaders laid dead and no Igbo leader was killed, sowed the seed of distrust among the different ethnic groups and further aggravated the problems of Nigeria. However, only an impulsive lair could have written, as Femi Fani-Kayode did, that, in addition to killing these leaders, they (the coup plotters), “in some cases, mocked, tortured and maimed them before doing so, took pictures of their dead and mutilated bodies and killed their wives and children as well”. There was no wanton, indiscriminate or vengeful killing in the January 15, 1966 coup.
Mr. TOCHUKWU EZUKANMA, a commentator on national issues, wrote from Lagos.
Showing posts with label Lagos and Fani-Kayode. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lagos and Fani-Kayode. Show all posts
Monday, 2 September 2013
Saturday, 31 August 2013
RESPONSE TO DEPORTATION: A cure worse than the disease
By Akin Osuntokun
As the cliché goes, all this would have been laughable if it is not so tragic. In the heat of the subsisting venom and vitriol, it seems nobody now cares that the first set of “deportees” from Lagos were no other than Yoruba indigenes of Oyo and Osun states. I say this because this knowledge is not reflected in the way and manner protagonists have been conducting the debate on the so-called “deportation” of Igbo from Lagos.
This precedent completely nullifies the presumption and dangerous peg of tribalism on which the mutual trade in personal and ethnic slurs, derision, denigration, demonisation, and hubris has been hoisted. It tells us that Governor Babatunde Fashola’s action was not motivated and informed by ethnic calculations neither was it intended and directed against any particular group or nationality.
It is a detribalised act but it is not a good policy. It is a joke carried too far. It is a conduct unbecoming of any government that aspires to be taken seriously. It fails miserably on the template of cost-benefit analysis. It is an instance in which the cost - in distraction, goodwill and reputation- has far outweighed any conceivable benefit from the forceful relocation of a few pathetic destitute. It also underscores the predilection of Nigerians for political theatre and excitement at the expense of calm and fruitful introspection; for heat and passion over and above light and reason; for mutual recrimination over cooperation and consensus.
In the first place, there was no need for ethnic casus belli. The ill-starred destitute were not relocated as Igbo but as indigenes of Anambra State. It was done in replication of the precedence of Oyo and Osun states where similar victims were earlier repatriated. They received the short end of the stick not as Yoruba but as indigenes of specific states. It was then left to the government of those states to respond and take up the challenge of accepting or rejecting the folly of the Lagos government.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that any litigation initiative on the case is a wrap up, open and shut case against Lagos State. Rather than political grandstanding, the affected governor of Anambra State, Mr. Peter Obi, for instance, should have proceeded to the courts and seize an opportunity to make the destitute of today the multi-millionaires of tomorrow – in consequent hefty damages that would accrue to those hapless Nigerians through judicial penalty and sanction. Quite significantly, it also poses the unique utility of testing the Nigerian Constitution on the key and basic question of citizenship.
How then did the unbecoming nuisance of repatriating some unfortunate citizens of Nigeria from one state to another transmogrify into a virulent diatribe across the ethnic divide bringing out the worst in the protagonists? It will be difficult for any thinking Nigerian not to admire and identify with Professor Chinua Achebe, but it was his grating remarks in the Biafra evocative book, There Was a Country, and the debate it spawned that served as the dress rehearsal for the present turn of events.
[caption id="attachment_408386" align="alignnone" width="412"]
Deportees from Lagos[/caption]
In the book, the civil war was relived all over again with the attendant ripping open of old wounds and injuries. The story was told from a partisan point of view where blames and villainy are liberally attributed to the other side in counterpoise to the exhortation of heroic Igbo exceptionalism. The thematic backdrop was of a martyrdom suffered by a people whose surpassing excellence had incurred the envy and spite of fellow Nigerians. There was the account of how within the decades of the 1930s through to the 1960s, the Igbo caught up and excelled the Yoruba in education and modernisation.
Yet I do not begrudge Achebe. The indomitable Sir Ahmadu Bello was the one who counselled that if you do not blow your trumpet, nobody would blow it for you. The modernisation rivalry among the component units of Nigeria, especially between the Igbo and Yoruba, is the stuff of which social progress and advancement is made. Nigeria will be the better for it. But there is also the pernicious strain, which is neither good for the Igbo nor fair to the rest of Nigeria.
It has been repeatedly stated along the following lines- “the military coup of 1966 presented a pretext to carry out a plan that had been laid out years before. It was a plan that aimed at a total extermination of the Igbo or, at least, their containment. The pogrom and the brutal war that followed was the final solution to the perceived Igbo problems in Nigeria.
When Anthony Enahoro travelled round the globe arguing that starvation was a weapon of war, he was following the script for the total extermination of the Igbo. When Benjamin Adekunle boast ed to foreign reporters, ‘I want to see no Red Cross, no Caritas, no World Council of Churches, no pope, no missionary and no UN delegation; I want to prevent even one Ibo from having even one piece to eat before their capitulation; we shoot at everything that moves and, when our troops march into the centre of Ibo territory, we shoot at everything even at things that do not move’, he was following the same script.”
Could there indeed have been a plan by the rest of Nigeria…laid out years before….. aimed at a total extermination of the Igbo? Recent political history of Nigeria does not bear out this preposterous and extravagant claim. Such conspiracy would have required at the minimum an entrenched and long-standing political rapport between the governments and peoples of the northern and western regions.
On the contrary, the first lesson in politics and most successful political currency among the Yoruba (until the advent of the nascent APC) is to swear fidelity to the political canon of everlasting defiance and resistance of the Hausa-Fulani standard bearers of feudalism and hegemony. If there was any relationship between the two blocs, it was that of adversity, mutual suspicion and disdain.
Incidentally, it was the NCNC –as it evolved to become the eastern regional denominated party – that went into alliance with the Northern People’s Congress, NPC, (having spurned overtures from the Action Group, AG, of the Western Region) to form the Federal Government at independence. And in the post-independence years, the adversity and hostility between the West and the North only deepened with the northern backed factionalisation of the AG and the imprisonment of Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
In the century before British colonialism, the long-drawn war to checkmate the expansion of the Sokoto Caliphate into the Oyo Empire served as the singular presage to the unhappy relations between the Yoruba and the inheritors of the caliphate within Nigeria. Thus, it is difficult and improbable to impute any logic to the suggestion of a grand conspiracy between the Yoruba dominated western region and the Caliphate-dominated northern region.
If ever there was such a conspiracy, western region could not have been part of it. Neither, for that matter, could the northern region.
If we were not to stand guilty of seeing ghosts where none exists, it was the chain of events set in motion by the western regional crisis of 1962 leading to the military coup of January 15 1966 that culminated in the civil war. It is possible that the coup was not a product of Igbo conspiracy but, in politics, perception can be more important than reality. And in the interim between January and July 1966, this perception was reinforced by two inadvertent events.
The coup-makers were not tried and punished (court-martialled by the army authorities) as they should; and the Ironsi government, perhaps, in good faith, legislated the abolition of the regions and the unification of Nigeria under the unitary rule of the military – whose hierarchy was disproportionately skewed in favour of officers of Igbo origin. I do not need to be an apologist for the northern region to propose that no group can be dispossessed of power in the summary and traumatic manner that functionaries and officers of northern extraction were wiped out in the January 1966 coup and not react in a bitter riposte commensurate with its capacity to exact revenge.
Beyond the leveling up of scores in the counter coup, was the subsequent gross violation and pogrom of the Igbo resident in the North a product of conspiracy? Without a shade of doubt it was. But it was a conspiracy that did not antedate 1966. As a matter of fact, the original objective (from which it deviated at the instance of the British High Commissioner in Lagos) of the July 1966 counter coup was to terminate in a secession of the North from Nigeria and not remain to pursue any hidden agenda. Nothing exemplifies the lack of a Nigeria wide or even a northern conspiracy against the Igbo than the incoherence and sheer ineptitude that characterised the conduct of the Nigerian government towards the Eastern Region in the months leading to the civil war. Remember the Aburi debacle?
Yet, I was not of any mind to join this hoopla until I read a rejoinder by Mr. Femi Aribisala. One virtue I have always urged on Femi Fani-Kayode (a close friend and a brother) is to exercise a sense of proportion and moderation in his all too frequent public interventions. Alas, how successful I have been in this regard is plain to all those who have followed him!
Fani-Kayode is gifted at working himself into a storm in a tea cup on virtually any issue that catches his fancy; and has a provocative penchant for overstating his advocacy. Subtlety and diplomacy are not his strong points. And he has been duly admonished and upbraided in sundry responses. Now the other Femi (Mr. Aribisala) is an academic and a pastor and he is 61years old. He took umbrage and has published a rejoinder to the younger Femi and it is a cure worse than the disease.
His words: “Power-power, Fani-Igbo: I was having private lessons in mathematics at the home of a colleague, Enitan Abiodun, when we heard the noise of a crowd outside. We rushed to the veranda to see Chief Femi Fani-Kayode (alias Fani-Power), then deputy governor of the Western Region, standing on the seat of a moving convertible. He was surrounded by a mob, which was shouting and hailing him. On hearing the noise, Enitan’s mother rushed to the veranda shouting ‘Awo!’ only to discover that the people outside were not supporters of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, but those of his arch-enemies.
“The shout of ‘Awo!’ by Mrs. Abiodun brought the procession to a screeching halt. ‘Who said that? Who said that?’ demanded the mob, enraged. “‘Fani-power’ turned and looked up at us. His eyes were the usual blood-shot red. At the time, many claimed it was because he regularly smoked Indian hemp. Fani-Kayode pointed to our building and identified to his thugs that the offending shout came from our direction. We did not know that the floor of the convertible he was standing in was loaded with empty bottles. His thugs reached for the bottles and rained them down on us as we all scrambled back inside the house for dear life.
Like father, like son: that was 48 years ago. Today, Femi Fani-Kayode, the 53-year-old son of ‘Fani-Power,’ continues in the mischievous tradition of his father.”
Pray, what civic etiquette does one learn from this kind of admonition, reeking, as it does, of pure and unadulterated malice? Why should one hide under the cover of an opportunistic moment to vent personal animus with reckless abandon? So what was the whole uproar against Mr. Fani-Kayode about if those who criticise are themselves a worse advertisement on the ethics of public engagement?
Mr. Aribisala has published quite a number of peculiar and controversial sermons on Christianity, which many Christians will find grossly offensive, for example, “God is the servant of man”; yet it will not be proper to wonder whether such behaviour might be attributable to what his parents did or did not do 50 years ago. The hallmark of a true and genuine man of God is charity and temperance towards all, not unrestrained anger and bile; the measure of good character and learning is sobriety and comportment when others are losing their cool in bitterness and outrage; an elder, according to Yoruba adage, is quick to hear and learn but slow and hesitant to speak and join a cacophony. As a pastor, academic and elder, how does Aribisala fare on each score?
*Osuntokun is a former MD of News Agency of Nigeria, NAN
As the cliché goes, all this would have been laughable if it is not so tragic. In the heat of the subsisting venom and vitriol, it seems nobody now cares that the first set of “deportees” from Lagos were no other than Yoruba indigenes of Oyo and Osun states. I say this because this knowledge is not reflected in the way and manner protagonists have been conducting the debate on the so-called “deportation” of Igbo from Lagos.
This precedent completely nullifies the presumption and dangerous peg of tribalism on which the mutual trade in personal and ethnic slurs, derision, denigration, demonisation, and hubris has been hoisted. It tells us that Governor Babatunde Fashola’s action was not motivated and informed by ethnic calculations neither was it intended and directed against any particular group or nationality.
It is a detribalised act but it is not a good policy. It is a joke carried too far. It is a conduct unbecoming of any government that aspires to be taken seriously. It fails miserably on the template of cost-benefit analysis. It is an instance in which the cost - in distraction, goodwill and reputation- has far outweighed any conceivable benefit from the forceful relocation of a few pathetic destitute. It also underscores the predilection of Nigerians for political theatre and excitement at the expense of calm and fruitful introspection; for heat and passion over and above light and reason; for mutual recrimination over cooperation and consensus.
In the first place, there was no need for ethnic casus belli. The ill-starred destitute were not relocated as Igbo but as indigenes of Anambra State. It was done in replication of the precedence of Oyo and Osun states where similar victims were earlier repatriated. They received the short end of the stick not as Yoruba but as indigenes of specific states. It was then left to the government of those states to respond and take up the challenge of accepting or rejecting the folly of the Lagos government.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that any litigation initiative on the case is a wrap up, open and shut case against Lagos State. Rather than political grandstanding, the affected governor of Anambra State, Mr. Peter Obi, for instance, should have proceeded to the courts and seize an opportunity to make the destitute of today the multi-millionaires of tomorrow – in consequent hefty damages that would accrue to those hapless Nigerians through judicial penalty and sanction. Quite significantly, it also poses the unique utility of testing the Nigerian Constitution on the key and basic question of citizenship.
How then did the unbecoming nuisance of repatriating some unfortunate citizens of Nigeria from one state to another transmogrify into a virulent diatribe across the ethnic divide bringing out the worst in the protagonists? It will be difficult for any thinking Nigerian not to admire and identify with Professor Chinua Achebe, but it was his grating remarks in the Biafra evocative book, There Was a Country, and the debate it spawned that served as the dress rehearsal for the present turn of events.
[caption id="attachment_408386" align="alignnone" width="412"]
Deportees from Lagos[/caption]In the book, the civil war was relived all over again with the attendant ripping open of old wounds and injuries. The story was told from a partisan point of view where blames and villainy are liberally attributed to the other side in counterpoise to the exhortation of heroic Igbo exceptionalism. The thematic backdrop was of a martyrdom suffered by a people whose surpassing excellence had incurred the envy and spite of fellow Nigerians. There was the account of how within the decades of the 1930s through to the 1960s, the Igbo caught up and excelled the Yoruba in education and modernisation.
Yet I do not begrudge Achebe. The indomitable Sir Ahmadu Bello was the one who counselled that if you do not blow your trumpet, nobody would blow it for you. The modernisation rivalry among the component units of Nigeria, especially between the Igbo and Yoruba, is the stuff of which social progress and advancement is made. Nigeria will be the better for it. But there is also the pernicious strain, which is neither good for the Igbo nor fair to the rest of Nigeria.
It has been repeatedly stated along the following lines- “the military coup of 1966 presented a pretext to carry out a plan that had been laid out years before. It was a plan that aimed at a total extermination of the Igbo or, at least, their containment. The pogrom and the brutal war that followed was the final solution to the perceived Igbo problems in Nigeria.
When Anthony Enahoro travelled round the globe arguing that starvation was a weapon of war, he was following the script for the total extermination of the Igbo. When Benjamin Adekunle boast ed to foreign reporters, ‘I want to see no Red Cross, no Caritas, no World Council of Churches, no pope, no missionary and no UN delegation; I want to prevent even one Ibo from having even one piece to eat before their capitulation; we shoot at everything that moves and, when our troops march into the centre of Ibo territory, we shoot at everything even at things that do not move’, he was following the same script.”
Could there indeed have been a plan by the rest of Nigeria…laid out years before….. aimed at a total extermination of the Igbo? Recent political history of Nigeria does not bear out this preposterous and extravagant claim. Such conspiracy would have required at the minimum an entrenched and long-standing political rapport between the governments and peoples of the northern and western regions.
On the contrary, the first lesson in politics and most successful political currency among the Yoruba (until the advent of the nascent APC) is to swear fidelity to the political canon of everlasting defiance and resistance of the Hausa-Fulani standard bearers of feudalism and hegemony. If there was any relationship between the two blocs, it was that of adversity, mutual suspicion and disdain.
Incidentally, it was the NCNC –as it evolved to become the eastern regional denominated party – that went into alliance with the Northern People’s Congress, NPC, (having spurned overtures from the Action Group, AG, of the Western Region) to form the Federal Government at independence. And in the post-independence years, the adversity and hostility between the West and the North only deepened with the northern backed factionalisation of the AG and the imprisonment of Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
In the century before British colonialism, the long-drawn war to checkmate the expansion of the Sokoto Caliphate into the Oyo Empire served as the singular presage to the unhappy relations between the Yoruba and the inheritors of the caliphate within Nigeria. Thus, it is difficult and improbable to impute any logic to the suggestion of a grand conspiracy between the Yoruba dominated western region and the Caliphate-dominated northern region.
If ever there was such a conspiracy, western region could not have been part of it. Neither, for that matter, could the northern region.
If we were not to stand guilty of seeing ghosts where none exists, it was the chain of events set in motion by the western regional crisis of 1962 leading to the military coup of January 15 1966 that culminated in the civil war. It is possible that the coup was not a product of Igbo conspiracy but, in politics, perception can be more important than reality. And in the interim between January and July 1966, this perception was reinforced by two inadvertent events.
The coup-makers were not tried and punished (court-martialled by the army authorities) as they should; and the Ironsi government, perhaps, in good faith, legislated the abolition of the regions and the unification of Nigeria under the unitary rule of the military – whose hierarchy was disproportionately skewed in favour of officers of Igbo origin. I do not need to be an apologist for the northern region to propose that no group can be dispossessed of power in the summary and traumatic manner that functionaries and officers of northern extraction were wiped out in the January 1966 coup and not react in a bitter riposte commensurate with its capacity to exact revenge.
Beyond the leveling up of scores in the counter coup, was the subsequent gross violation and pogrom of the Igbo resident in the North a product of conspiracy? Without a shade of doubt it was. But it was a conspiracy that did not antedate 1966. As a matter of fact, the original objective (from which it deviated at the instance of the British High Commissioner in Lagos) of the July 1966 counter coup was to terminate in a secession of the North from Nigeria and not remain to pursue any hidden agenda. Nothing exemplifies the lack of a Nigeria wide or even a northern conspiracy against the Igbo than the incoherence and sheer ineptitude that characterised the conduct of the Nigerian government towards the Eastern Region in the months leading to the civil war. Remember the Aburi debacle?
Yet, I was not of any mind to join this hoopla until I read a rejoinder by Mr. Femi Aribisala. One virtue I have always urged on Femi Fani-Kayode (a close friend and a brother) is to exercise a sense of proportion and moderation in his all too frequent public interventions. Alas, how successful I have been in this regard is plain to all those who have followed him!
Fani-Kayode is gifted at working himself into a storm in a tea cup on virtually any issue that catches his fancy; and has a provocative penchant for overstating his advocacy. Subtlety and diplomacy are not his strong points. And he has been duly admonished and upbraided in sundry responses. Now the other Femi (Mr. Aribisala) is an academic and a pastor and he is 61years old. He took umbrage and has published a rejoinder to the younger Femi and it is a cure worse than the disease.
His words: “Power-power, Fani-Igbo: I was having private lessons in mathematics at the home of a colleague, Enitan Abiodun, when we heard the noise of a crowd outside. We rushed to the veranda to see Chief Femi Fani-Kayode (alias Fani-Power), then deputy governor of the Western Region, standing on the seat of a moving convertible. He was surrounded by a mob, which was shouting and hailing him. On hearing the noise, Enitan’s mother rushed to the veranda shouting ‘Awo!’ only to discover that the people outside were not supporters of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, but those of his arch-enemies.
“The shout of ‘Awo!’ by Mrs. Abiodun brought the procession to a screeching halt. ‘Who said that? Who said that?’ demanded the mob, enraged. “‘Fani-power’ turned and looked up at us. His eyes were the usual blood-shot red. At the time, many claimed it was because he regularly smoked Indian hemp. Fani-Kayode pointed to our building and identified to his thugs that the offending shout came from our direction. We did not know that the floor of the convertible he was standing in was loaded with empty bottles. His thugs reached for the bottles and rained them down on us as we all scrambled back inside the house for dear life.
Like father, like son: that was 48 years ago. Today, Femi Fani-Kayode, the 53-year-old son of ‘Fani-Power,’ continues in the mischievous tradition of his father.”
Pray, what civic etiquette does one learn from this kind of admonition, reeking, as it does, of pure and unadulterated malice? Why should one hide under the cover of an opportunistic moment to vent personal animus with reckless abandon? So what was the whole uproar against Mr. Fani-Kayode about if those who criticise are themselves a worse advertisement on the ethics of public engagement?
Mr. Aribisala has published quite a number of peculiar and controversial sermons on Christianity, which many Christians will find grossly offensive, for example, “God is the servant of man”; yet it will not be proper to wonder whether such behaviour might be attributable to what his parents did or did not do 50 years ago. The hallmark of a true and genuine man of God is charity and temperance towards all, not unrestrained anger and bile; the measure of good character and learning is sobriety and comportment when others are losing their cool in bitterness and outrage; an elder, according to Yoruba adage, is quick to hear and learn but slow and hesitant to speak and join a cacophony. As a pastor, academic and elder, how does Aribisala fare on each score?
*Osuntokun is a former MD of News Agency of Nigeria, NAN
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)