Strictly Personal

Who poisoned the communion? By Sam Omatseye

Published

2 years ago

October 24, 2022

Some say they can’t vote for him because he is ill. But it’s because he makes them ill at ease. They tremble at the compass of his mind and the stature of his legacy. With affectionate defiance on Saturday night, he asked the Kano business community, “Do I look like someone who is sick to you?” He then pointed his finger to his skull, and quipped, “It’s because I am smarter than all of them.” He permitted himself a little swagger.

Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was still floating on the after-waves of ideas at the Arewa Consultative Forum. All who attended attested to his magisterial performance. Not the hegemonic effluvia of Atiku or the incantatory void of Obi. Asiwaju left the place with food for the Nigerian thought when he tackled the question of climate change.

The images of “church rat” and “poisoned holy communion” ruffled quite a few cassocks and their political hangers-on. They mistook it for a cannon against the canon. They claimed he had breached the holy of holies. He was turning the scriptures upside down. How could the holy communion be poisoned? It is holy, and so Tinubu had touched the unclean thing.

They were invoking Christ where he did not invite them. But Christ told them, “I never knew you.” They saw visions without eyes of understanding. The blind leading the blind.

For those who know the Bible, even the holy communion can kill. Hence Apostle Paul said, those who are not worthy should not take it or they will die. So, if we look at what the Catholics call the Eucharist, it is like poison to a defiled soul. The sinner who goes to the bowl with malice takes a poisoned chalice, ditto the adulterous appetite. They may swallow sweet poison. It is a holy death.

The communion then can also stand for purity, including the men of the altar. If prophets can lie and sully the word of God, so can they dispense a poisoned holy communion. It is all within us as humans, whether pastor or laity, to abide by the word. A pure holy communion is no guarantee. It depends on both laity and pastor. A compromised pulpit poisons the communion. A sinful laity courts damnation. Hence Jesus said, when the blind leads the blind, BOTH shall fall into the ditch. Jesus knew this, so he warned of the distinction between his bread and wine and the manna in the wilderness. Those who ate manna in the wilderness later died. His own will give eternal life. So, it is not about the holy communion but who poisoned it and who agreed to eat it. Tinubu says it is the west who added the killing vial. The church rat should not die for the sins of a wayward priest. The west is the priest.

Partisans who know little scripture aped the lead of these vain ecclesiastics. Beware of false prophets.

But what Tinubu was doing had nothing to do with holy matters. But he is asking if we are ready for the manna of the wilderness or the bread of life. He borrowed them as metaphors to show that we are stewards of God’s earth, but we are not subjects but sovereigns as Nigerians. The metaphor of poison is not new. We have the metaphor of poisoned chalice, poison mercury, poison oak, or Poison Ivy. Some are biological and they can, with imagination, become metaphors that picture human experience.

The poisoned holy communion here is the compromised climate or earth. We are the church rat, the innocents who would live but are confronted by the prospect of poison. But what shall we do? We are not compelled, according to Tinubu, to eat the white man’s poison. The world was pristine before the whites began pillaging it. But in doing so, they became rich.

Now, they are affecting climate remorse, and want the whole world, including us, to save the earth from the devastation of industrial man.

But in making their prosperity, they created an unequal world. They enjoy, we toil. Now, says Tinubu, we need to develop and go through the path they followed, so we too can enjoy. But they say no. The world is fragile. It faces apocalypse. No problem, says Tinubu, we can see it ourselves. We want to be rich, too. If they want us not to follow their path, if they don’t want us to burn fuel as they did, attack the ozone layer as they did, let flood wreck us and our rivers and ponds run dry as we are experiencing, let them pay us. If not, we shall, as church rats, do what we shall and allow the holy communion – the earth – to remain a poison. The earth is ours and we all can either perish together or save it together. Know that the church rat is there when the congregation is at home. On Sundays, the poisoned holy communion can kill the whole church with all of them dressed in fancy clothes and stuffed with billionaire offerings. All, both church rat and cassock man, will die. It’s like a terrorist that lobs in a bomb during mass.

Tinubu was exposing western hypocrisy. They have, in the words of poet Alexander Pope, raped the lock. It cannot easily be restored to its original beauty. This is not the first time Tinubu has mused this issue. It is a call to climate and environmental nationalism. What the west is doing is climate imperialism.

We all want good earth. But let us enjoy it equally. The west has been at odds with China over this. Premier Xi is saying what Tinubu is saying. Let us all be rich. They wasted our earth to make them rich. Tinubu knows the value of saving the earth. Before this era of flood fury, Lagos had it decades ago, and Tinubu, as Lagos State governor, confronted the Obj administration that splurged N4 billion a year to pour sands on the Bar Beach. It was a patchwork, not a solution. The thing was eating up Victoria Island like termites. Tinubu developed an idea to turn disaster into prosperity. Today, that swath of earth known as Eko Atlantic makes more money than many states put together. Even the United States is building its biggest embassy on the Eko Atlantic.

But the west must allow us to do it on our own terms. This is no colonial era. When the west started with the industrial revolution, they did not prioritise saving the planet. William Wordsworth, known as the high priest of nature, wrote: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

What Tinubu has done is to stake an idea for economic prosperity and diplomatic tour de force in one phrase. Shakespeare says, “brevity is the soul of wit.”

This is the third lie of the west. The first was what is known as the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. It was the genesis of international rule of law. The agreement was to recognize all nations as equal and no one should invade another without cause. It is still a fraught issue as Henry Kissinger tackles the subject in his book, World Order. Same Europe did not even recognize other continents, like African kingdoms, as sovereign. It led to the second lie: they invaded African kingdoms and raided for slaves to build the prosperity of the west. They couched us as savages and societies without civilization. It justified the invasion. Even the Church of England said we had no soul. Yet they sent us the Mary Slessors.

What they are doing now by asking us to abide by climate change is the same as they did when they started industrialism. It was then they knew slavery was inhuman. They stopped it for cynical reasons. To quote again my late teacher, Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin: “The abolition of the slave trade was an act of enlightened self-interest by the Europeans to give the Africans a new role in the international economic system.” Again, they decided to give us our nations, according to their lights. They jumbled peoples together without symmetry of culture and history. Yet, there was no concept of Europe until about the 5th century as the Roman Empire began its decline, and savage tribes invade each other like the Germanic tribes. The west is like the gang leader who becomes a priest because he needs quiet to enjoy his loot.

Climate change is their new apology. They can pay us if we insist, says Tinubu. In the US today, farmers are paid not to farm. The food will waste, so they get paid to do nothing beyond the nation’s capacity. They did not hurt the American farmer. But they hurt us for centuries and this may be Asiwaju’s way of asking for reparations while we heal the earth. As Shakespeare wrote in his play of international intrigue, Antony and Cleopatra, we can make “fancy outwork nature.”

That is Tinubu’s conundrum, a laconic riddle that we expect only from the lips of a genius. He is a financial expert but he has used language that turns professors of literature into their altar.

We can see why they fear Tinubu, and so hate him. He is the one asking the right questions.

Strictly Personal

If I were put in charge of a $15m African kitty, I’d first deworm children, By Charles Onyango-Obbo

Published

4 days ago

May 13, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

One of my favourite stories on pan-African action (or in this case inaction), one I will never tire of repeating, comes from 2002, when the discredited Organisation of African Unity, was rebranded into an ambitious, new African Union (AU).

There were many big hitters in African statehouses then. Talking of those who have had the grace to step down or leave honourably after electoral or political defeat, or have departed, in Nigeria we had Olusegun Obasanjo, a force of nature. Cerebral and studious Thabo Mbeki was chief in South Africa. In Ethiopia, the brass-knuckled and searingly intellectual Meles Zenawi ruled the roost.

In Tanzania, there was the personable and thoughtful Ben Mkapa. In Botswana, there was Festus Mogae, a leader who had a way of bringing out the best in people. In Senegal, we had Abdoulaye Wade, fresh in office, and years before he went rogue.

And those are just a few.

This club of men (there were no women at the high table) brought forth the AU. At that time, there was a lot of frustration about the portrayal of Africa in international media, we decided we must “tell our own story” to the world. The AU, therefore, decided to boost the struggling Pan-African New Agency (Pana) network.

The members were asked to write cheques or pledges for it. There were millions of dollars offered by the South Africans and Nigerians of our continent. Then, as at every party, a disruptive guest made a play. Rwanda, then still roiled by the genocide against the Tutsi of 1994, offered the least money; a few tens of thousand dollars.

There were embarrassed looks all around. Some probably thought it should just have kept is mouth shut, and not made a fool of itself with its ka-money. Kigali sat unflustered. Maybe it knew something the rest didn’t.

The meeting ended, and everyone went their merry way. Pana sat and waited for the cheques to come. The big talkers didn’t walk the talk. Hardly any came, and in the sums that were pledged. Except one. The cheque from Rwanda came in the exact amount it was promised. The smallest pledge became Pana’s biggest payday.

The joke is that it was used to pay terminal benefits for Pana staff. They would have gone home empty-pocketed.

We revive this peculiarly African moment (many a deep-pocketed African will happily contribute $300 to your wedding but not 50 cents to build a school or set up a scholarship fund), to campaign for the creation of small and beautiful African things.

It was brought on by the announcement by South Korea that it had joined the African Summit bandwagon, and is shortly hosting a South Korea-Africa Summit — like the US, China, the UK, the European Union, Japan, India, Russia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey do.

Apart from the AU, whose summits are in danger of turning into dubious talk shops, outside of limited regional bloc events, there is no Pan-African platform that brings the continent’s leaders together.

The AU summits are not a solutions enterprise, partly because over 60 percent of its budget is funded by non-African development partners. You can’t seriously say you are going to set up a $500 million African climate crisis fund in the hope that some Europeans will put up the money.

It’s possible to reprise the Rwanda-Pana pledge episode; a convention of African leaders and important institutions on the continent for a “Small Initiatives, Big Impact Compact”. It would be a barebones summit. In the first one, leaders would come to kickstart it by investing seed money.

The rule would be that no country would be allowed to put up more than $100,000 — far, far less than it costs some presidents and their delegations to attend one day of an AU summit.

There would also be no pledges. Everyone would come with a certified cheque that cannot bounce, or hard cash in a bag. After all, some of our leaders are no strangers to travelling around with sacks from which they hand out cash like they were sweets.

If 54 states (we will exempt the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic for special circumstances) contribute $75,000 each, that is a good $4.05 million.

If just 200 of the bigger pan-African institutions such as the African Development Bank, Afrexim Bank, the giant companies such as MTN, Safaricom, East African Breweries, Nedbank, De Beers, Dangote, Orascom in Egypt, Attijariwafa Bank in Morocco, to name a few, each ponied up $75,000 each, that’s a cool $15 million just for the first year alone.

There will be a lot of imagination necessary to create magic out of it all, no doubt, but if I were asked to manage the project, I would immediately offer one small, beautiful thing to do.

After putting aside money for reasonable expenses to be paid at the end (a man has to eat) — which would be posted on a public website like all other expenditures — I would set out on a programme to get the most needy African children a dose of deworming tablets. Would do it all over for a couple of years.

Impact? Big. I read that people who received two to three additional years of childhood deworming experience an increase of 14 percent in consumption expenditure, 13 percent in hourly earnings, and nine percent in non-agricultural work hours.

At the next convention, I would report back, and possibly dazzle with the names, and photographs, of all the children who got the treatment. Other than the shopping opportunity, the US-Africa Summit would have nothing on that.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. X@cobbo3

Strictly Personal

AU shouldn’t look on as outsiders treat Africa like a widow’s house, By Joachim Buwembo

Published

1 week ago

May 9, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

There is no shortage of news from the UK, a major former colonial master in Africa, over whose former empire the sun reputedly never set. We hope and pray that besides watching the Premier League, the managers of our economies are also monitoring the re-nationalisation of British Railways (BR).

Three decades after BR was privatised in the early to mid-nineties — around the season when Africa was hit by the privatisation fashion — there is emerging consensus by both conservative and liberal parties that it is time the major public transport system reverts to state management.

Yes, there are major services that should be rendered by the state, and the public must not be abandoned to the vagaries of purely profit-motivated capitalism. It is not enough to only argue that government is not good at doing business, because some business is government business.

Since we copied many of our systems from the British — including wigs for judges — we may as well copy the humility to accept if certain fashions don’t work.

Another piece of news from the UK, besides football, was of this conservative MP Tim Loughton, who caused a stir by getting summarily deported from Djibouti and claiming the small African country was just doing China’s bidding because he recently rubbed Beijing the wrong way.

China has dismissed the accusation as baseless, and Africa still respects China for not meddling in its politics, even as it negotiates economic partnerships. China generously co-funded the construction of Djibouti’s super modern multipurpose port.

What can African leaders learn from the Loughton Djibouti kerfuffle? The race to think for and manage Africa by outsiders is still on and attracting new players.

While China has described the Loughton accusation as lies, it shows that the accusing (and presumably informed) Britons suspect other powerful countries to be on a quest to influence African thinking and actions.

And while the new bidders for Africa’s resources are on the increase including Russia, the US, Middle Eastern newly rich states, and India, even declining powers like France, which is losing ground in West Africa, could be looking for weaker states to gain a new foothold.

My Ugandan people describe such a situation as treating a community like “like a widow’s house,” because the poor, defenceless woman is susceptible to having her door kicked open by any local bully. Yes, these small and weak countries are not insignificant and offer fertile ground for the indirect re-colonisation of the continent.

Djibouti, for example, may be small —at only 23,000square kilometres, with a population of one million doing hardly any farming, thus relying on imports for most of its food — but it is so strategically located that the African Union should look at it as precious territory that must be protected from external political influences.

It commands the southern entrance into the Red Sea, thus linking Africa to the Middle East. So if several foreign powers have military bases in Djibouti, why shouldn’t the AU, with its growing “peace kitty,” now be worth some hundreds of millions of dollars?

At a bilateral level, Ethiopia and Djibouti are doing impressively well in developing infrastructure such as the railway link, a whole 750 kilometres of it electrified. The AU should be looking at more such projects linking up the whole continent to increase internal trade with the continental market, the fastest growing in the world.

And, while at it, the AU should be resolutely pushing out fossil-fuel-based transportation the way Ethiopia is doing, without even making much noise about it. Ethiopia can be quite resolute in conceiving and implementing projects, and surely the AU, being headquartered in Addis Ababa, should be taking a leaf rather than looking on as external interests treat the continent like a Ugandan widow’s house.

Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail:buwembo@gmail.com