A salute to my
mother’s life
By
Okey Ndibe (E-mail: okeyndibe@gmail.com)
My mother turned 83 last Friday, April 18. I’d like to pause to celebrate
this most inspiring woman, love personified, a splendid gift God gave to my
four siblings and me.
My wife, children and I called her and joyfully croaked “Happy Birthday”
to a woman who is entitled to more gratitude than I’ll ever be able to
muster. When we finished, she let out that energetic laughter of hers that gives
me a glimpse into the youthfulness of her spirit. My youngest child then serenaded
her with two numbers on the piano. Her delight was palpable.
It’s impossible to talk about my mother without talking about my father
in the same breath. I wrote on the dedication page of my novel that God flattered
me with noble parents. That sentiment was not expressed lightly. I have written
elsewhere about my parents’ marriage, but that story bears repeating.
My parents married in 1958 when Father was thirty-six, my mother thirty-three.
Father’s relatives had been scandalized when he revealed the woman he
desired as a wife. They told him the woman was too old, and that she would not
be able to have children. My father then made the astonishing response that
he didn’t care, that he still wanted the woman because he loved her.
My mother actually had two counts against her. One was her age. The other was
that she had gone to a teacher’s college and was a tough teacher. In an
era when the “safest” wife was a housewife, a woman who held a job—and
who had a reputation as a steely disciplinarian of male and female students
alike—was to be avoided like a plague. That was held against my mother.
For some of my father’s relatives, his talk about love was just bunkum.
For them, the first thing a sensible man ought to be concerned with was his
wife’s ability to give him children. Once a woman could bear children,
all else would fall in place. My father insisted on starting off with love—and
having other things added.
When a few of his relatives threatened not to go with him to my mother’s
relatives, Father told them he was willing to go alone—if it came to that.
That served unambiguous notice that he was in deadly earnest. Reluctantly, they
“escorted” him to marry the woman on whose account he was willing
to “lose his senses.”
Mother’s life has been a splendid string of surprises. She surprised those
who said she was too old to bear children by having five of us, four boys and
one daughter.
Throughout their marriage, until my father’s death in 1995, they took
seriously the dictum that a married couple became one. One day, I overheard
a man who told my father there was a secret he wanted to whisper to him, but
asked that my father first swear not to relay the confidence to any other person,
including his wife. My father tersely told the man to keep his whisper, that
there was nothing he wouldn’t share with his wife.
They lived everyday, father and mother, like young lovers who just met each
other. They exchanged love letters. They ate their meals together, unless one
was out of town. They held hands and took walks in the evening. At any given
moment, each could tell you where the other was—with stunning precision.
Early converts to Catholicism, they woke up every morning at 5:30, said the
rosary, and then went to Mass. This one still amazes me. They cleaned their
teeth morning and night with the same chewing stick!
They strived to give us, their children, the highest moral training. They didn’t
just preach at us, they lived out, before our eyes, everything that they taught
us. They were never materially rich, but they modeled for us what it means to
hold oneself to noble moral standards. Throughout our formative years, my parents
always drummed it into us that their job as parents would have been well done
when they would be able to boast that none of their children would know that
something was wrong or evil and yet do it.
When my father took ill and began his last dance, Mother was by his side every
step of the way. One night, as one of my brothers drove home from Enugu where
my father had gone for treatment, armed robbers threw a huge log in the path
of the car. It shuddered and came to a stop. The robbers emerged from the darkness
and robbed them. They snatched my mother’s handbag, ignoring her pleas
that it contained the medication for her husband who was sprawled in the backseat,
too sick to respond to their ordeal. At the end of the robbery, the car would
not start. My mother, then close to seventy, helped my brother to push the car
for about a mile until they found a house near the expressway. They knocked
on the stranger’s door. The homeowner, a good Samaritan, welcomed them
to spend the night at his home.
In the years since her husband—my father—died, Mother has loomed
even larger in my consciousness and in that of my siblings. She has continued
to provide us with a center, a moral anchor, a source of inspiration. In our
father’s absence, Mother has remained a symbol of love and strength, a
moral compass.
My life’s task, and my siblings’ as well, is to strive to be worthy
of the moral formation we received from our parents. In all we do, it is our
bounden duty to do credit to the clay out of which we were moulded. As I celebrate
Mother’s birthday and the excellence of her life, I am reminded of my
duty to give my own children the benefit of the kind of upbringing that my siblings
and I were lucky to receive.
On behalf of my siblings and cousins and all who have been touched by you, I
salute you, Sweet Mother. I call you by your well-earned praise name: Ngala!
You are, indeed, worthy of pride.
From a son humbled by your grace and the generosity of your many enduring gifts,
I say: May you remain as warm and vibrant as the sun. May you continue to shine
as an example to us and to others who meet you every day. May you, Mother, see
many more birthdays.
Ibrahim Tahir’s dangerous prescription
Last week, this newspaper carried a news report titled, Probe with caution,
Tahir warns lawmakers. The paper reported that Ibrahim Tahir, a former minister
and conservative intellectual gadfly, was disturbed by the sewage of scandals
from the House of Representatives’ ongoing probe of the $16 billion former
president Olusegun Obasanjo squandered in the power sector with nothing to show
for it.
The paper quoted Tahir as likening the power probe to “running a three-legged
race in a track that is strewn with eggs.” He suggested that perhaps “you
shouldn’t run the race at all and probably leave situations and give the
state its peace.”
To be sure, the so-called probe has been conducted so far in a less than impressive
way. It has been organized as spectacle and packaged as a form of perverse entertainment.
What it has lacked is a sense that the nation’s political leadership understands
the gravity of the scam that was foisted on the nation in the name of improving
power supply. Some of the ex-ministers who appeared before the House committee
were permitted to turn their session into a public relations bonanza. Instead
of hanging their heads in shame and displaying sobriety, they swept into the
public hearing with their cheerleaders in tow. One or two of them even seized
the opportunity to lecture the committee and Nigerians.
Still, this financial scandal is so serious it could bring down the roof of
the political scandal we have misnamed democracy. As a cousin of mine told me
over the phone, albeit with a measure of exaggeration, $16 billion is enough
money to start a nation from scratch and make it work. And the former president
apparently handed that healthy sum to a few favourite gluttons.
How Nigeria deals with this scam—and such other affronts as the sale of
the Ajaokuta Steel Complex, the sale of government-owned houses in Abuja and
Lagos, the disposition of oil blocks—may well determine whether our so-called
nascent democracy is going to go belly-up—or survive for another season.
What is Tahir’s prescription? He counseled the National Assembly to handle
the power probe “with the greatest delicacy.” He then continued:
“I am one of those who do not believe in corruption. If Nigeria is really
serious about fighting corruption, we should copy China and the Soviet Union
of those days in terms of the punishment they meted out to economic saboteurs.
I feel sad, but there’s a way to deal with corruption. Everyone handling
the fight against corruption should do it with restitution in mind rather than
humiliation and public disgrace. It should be done quietly, privately and in
the most discrete manner. Handle those who represented your country’s
image with care and make sure you recover what has been made away with. You
do not, in the process of cleaning up, become the swimmer in glue.”
Tahir’s posture struck me as confused—and an attempt to confuse.
He seemed to suggest that Nigeria’s choice was either to summarily execute
economic saboteurs, Soviet Union-style, or learn to deodorize the stinky image
of the nation’s powerful thieves. Nigerians’ money has been wasted,
at best, or stolen, at worst, but Tahir’s concern is with addressing the
issue in a secret conclave. “It should be done in camera,” he suggested.
“Make it a committee matter and try and clear the gallery and do this
thing in private and issue statements on what you’ve found in such a manner
that it does not shake the tree, not to talk of digging out its roots. If you
are sure something has been taken and if you have proof, make sure it is returned.
The consideration should be the safety of the nation.”
There is no argument: The issue is precisely the safety of the nation.
And a nation survives—deserves to survive—only when it is built
on the foundations of justice in all its ramifications and animated by the best
corporate interests of its citizens. Nigerian jails overflow with pickpockets
and small-time felons who languish, all-but-forgotten. Is it not bizarre, then,
that we should seek to protect the image of our cabal of robbers robed in agbada
and suits and who answer to the name of leaders? Even when they contrive to
violate the tenets of justice and to serve their greed at the expense of the
citizenry? The trouble is not that the perpetrators of economic perfidy are
being stripped naked. It is that Nigerians don’t feel certain that criminal
charges will be brought against those who sabotage their nation’s aspirations.
Tahir’s prescription is the wrong one. Individuals who betray public trust
have no right to seek protection from public humiliation. This is the people’s
business, and we keep the business of unmasking them in the public domain.