Sent: Sunday, December 29, 2019 12:29 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Awo's reply declining membership of the 1986 Political Bureau
Long time. Here comes the Biafran Chauvinist Nwakanma ! The glorious Igbophiliac rides into town ( the USA – Africa Dialogue Series) once again, waving his flag, bristling with his usual disdain and arrogance, talking about "at best, an above average intelligence" – as if he has just designed a new intelligence quotient test for his super-Biafrans and his intellectually malnourished fellow Nigerians, with he himself sitting at the apex of Mt. Olympus as the Naira's new gold standard, himself ( with a modest small h) just freshly minted from some citadel of learning or other and about to start awarding/ handing out IQ certificates to the like-minded starting with his demi-god Azikiwe, destined in Nwakanma's mind, to sit atop of the Great Pyramid as the one and only Zik of Africa, forever.
Within his single paragraph response to Dear Tunji Olaopa he has managed to sprinkle his key words, "intellectual history": he would like to confine the " terrifyingly mediocre" and relegate all those that he so humbly disdains, to "the height of intellectual infamy" and then consign them to the dustbin/garbage heap of history, leaving the rest of us himself gasping for some fresh air and wondering, when did the best of us become the worst of us?
He would like us to believe and have faith in his wayward conceit that unlike him the great AWO was " no visionary" although the foresight in Chief Obafemi Awolowo's free primary education programme in Western Nigeria 1952-1966 is still reaping its dividends, for all to see and this continues to be an inspiration - so that in the oil-boom years, Bendel's Governor Ambrose Ali invested as much as 50% of his state budget in education.
Nwakanma's latest little tittle-tattle culminates in the expected anti-climax to this long thread that there is no "high intelligence" in the tone and texture of AWO's tersely written letter to Babangida.
Let's hope that Nwakanma will spare Babangida and not downgrade or degrade his intellectual capacity to some imaginary lower level, because in my opinion, Ibrahim Babangida too is still very intelligent and very much, still an astute politician.
But not to worry; I leave Nwakanma to the tender mercies of Baba Kadiri
On Saturday, 28 December 2019 23:03:34 UTC+1, Rex Marinus wrote:
Dear Tunji Olaopa:Awolowo did not see any further than the political realities and conditions in Nigeria of which he was a key architect from 1947. He was no visionary, and did not possess a god-like capacity to see a future. He was no futurologist, nor did he possess any more than at best, an above average intelligence! At this stage in our intellectual history, it is important to stop all the pointless, really mediocre, low-level kinds of myth-making we call 'history.' Nigerian history is properly documented in the places where archives are properly preserved and not manipulated. We do not have "three founding fathers" for instance in Nigeria. If there were any founders and movers for modern Nigeria, they were those who with Azikiwe belonged to the Nationalist party and the nationalist movement. Neither Awolowo nor Bello supported the Nationalist movement or the very basis of a Nigerian nationalist anti-colonialism. We can tell who did what from 1937-1947. From 1947-1957. From 1957-1967. From 1967-1977. From 1977-1987, and so on. We can already harvest from the End of Empire documents already publicly available to us the work, state, and place of each of these historical figures in the formation and deformation of Nigeria. The constant attempts to apotheosize Awolowo beyond his weight is a very laughable, repetitive, but by now exhausted ploy. And to ascribe some kind of immanent insight in this terrifyingly mediocre letter he wrote to Babangida is the height of intellectual infamy. Any elementary rhetorical analysis of this letter will basically show exactly what Awo was saying to Babangida: "Sorry, sir, but Fuck Nigeria and Nigerians! I'm not interested." That's basically the sum of Awo's letter. Now, you want to ascribe some high intelligence to it? Get real sir!Obi Nwakanma
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com > on behalf of Tunji Olaopa <tolao...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2019 10:35 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com >
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Awo's reply declining membership of the 1986 Political BureauReading Papa Awo's letter declining to serve on IBB's Political Bureau in 1986 again, and with the clear declining fortune of the Nigeria Project, I woke up this morning wondering, did the sage saw something about the future that we are in that we were perhaps too blinded to see?
RESTORING GOVERNMENTAL AND SOCIAL ORDER - CHIEF OBAFEMI AWOLOWO
In 1986, former President Ibrahim Babangida had asked Pa Awolowo to provide input into charting a New Social Order for Nigeria via a National Debate. A couple of my bosom friends have over the last few days reminded me of the force and depth of Pa Awolowo reply:
"Dear Sir, I received your letter of February 28, 1986, and sincerely thank you for doing me the honour of inviting me to contribute to the National Political Debate. The purpose of the debate is to clarify our thoughts in our search for a new social order. It is, therefore, meet and proper that all those who have something to contribute should do so. I do fervently and will continue fervently to pray that I may be proved wrong. For something within me tells me, loud and clear, that we have embarked on a fruitless search. At the end of the day, when we imagine that the new order is here, we would be terribly disappointed. In other words, at the threshold of our New Social Order, we would see for ourselves that, as long as Nigerians remain what they are, nothing clean, principled, ethical, and idealistic can work with them. And Nigerians will remain what they are, unless the evils which now dominate their hearts, at all levels and in all sectors of our political, business and governmental activities are exorcised. But I venture to assert that they will not be exorcised, and indeed they will be firmly entrenched, unless God Himself imbues a vast majority of us with a revolutionary change of attitude to life and politics or, unless the dialectic processes which have been at work for some twenty years now, perforce, make us perceive the abominable filth that abounds in our society, to the end that an inexorable abhorrence of it will be quickened in our hearts and impel us to make drastic changes for the better. There is, of course, an alternative option open to us. To succumb to permanent social instability and chaos. On the premises, I beg to decline your invitation. I am yours truly, Obafemi Awolowo."
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