Today is the birthday anniversary of a classmate; a conservative radical and revolutionary; an activist; a progressive politician; a lawyer; an academic; a sociologist; a Doctor of Philosophy; a fighter of worthy causes; and a man who is an enigma in every ramification.
I know him so well because our paths crossed almost fifty years ago, when we were starry-eyed boys entering secondary school, swept by innocence and totally oblivious of what the future held for us.
Even though we grew up in a country just emerging from a bloody and tragic civil war — a war that disrupted the lives of our parents in particular and the country in general — we triumphed. Notwithstanding the stumbles and setbacks we suffered here and there, we rose like the phoenix, shook off the lethargy of our environment, and made a success of our lives.
Papa DC Enamhe, congratulations on attaining 60 — your Diamond Jubilee and your entry into the club of sexagenarians — in an environment where the average life span is less than 45 and where hundreds of our contemporaries have since gone to the great beyond to enjoy the perpetual eternal rest that awaits us all whenever it pleases our Creator.
We are hard fellows, men of justice, who fight for everyone around us to our own detriment, unmindful of the dire consequences of fighting for others in a society brimming with crass opportunists.
I remember how, as boys in Mary Knoll College, Okuku, we conspired like legendary conspirators to fight what we believed was an act of consistent and persistent oppression by those bigger than us. Our audacity and courage would never allow us to see something we believed was wrong and walk away, close our eyes, and leave it unchallenged.
This rebelliousness and revulsion against the establishment, against oppression, and this quest for social justice is genetically ingrained in the veins of Papa DC. It manifested as early as when we were in Class One in 1977, when students of Mary Knoll College, enraged and peeved by the incompetence and maladministration of its Principal, Mr. E. E. Okon, revolted in the famous “Okon Must Go” protest march. That act ruffled feathers in a school established by the Catholic Church to train and prime its students to be pro-establishment and not to rock the boat.
That same rebellion against acts of oppression by senior students later led to a serious crisis between the students of Mary Knoll College and the students of the School of Basic Studies, which Mary Knoll College was then temporarily hosting, and ultimately led to the decision by the Government of the old Cross River State to relocate the School of Basic Studies from Mary Knoll to Akamkpa.
Leaders are naturally born. God bestows leadership at the point of conception in their mother’s womb and instils charismatic traits of the kind the German sociologist Max Weber wrote about — charismatic authority as a distinct form of legitimate rule, alongside traditional and legal-rational authority. Papa DC is one such leader. To that extent, in 1981, when both of us conspired to lead the rebellion that resulted in the clash against SBS students, he was the one nominated by the Mary Knoll students to speak at the Divisional Police Station in Ogoja, where the police had rounded up both combatants to resolve the matter.
That trait which you incubated in those heady, innocent days has guided, influenced, and shaped your entire life to this Diamond moment.
Many happy returns to a worthy sexagenarian.
@ Okoi Obono-Obla
Disclaimer: The opinion expressed in this article is strictly that of the author, Chief Okoi Obono-Obla and does not represent Theluminenews, its agent or the organisation the author works for/with.