22 Apr 2008 |
|
Life teaches a lesson that evil is its own recompense. But greed and selfishness sabotage the assimilation of these lessons, whenever they land on our perceptual shores. History has taught us that men, who make themselves dogs for the sake of bones, would be treated like beasts, when power gets tired of their services. Old dogs could be expendable embarrassments. They are either quietly euthanized or violently executed, to release their owners from the burden consequent on their weak bones and embarrassing comportment. A few tears may be shed by the eccentric, while authorizing the murder of their dogs. But the ultimate fact is that the dog must die, because age has eroded its competences. Time has wearied its usefulness. Its utility is now a burden. And men do everything to escape or cast burdens adrift. Every mercenary is a dog. He lives the life of a dog. In his youth, he is conscripted as a dog of war. Napoleon did this in the Orwellian Animal Farm. Obasanjo used Frank Nweke Jr.; and Fani Kayode, as presidential Rotweilers while he reigned. Babangida used and dumped many while he held sway as the supreme corrupter of Nigerian morals. Andy Ubah and the dynasty of corruption he is presiding over in Anambra State is the greatest corrupter of morals in southeast Nigeria. Andy Ubah since he was exposed as the face of a fraud has been on a shopping spree. He has been in the market shopping for all the compromised consciences, fraudulent intellectuals, lewd mouthpieces, Otimkpu(s) and other “shopkeepers of spiritual wares”; all of whom are wandering minstrels of cant, who would sugar-coat and peddle his dishonest intents and corrupt messages for a fee. And his voyage into the Nigerian conceptual and socio-political slave market yields some top journalists of rogue capabilities, who are ready to mouth this man’s inanities for a fee. These guys are no better than ideological slaves, who are ready to sell and prostitute themselves to the guy with the heftiest loot. The journalist is a social watchdog. But instead of “watch-dogging” the rapists of our commonwealth, or leaning on them to tell us how they got their loot, when the majority are starving; they accept peanuts from them, and shout down every other incorruptible voice of conscience, who has the audacity conferred by goodness, to question the basis of their pretences. Ikenna Ellis Ezenekwe, the liar for hire who uses the name of his town to hawk lies and lately Mr. Chidi Anyaeche are the compromised consciences singing in a duet the songs of thieves. I have always wondered what would compel a man to sell his conscience and his posterity. But lewd money seems to be the answer. These guys are moral weathervanes, who are ready to embezzle the truth pursuant to their paid charges. But my joy always lies in Ola Rotimi’s observation, to the fact that no matter how long and stout the human neck, on top of it must always sit a head. So these traitors to our renaissance should not be profound in their joys. Their days are numbered. Their memories have been effaced for ever. History will always remember them as scoundrels and incestuous rascals. This lies in the fact that morality can never be in the employ of rogue power. It can never succumb to the mercenary considerations of naked might, without ruining society. This lies in the ontology of ethics. Morality is a construct of nature, flowing from the deepest wells of human nature and social heritage. Its principles run through all climes and cultures. They are basic to our being. They transcend the artificial walls and moats, which “political correctness” and hypocrisy advertises. Its violations repulse our natures in all cultures and epistemic traditions. Though politic and impious neurosis of the powerful have attempted to impose their conceptual schemes on it, what is bad has always remained bad. Though Situational Ethics attempted to relativize it, some other authorities have equally created a counterpoise; warning of this tyranny or imperialism of relativism. That the evil that men do lives after them seems to be the exclusive province of Shakespearean philosophizing. The evil that men do sometimes, walk with them the entire stretch of their existential road. Ifeanyi Okonkwo is a case in point. If a panel of the learned judges of the Supreme Court of any land could order a man to stand up, and take a bow as the “FACE OF A CROOK”, then this man must an irredeemable crook. It is only an imbecile that can canonize himself an idiot with pomp and pageantry. But Mr. Ifeanyi Okonkwo did just that with all the foolishness, which greed recommends. Mr. Okonkwo dressed and packaged himself a monumental idiot defying anyone to insult him. And the Supreme Court judges not only did, they summarized his character in the process. This man was a foil for Andy Ubah’s character. The company a man keeps tells a lot about his character. Andy Ubah would be an imbecile to think that the Supreme Court judges were not speaking to him as well, when they took the reputation of his wayfarer to the cleaners. By canonizing Mazi Okonkwo as a crook, the judges emblazoned his face for eternal remembrance in ignominy, as the personification of all that makes a man a crook. They equally told Ubah that he is not better than the company he keeps. But in spite of this august denigration, mercenaries like Ezenekwe and Anyaeche are not letting up in singing the songs of rogues and insulting our intelligence hawking inglorious lies. They are as corrupt as Ifeanyi Okonkwo. They are the moral prostitutes of Anambra State. Andy Ubah did not corrupt Ifeanyi Okonkwo or vice versa. No! He just used him like he has been using everybody that comes across him. He used Obasanjo in a way, mutually enriching for both of them, though with the most perverse implication for Nigeria. At the end of that relationship, Ubah and Obasanjo divided a portion of Nigeria’s wealth to their various estates, at the ratio of power that each held. Andy Ubah used Ifeanyi Okonkwo, as Mr. Okonkwo wanted and/succeeded in using him for his own parochial ends too. But Mr. Okonkwo, being a shameless mercenary; a man lacking conscience and good sense; a man who would gladly make himself a dog for the sake of a bone, took his reputation to Golgotha and had it crucified in obeisance to his greed and non-conscience. At that disgrace, we thought that other characters married to avarice would learn their lessons. But they did not, as could be seen in the rise and rise of Ezenekwe and Anyaeche, who are writing themselves into eternal disrepute based on their stances against the truth. Greed is a bottomless pit. A man who nurses a vaulting ambition is a potential murderer of innocent sleep. Macbeth is an eternal example of this. I rejoice when something good happens to bad people. My joy knew no bounds when the Nigerian Supreme Court mandated a desperate, power-hungry cabal to go and get some life and stop polluting public space with their unwanted and disgraced presences. Truth rejoiced the day Ifeanyi Okonkwo was reduced to size. And truth rejoices everyday that Nigerians and the world see Mr. Ikenna Ellis Ezenekwe and Chidi Anyaeche for who they are; namely shameless liars, who have no place among civilized people. If I
am Andy Ubah, I would go and thank my stars, that at least, there is a force
that can stop my vaulting ambition. When Andy Ubah mustered the effrontery to
ask the Supreme Court to reverse itself, it was a moratorium on reason. When
death would kill a dog, it cannot perceive the smell of excreta. But since evil
is forever its own recompense; and since the arrogance of unmerited privilege
perforates itself at the needles of its haughtiness, the Supreme court put him
in his place reminding rogues of all times that justice is not for sale. The
fact of the case remains that this haughty fool insulted the Supreme Court;
asking it to reverse itself on a judgement which all lovers of truth knew to be
right, just, and fair. Ubah’s pretence to an office, which his shady
character renders him superlatively unqualified for, was once again stripped
off him. The ontology of Andy Ubah’s rise is a dysfunctional one. A guy without a legitimate source of income became a trillionaire simply as a houseboy of a corrupt emperor. His source of wealth can never be legitimate. Great wealth should be the recompense of great industry and ingenious enterprise. But Ubah was neither industrious nor ingenious except in the negative extreme of burning down a state he desires to govern; and being a co-conspirator in the plunder of the Nigerian treasury. That an Ofeke like Andy Ubah could gain prominence in the impressionable minds of some young Igbos like Chidi Anyaeche and Ikenna Ezenekwe, who are ready to do his bidding, is not only thanks to poverty and gastronomic emergencies engendered by harsh economic conditions that Nigeria has been embroiled in for decades, but equally thanks to a corrupt version of Igbo philosophy of achievement aptly personified in the recent musical lyrics of Oliver De Coque. Oliver de Coque whose music I love. But I hate some of his philosophies. His lyrics are paragons of excellence. But the values he propagates are some lewd approximations of an ephemeral hyper-materialism, which compromises social justice and promotes instant gratification. He succeeded in imposing a mutilated philosophy of wealth and greed as virtues, upon beautiful lyrics, in the Igbo space. When thinkers like Theophilius Okere were asking about the possibility of an African philosophy, or when Emmanuel Edeh, Cssp, was writing “Towards an Igbo metaphysic”, or when Pantaleon Iroegbu designated metaphysics as the “kpim” of philosophy, these giants were withdrawing from the deposits of their rich Igbo heritage. This was the same weltanschaung that suckled the great Chinua Achebe. But Oliver the Coque in the late 90s attempted a recreation of Igbo ontology of achievement by mutilating the Igbo veneration of achievement and merit and encapsulating achievements only in terms of wealth. The Igbo philosophy of achievement is an integral one deeply rooted in the Igbo life. It is not a veneration of unmerited wealth. The Igbo country never canonizes a thief. Wealth in Igbo country comes always from hard work. Inheritance is out of the question. And a man’s worth in the community is in direct proportion to the truth value of comportment in all endeavours, where he founds himself. That explains why Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo was a quintessential Igbo man in his drive to achieve. Chidi Anyaeche, Ikenna Ezenekwe, Ifeanyi Okonkwo and the rest of their kind in Igbo country are shameless subscribers to this kind of dysfunctional philosophy, which canonizes greed at the expense of hard work. And they are ready to do anything, include lying through their teeth to gain cheap, transient gain at the expense of their communities. They are ready to sell their communities for gain. Ezenekwe tried doing it with Nanka.org. Chidi Anyaeche is now his prominent camp follower. And that is the property of prostitutes. That Ezenekwe and Anyaeche are dedicating their talents to hawking primitive lies against forces of progress and good conscience represented by Mr. Peter Obi in Anambra State is behaviour unacceptable on the score of manners. They are forcefully trying to coax us into bowing and paying court to the ambitions of a crooked knave, named Andy Ubah. But no true Igbo man with balls in between his legs will beat the drums of joy at the obnoxious fart of an owl. Theirs is a profane misrepresentation of all that is good and beautiful. The characterlessness of these actors is compounded by the unattractive prose they produce in defence of falsehood. These few words were stringed together to ask them to keep on exposing their pettiness. Those who wish Anambra well and are genuinely read to work for it will always do their best.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
# 
Your Comments
Please make The Square an enjoyable experience for everyone by refraining from gratuitous ad-hominem contributions, defamatory comments and off-topic posting. Such posts will be removed.