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Truly enlightening piece by Olisa H. Osita.
quote:DOCTRINE OF OJUKWU HAGIOGRAPHY
(A Case Of: OBI NWAKANMA & KEN OKORIE)
The history of the world, Hegel wrote:
"is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom." Georg Wilhelm Friedrick Hegel
Let me first say without whiff of doubt in my mind that Obi Nwakanma is a bright man with enormous scholarship. I enjoy reading his treatise per expressed intrinsic and audacious fidelity to Ndiigbo nationalism. Most of the time, excuse me for naked candor, l do not share his views on intra-relationships within Ndiigbo and intra-relations with other ethnic nationalities. He is a thoroughgoing Ndiigbo nationalist. In my opinion he seems to be an enamored sentimentalist steeped in colored urban legend in views and interpretations of Ndiigbo current and ancient histories. I honestly respect his views even though he has expressed contempt for what l stand for and believe in. I would be most grateful if he could indulge me into his intellect to showcase for my education those things he disagrees with in relation to my social cum politico-cultural viewpoints. In the end l would have learned one or two things to become richer in my spirituality. Let me quote him and follow it up with editorials.
OBI NWAKANMA
"I think those who genuinely habour animosity against Ojukwu are those whom Ojukwu either screwed their wives, their mothers or their girlf-friends. My sincere advice to them is, get over it!"
OLISA H. OSITA
From the above statement no lowest moron in human category would doubt that Obi Nwakanma is very intimate with derived facts predicated on his eloquently rendered experiential conclusions. Obi Nwakanma in his statement never quibbled nor fudged nor pettifogged that Ojukwu was a convicted felon in court of public opinion for bedding men’s wives and girl friends. He only admonished an advisory injunction, however distastefully condescending and patronizing, that victims of Ojukwu’s lark sexcapades, must take it in stride with stiffed upper-lip and move on. My response to Obi Nwakanma was to share with him how profoundly deep the wounds are seared to the victim’s bones with butterfly effect in petrified pulverization of the victim’s family structures. It was an incisive calculus tied to bring Obi Nwakanma down to our human level devoid of overtly rationalized and oversimplified ratiocinations in objectified reductionism. Those who wear the shoe know where it pinches and cauterizes most. Even though Obi Nwadanma is not one of the victims with toxicant, poisonous stake driven into his bleeding heart but the details l provided were to stimulate his faculty of imagination in visualization and sensing of what it feels like to be entrapped in such debility. One would demur and shudder of seeing Obi Nwakanma coming off as a cold-blooded predator of warthog swine ancestry. This is precisely an antithesis of what the promising young man had in mind.
OBI NWAKANMA (OJUKWU’S HAGIOLOGIST)
But who is Obi Nwakanma in relation to Ojukwu? I am going to cull from Obi Nwakanma’s treatise to throw up for review if he extraordinarily adores Ojukwu or slyly despise him?
In actual fact, by today’s value, Sir Louis Ojukwu’s wealth would be in the range of about ten billion in proper sterling.
OLISA H. OSITA
Any careful observer can easily figure out that Obi Nwakanma’s adulation and adoration for Ojukwu is not reality based but fantastic phantasm more proper for Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. Let me repeat what l know of Sir, Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu’s wealth.
When Ojukwu came back from exile in 1982, one of the things he did was to fight, albeit selfishly, to reclaim his father’s property confiscated by Lagos State Government during the war. Ojukwu took the Lagos State Government to court and won. As usual, Ojukwu wanted to control, dominate and appropriate his father’s wealth as undisputed custodian without whiff of reality check that his father had other children. Ojukwu’s siblings said enough and expected him with studied anticipation to moderate and modulate. But that demon of intransigence and ADD with hyperactivity hothead was running haywire. When reasonable accommodation was beyond reach, his siblings had no option but to sue him in Lagos State Court.
Many things conspicuously unraveled and entranced public consciousness that most touted, amplified siren song of his father’s wealth became part of public records. The record showed conspicuously like a bulging stomach of a pregnant woman that Ojukwu’s father’s wealth was valued at 550,000 British pounds sterling’s in 1966 before the outbreak of Nigerian civil war.
My good friend Obi Nwakanma, if such wealth (500,000 pound sterling) was invested at the rate of 60% annual returns, which is magical and improbable probability to say the least, and the investment is compounded annually to date, the gross family worth in pound sterling’s would be 193 million. This scenario is over liberal and untenable. At 10% return on investment, the value would be 31 million in pound sterling. We have assumed that there were no expenses in maintenance and depreciation costs, taxes, losses, working capital and recurrent expenditures, welfare and many other incidentals. Obi Nwakama has not done himself any good as a scholar of reliable stature as he should. He was just all heart and mouth without head. We must forgive him as a commonplace observation symptomatic of those inflicted with intoxicated blind hero-worshiping debilities. What is religion if not self-narcotization?
But he was a sportsman. He was brilliant. He was a rich boy. He was inevitable. In Oxford, Ojukwu joined the socialists, even though he rode about in a Rolls Royce.
OLISA H. OSITA
When Gowon was overthrown and he went to exile in London, BBC profiled Ojukwu and Gowon’s. A Professor who taught Ojukwu some course at Oxford, said that Ojukwu was a great sportsman who liked rugby and rode on sports cars. He said that Ojukwu was not particularly a good student in academics. I would like Obi Nwakanma to stop padding Ojukwu but allow people to evaluate him on merit. Ojukwu never claimed anywhere that he rode on Rolls Royce. Please hear Ojukwu himself and avoid embarrassing statements that cannot be minimally substantiated and violently false.
What I had was an opportunity to live an affluent life. As a black student I had a car of my own, first it was an MG, the next year I had a Jaguar, I used to carry around my tutor who loved cars and never thought he would ever own such a car and I carried him once a week provided he did the teaching inside the car.
OLISA H. OSITA
Ojukwu the great Oji Onu Abagana. “Oji onu Abagana” is a masquerade I Igboland known for singing and dancing to its music with certified carte blanche to concoct and tell any story and people understood it very well without taking exceptions. You see, a teacher or tutor in England never thought he would ever own such a car. But it is providential for a son of an illiterate trader to own one. Furthermore, the teacher would be teaching Ojukwu in the car. Was Ojukwu talking about making up at the backseat of the car he was most gifted at rather than putting his hand on a book he abhors? We all know that his little head was very active during his days in England. What is the prodigal son, the weakest link? For sure he learned how to speak English very well as a precondition of dating university girls in the campus but Ndiigbo mistook his eloquence informed by necessity as sign of accomplished intellectuality. Hail Biafra, we must fight to the last man, even with our headquarters moved to Abidjan. How long would Ndiigbo allow themselves to be handy dildos for Ojukwu at his randy discretions?
Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s father, Sir Louis Phillipe Odumegwu-Ojukwu was the wealthiest Nigerian of his generation: a multi-millionaire businessman, who had been chairman of UAC (West Africa), the Nigerian Stock Exchange, director of Shell-BP, had vast investment in property in Lagos, Kano, Port-Harcourt, Enugu, Onistha and other places and owned controlling shares in many of the top blue-chip corporations that still operate in Nigeria today, Emeka Ojukwu could have walked naturally to a life of ease and indolence.
OLISA H. OSITA
There is no question that Obi Nwakanma as Odumegwu Ojukwu’s hagiologist has over-ambitiously taken the gospel of hagiography to another alien stratosphere. There are things we ought to know using our commonsense. We know that the highest principal shareholder in an investment nominates the Chairman of the company. Nigerian Stock Exchange was established in 1961 and became functional in 1962. It was operating on the subvention from the Central Bank of Nigeria. If Sir Philipe Ojukwu were to be appointed to be the Chairman, what was an illiterate going to contribute to such organization? You have to appoint those with relevant technical competence and know-how to the board. Knowing nuts and bolts of loading passengers to the buy and selling bus ticket is by far too simplistic than the complexities of managing stock exchange. How could Sir Phillipe Odumegwu Ojukwu be nominated Chairman of UAC (West Africa) when foreign companies are allowed to own 100% share in a company? How could a man without formal education be the Chairman of highly technical Nigerian Stock Exchange? My brother, when you say somebody was the wealthiest Nigerian of his generation, would you provide us with independent source of your information. You know, how people are so gullible that there are some among us who are so stupid to believe that Ojukwu used his father’s wealth for fighting Biafran war. But what is actually fuelling these stories of the urban legend? It bears on one source, of which is?
"Frederick Forsyth is a best-selling popular novelist. He strongly and publicly supported the cause of Biafra in the Nigerian civil war, and covered the period as a war correspondent in Biafra. He had a fifteen-year association with the Igbo leader, Chukwuemeka Ojukwu. His biography of 'Emeka' was published in 1982 with the full cooperation of the subject. It covers his youth, army training, the civil war, and his twelve-year exile. Still of great interest, the biography has now been revised."
He then became a reporter, and spent three and a half years working at a small newspaper before joining Reuters in 1961. In 1965, he joined the BBC and was assistant diplomatic correspondent. From July to September 1967, he covered the Biafran War between Biafra and Nigeria.
In 1968, he left the BBC amid allegations that his reporting of the Biafran War was biased towards the Biafran cause, and that he had falsified elements of his reports, and returned to Biafra as a freelancer. In 1969, he wrote a book about the Biafran War called The Biafra Story
“But Freddie Forsyth is a conspiracy theorist - his books are all about conspiracies - and the BBC's glib explanation doesn't satisfy him.”
“He admits that he isn't terribly clubbable, not much good at organisations. He spent the first couple of years of his career at Reuters, then joined the BBC, from which he was sacked, he claims, because the Foreign Office didn't like his coverage of the Biafran war. He returned to Biafra independently and reported from behind the lines for two years, at the end of which he weighed eight stone. Unhappy with the hand-to-mouth nature of freelance life, he came home and wrote The Day of the Jackal.”
OLISA H. OSITA
It may be a good idea if our people become sophisticated thinkers. Sophisticated thinking means taking information and critically processing and evaluating them for probabilities, authenticities and above all, if they would make commonsense.
War reporters are not only reporting events of the war but they also have interest in writing books of the events of the war. That is to say that the venture is not just about career, income earned on the job but for the author to publish good quality book with enough information and authenticity to earn the book as the bestseller on the market. In more direct terms, it is a business venture.
Frederick Forsyth is a brilliant mind with idiosyncratic bent. But we also know that he allows his biases in most of his work to color his viewpoints. He is also a thoroughgoing conspiracy theorist. Here is what Forsyth said for joining Conservative Party in 1997 when they were finally, and disastrously defeated:
"I have a pathological desire to help lame dogs over stiles"
Relationship between Frederick Forsyth and Ojukwu is very symbiotic and by no stretch of imagination, disinterested. Everything Frederick Forsyth wrote about Ojukwu’s upbringings, education, military career, his father’s wealth, Sir, Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu – were based on information furnished to him by Ojukwu himself. I have caught Ojukwu brazenly lying on issues he should not have lied about. That his father who had no formal education to become the Chairman of Nigerian Stock Exchange or UAC (West African) is an award winning fairy-tales of the century. Let me give an example why our people are not sophisticated in their thinking processes even though they could earn Doctor of Science Degree (DSc.) in their chosen careers but the cave they were brought-up in is still in their hearts. Let us read what Ken
KEN OKORIE (OJUKWU’S HAGIOLOGIST) KEN OKORIE:
Emeka Ojukwu is a perfect example. His personal sacrifices and those of others gave us the hope, freedom, and even life that we still enjoy today.
OLISA H. OSITA:
Could Ken Okorie expatiate what hope, freedom and life Ojukwu gave to which people. I do not know what Ken is trying to communicate except some fantastic claim that cannot submit to critical reasoning. Before Republic of Biafra was declared, there is no record anywhere that Nigerians were planning to attack Biafra. Why would Ojukwu in his idiocy of declaring the Sovereign Republic of Biafra responsible for welfare of Ndiigbo. Ojukwu led Ndiigbo to the bottom of the ditch and Ndiigbo nearly self-destruct themselves. If internal and external pressure was not put on the power maniac to exit from Biafra, who knows how many more millions of Ndiigbo would have died do to foolish intransigence of one man.
KEN OKORIE:
Emeka had the privilege to ride on white horse into unique opulence at will. He chose the path of sacrifice and public service.
OLISA H. OSITA:
Ken Okorie is only expressing third world viewpoints. Would anybody have known about Emeka Ojukwu if he had earned his employment or vocation in the private sector? Public service gave Ojukwu the profile he would not have earned if he were in the private sector. If a person like Ross Perot were to be offered to pay $50 million to become US President, he would have paid it in a heart beat. All members of the US Senates are millionaires and they are in public service. Who is Ojukwu who is not the only sibling to inherit his father’s assets, when his father’s assets were just 550,000 pounds before the civil war? Let me be clear. This is a huge accomplishment by his father to have assets of up to $1million dollars at the time. My beef is that people should stay with facts and leave fictions. The worth of Sir Odumegwu Ojukwu’s assets is over bloated and over amplified beyond commonsense as if we are illiterates who do not understand figures.
Ojukwu took the route of low resistance to power. He hedged all his bet on future coup and its benefits. What sacrifice? People can pay anything to get power. Did John Kerry take on his house for election? Go figure it out.
KEN OKORIE:
His wealthy father died of heart attack because of his decision to pursue the common good of our people rather family wealth!
OLISA H. OSITA:
What a bogus story. Ojukwu joined the military in 1950 and his father died around 1966 / 67. It must have taken his father ten years to suffer heart attack from the time he joined the military excluding his stint with Eastern Region’s Public Service at Udi. Ojukwu’s died few months after Ikemba kicked Zik out of UN as the Chancellor. Get your facts straight. The relationship between Zik and Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu is what obtains when a very educated man has uneducated friend but both care for themselves. Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu were among the first Ndiigbo who invested in Zik’s publishing companies when the colonialists were trying to run Zik out of business. Furthermore, Zik and Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu became friends when Zik had never gone out overseas for further studies in Zungeru. On the other hand Zik provided Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu access to people he would never have met because he did not have formal education. If you have ever dealt with very rich, uneducated Nigerian businessmen you will understand the difficulties. I have dealt with Dike the owner of Dubic Breweries Aba and l know what it feels. The man has his house just adjacent to TY Danjuma’s in Victoria Island, Lagos. Sir Louis Odumegwu-Ojukwu knows the prodigality of his son and sent him overseas to complete his high school. If Ojukwu’s father did not have money to send him overseas, who knows, if he would become a serious agboro if he could slap his tutor in high school. Ojukwu’s action to kick Zik out of the UNN was responsible for his father’s cardiac arrest.
KEN OKORIE:
How many of the people who daily rain insults on Ikemba consider these truths?
OLISA H. OSITA:
The above statement is redundant and oxymoronic since all the information presented above are pure fabrications. By the way, Ikemba is a public figure and taking him on his role prior and during the war is a resounding fair game.
KEN OKORIE:
In the case of Ojukwu, we are talking about the heir to one of the greatest wealth accumulated anywhere on in the British Commonwealth (the colonial government in Nigeria borrowed his father's Rolls Royce to transport the Queen of England when she visited Nigeria in 1956).
OLISA H. OSITA:
First Ojukwu’s father never owned Rolls Royce all his life. Before Queen of England visits any country, it is planned ahead of time and advanced team is dispatched for coordination. British High Commission of the host country to be visited in collaboration with the Queen’s protocol’s office and British National Security will work out itinerary with the host country. Every food item - be it salt, drinking water etc. are imported from Britain and supervised by pre-designated British officials. Every detail of her movement is planned and rehearsed ahead of time. The car or limousine she will use in that visit is air-freighted from Britain in case of Third World countries. Then in 1956, Nigeria was still a British Colony with British Governor-General. Ken Okorie has no clue about the British people, their psyche and pride. Queen of England would not even fly Nigerian provided aircraft. Please, brother, get serious.
What happened to that wealth accumulated by Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu? Was it all lost at Otolo Nnewi during the war? Nigerians are very funny people. If Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu had that kind of wealth with stocks in UAC, Shell Oil Company, his son Ikemba will not be living in a rented house in Independence layout Enugu. Guys will not be contributing money to buy his airfares when he travels overseas. I hope our people will not be so idiotic to think that shares with oversea companies were part of confisticated-abandoned properties. By the way, Ojukwu is living off Biafran assets he never retired at the end of the war. Ojukwu should live up to what he preaches and tender
SUMMARY We are experiencing a new paradigm where idolization is intertwined with romantic nationalism. Like most things that are not achieved by natural merit system, except by fraudulent engineering and weaving into a reverential hero of counterfeit extraction, is the poison the critical mass can do without. Each time they write or claim that their hammerhead leader achieved one feat or the other, do not take them for their word but investigate with penetrating searchlight. Most often what turns out at best would be the crudest and puniest of the most perverse and dwarfed contraptions. They are so enfeebled and fickle incapable of inspiring the lowest grade of cripples.
How could people embrace the most twisted and convoluted of all lies as a collective virtue worthy of practiced emulation; such virtues as when analphabetic nescient tobacco-snuffing Chief would pass as Alan Greenspan of Nigerian Stock Exchange in the person of late Sir, Louis Phillipe Odumegwu Ojukwu without arousing the suspicions of primitive mishmash mobs as the most farcical and cockeyed abortion of hallowed intellectuality of civilized people. When contemporaneously, their most revered, venerated hero is that bunco, diddle power-hungry flimflam, whose highest achievement were to turn his ancestral home-land into a ravaged war-front; sending generations of men and women to their untimely death in a wild goose chase of “Brain Dead Republic”; while the maniacal brute would be rendezvousing with the wives of men he sent to gulag as saboteurs in the most perverse escapades of sexercises with resultant wreckage of families.
He anointed himself King of Kings in Igboland, translated in vernacular as ‘Eze Igbo Gburu-Gburu” pronounced “Eze Igbo Wuwu-Wuru”. Eze Igbo Wuru-Wuru, what a tragicomical adventure in a humorous vein analogous to Catholic canonization to “Sainthood” of a predatory Priest who never saw any mini-skirt or intimate-apparel he never liked. Instead of seriously using his head for strategic planning of the war, he spent time dispensing unsolicited blessings with his little head. No wonder he sent 3000 ill-trained militia men as army of occupation to cover over 20 citiess in Midwest and Western Regions. What is drunken simpleton? Let us look at human ideals that animates my kind of persons.
Experience has thought us these facts of life: that people meet, come up against one another, happen upon one another, and that from each meeting a new and different world is born. Crucial though they are, these facts of life are not obvious to children nor even to adults (separatists, romantic nationalists, ethnic supremacists etc). Most people experience too little difference in the course of growing up to recognize the creative power of human intercourse. There is too much constancy in most biographies, and too little self-initiated change.
In Hegel's own words:
"The changes that take place in Nature—how infinitely manifold so ever they may be—exhibit only a perpetually self-repeating cycle; in Nature there happens 'nothing new under the sun,' and the multiform play of its phenomena so far induces a feeling of ennui; only in those changes which take place in the region of spirit does anything new arise. This peculiarity in the world of mind has indicated in the case of man an altogether different destiny from that of merely natural objects..., namely a real capacity for change, and that for the better—an impulse of perfectibility."
Georg Wilhelm Friedrick Hegel
History is the difference for which we are responsible, the change we have made through our intercourse of love, labor, laughter, also of violence and war. History, the consequence of our encountering each other, indeed embraces all the genuine newness in our experience. By repeatedly getting under one another's skin, we humans have made change the supreme reality. It is our lot today to set the chain reaction of breaking old tables of values and replacing them with postmodernist values. We cannot achieve it by lying about ourselves, to ourselves, about the world around us, our experiences including our successes and failures.
In the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s Ndiigbo made giant strides in Nigeria. Parents who did not have opportunity for education told their children to aspire to be like Azikiwe the first torchbearer of intellectual illumination in Igboland. It was based on values expressed in thrift, resilience, education and learning. No backdoor shenanigans. Ndiigbo responded with burst of energies with oversuplus of returns. Then comes the birth of tragedy. That power seeking and intoxicating trickster maniac who within five years undid over 40-year accomplishments born out of hard work, planning and execution - building-block-by-building-block. He gave birth in Ndiigbo the vices expressed in saboteur paranoia and persecution mentality. The results are speaking eloquently into our and booming audibly into our ears. But we are still in terrestial wasteland. Who would show us the way out of the dark valley of existential vaccum? We are facing only two choices at our disposal.
Embrace tenets of humanism that is outreaching and outbranching to hug the universe and the world as a significant whole. Or atomization into fragmented separateness in descend into ancient caves where the greatest value is in performing rituals and dancing as world jesters. Odumegwu Ojukwu is the cheerleader for the latter that represents the worst in humanity and Ndiigbo in particular. Our deconstruction is just the beginning. Today we are the celebrated efulefus and whatever. But our grand children will be proud of our work and marvel how we endured in the face of blistering name-calling. Thank you Nietzsche. "If you know why you can bear anyhow."
Olisa H. Osita
California
Best of luck and stay blessed Olisa H. Osita California
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Let the introspection begin! You can't just blame us for what is wrong in your house. It is time for you to look within.
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