Let me join teeming Nigerians to wish you a Happy Birthday. I narrowly missed your cake cutting at Grand View Complex (PRONACO office), Magodo, on the 13th.
As there is no stopping a man with passion for a mission, I did eat of the holy cake on the 14th and ever since I have eaten the “forbidden fruit,’ I am consumed with desire and constipation of ideas to get through to you.
With the risk of being labeled rude, I dare ask, what is Soyinka doing with PRONACO?
Do we mortals deserve the active presence of Soyinka, Pa Enahoro and the other trusted and tested veterans of Nigerian struggle in shaping of a new Nigeria?
Isn’t it failure on their part that after years of selfless service and untold denial, these old men do not have a worthy successor?
Despite the ferocious insistence of Soyinka that The National Association Of Seadogs is a “liberation” minded confraternity, , we are yet to see the soldiers from this elite company produce a General. Or are they wrapped in the folly of hero worship?
Or are there Stars and Moon among them whom the Sun has eclipsed? Or is Shoyinka an insecure father, who would rather hide behind a will to shape his sons than actively tender the veins and direct them when they stray?
Or is Soyinka enjoying the cheer of market women, not knowing that the flute player has changed rhythm?
I grew up knowing that Nigeria got her independence from the colonial masters. And among the paper warlords, is Pa Enahoro.
From 1957 to date is too long for a General to remain on the battlefront. Is it that the razor is blunt or the barber is half-baked? If for all these donkey years, Enahoro’s dream of a better Nigeria has not come, he should allow younger generation to fashion out their vIsion in accordance with the dance step prevalent in their own time.
One of your “sane” generation men, Achebe, dazzled us when he wrote a letter to one of you,(Obasanio) last year denouncing state of the Nation.
But like the snuff of a contented old man blown by wind, we have not seen the action to march his inflammatory letter.
Seeing you at PRONACO women’s forum seminar, one could not but feel pity for your generation. For you to have defied the rain, it shows that your generation has a demon of failure to exorcise before joining the company of great patriots in the celestial!
Unfortunately, my generation is still carried away with the joy of snapping pictures with relics rather than plough into the work ahead.
Sir, it grieves me that your generation that ought to define the boundaries of the farm land, is still deforesting!
Who will tell the grandchildren bed time stories of our heroes past? To whom do we go for divination when our chief priest has joined the mortals! Who will pour libation when our elders rise early to farm?
Ché Orinatumba,
Owerri.
Nov. 2005.
