Dear His Lordship,
Happy New Year to you over there in Sokoto! This is actually not my project in its original sense. The duty of taking it over and reconceptualising it has only fallen on me because the original source is late. Dr. Yima Sen who died over a year ago served the original summons for this type of reflection which the 45th anniversary of your priesthood, ten of it as the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, has brought back. I credit Dr. Yima with originating it when he expressed the wish at the time you were taking up the Sokoto posting as the Bishop that, as Bishop, Kukah would now advance beyond clerical populism to something concrete. That is why I am certain Yima Sen would have been overjoyed if he were still alive today to hear your announcement at the muted anniversary regarding taking “five thousand (5000) families out of poverty through an empowerment programme that is upcoming soon by the grace of God”.
The late Dr. Yima Sen
Notwithstanding his creativity with Marxism, Yima was still not beyond the structural and the intransitive. My critique of his critique of you is to take it to a textual level, without suggesting that taking 5000 families out of poverty is not of strategic relevance. In other words, we have had this problem of running away from critical engagement with our signifiers. Apart from General Gowon who wisely allowed Prof Isawa Elaigwu, a round peg in a round hole on such matters, to conduct a study on him, (Gowon), no other signifiers has been so engaged. There is no similar study on General TY Danjuma, for example, that is known to all and that would satisfy the critical rigor. There is still none on Chief Olusegun Obasanjo too beyond what the Chief has written about his military and political offices but which are mere raw materials for the kind of exercise I am talking about. Both Prof Oyovbaire and Dr. Ibrahim Tahir who expressed the wish to conduct such a quality work on Obasanjo, (Oyovbaire wished he were still in academia so he could get one of his students to do his/her PhD on the Obasanjo persona) are either getting old or dead. Yet, Obasanjo is a one-man store house of empirical data on the past and the future. This must be the point in Oyovbaire’s desire: a critical engagement with someone who has been privy to the critical moments in the Nation’s history. It has nothing to do with whether one likes or doesn’t like Obasanjo as a person.
You have not been a (former) president of Nigeria. But you have covered too many grounds: from clerical populism to subalternity; from Discursive Exit (in Northern Nigerian politics) to post-colonialism; from civil society campaigns to media activism and, above all, intellectual warfare. In each of these spaces, you have made claims, pursued one line of argument or the other; clashed with many as well as converged with even more. These are facts from from which it is incontrovertible that you signify struggle for balancing of material, cultural and of opportunities among Nigerians. There may be nothing to dispute in such framing of your exertions but let the deconstruction prove it so that no one would say there is no theoretical or conceptual reference about you.
Symbolising Bishop Kukah’s mutation from the ‘Mustard Seed’ to the Oak tree but he still has to be made legible
So, while we might not dismiss those who might be perplexed about this because it is easy to say, how can you ask what sums up a Catholic Bishop, we would say they miss the discursive character of the social space and the politics of meaning. Every single subjectivity in the social space is capable of millions of different interpretations, competing against each other. The implication is that the concept of empowerment under reference here must be operationalised and its potentials and limitations demonstrated. That way, the research can employ the power of interpretation over facts to bring the diverse exertions of His Lordship into a definitive totality. And in doing so, create and locate Kukah in a discursive formation that is about but also beyond Kukah.
At whatever level we locate Kukah, such a creativity is justified. The Ikulu people where you come from would not mind it. Northern Nigeria would not mind it. Nigeria would not mind it. Africa would not mind it. The ‘third world’ will need it and the Catholic Civilisation will love it. All of us cannot be subalterns. A few of us have to be constructed and placed out of that bracket, to serve as the Oak tree upon whom the rest can fall for the power of the voice of ‘the Oak tree’ when we fall into the many ditches in an unfair and unjust world.
Breaking barriers!
At this point, I would consider the idea effectively put on the table of the Bishop House, Sokoto. It is up to the Bishop’s House to sort it out but there is a little point to consider. There is something that happened in March 2014 that you still don’t know about because, unlike before June 2012 when we were seeing each other as many times as I was either on my way from Jigawa to Abuja or the other way round, branching to savor a plate of food of my choice at the Catholic Social Centre in Kaduna, 2014 was different. But it was in March 2014 I stumbled on a Kirk-Greene’s review of your PhD. It wasn’t what I was looking for at that unsure moment of taking off into an uncharted UK style MA thesis at the University of Warwick but I couldn’t help stop to read it and to marvel at Kirk-Greene reviewing a thesis by someone who could, at best, have been his student. That’s not because of any haughtiness on his part but that the former District Officer who ended up at Oxford University had a name to protect. My conclusion is that no amount of friendship or any other such consideration would have gotten Prof Kirk-Greene involved in reviewing a thesis if that thesis hadn’t anything substantial to say. So, I said to myself: this Kukah has gone far oh!. Is it the same Fr. Kukah, (remember, many people, from Bishops to President Goodluck Jonathan, were still calling you Fr. instead of Bishop Kukah long after the moment because the Fr. appellation had so sedimented from your ‘the Mustard Seed’ column in the now dead Sunday New Nigerian) this professor of professors is writing about? Actually, it was that day I coined ‘the Oak tree’ metaphor, not to cancel out the metaphor of ‘the Mustard Seed’ but to register the progression.
First at war, first at peace too!
The import of this background is that I am not thinking of anything less than what a Prof Kirk-Greene (his successors since he is now dead) would be compelled by the vigor of the content to review. In other words and without prejudice to whatever might be going on, I am not thinking of a Festschrift or a documentary or such stuff. Great and useful in their own ways as such could be, I am thinking of a critical synthesis, of something like a PhD work capable of being an acclaimed text in Cultural Studies, Discourse Analysis, History of Ideas, Postcolonial theory, Subalternity, Liberation Theology in Africa, Critical Theory, and African Political Thought, amongst others. An alternative route is re-mobilising an emergent crew of recent graduates from the Catholic University of Nigeria – Sarah Ahmed, Idara, Depuun, Hazel, Keren, Esther Ayoola – and put them to the job under someone like Prof Chimalum Nwankwo. His Lordship can be assured that I am aware of a part of the BSc Degree of these recent graduates of Veritas University I have mentioned that amounts to an adequate processing for a task as this, particularly if, somehow, they were to be sent for further grilling at SOAS, for example, for a year.
Having mentioned Prof Chimalum Nwankwo, it is also important to background that. In case some bloke who doesn’t know what to do with his or her time and money stalls His Lordship to suggest that Prof Chimalum would not be an ideal project Coordinator, please, thank him or her profusely and ask the most fierce Dogari the Sultan might have seconded to you to escort him or her away. For, the fact that a Prof Chimalum is in this country but not part of any strategic thinking cell of the Nigerian State is part of why we are the way we are. Because there must be many Chimalum Nwankwos around that the Nigerian State is not aware of in terms of needing their intellectual values. We all do not have to admire how a Chimalum Nwankwo walks or laughs but that is a different thing from what he has up there. He is currently a Professor of World Literature at Veritas University, Abuja.
An idea which has not got the Bishopric nod can probably do without these much of the details about implementation. But the politics of iterability compels escorting this suggestion with as much details as possible at this stage. As followers of Jacques Derrida would say, “an author can never succeed in determining the meaning of a text” because “every text participates in a code that necessarily exclude authorial control”. To that extent, I am dead as soon as I publish this letter to His Lordship. I might be biologically alive but would have lost the power to determine the meaning, the acceptability or otherwise of this idea. The numerous interpreters of it in a highly discursive and contentious social space would have taken over, no matter how many times I write to say, “what I mean is that…”.
The last point is the puzzle about how you always end up stealing the thunder from under ‘our’ foot, the word ‘our’ referring to those of us of different ideological grooming or convictions from those of the priest. The last time you did that was when you enacted a daring dancing exploit back in your local community that was subsequently circulated on social media. To be frank, that should be the dream of all of ‘us’ called Socialists, activists, rebels, cranks or whatever such terminology our traducers are comfortable with. That return to base is what all of us who were born on top of leaves without the presence of any doctors owe the communities. There is no material intervention that can adequately compensate what those women went through in innovating with whatever could fetch money so that we could go to school more than that dancing expedition by any child of subalternity, particularly if that child has grown into an Oak tree of any sort. Before the elders asked me to shut up recently, I thought that conducting the burial ceremony of my mother while she is still alive would be the most symbolic compensation for all her exertions. I wanted her to savor it live. What could I ever have been without her? Comrade John Odah, our common friend, may therefore be right to say that our socialism is a combination of communalism and Catholicism. So, what you have done in that dancing expedition is more ideologically remarkable than cultural. It was the ultimate moving moment!
Congratulations on your 45 years of priesthood, ten of it spent as Bishop and many more years of Bishopric creativity!
Yours Adagbo ONOJA
