By Adagbo Onoja
This is a piece I have to do or else my humanity would be questioned. To receive such unbelievable show of solidarity and not to put one’s appreciation on record is to be less than a human being. And so, one would take his mind away briefly from the social commotion raging in Nigeria to attempt to design and wrap a ‘thank you’ distinguished not in size but in the intention to all those who have made this paradox possible.
It is a paradox in the sense that I am compelled to appreciate the power of the outcomes of what goes against my idea of burying a parent. I cannot remember from whence I came by the consciousness that the best way of doing any of those things is to have comrades, friends, brothers and sisters share drinks, jokes and memories under an oak traee, play and perhaps dance to some Fela tunes and everyone goes away. It must have come from the story of what a comrade did at the burial of his own father several decades ago and which I might have internalised even though, I have always been over ruled in putting such into practice. I was over ruled during my wedding a decade and a half ago and during my father’s burial recently.
As far as I was concerned, my father had passed away much earlier than my departure from Nigeria late 2013. Each time one spoke with him on the phone, one got the impression of someone already looking at somewhere else. So, I thought he should be buried immediately he died and instructed accordingly. That way, I would be in a position to give him a burial which would be a convocation of political, social, professional and other associates and, therefore, a critique of the routine. I was probably not jerked to re-assert the immediate burial option because he didn’t speak in parables when I spoke with him an hour before he diedon March 29th, 2014. Then he only complained against the doctor but, given his legendary animus against doctors except the only one he was comfortable with and whose prescriptions he readily accepted. Once he was taken to the mortuary, it meant his burial must follow immediately. To insist otherwise would be to give the impression that one was bidding for time to look for money to stage an ‘owambe’ sort of thing. Not when those like Comrade John Odah who might have been expected to understand what I was getting at conspired with the ‘conservatives’ to get on with the burial now instead of allowing for time to put my kind of plan in place against sometimes in October this year.
One strategic error with over turning my agenda is that we ended up holding the burial during the rainy season. That is the first reason for this piece, to thank God again and again that, throughout the three daysthat the fiesta lasted, there was noeven a sign of rainfall. What a total tragedy it would have been had it rained. The 15-20 minutes from the Utonkon-Okpoga highway to my village is simply and automatically impassable once there has been a drop of rain. This is without exception to both the pedestrian and the person on the wheel because of the loamy nature of the soil. All the visitors who came to the burial would never have dreamt doing so if any rain fell. God, I thank you beyond words.
But the most humbling was to come from the experience of popular solidarity. How could people in the existential quagmire in my community afford that level of solidarity is what I can neither explain nor understood, especially the primary school teachers who have not been paid for half a year but who went to the extent they went. It was so moving that, at some point, you didn’t know whether to be happy or to cry. In fact, at the end of the funeral, I could comfortably open a yam factory with what was left of the yam tubers. There is a particular case of a farmer who brought us 176 tubers of yam, free of charge.
Comrade John Odah and I have ruminated over the fact that we have carried out human rights, gender, labour education, youth conscientisation works, etc in our activist life but never inside our own local communities. Even as a journalist, I have never worked in Benue State up to a year, not to talk of Odah. This is nothing to regret about because, for comrades, ‘home’ can be anywhere. Additionally, there is no way we could do what we have done outside our state without it being interpreted as positioning for political office. Our elite are so mercenary in orientation that they think everyone loves to be a legislator, a governor and so on.
Not having done so and be known for it, I carry the feeling of deficiency in communal responsibility in my mental diskette, to borrow this expression from the original owner. That was until this funeral provided an opportunity for the folks to say very nice things about me and my junior brother. Although they were talking about things I could never have remembered ever doing, each testimony was very true and they were, therefore, not telling lies. And it gave me incredible happiness and eternal fulfilment that my record in communal responsiveness is not as dismal as I thought.
Our people are very genuine, very sincere and too generous. They don’t give their best only to those they see as deceivers, politicians in particular. To this stock I must put my appreciation on record even as many or most of them would not read it but because appreciating them is the correct way to appreciate my father as a member of that collective.
Beside their solidarity is the joy in watching their energy, resilience, creativity and vitality in spite of the poverty of their existence. In Nigeria, everyone complains of marginalisation. So, no one really knows who is suffering real marginalisation. I still maintain that Edemoga District has been most marginalised. Until the Suswam regime tarred the Utonkon-Okpoga road early in the life of the regime, (and it is high time Mister Governor passes through this road again with a view to arresting the contractor and the engineers who worked on the project) the whole place was locked up. The foot paths we trekked to primary schools in those days, the ponds from which we drank water and the wretched primary schools we attended are still what you get. Majority of the women are classic cases of permanently poor, pregnant and powerless.
