OWERRI—The unbridled
quest for money and the attitude of “only money counts” in all Igbo affairs,
came under severe attack, yesterday, when the Catholic Bishop of
Nsukka, Most
Rev. Professor Godfrey Igwebuike Onah, delivered the 33rd Public Lecture of the Federal University of Technology,
Owerri, FUTO, titled “Intellectualism and the Development of a People.”
According to the
fiery Catholic cleric, the toll Igbo people have paid in values for this, has
been enormous, adding that money and what money can buy seem to be all that
matter to Ndigbo. “Even our proverbial egalitarianism and republicanism seem to
have disappeared as the super rich became the owners of the community and their
praise singers remind those who were in doubt that the community or town,
indeed belong to some people”, Professor Onah lamented. Tracing how the Igbo
degenerated to the present level, the Bishop said that before the
Nigeria-Biafra war, the intellectual was the pride of the Igboman, pointing out
that it was a pride to be referred to as doctor’s mother or father. “Then came
the war, the blockade, the starvation, the surrender, the humiliation and the
economic emasculation. Despite the beautiful slogan of no victor, no
vanquished, there was and still is, a clear plan to crush the presumably
rebellious Igbo spirit and, thus, shatter the myth of the resilient Igboman”,
Onah said. Continuing, the erudite cleric recalled that at the end of the war,
the foremost battle of Ndigbo was for survival in a Nigeria that neither wanted
them in its fold nor would let them go, “having been stripped to the bare skin
of all the material wealth they had acquired before the war by the post war
Nigerian government”. According to the cleric, a careful scrutiny of the way most political office holders were
selected in Igboland and what they do with the common patrimony when they are
in office, will confirm that Ndigbo have collectively sold their birthrights to
those who have the hard currency to spray. “Before long, the only money counts
attitude found its way into the precincts of the churches and, through
harvests, bazaars and the unending fund raising programmes for the innumerable church
projects, it gradually moved into the sanctuary”, Onah said. The Bishop also
reasoned that from the sanctuaries, the money virus exploded like a petrol tank
on fire, spilling it’s content into massive open air rallies, crusades and
fanfares of the miracle industries and mega markets, where the insecure wealthy
class, the distressed youths and miserable victims of the reckless pillage of
our national wealth by an unscrupulous political class collectively fund the
extravagance of some self-appointed redeemers.
