If religion has not taken the character of checkmate politics between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria but rather taken the radical tone with which the Catholics wrestled military dictatorship in much of Latin America in their hey days, an individual such as Dr. Emmanuel Okwara would have been a striking actor in that process. As a Catholic priest, his orientation is the archetype ‘fisher of men’ in a generic sense rather than anything remotely linked to “undue radicalism” but his verbal facility and articulatory endowments would have forced him to prominence in such a process.
In the lecture room, at staff meetings and from the pulpit, Dr. Okwara can be sure to drop an expression that can be arresting. He once said from the pulpit that “when Christ is in your crisis, your cross will never crush you”. Demonstrating this through selected precepts and practices such as the narrative of Jesus Christ’s imperturbability about the threat of a storm but, instead, cutting back at his disciples as being ‘of little faith’ is not just clerical populism but a deliberate language game. The message is that he is not a bland preacher but deeply conscious of the constitutive character of language.
It is not surprising that he is also an artist, albeit a Christian music producer just as he can teach ‘Strategic Studies’ across History and Political Science. Of course, he was the first Chaplain of the university and was, for years, the Dean of Students Affairs, a damned hot seat on any campus anywhere in Nigeria today because of the generational instincts of many students today.
Like everyone else, those are probably his own extra grace from providence and which he uses to effect presently as the third of the priest-political scientists in that Department at Veritas University, Abuja but also in the spaces of Christianity where he also unfolds. The cumulative effects of demonstrable competences to his credit must explain the insistence by many constituencies on being part of the Silver Jubilee of his ordination as a priest.
Aside from Veritas University, Abuja where it comes up later in June 2022, two different parishes in Kubwa are marking his Silver Jubilee and, up to September, the Diocese will be at it one way or the other. A statement is discernable in all these: celebrating Dr. Emmanuel Okwara is an acknowledgment of depth, creativity and substance, not a typical false event we see all over Nigeria these days and age.
