Nine years ago, Anthony Ibe Onyearugbulem, who was a military administrator of Ondo State and later of Edo State, died under befuddling circumstances inside a Kaduna hotel, at the age of 47.
The incident, a rude shock to his immediate family, friends and associates, also eternally silenced his aspiration to become the civilian governor of Imo, his homestate, having launched out campaigns on the platform of All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). His words of existential intellectuality are today cropped as an epitaph while also ruing on the annoying misfortune of political spirogyra that whirl in space, for the Nigerian state. Sitting upright in an arm-chair nestled amid hibiscuses and other sweet-smelling flowers, this naval officer would stare at the press corps, of which I counted, and speak words that were at best surreal but which upon serious reflection, addressed psychic dislocations in most Nigerian mentalities.
A likely telepath of historical fecundity, Onyearugbulem’s steaming hot, extra-terrestrial intellectual endowment made him an enigma, amid the political dysfunctions spurned by the Sani Abacha military dictatorship, to which the former lived to entrench at Ondo, his duty post. His eyes bulging as would a tipsy sailor’s, this military administrator, in the velvety of his stylishly baritone voice, would say, “Where are the Inca, where are the Maya? They are no more. In the next 200 years, If the black race continues in this culture of mental idleness, we will be no more.”
I think he also referred to the Kryptonians in his gale of rhetoric; apparently since he spoke with the nosedeep accent of a ‘been-to’, for a local that I was, it would require straining the ears. If he did, he was in a way talking of the supersonic feat of the magic beings called the Kryptonian, which despite having special supra-human abilities is today, no more in race. That is even folklorist.
How about the Inca, a pre-Columbian American empire that reigned between 1438 and 1533? Despite its great political and economic attainments of the era, which tended to serve as precursor shadows of modern American prosperity, the empire ultimately crumbled, while its peoples were scattered abroad.
In educational attainments too, earlier had come the Maya of the Mesoamerican civilization with great obsessions for the development of written language, art, architecture, mathematics and astronomical systems.
This race had come to world renown in 200 BCE (Before Common Era) and reached the crescendo of its fame in 900 CE (Common Era). What Onyearugbulem was saying is that, ultimately, these great achieving races, which despite the Olympian heights they respectively attained and ought to at least maintain own Sovereignty like the Vatican of His Papacy, are nowhere to be found in the modern era. How much less a generation of the indolent? His words today ring a warning bell for Nigeria.
Those words should whiff past Aso Rock, the seat of government in Abuja, that Nigeria, if at least to exist for close to a Century like the Inca (and please perish the thought of existing for seven Centuries as the Maya), needs to look homewards and develop its potentials. The agricultural sector has not been able to afford job opportunities for grossly five per cent of the nation’s population despite having a Federal Ministry of Agriculture and states’ agric. ministries.
The industrial sector, if not totally dead, is no doubt in the throes of death as the energy sector is epileptic and too weak to power the industries. As Nigeria remains a consumer and not a producer country, thus dipping the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) index, how can it manage a population of disparate ethnicities, religions and ethereal beliefs, mostly lain prostrate by hunger and the killing despondency of the want of what to do?
Anger can only come in denouement, welling up seeming insoluble crises and pointing to the dismemberment of the state, far beyond whether the leadership remains or is unseated. Perhaps, Onyearugbulem’s involuntary clairvoyance in his perusal of the black race’s future, albeit sharpening rhetoric, would make meanings in the ears of the Nigerian leaders. Sleep well, fine officer.