Former President, Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Professor Olu Obafemi
On a series of eight consecutive Fridays (which, primarily, terminated last Friday) on Professor Olu Obafemi’s well-grounded educational, truthful, philosophical, solid, comforting and un-comforting realities about the state of our public universities, it may seem strange that I am not immediately allowing my readers to give us echoes of their fascinating impressions and contributions and questions to the strikingly stimulating presentations.
[ad]
Of course, Olu Obafemi will be delighted to have the echoes with their hints and allusions and sensations and praises and hammers. But these can wait. The columnist must demonstrate from time to time his awareness of the growing division of labour. As a first-grade patriotic patriot he must not cease to be himself.
On Saturday, April 27, 2024, two events, which I considered (and still consider) as significantly private engagements, happened in Benin City. A peculiarly peculiar Nigerian patriot and labour leader and revolutionary playwright in the person of Jonathan Ihonde, an octogenarian, who died sometime earlier than April 27 and was buried before the said date, was being mourned and honoured at the same time by his blood relatives, friends, erstwhile colleagues and associates with “A Day of Tributes.”
The other event on the same day and almost about the same time was a celebration of the 89th birthday of a very quiet but a very sound and profound mystic – for want of a better term presently to describe him – of the Way of Truth. Incidentally, Sahaji Jacob Oshodi and Jonathan Ihonde are/were Awoists – the former at a super high spiritual level and the latter within the confine and confidence of high-stake revolutionary politics.
[ad]
Both of them were for many years colleagues at the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), Benin City where they statutorily retired from active service. Again, they both had their respective upbringing and working careers from their Ibadan (Western Nigeria) surroundings before they as Edo indigenes and citizens, moved in the fabulous nineteen sixties to the Mid-West, whose capital was Benin City.
I am not interested in any comparison of both men, one of whom has just gone from us, as already indicated. Both of them became my cherished elderly friends later, much later, in my life – essentially because of each one’s willingness at every time to let go of one’s own self for the common good. I was far away from Edo State and Benin City at the date and times scheduled for the two events.
[ad]
Yet I found the nerve and time to elevate myself to attend both engagements. I honoured the glorious memory of the revolutionary playwright Jonathan Ihonde who created the highly popular Hotel De Jordan series on our national television in the nineteen seventies long before the little baby Nollywood came into existence and our consciousness.
Today’s column is, however, specifically for Jacob Oshodi, a Living Spiritual Master who has attained universality from his Nigerian surroundings and specificities which are not totally fixed in Benin, or, better, African spiritual modernity. Indeed, his spiritual mastery and endeavours extend to Tibet, America, Europe, and beyond. Since I knew him we had shared a lot of usefully significant sensations, especially about our country, every facet of it, in common.
His specific gift and task, his successes in what he has done and achieved, and he is still doing and achieving, on behalf of mankind, are things that are more than things I don’t wish to dwell on – more than what I am doing or getting into now. My spiritual mind is too meagre to penetrate his larger design which he was shaped and pre-destined to frame from time to time and embrace in accordance with God’s cosmic purpose.
There is nothing that goes on in the corridors of power anywhere in the globe that he does not know about. This is not an exaggeration. We, at different times, had had our political and spiritual differences. But we always in the end needed to embrace what we needed to embrace on the basis of our recognition of the confidence in the identity of each one’s self.
[ad]
Clearly, I always yielded what I needed to yield, and deferred what I needed to defer to this Living Spiritual Master who is absorbed fully in God’s Wisdom. That is why he is a Sahaji. In my understanding of the little and much that I understand relating to his relationship with us as a country and nation, he is an articulator of patriotic spiritualism and sensitive, secular consciousness.
I don’t know, to cite one example, how many of us will still remember what President Goodluck Jonathan went through thoroughly and thoroughly at the hands of his opponents, enemies and Boko Haram. He was to be driven bleakly and painfully from Aso Rock as a prelude to a boisterous change of government. Sahaji Jacob Oshodi knew the implication of what was coming to us as a modern postcolonial democracy. A man of insight, he did what he needed to do.
Despite my un-healthy feelings and sensations towards President Jonathan, I joined the spiritual train the Sahaji put together from Nigeria to Tibet and America to save Dr. Jonathan and Nigeria from a fatally fatal situation of bewildering proportions. On the D-Day, Boko Haram had a sparkling time in Abuja but the daredevils could not oust Jonathan as they fully wished in their red-hot iron minds.
[ad]
What Rosicrucians call the art/act of Medifocus, and Way of Truth adherents call voyage of Contemplation was at work all through to ward off what was warded off. Thereafter several physical attempts were made to get to Jonathan to pull his ears. The Spiritual Masters did not approve any physical visit to him from their end. But messages got to him concerning his attitude and style of governance.
One more thing out of numerous others: Dr. Jonathan was un-necessarily afraid to do what he needed to do with the national conference he set up. If he had hearkened to the imperative voice of the Master who was engaged to administer to him, but was forbidden to compel him against his free but un-willing mind, Dr. Jonathan would have gone down in history as your country my country our country’s legendary president from the front. As a spiritual rule, the Supreme Spiritual Masters don’t go beyond the boundary of any political personage or leader’s destiny or fate.
Because Dr. Jonathan did not want to be rescued from the cliché of having ruled and led Nigeria as President, he was allowed to remain what he wanted to remain as – in this wise General Buhari similarly shared his fate. There is no credit in living as president or ex-president. The credit is in being able to specify experience solid achievement-wise. Presidents come and go. As it is with presidents and ex-presidents so it is with governors and ex-governors.
[ad]
These reminiscences may appear fortuitous and insignificant to the non-initiate. But to the initiate anywhere and everywhere, a president (or governor) that does not have the right attitude to what he must do sparklingly for the advancement of the people and country foolishly fails; he is a foolish failure.
Is President Bola Tinubu reading this? Are his acolytes and allies reading this? Do I give them (and our fellow compatriots) taciturn Sahaji Jacob Oshodi’s insight and prophecy concerning this presidency? If I do so President Tinubu will find no ground under his feet.
Meanwhile, let me give our president the following quotation from Marcus Aurelius: “Never value the advantages derived from anything involving breach of faith, loss of self-respect, hatred, suspicion, or execration of others, insincerity, or desire for something which has to be veiled and curtained.” This is straight from the heart of a spiritual emperor who was a spiritual emperor.
Now without saying more than I have been ‘commanded’ and inspired to say, I can say with solemnity thus, in closing this: Happy eighty-ninth birthday, Living Spiritual Master Jacob Oshodi. Stay long and ever blessed in our spiritual capital and firmament, and consciousness. You are a spiritual treasure and delight. Happy eighty-ninth birthday that we are still celebrating up to now!
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.
[ad]