BEFORE I finally settled in my native Awomukwu in Ikwuano Local Government Area of Abia State to complete my primary education at Awomukwu Central School, I had lived for about one year in Amizi. The nearby Amizi is my mother’s native community. That was where I had the real first taste of life as Igbo, in a typical Igbo setting, including a one-year stint at Amizi Oloko Community School. My mother had taken me with her to her father’s compound when she left Ibadan to the village to supervise the building of our home in Awomukwu. I was uprooted from Immanuel College Primary School, Orita UI, Ibadan and replanted in Amizi and thereafter, Awomukwu. I was a roving village boy, but I was not a rolling stone.
My experiences in that tripartite upbringing are still part of me. I can confidently tell of my friends in Amizi, Awomukwu and Ibadan. We still interact from the days of Immanuel College Primary School and Samonda; Amizi and Amizi Oloko Community School and Awomukwu and Awomukwu Central School. One of my classmates in Awomukwu is Chima Ngadi, a published author. I also have my friends from Holy Ghost Secondary Technical School, Umuahia. I remember walking to Holy Ghost, Umuahia every morning with Ebere Ohaeri, from Ohokobe Ndume. I also remember some of my other classmates and the nicknames we gave them, especially Chike Obi. Chike Obi came to school nearly every week with a new school bag. We assumed that his parents were traders in travel bags. Because he would come to school with a new bag each week, we named him ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. He was unlucky that we were reading that legendary satirical book by Jonathan Swift as one of our class literature texts at that time. Some of our teachers too were not spared. They were pasted with some uncanny nicknames, like that of our Government teacher who ended up being more known as “Nine-Fi” because he had one of his fingers off, than what he did with us in the classroom. I have forgotten the government teacher’s name, but I can never forget the huge Mr. Isaac Amah, whom we ended up rechristening “Mr. Malinger” because he would always flog us for ‘malingering’ – a word we saw as out of this world.
It’s easy for me to talk about all these because there are no grey areas in my trajectory, nor are there hitched events at different times which had crept into unreachable orifices of my personal history. The kite does not hide in its flight. I saw the same kind of thing in a former governor of old Oyo State and first class mathematician, Dr. Victor Omololu Olunloyo. Supremely brilliant and hilarious Dr. Olunloyo would gladly describe his time at the Government College, Ibadan. He would hand you documents and books to read particular pages and leave you to decipher by yourself that he was not bluffing about his gorgeous past. I read from one of the documents in his impressive library that he was a fantastic talent in Cricket, and that fact was highlighted by King’s College, Lagos as they prepared for a cricket match with the Government College boys from Ibadan.
So, if you have it, you can flaunt it if you may. Some hold this opinion in definite terms: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” When the skilled acrobat says it is not yet time to perform the day’s show, he’s holding back because he relishes and appreciates the value of the spectators’ applause.
It is the belief of some people that it is easier to tell your story when you’re younger. Edmund Goose advised in his autobiography, ‘Father and Son’, that it’s good to write your biography when you’re still young. Goose, in the book he said was “A study of two temperaments”, holds that when you write you story earlier, you would have a lot in your memory that are still alive, which would form parts of the story and which would be useful to the society – to humanity.
So, when some of my classmates at Immanuel College Primary School, Ibadan like Kola Ojo, Chief Olusina Moses Adebayo and Mrs. Oluwatoyin Comfort read this or hear about their names being mentioned in a newspaper article, they would get curious, then smile and afterwards affirm the authenticity of what Sam Nwaoko is musing over. I can also gladly trace the genealogy of my social life up to the University of Ibadan, where I met Professor Peter Olamakinde Olapegba, Chief Demola Adebayo and Chief Olusola Olaniyan as roommates in B48, Kuti Hall. I am also confident that these people would remember that there was a Sam Nwaoko in B48 as we all studied hard for a future we have found ourselves in, today. I can also confidently aver that ‘Tunji Ayorinde, who is a cleric of note today in The Apostolic Church, will also remember our days in Nigeria’s Premier University.
So, what is the point in all of these? Well, it is because I do not know why it is so difficult to define a man. It is confounding that just one man has presented a variety of problems for the Nigerian polity as the country limps towards another political dispensation. It is affirmed that no matter how long a rope might be, it must have a point where it started from. Why are we so blind to morals and truth as Nigerians? A story was told of a retiring employee in one of the many oil servicing companies in Nigeria’s hydro-carbon capital, Port Harcourt who was eulogized by all the speakers at the retirement ceremony for his honesty. The visiting expatriate-head of the company got curious because everyone that spoke about the retiring man, from one of the South-South states, touched on his honesty and uprightness. The expatriate, in his speech at the event asked why everyone was saying the same thing about honesty and the man. He asked: “Is honesty so scarce here that it has to be this celebrated?”
Since Nigeria does not have “distinctive and inseparable characteristics” that stand us out as a nation, should we not begin now to cultivate one? Chief Obafemi Awolowo noted that these “distinctive and common characteristics of a nation are common language, common culture and sometimes common ancestry.” Perhaps, the only things that could be said to have lumped Nigerians together is the English language and our skin colour. Otherwise, if we shared the characteristics enumerated by Chief Awolowo, we would not be singing “my thief is not as big as your thief; your fraudster is bigger than my fraudster.”
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