By Patrick Mokogwu
I am a believer in Christ! And this is incontrovertible. But beyond this kind of faith, i.e the saving Faith in the atoning blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, I also have this confidence, trust, hope, or call it assurance, that though my Nigeria and, specifically my Igboland, is troubled, things can still get better.
Unfortunately, on a daily basis, this my hope of a better tomorrow for my fatherland is being threatened.
If the threat is like that of our brethren in Israel (Middle East) the story would be different. For them in Israel, they know their enemies are external, i.e non-Jews, who live within and around them.
The challenge of my fatherland stems from the internal and inherent contradictions in both the geopolitical zones that make up the Igbo race and the insincerity of our political leaders, who have not only impoverished, cowed and enslaved the people but also made the Igboland unattractive to the indigenes and strangers.
For a very long while, I have not been a regular visitor to the East during most festive periods, like Christmas, Easter or the New Yam Festival but I am a regular visitor to my homeland – Okpanam in Oshimili North Local Government Area of Delta State.
I can boldly say that I go home averagely three times every year. It was also a thing of delight to take my children home regularly. I did this often when they were younger and under my roof.
Now that they are adults, I can no longer dictate to them when to join me home, but they cannot refuse when I ask, provided I avail them the necessary incentives that would make their journey and stay enjoyable and memorable.
Surprisingly, their craving for home-return has waned substantially as the hitherto village that showed a semblance of what they used to watch in home videos or African Magic is becoming too urbanised.
I cannot say for certain whether my story fits into those of some of my friends.
However, I often hear some of them say, “my children are not used to the village, the people are hostile, some of them are wicked, there are witches there” and all such fables.
It will be difficult for me to criticise them or condemn them outrighly but I wished they found a different narrative. I am of the opinion that there are wicked, hostile people or witches everywhere.
For very sincere friends, they would say, “Ol’boy, my problem is that I don’t have a personal house in the village.”
I think I like to identify more with this last set of friends – who say they lack accommodation, i.e a house of their own.
However, depending on your upbringing and your family structure, I think this complaint of a house also has an antidote.
I do not want to trivialise or ignore the challenges in some families, particularly in some polygamous homes (I dare say even in a home of a single parenthood, i.e monogamous homes) and their inherent challenges but I think it all depends on how the man “on the wheel” (i.e your father), whether living or dead, managed his wife (wives) and the children.
I’m not by no means approving of polygamy or multiple wives; that is outside my remit.
What I’m saying is that, assuming your father or any family member had built a house in the village and every member of the family had usually identified with that house, then everyone could manage themselves peaceably, when there is a MAN IN THE FAMILY playing the desired leadership role.
I must also say that you don’t start “managing” together from adulthood or only from the day you travelled to the village. The bonding, or what I call managing among siblings, ought to have started right before you all left the village, continues while you were still bachelors or spinsters and continues when you all got married and start having offspring.
If this interaction had been there, it would be easier to travel home and you all converge and make do with the available space in the family house in the most convivial atmosphere.
And in case there is no house at all, nobody says you cannot build one. Somebody may ask “a house”? How? Yes! I mean you can build a house.
How many of you live in a six- bedroom duplex in the city where you reside now? And you have been there for the past 20 years or more. Some of you have even built big houses in the cities but none in the village.
But I’m sure an average number of people reading this piece live in a two or three bedroom apartment in the city.
How much rent have you paid to another person all these years? You don’t need up to that amount to put up such a structure or some sort of structure in your family compound.
If you did that four to five years ago, there must be indeed a craving in you to always go home.
But our problem starts the moment we begin to think that until we build a six-bedroom duplex, like Okey, we have not built a house.
Who says you cannot build a six-bedroom duplex? You can! But it’s better at God’s time not because you want to keep up with the Joneses.
All that you need now is where you can put two or three beds, a kitchen, one or two bathrooms for the family and you’ll be “cruising.”
So, back to the story of my “pain,” arising from the state of our Igboland.
As the North-East wind is now hovering in the horizon, the appearance and return of “lekeleke” in the South and nature itself is “singing” Jingle Bell, i.e the song of Christmas and associated events, my stomach rumbles, my heart kicks and my feet shrink as I think of the deplorable state of our roads, the multiple security checkpoints, peculiar only to the South-South and South-East (even in Gaza, they appear fewer), the rooftop airfares (as if the distance is to Mars), the general apprehension (as if we joined Hamas to bomb Israel) and, worse still, our empty pockets, empty bank accounts and uncertainty about what the school fees would be in January.
I recall with great nostalgia, how immediately after my Easter or December Retreat at the return of the Republic in 1999, up until about 2014, with my jalopy I would take my family and with great excitement, we would hit the road the next morning, heading for Okpanam en route Owerri, the home of my in-laws.
Before we enter the Retreat Camp, we would have made our shopping. Our shopping was not to buy Christmas clothes but what we knew we could not get easily and cheaper in the village, e.g “isi nama”, ukwu nama, pure groundnut oil, kulikuli, groundnuts, etc, etc.
If we cooked rice on the eve of our trip, we would carry it, and somewhere around Okenne, under a tree, we would park.
There was no fear of attack or kidnapping! If we did not cook, we would drive straight to Aviele in Edo State; not (Lokoja) because we wanted fresh pounded yam/akpu and grasscutter meat.
If we cooked, Okene would be the stopping point. There we would refresh, eat and rest for a while, pluck cashew or mango, interact with some locals, particularly the Fulanis (Agwoi), and even share our food with them, sometimes in exchange for their gift of fruits.
Okenne was considered more than half of our distance to Okpanam then, when the roads were good and commuters could easily estimate their time on the road and arrival at their destination.
Then, as soon as we got home, the celebration would start. You would ask, what are you celebrating? Nothing indeed too special was being celebrated but the joy of meeting your siblings, parent(s) uncles, nephews and nieces, cousins, aunts, kinsmen and women, old friends and family acquaintances, etc.
The joy of cooking with firewood, cooking food that you know your immediate family alone could not finish, the joy of visiting old men and women, the joy of giving them small tokens, even as small as N200 (but crispy notes) and the smiles on their faces, their warm responses in prayer and appreciation, the excitement of children seeing and running after goats, fowls and visiting streams and rivers and all of those, were exceptionally pleasing and memorable.
The joy of taking the children to farms, showing them that yams and cassava do not grow on branches of trees, like mangoes and apples, but that they have to be dug up from the soil.
Our stay may not be more than a week. The size of your pocket and/ or the nature of your job and children’s school programmes might determine the duration of your holiday.
It would be very difficult or near impossible to return to school and the children have no stories to tell or enough experience to pen down a few beautiful essays.
I’m praying seriously and I hope you join me in this prayer to have back this type of experience!
We can achieve it by participating in the governance process of our various states, by contributing intellectual ideas on Dozie Igbo platform. We can do it by sharing our social capitals with our fellow Igbo, family and community members.
We can achieve it by supporting one another to rise from joblessness to employment, we can do it by just contributing to payment of school fees for that small orphan or indigent child, who could become a Peter Obi or Charles Soludo tomorrow.
We can do it by saying NO to bad governance and by sponsoring men of goodwill and good conscience to run the affairs of our society.
We can do it! And when we do, envy will disappear, jealousy will die, that thing we call witchcraft will no more be, siblings and children from polygamous homes would find love among themselves and then we would discover we are indeed on the right path to IDOZI ala IGBO. Ndewo nu!
Patrick Mokogwu is a Chartered Insurer/Student of Law. He wrote from Abuja.
