Surely, there was wine and the usual debate about whether wine should be consumed at room temperature or chilled in the African heat. This time, the host was, temporarily defeated by a simple majority vote. How the second round of wine became a room temperature stuff is what only a probe panel may help unveil.
But it didn’t matter anymore at this point because the mood of the birthday lunch participants had moved from celebrants to ‘mourners’ more or less. Fueled by recollection of memories of the ties that bind all the parties to the lunch, the puzzle that obstructed what was supposed to be an afternoon of ‘jouissance’ was how could Nigeria have degenerated from a great height to nothingness within just three decades?
One of the faces at the lunch is a retired Director in the Federal Civil Service. The service sent him to, guess where? The Institute of Social Studies at the Hague. It was a manifestation of seriousness of any system that had that presence of mind to do that. Does it or can it still happen in the Federal Civil Service of today?
Still not forgotten after many lies against him
There was one of the parties who went to Government College Keffi, a finishing school in those days which is now a shadow of itself in terms of whichever metric chosen. The fellow subsequently trained in the defunct USSR. He is a retiree now but he can tell you a lot about the making of Abuja in terms of the defining urban symbols before the locusts descended and robbed Abuja of a soul. Today, it has neither a soul nor a heart, with uniformed thugs rupturing municipal management codes. It is doubtful if one will encounter uniformed operatives standing in front of a moving vehicle as a way of getting the driver to stop for validity checks in Cairo, Nairobi, Dakar, Paris, New York, Ottawa, Canberra and so on. This happens everyday in Abuja, the black capital of the world.
There were two faces at the table who all attended the University of Jos in the early 1980s and who remembered the racial and ideological diversity of the academics who nurtured them. They are alarmed by what their own children tell them about universities today even as they still give kudos to UNIJOS in terms of a history of succession of mature Vice-Chancellors as against Vice-Chancellors who see themselves as Brigade Commanders, demand an ‘Obey before complain’ logic.
The larger African context of the sadness at the palace of ‘jouissance’ turned dispiriting were the recollections from a Ghana trip. In spite of all the rubbish heaped on Kwame Nkrumah by imperialist propaganda, the man died without a house of his own. An individual who dies without a house of his own is an embarrassment to himself and the society but a president who dies without a house of his own is a statement in leadership. Even the house built for him by women members of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) who discovered that Nkrumah had no personal house was returned to the Government and people of Ghana at Nkrumah’s instance. That’s what he wrote in his Will, the same thing Julius Nyerere of Tanzania did: staying off looting of state resources.
It was common to the first generation of African leaders, including the Nigerian set. Zik, Sardauna, Awo, Balewa were all like that, in one way or the other. In fact, it was Zik who inspired Nkrumah into radical nationalism before Nkrumah got elected into Parliament from prison.
So, the tradition of leaders as warriors of looting is an aberration that came with the later set. But Africa cannot go down the drain. It won’t because while the Nkrumah generation have not been forgotten, people whose only contribution to governance is looting will be forgotten, even before they die. All of that, the table was told, shows there is no cause to despair or for depression.
Nyerere, promoter and practitioner of ‘African socialism’
Otherwise, how would one understand that Nkrumah was first buried in Romania before Sekou Touré insisted in retrieval of the body. Neither Romania nor Guinea was Nkrumah’s homeland. Socialism made him a citizen of the world, long before madness in his own country gave way to the retrieval of his body and eventually the building of the Mausoleum by the Jerry Rawlings administration. And, in Ghana today, the Nkrumah Mausoleum Rawlings built is a huge tourist centre, with its own performative implications, going by the number of visitors there from across the world.
At the end of the day, the food must be eaten. Majority took pounded yam but with different soups: bitter leaf, Edikaikong and Okro. Someone took plantain flour, there was a chicken plate and the last dish was a Caesar salad plate with chicken.
The consensus on the table was for God to give John Odah His blessings. Someone said John will fight for you to make sure you get what belongs to you. He added that John had a special grace and that he would be among the most credible set of politicians if he were to be a politician. “The way you mobilise people, it would have been an advantage for you if you were a politician”, said the ex-UNIJOS course mate who declared he doesn’t know how to appreciate God for John’s life.
This one who was nicknamed ASUU as an undergraduate declared John as a “special gift to us”, adding that John has always been wonderful, never diverging from the ideological line he has toed: Justice, fairness and all of that
The Sociologist-lawyer in the small crowd who combines being a Lagosian and a Bendelite at the same time recall their being together since 1979 when they entered the University of Jos for their undergraduate studies where John carried his Edumoga generousity as an avuncular recruiter of other students to join the radical campus platform – Movement for the Advancement of Africa (MAAS). “He was the one rallying round, organising and coordinating”, said the speaker.
The last said he was greatly disturbed as this birthday approached, wondering “what could I do for him”. He answered himself, rhetorically: Apart from prayers, I can’t do anything. But God can do it”
The reporter on the table said he had nothing to say because he had no contrary details to challenge what all the speakers had said. Only thing he recalled in support of his position was what squatting along with other comrades in John’s house in Lagos did to him. At the time, he was the only non-graduate comrade in the house. One night, all the comrade said he must pack his stuff and go to the university. An admission had been secured. The counter argument that Kano was too volatile for a return to that city was defeated by the comrades more adept in the debating competition. So, although from the same place with John, the relationship is not as on that nativist front as it is on shared values. Or, it is a relationship built on the inherent harmony between the communal, the Catholic and communist views of the human family.
At the end of the day, it was as much a birthday as much as a memorial event. Memorials to friends who have passed on in the past few months, the state of the nation, especially the way many people go to sleep and do not wake up nowadays and the insecurity to which everyone is helplessly vulnerable. Of course, the level of hunger and the situation whereby it has become criminal to fall sick. Except if the call from John’s daughter in the midst of the joyful sadness at the table, not much are exciting. The call served to prove an anti-male by the feminist laden table that daughters remember their fathers than the boys who are always in pursuit of a career, power, money or a wife to contend with.
