INTERVIEW: Regional Police And Insecurity In Igboland

Dave Umahi, Ebonyi State Governor. Image: Facebook 

BY CHRIS ONUOHA

Governor Dave Umahi of Ebonyi State is also the Chairman of the South-East Governors’ Forum. Umahi, in this interview, speaks on insecurity in the country and the agitation to have regional police in the South-East just like the South-West has Operation Amotekun.

Can you tell us about your conversation with the Inspector General of Police? Was it what you were proposing that you got or what did you agree?
Because of the heightened insecurity in every part of the country, people are agitating for different types of protection. And the summation of all these agitations is that people want state police. Governors took the oath of office to uphold the Constitution. So, it becomes very difficult to have the governors do the wish of the people in terms of giving them what they are asking for in different forms. But we had a discussion with the Inspector General of Police (IGP). Let me commend him (IGP) as a professional officer and very committed to his job. We took the IGP through all the agitations. What our people expect from the meeting and we were able to reach a number of agreements. First, the IGP introduced what community policing is all about. When we listened to him, it fitted into what we are doing in the various states in the South-East, but people tend to lose confidence in security agents, although not their fault. Because there is heightened insecurity and the personnel are not enough, so when you hear about community policing, you just believe that it is another kind of police outfit. We agreed on a number of things. In our different states, since 2015, we have ministries of security, and we have laws that back up our community security outfits. Like we have ‘Operation Kpochapu’ in Ebonyi, we also have Neighbourhood Watch in Ebonyi and Enugu. We have Gatekeepers in Abia, herdsmen committees in Imo, forest guards and others. These outfits were all backed up by law. The IGP told us that community policing is community-based, that he was not going to select the personnel and they were going to be independent of the IGP or the commissioner of police. They handle their affairs perfectly well. One sticking and very important aspect of community policing is that they will have the ability to arrest and arraign but will not detain. 

But one interesting thing you said about what you are proposing and what you have on the ground are similar. You said you had a conversation with a former deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, who said community policing as being proposed by the IG is a distraction. He said it is more like police PR when we should be talking about building peoples relations. And that’s not what people are talking about. He called it a fraud. What do you make of what he said?
Senator Ike Ekweremadu is one of our leaders, and I wouldn’t want to comment against what he said, but I want to speak in line with what we heard from the IGP. If what we heard is what it is, I can assure you that community policing is an enhancement of what we are already doing because what we are doing is backed by law and community policing is going to be domesticated in each of the states, and also backed by law. Where we don’t have alternatives, you have to find a way to protect lives and property. What we are doing is giving comfort to our people, making sure that we have peace in the various communities. If we now come up with community policing, it is an added advantage because it is backed by the Constitution. At the local level, we will now be able to enhance the security situation. They can arrest and arraign and will not also go to the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) with cases. 

I find it interesting when you say you were able to reach some compromise with the IGP. In other words, what was the point of departure concerning the things you wanted initially, that you have to come to a middle ground to achieve? 

The idea is that our people want a security outfit to protect them because of heightened insecurity now. In other words, the IGP was able to convince us that if there is no state police which there won’t be unless the Constitution is changed, community police will enhance community security. The people want to state police. When people talk about regional security, there is nothing like that. Regional security is above state police. Even ‘Amotekun’ is not a regional police. Some of our people just believe that we have one central security outfit and then a central command. The Constitution doesn’t allow that. What we started in July 2018 in South-East prompted the South-East security committee and what we agreed in Enugu which is our central home is that the committee will be saddled with the job of intelligence gathering. We have our ex-servicemen and communication gadgets there. These people get information and coordinate the local vigilante to ensure that they are trained. But when Ohaneze kicked, we held another meeting with all the stakeholders of the South-East and said we can improve on that security committee. 

But we heard of those flying the kite of ‘Ogbunigwe’ outfit before South-West came out with Amotekun. Was it a thing that came out from South-East governors? 

That is personal opinion because everybody is entitled to his own opinion. Everybody is thinking about how our lives can be protected, because you don’t know who may be the next victim. There is nothing like a regional outfit, not in any part of the country. I don’t see Amotekun as a regional security. It is a cooperation outfit. We have a similar outfit that is in the making. I have read through the Amotekun law and one interesting thing is where they say ‘we apply to the IGP for firearms’. And I heard the police PRO saying, ‘if you have to apply for firearms, it has to conform to the law of the country’. There are two kinds of firearm license; one is issued by Mr President and another one is by the IGP. When you look through the law, there is no common law for Amotekun. What we have is a similar law. 

But what is different between regional cooperation and regional outfit? 

The difference is that in the regional outfit, you have an outfit, postings, and financial purse managed by one central command. But that is not what they have, rather it is an enhancement of regional cooperation that, if there is a problem in Osun for example, under their law, people from Ogun can come to help to show that they are one people. That is what we are having in the South-East. We have not jettisoned the idea. It is in the making. Our attorney generals are working on our papers based on peculiarities. When we finish, what we are going to have that will bind all of us together is a unit that will be centred in Enugu. This committee will coordinate the security outfits we have in our various states. We know what the IGP told us about community policing, and if the template comes out and we found it a departure from that agreement we reached, both the South-East governors and people will not embrace community policing. 

You did state that community police fits into what the governors are doing in the South-East and others. Can you expatiate? 

Saying that community policing fits into the local security in our states, and people are losing confidence is not together. The right thing to say is losing confidence in the security in our states. We are trying to do what we can to restore that confidence. Why is it that what we are doing is not enough for them? You cannot confront a terrorist without arms. That’s why they feel that our various security outfits that do not bear arms will not adequately help the people. They are looking at a people-based security arrangement that can assist the people. For the community policing to bear arms, it is only the IGP that can answer the question, because he has the power to issue certain kind of license to this arrangement to build up confidence in the people. 

But even with the security outfits set up in the country, some have the right to apply for arms… 

That is exactly what we are working on. They are doing everything without breaking the law; to enhance the confidence in our people in the local arrangement for self-help, especially when people are helpless. The issue of community policing has been there from day one, even in the villages when groups came and barricaded the roads at certain hours of the night to ensure that late night comers were clean people. What we are saying is that we had listened to IGP who told us a number of issues that concern community policing which do not affect what we are already doing at our local level. What we are waiting for is the template that will reflect what the IGP told us. If that happens, we now embellish it in our various security outfits. We are also going to apply for firearms so as to equip the outfits. 

Different states have different security groups that comprise traffic warders, vigilantes, Neighbourhood Watch and others. If they can apply for arms within the confines of the law, what is then wrong for states to have their own police? 

South-East people support state police and restructuring as well. State police are also part of a restructuring. There are two kinds of insecurity in the country; the terrorist and internal insecurity occasioned by the kind of elections we conduct in Nigeria. Until we can sit in our homes and count election results without challenges, this kind of insecurity will definitely continue in Nigeria. Politicians are desperate people who go all out to get arms for youths and after elections when the youths’ expectations are not met, they will now turn around and use the guns to help themselves. It is a serious issue of insecurity. Let us have a proper method of election that is peculiar to our people. Another source of insecurity is when people that are elected into positions which are people-based did not sit down and consider working hard for another re-election through the favour of the people, but basing it on manipulation through the barrels of the gun and believing that they can always sustain it, it breeds poverty. Poverty is as a result of the kind of election we conduct that allows anybody to be elected again through the wrong mechanism. It is a very serious issue that we have to look at the country. The ability of the governors to protect the people is what we are doing now. What we are doing with the Ohaneze and other committees of the South-East is to sit with the attorney generals to see how it can be backed by law. Then when the template comes out, we will match it with our similar regional law. The effect is that there will be cooperation between the South-East states and the centre to ensure that when a crime is committed in Ebonyi, the security there will activate the information gadget to other states to block and apprehend the offender wherever he is within the region. 

Is the challenge of getting the states to embrace community policing a subject that has been discussed at the governors’ forum, because some governors who may feel that they might not benefit from the project may not want to push the case? 

I have not seen any governor that has come to speak about state police. Every problem creates its own solution. You cannot say that state police is going to be an answer to all our insecurity. It will have its own problems too. I think it is what our people need. There may be a lot of problems with our Constitution but we don’t have another one. We have to manage it and also assure our people that we will get there. I think the country has an opportunity with the review of the Constitution now so that we will be able to push that demand. Insecurity in the communities is peculiar to all communities. We as a nation cannot continue to fold hands and see the people being wasted. State police should be advocated for. What our leaders should be aware of is that you don’t make a law to suit only you. The political positions are ephemeral; it is not more than eight years. We have to make a law to protect the generations to come, but, sometimes, we make a law thinking that we will be there forever. We have to sit down and look at the pros and cons of state police, if that can guarantee the safety of lives and property. 

What was the outcome of the governors’ meeting with the Ohaneze? 

I must tell you that everything about security is not always discussed on the pages of the newspaper, and the South-East, in that case, could easily be misconstrued. That is why we are being very careful so that we are not misunderstood. Our people, including Ohaneze, did not quite understand the governors. But I can tell you that South-East is quite secured than any other region, with kudos to our governors who make sure it happens. We don’t have to totally tell the world about what we are doing. But about a week ago, we had a meeting with a smaller group of Ohaneze and other stakeholders in the South-East where we discussed the issue of community policing. We explained to them our deliberations especially the ability of the outfit to arrest and arraign without reference to police, backed by law. Currently, we have members from Ohaneze, South-East stakeholders and other cultural organisations together with the governors to fashion out areas of cooperation, and then come up with common law to give the people confidence which Ohaneze is happy with. But it is very unfortunate that some people grant media interviews without listening to us. I listened to one-time PDP leader in Anambra insulting governors on television which is so unfortunate. It is only in South-East that you can get that kind of trash. To say the least, we are on the same page with Ohaneze and our people. But one thing is certain; that it is very difficult for our people to get what they are looking for, in terms of security in this country without tampering with the Constitution. But when the IGP allows certain categories of outfit to bear arms, it will enhance the security of the country. 

What are the governors doing to tackle one of the challenges of security which you mentioned as poverty? 

We are doing quite a lot to enhance the fortunes of our people. But you know, the south-easterners are majorly commercial people and certain institutions of the Federal Government do hamper the ease of doing business in the South-East, such as road. Our roads are so bad and there is a very high level of demobilization from this bad state of the roads. I must thank Mr President, especially on the road projects he is doing in the South-East. I don’t seek the permission of anybody to speak the truth. But do we really need more? Yes. The roads are totally cut off. I have proposed a solution that will maintain our roads, and this involves dividing these roads from one kilometre to another by means of concession and allow the handlers to create service centres and armed men to parade the road. It is not hard to put solar-based light on the roads with communication gadgets to monitor the situation on-site. Within a section, there will be infrastructures to cater to workers and peoples’ needs. The road is basic in fighting poverty. 

Why do you have to wait for the IGP template when South-East is also coming up with theirs? 

We have our laws since 2015 backing our various security outfits and nobody has come to tell us that we have broken the law. But when the Inspector General of Police came up with a new idea, that we can integrate community police into what we are doing, we have to wait. What we are doing without bearing arms is also giving comfort to our people. The people like what we are doing, and that’s why South-East will always support state police. We are waiting for the IGP to produce the new template; to be sure that it bears what he promised it would look like.

Ebonyi Lawmaker Clears Five Undergraduates’ Fees

Chinedu Ogah, Chinedu Ogah Foundation. Image: Facebook

BY UCHENNA INYA

A member representing Ezza-South/ Ikwo in the House of Representatives, Hon. Chinedu Ogah,yesterday paid school fees for five undergraduates studying across different universities in the country.

The students are Otubo Godfrey, a Department of Computer engineering technology, HND1, Oko polytechnics, Anambra State, Agwu Mmaduka Alobu, Computer engineering technology, HND2, Oko polytechnics, Anambra State, Nwafor Kingsley student of Ebonyi State University, faculty of law, 300 level, Igwe Chika, Student of Institute of management and technology, HND1 Enugu State and Nwonu Emmanuel Onyebuchi a graduate of Ebonyi State University who was given his clearance fees by the lawmaker.

Ogah handed the school fees over to the undergraduates in his Abakaliki residence while urging them to use it for the purpose it was meant for.

He, however, asked other students with OND to go to cyber cafe and apply for INEC jobs with their OND certificates for immediate employment.

He noted that the gesture was to increase literacy in his constituency and reduce youth’s unemployment in the area.

While addressing those he paid their school fees, the APC lawmaker called on them to use it for the purpose it was meant for, promising to assist other indigent students in the constituency and urged the undergraduates to be serious in their studies to make good results.

SOURCE: NEW TELEGRAPH

ANAMBRA: Ekwulobia : A Town Craving For Attention

Ekwulobia-Nnewi Road. Image via Naira Land

BY OKEY MADUFORO

The mourners had come to claim the corpse of their dead relation but the ambulance could not enter the premises of the community general hospital due to the state of the road in the area.

They had to carry the corpse on the head to the ambulance, waiting outside before they left and stationed somewhere near the mortuary are two abandoned and disrepair hospital ambulance that would have been used to carry the corpse.

The hospital wards now look like a shadow of the past when it used to receive patients from far away towns such as Onitsha, Awka and parts of the towns in Imo State.

A truck carrying tubers of yam got stuck along the market road and a long line of vehicle traffic had been formed and commercial activities had been stopped by the traffic.

“We don’t understand if we are part of the state. Just look at our roads. This is what we go through every day because of bad road. Something should be done about our roads.

“This is the trauma the people of Ekwulobia town in Aguata Local Government Area have been facing so far and during every general election candidates frequent the area canvassing for votes.

“They make promises of providing social amenities for the rural dwellers only to practically forget those promises leaving the people to their fate”, said a concerned resident.

On that fateful day, red cap title holders in Ekwulobia came out in their numbers to take reporters round the town.

They explained that it was not a protest against the Anambra State government but a passionate call on the government to look into their plight as a people.

President General of the Ekwulobia People’s Assembly, Rev Emeka Ezike, told reporters that the Ekwulobia hospital road cuts accross Isuofia, Umuona, Igbo Ukwu down towards Onitsha road.

“The general hospital was built before the Nigerian Civil war and it used to serve so many towns in the Old Aguata which is now made up of the present Aguata, Orumba North and South Local Government Areas.

“Recently Gov Willie Obiano sent some hospital equipment to the hospital but we do not even have power in the hospital and the power generating set has parked up long ago.

“People no longer patronize the hospital anymore and most medical personnel do want to come and work here because of the hopeless state of the medical facilities.”

Chairman of Agba village in Ekwulobia town where most of the roads have fallen, Prince Peter Michael Ezekagha, lamented that the roads were first awarded twice when Prof Charles Soludo was Central Bank of Nigeria governor and later awarded again under the regime of Mr Peter Obi as governor but the contractors never mobilized to site.

“As I speak with you, over 300 houses would be washed away by flood in the coming rainy season this year if nothing is done before then.”

He noted that Obiano had announced the construction of 12 kilometres of roads in Ekwulobia and the contractors said that work would commence within six months but it is getting to a year now and nothing is on ground to show for.

Pa Hycienth Onegemechi is in his early eighties and has been doing business in the town all his life.

He recalled that Ekwulobia market used to be the commercial hub of over 70 towns accross Anambra, Imo and Abia states, being a boundary town, adding that it used to be the largest market for Palm oil, palm kenel, timber and building materials.

“We are losing patronage due to lack of facilities in the market like electricity, water supply and the terrible state of the roads within the market.

“Recently, the Anambra State government had to put street lights in some areas and we thank the governor for that but a lot of things need to be done.

“Our town is the fourth major town in Anambra State but it is yet to have that urban status. This town shares boundry with Oko town where we have the Federal Polytechnic and the home of former Vice President, the Late Dr. Alex Ekwueme.

“We voted for the governor massively during the last election and he knows that the town is an APGA town.

“Yes, we have benefited from the governor’s ‘choose your project scheme’ and we executed two and we are waiting for the third phase of the scheme but it is not enough.

“We need transformers and water scheme in our community, so that we can enjoy those amenities already provided by government.”

There appears to be signs of better days ahead following the construction of St Peters Bishop Court road, which is undergoing asphalting and according to the Special Adviser to the Governor on Community and Chieftaincy Matters, Bar Vera Okonkwo, no part of the state is being marginalized by the administration of Obian. He said that in the case of Ekwulobia town, all the projects flagged off by the governor would be completed on time.

“The state government has concluded arrangements for the physical upgrading of the General Hospital in Ekwulobia and very soon it would assume the status of a Specialist Hospital in due time,” he said.

SOURCE: NEW TELEGRAPH

Nigeria: Catholic Bishops Wearing Black To Protest Killings By The Islamic Jihadists

BY REV. FATHER AHAM NNOROM


The cowardly inaction of the Catholic bishops of Nigeria-indeed of 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide and of the 1 billion Protestants to the massacres and Islamization of their Nigerian co-religionists-is a tragedy. For decades now, even before the current nigerian administration, thousands of priests, Pastors, Seminarians, Revered Sisters, and members of the laity have be been slaughtered, beheaded, raped,  kidnapped, and driven from their homes, by Islamic groups like boko haram, isis in west Africa, and the Fulani "herdsmen" terrorists. Islamic terrorists have also destroyed thousands of churches, homes, schools, hospitals, and villages in Nigeria. And what have the bishops done?: Ask members to wear black on Ash Wednesday! What a joke!

This weird reaction is symptomatic of their usual behavior. For example, in the early 2000's, the muslims imposed sharia thus undermining the supposedly "secular" nature of the Nigerian State. And what did the Church do? Bark and no bite. It is most probable that if the Church leaders had reacted more forcefully by warning the Muslim leaders: "if you impose sharia, we will not be part of an Islamic state," the latter could have relented; and Boko Haram and its evil terrorist cousins may not have emerged. But what has been the Church's response? It's one cowardly concession after another-even to the point of accompanying top northern Islamic leaders to Europe and the US in campaigns to promote Islam as a "peaceful religion." Surely, peace is now blooming in Nigeria!

But did Pope John Paul II ask Polish Catholics to wear black in his campaign to defeat Soviet communism? Did the Polish Church not ally herself with the Labor Unions in a joint effort that toppled communism, a totalitarian ideology similar to radical Islam? And why is the papal nuncio (Pope's ambassador) in Abuja silent? Why is the Pope quiet? Why has the Catholic Church failed woefully to use her powerful multinational connections and immense diplomatic clout to save Nigerian Christians? Why are the bishops afraid to alert the church in America and Europe of the Islamic threat in Nigeria? Or are they resigned to suffer the fate of the ancient Churches of North Africa and the Middle East? Why are Nigerian and American Evangelicals the only ones who care about the massacres of Nigerian Christians? Perhaps the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury don't care, because Black African Christian lives do not matter as much as those of Christians of the Middle East, where the Church has been more outspoken and protective of her members?

It is well known that Saudi Arabia and Sunni Muslims worldwide protect the interests of fellow members in Nigeria; and Iran does the same for the Shiites. Why have the Vatican and the World Council of Churches abandoned Nigerian Christians to minimization and fulanization?

Or are they waiting for a Cardinal, an Archbishop or a bishop to be beheaded by boko haram before they act more forcefully?

Surely, Rome and Canterbury would have intervened if the Christians were engaged in mass revenge killings of Muslims-as they did in the Central African Republic.

INTERVIEW: Matias Marini Delves Into The Igbo In Feature Film

Image via Director's Note

“Shine Your Eyes’” Matias Marini on the Perfection of Squares, Portraying Sao Paulo, Brazilian Cinema

BY EMILIANO GRANADA

BERLIN (VARIETY) — Produced by Primo Filmes in co-production with MPM Film, Tabuleiro Filmes and SP Cine, “Shine Your Eyes,” warmly received at Berlin, tells the story of Amadi (OC Ukeje), a Lagos musician who flies to Sao Paulo to track down his older brother Ikenna (Chukwudi Iwuji), who’s gone missing, and bring him back home.

As he immerses himself in a city of simmering life, following the scarce trail that his brother’s left behind, Amadi encounters a multitude of characters and, despite language barriers, starts seeing the possibility of a new life.

The debut fiction feature of Matias Mariani who had made the documentary ‘I Touched All Your Stuff,” “Shine Your Eyes” is a highlight of Brazil’s recent drive into diversity via its cinema. A movie that, by both celebrating the culture of its protagonists, the Igbo people, an ethnic group of South-Eastern Nigeria and the exuberant life of Sao Paulo, delivers a tale of two brothers which is striking in tone and aesthetic with a colorful palette of human interactions and multiple unsaid mysteries.

“Shine Your Eyes” is about identity but also cultural differences and finding a common ground, human connection, which the films captures really well,” says Panorama head Michael Stütz. He adds: “Mariani also manages to dive into a subculture African diaspora, talking about roots, where you come from, what is home, what does it mean, where can you find yourself?”

Variety talked to Mariani as his film. the kind that demands a second viewing, finishes up its screenings in the Berlinale’s Panorama section.

Your film feels very much like a matrioska that as it unfolds opens up issues and ideas about cultural identity, family dynamics, physic theories, among others. What was the genesis of the script?

A lot of it has to do with the experience of living abroad. I come from a very big and protective family. So when I moved to the U.S. it really felt a different existence, like the difference between you and the exterior are much clearer. You know who you are, where you stop and other people begin. I felt very lonely but at the same time very myself. On the other side was this attraction to Sao Paolo, where I was born. Which is a weird city, that people have even mythologized how ugly and savage it is. So when you say to someone that you miss Sao Paolo, it’s very hard to explain.

That’s when Maíra Bühler came in. We started doing research (about the Igbo culture) and giving Portuguese classes to a community in Sao Paolo. And it became less of an actual research and more of an interchange. You’re giving something and getting something in return. But I also remember coming back so doubtful, making a film about people that are so different from me. So a lot of the screenwriting process was making myself feel at peace with that idea and in that sense it was really important to have a lot of collaborators who made me feel comfortable in each area. I was more at ease working with actual contributors, scriptwriters who knew the story.

That same process of collaboration, one senses, feeds into the mise en scene. The film has a very clear visual style, portraying Sao Paolo via striking compositions. How did you try to find the right style for that?

I directed documentaries before but my actual 9 to 5 job is as a producer, so it might be one of the reasons why I approach collaboration in a different way than maybe people that come from a straight-up directing. I see a lot of directors that are protective, as if collaboration would somehow dilute their idea, would somehow make it less personal. For some reason, i have a lot off fears but this is not one, that really helped to let people really go into the script and into the images.

Leo Bittencourt, the DoP, is a close friend, the godfather of my child and was present throughout the whole process. So it’s hard to know where the idea began. I really didn’t need to write the city into the script too much because we would do that through mise en scene. He came with the idea of shooting in 4:3, I was very reluctant. I thought it felt gimmicky and I love Sao Paolo skylines which are very horizontal in nature. But he convinced to change the format of my phone and take pictures during a week and it felt amazing: The city opened up: How the 4:3 plays with the modernist architecture of Sao Paolo; how the lines appear much more in that format. But it came as well from talking with Chioma Thompson one of the script contributors. She understands a lot about Igbo mythology and religion. She gave me a book where I discovered that the mythological genesis of the universe in the Ibo religion is the idea of the square. So you had this concept that the world was a square originally and from there came the big bang, the breaking of that square. The square is perfection, the idea that things are in order. I felt this came into contrast with our idea of the celestial spheres, the sphere as a perfect figure. And talking to Fernando Timba, our art director, we decided to use the square as our shape and began figuring out how to visually break it.

Still today there’s this preconception of Latin American cinema as more bleak stories that handle social realism with a certain grit. In contrast, your film jumps from family drama, to horse racing equations, to magical realism, to moments of comedy, without losing some lightheartedness. How was the process of creating the film’s own tone.

As you say, that certain bleakness of Latin American cinema, that sense of urgency, we’re here to talk about social issues, so much pressing urgency to it. I totally get it and I understand why some Latin American cinema is like that and I respect it but at the same time I feel very disconnected, aesthetically and linguistically. That was something that I would constantly think about in this film. What’s the need for this film? How to explain to people why this film needs to be? As I was talking to Chukwudi, he said that to have characters who are not living from hand to mouth, who are not so much subject to the destiny of things because they are desperate, is in itself an act of subversion, specifically if you’re doing black characters. This is a heavy political, to give agency to characters like that. Of giving subjectivity, to create characters with rich inner roles. It’s heavily politica. That made me feel more at ease with the film – not being part of that tradition. Tone-wise I think it comes a lot from specific films, I wanted to emulate. “Into the White City,” by Alain Tanner; “C0de 46,” from Wintebottom, There was something about how they build their tone which is basically interpretation beyond simply aesthetics. And I knew I needed to find a tone because the actors were so diverse, OC who is a Hollywood actor and does much bigger roles in terms of gestures, then Chukwudi who is Shakespearian, thespian and then Indira who is more Brazilian theater which is very different from English theater. So there was a sense that if I did’t do anything, things would go all over the place.

Now, more than ever, that bleakness is very present in Latin America’s political and social climate. What is your perspective on what’s happening to Brazilian Cinema?

I’m glad you ask. I’ve been talking in interviews and I feel that I’m so pessimistic and I should give some sense of hope but that is not how I feel. We are in a very dark place. Art of course is not the worst, we have social economics, press freedoms, that have a stronger impact on people than cinema. And this is what people should focus on now. But talking about what I know, which is art, I think Bolsonaro is very intentionally closing down all the financial possibilities in filmmaking, theater, arts in general. There was a huge work community of thousands and thousands of people and now you’re in Rio or Sao Paulo and everyone is unemployed. There’s a sense of doom among people who have dedicated their whole life and suddenly from day to night things have stopped. And he did it because it was the main focus of opposition to him, something that he very much wanted and needed to silence in order to do all the other stuff he wanted to do. But is also about how he needs to tell stories that are more akin to what he is trying to do, that’s his main objective, to work his own narrative. People will continue to make cinema, that is without question, but the conditions in which it’s made will be set back, I think, for a long time. And it came exactly at the time where things were changing for Brazilian cinema, as a result its being taken care of by many politicians from both left and right. But I think this climate will reinforce those aesthetics that we’ve talked about, less subjectivity and more “savagery.”

Azubuike Leading No. 1 Kansas Back On Top Of College Hoops

Kansas center Udoka Azubuike, left, comes up with the ball after a dive on the floor with Oklahoma forward Brady Manek, right, during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in Lawrence, Kan., Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

BY DAVE SKERETTA

LAWRENCE, KANSAS (AP) – Oklahoma State coach Mike Boynton had just finished watching Udoka Azubuike bully his way to 19 points and 16 rebounds against his over-matched Cowboys when he pulled the 7-footer aside and pointed to the rafters in Allen Fieldhouse.

“Keep it up,” Boynton whispered into the ear of the Kansas center, “and your name will be up there, too.”

There are certain requirements for a player to have his jersey raised above the south seats in the old field house, among them becoming an All-American or winning the Big 12’s player of the year award. It’s not an honor that the Jayhawks bestow on just anyone.

The way Azubuike has been playing lately, it won’t be long before his No. 35 joins the jerseys of the great Wilt Chamberlain, Clyde Lovellette, Jo Jo White and Danny Manning hanging from the ceiling.

“I don’t watch a whole lot of national basketball,” Boynton said later, “but I’d be hard-pressed to find a better national player of the year candidate than he is. The way he’s playing now is pretty special. Obviously there’s a special kind of fan base here and they appreciate it, but I don’t know if people appreciate him nationally.”

Azubuike has certainly opened some eyes over the last month.

His run began with 17 points and 12 rebounds against Texas, then continued with 20 points and 15 boards at TCU. Azubuike had another double-double against Oklahoma, then had 23 points and 19 rebounds last Saturday as the Jayhawks (25-3, 13-1) beat then-No. 1 Baylor on the road to regain the top spot in the nation and forge a tie atop the Big 12 standings.

Along the way, Azubuike reached the 1,000-point mark for his career – a nice benchmark considering he missed much of his first couple seasons to injury. His total of 35 rebounds in the past two games are the most since Thomas Robinson had that many during the 2011-12 season, and his 42 points and 35 rebounds allowed him to join Robinson, Dedric Lawson, Wayne Simien and Drew Gooden as the only players with at 40 or more points and 30 or more rebounds in a two-game span.

Azubuike has also been able to steer clear of foul trouble. His conditioning has improved to the point that he can easily play more than 30 minutes per game. And his defense has been unparalleled, almost single-handedly shutting down the entire paint.

“We’ve been trying to tell Doke all along he can dominate a game without getting a lot of touches. If that’s the case, he’s quickly becoming as good a center or the best defensive center since I’ve been here, and we’ve had some good ones,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “I think people have begun to recognize him for what he brings to the table.”

Azubuike has come a long ways since his childhood in Delta, Nigeria. He was an exceedingly raw prospect coming out of high school, and his only offensive move early on was a dunk. But his game has improved over time to where he is a more well-rounded player – even his chronically poor foul shooting has reached an acceptable level.

Still, the question remains: Will the bruising big man’s game translate to the NBA?

Most mock drafts have the senior center going in the second round, if at all, primarily because teams are wary of drafting a prototypical center the way the game has evolved. And whereas Azubuike can dunk his way to big numbers in college, those easy looks at the rim will be much harder to find in the pros, and his mid-range game remains a work in progress.

“If he plays to his athletic ability that’s how he’ll get paid,” Self said. “He’ll never get paid by shooting 15-foot fadeaways or whatever it is. That’s not who he is. So, can he guard a ball screen? Can he get to the rim? Can he defend outside his area? If he can do those things he has a chance to make it.”

Most of the names hanging from the rafters in Allen Fieldhouse didn’t just put up big numbers or earn a long list of individual accolades. That’s not how the truly great ones get remembered at Kansas. They also took their team deep into the NCAA Tournament, and the best of them ushered the Jayhawks to the Final Four and beyond.

Azubuike has been there once, helping Kansas to the national semifinals as a sophomore. Taking his team back to the final weekend of the season would almost certainly cement his legacy among the best to play for the Jayhawks.

“If you look at Doke over the last recent games, you could make a case for it,” Self said. “Hopefully he’ll continue on this uptick and keep building on it, and if we win he’ll get some mention for player of the year. I’d like all our guys to be in the game for all the postseason accolades, but we still need to win games to think about any of that.”

Achebe's Things Fall Apart Evenly Explores The Barbarism And Culture Of Colonial Nigeria

Author Chinua Achebe held opposing realities in his hands and, setting personal interest aside, gave fictional life to a reality that emerged from a deplorable situation.

BY JOYCELYN CORDES

The novel “Things Fall Apart” by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe is a 20th-century classic for many reasons, including that it is an exceedingly even-handed account of the cultural clash between the African inhabitants of Nigeria and the English who descended on them in the late 19th century.

Achebe is credited with firmly placing African literature on the map with the publication of this novel in 1958 to great acclaim. Although he often demurred at that particular distinction, “Things Fall Apart” unarguably launched his highly successful career as both a writer and professor of literature in Africa and the United States.

The heavy praise this novel has since received is thoroughly justified. The story is gripping from beginning to end, it is masterfully structured, and the writing is executed with a poet’s ear for combining music and meaning. This essay is yet another homage to this work, motivated particularly by my admiration for the even-handedness referenced above, for “Things Fall Apart” is assuredly the most intellectually balanced work of literary fiction I’ve ever read.
Achebe Offers a Generous Perspective

Why is this worth pointing out in a forum devoted mainly to political analysis? These days, our political discourse is glutted with opinions formed in the heat of emotion and clung to with a hardened death-grip. When do we ever encounter a balanced perspective on anything, let alone matters of great import?

In a time of more rigorous standards, the claim to intellectual integrity would be predicated on a person having delved deeply into a subject, thoroughly examining it before arriving at a conclusion. Achebe’s novel, despite exploring one of humanity’s most despicable predilections — the colonization of foreign territories and their inhabitants — stands in sharp contrast to the emotion-driven, uncritical haste of our day.

This poignant tale about a great Igbo warrior depicts the gradual encroachment of Christianity and English law into an Igbo village in Nigeria. The novel’s perspective is so generous that both the merits and shortcomings of each culture receive equal consideration before the inevitable tragic end.

Both worlds contain objectionable evils; both worlds offer a deeply humane vision of life. In Igbo culture, for instance, whenever a woman was unfortunate enough to give birth to twins, which was considered an unnatural abomination, the newborns would be placed in clay pots and thrown away in the forest. Or a young man’s life might be deemed forfeit simply because the gods of his community commanded it.

At the same time, Igbo social structure was so tightly knit that, throughout the novel, a deep and abiding sense of community is palpable. Achebe’s fierce protagonist is a man whose strivings are universal — providing for his family, protecting his village against threats, respecting the traditions of his elders — responsibilities he views as fundamental duties and which, in the course of carrying them out, establish him as an eminently sympathetic character.

The English missionaries, on the other hand, are shown to have brought an alien religion completely at odds with that of the Igbo, one that mercifully forbade such practices as the abandonment of babies and random death sentences by the gods. They introduced an enticing form of commerce that enriched the villagers beyond anything they’d previously experienced, not only providing more money but making a wider variety of foods available to more people.

At the same time, Achebe presents quite dramatically the rough justice administered by the English system of jurisprudence. It brooked no dispute and ultimately destroyed the traditional authority of the village elders, ending forever the native community’s independence and self-governance, not to mention much of Igbo culture.

A Glimpse at Human Conflict, Internal and External
What may have inspired Achebe to represent these extremes of the colonial fact so fairly was that his parents, born into a traditional Igbo tribe, had revolted against their kin and converted to Christianity. Perhaps the balanced view he achieves stems from a desire to explore what motivated his parents to arrive at that choice at the expense of their culture. The result is a narrative that honestly depicts these warring values between the colonized and the colonizer as character conflicts, both external and internal.

That last point is so compelling. Antagonism between a colonized people and their colonizer is tragic but obvious. Less obvious and perhaps even more tragic is the same conflict played out within individuals on either side of the colonial drama. In this novel, it is within the mind and heart of the protagonist’s son Nwoye that doubts begin to stir about aspects of his culture. Those doubts ultimately flourish to the point that, to the horror of his father, the great warrior Okonkwo, Nwoye joins the English missionaries.

Achebe is careful to present this change as a form of self-affirmation rather than a mere rejection of parental or cultural authority. It is triggered by one of the novel’s most dramatic incidents.

A youth, brought into the village a few years previously as another clan’s payment for murder, is sent to live in the warrior’s household until the village decides what to do with him. After three years, the village oracle determines the young man must be put to death, and Okonkwo adheres to its wishes, albeit reluctantly.

When Nwoye realizes that the young man who has become a brother to him has been slain, and by his father no less, the emotion this realization engenders — “something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow” — catapults him into the memory of another time he experienced it.

He had had the same kind of feeling not long ago, during the last harvest season. … They were returning home … when they heard the voice of an infant crying in the thick forest. … Nwoye had heard that twins were put in earthenware pots and thrown away in the forest, but he had never yet come across them. … Then something had given way inside him. It descended on him again, this feeling, when his father walked in, that night after killing Ikemefuna.

This frank depiction of barbarism introduces a sharp wedge in our sympathies for this African village, sympathies to which the novel has carefully led us. But of significance here is that the narrative informs us of Ikemefuna’s callous murder and the practice of discarding babies, both within the context of Nwoye’s reaction.

Achebe Displays the Complexity of Human Nature

Why is that significant? It is his emotional reaction that introduces the wedge in the first place, and it has been introduced from within his world, rather than from values imposed without from the British colonizers. They would have considered these events barbaric, but the narrative shows us that at an inchoate, gut level, Nwoye, a child of the Igbo culture, does too.

This view is reinforced by how the arrival of the missionaries affects Nwoye:

Then the missionaries burst into song. It was one of those gay and rollicking tunes of evangelism which had the power of plucking at silent and dusty chords in the heart of an Igbo man. … It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn … seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul — the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth.

This passage is remarkable for more than its lyricism. For a person who had come of age at the height of Nigeria’s experience of colonialism and who would have seen firsthand the psychological and cultural depredations of the English, it is almost bewilderingly generous.

Achebe held opposing realities in his hands and, setting personal interest aside, gave fictional life to a reality that emerged from that deplorable situation: His character’s discomfited reaction to these death sentences — always referred to in the novel as “questions” — is succored by the Christian hymn.

The novel puts forward the bitterly ironic possibility that these life-affirming values, latent in the African sensibility and brought to the continent by force, required Christianity to become fully realized. Given the author’s historical standpoint, giving voice to that possibility is the ultimate example of intellectual integrity.

Jocelynn Cordes has written two award-winning books under the pseudonym Plum McCauley, a middle-grade mystery/treasure hunt and an adult mythological fantasy. Under her own name she writes short fiction, op-eds for her local paper and essays for various webzines.

Igbo Governors Get 90 Days To Establish Regional Security

BY CHINONSO ALOZIE

OWERRI (VANGUARD)--The Igbo National Council, INC, on Tuesday, handed down a 90-day ultimatum to the governors of the five states of the South-East zone, to establish a regional security outfit just like the Northern and South-West regions did.

The warning came from the statement issued in Owerri, by the INC, National President, Chilos Godsent, alongside other executives after their meeting.

According to them, failure to do so that their people would be encouraged to protect themselves from the killings by suspected armed herdsmen said to have camped themselves in the forest of the zone. 

He said: “We wish to inform the people of the Igbo Race that the proposed community policing by the IGP is meant to officially aid the framework for intelligence gathering and invasion of Igbo communities by the Jihadist. 

 “On the foregoing, the Igbo National Council (INC) request the Governors of the South-East, South-South and North-Central geopolitical zones respectively as a matter of urgent necessity to establish and officially inaugurate their regional security outfits like the South-West (AMOTEKUN) and North-West (SEGE KA FASA) within ninety days from 29th February 2020 as a sign of patriotism and commitment to the security and welfare of their citizens. 

“We note that failure for the Governors of the aforementioned geopolitical zones to adhere to this call, the Self-Determination groups in those geopolitical zones may be compelled to take their destiny into their own hands in other to protect their citizens from the rampaging Fulani Jihadist.

“The meeting supports in its totality the call by the National Assembly (NASS) of the Federal Republic of Nigeria urging President Mohammadu Buhari to sack all the Service Chiefs with immediate effect. 

“The reality on the ground has clearly shown that the present crops of service chiefs can no longer protect the lives and properties of Nigerians who are daily slaughtered like cows and chickens by Boko Haram, Fulani Herdsmen and Fulani Jihadists.” 

They continued: “The meeting condemned the wanton arrest and arbitrary detention of the elders and people of Ifite-Ogwari community in Anyamelum Local Government Area (LGA) of Anambra State for the simple reason of defending their community from Fulani Herdsmen who have continued to attack and kill members of the Ifite-Ogwari community in their ancestral land. 

“On the foregoing, INC urge the Government of Anambra State to rise up to the responsibility of protecting the lives and property of the people of Anambra State. 

“The NWC meeting urged the Federal Government to be very sensitive of the untold hardship the people of Southern Nigeria are passing through because of the border closure. On the above, INC, therefore, requests the Federal Government to reopen the southern border or otherwise close the porous Northern borders where too many smuggling activities have been taking place since the politically motivated closure of the Southern borders. 

“Finally, the Igbo National Council (INC) wish to advise the leadership of Miyetti Allah in Nigeria to urge her members who now camp in many forests in South-East and South-South geopolitical zone to immediately vacate those forests or regret their deviancy.”

IMO GUBER: PDP's Journey From The Streets to Supreme Court

BY ONYEKACHI EZE

OWERRI (NEW TELEGRAPH)--After series of street protests and visits to embassies, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) finally approached the Supreme Court, seeking a reversal of the judgement that sacked Emeka Ihedioha as Imo State governor, ONYEKACHI EZE reports...

The National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Prince Uche Secondus, was careful in his choice of words, when he addressed party members and supporters during a rally in Abuja on January 20, following the Supreme Court judgement that sacked Emeka Ihedioha as governor of Imo State.

The PDP national chairman had earlier disclosed the party’s intention to seek a review of the judgement. And he was careful not to offend the jurists when the party eventually files its petition for a review. That was why he told party supporters during the rally that PDP was only against the error observed in the judgement, but not the justices.

His words: “We’re not against you (Supreme Court justices), we’re against the error and by the special grace of God, I know you will revisit the error. All we are saying is that for you to review this error because the figures are not adding up.

“We, therefore, call on the leadership of the judiciary to please revisit and reverse the Imo State judgement because we believe that the figures are not adding up. That’s why we’re here, so that the world will hear us. We are a democratic nation, and therefore, all democratic nations of the world are hearing us – United States, United Kingdom, even the United Nations, the African Union and ECOWAS.

“We believe that people at the highest court of the land will hear our cry and revisit, review, and if possible, reverse, the judgement. This is time to show courage.”

The error in the judgement, according to the party was that the apex court inadvertently increased the number of votes in the March 9, 2019 governorship election, by 127,209 votes.

The number of accredited voters was 823,743, out of which, 739,485 was votes cast while 25,130 was cancelled votes, leaving 714,355 as valid votes. But with the addition of 127,209 to Uzodinma’s 96,458 votes (whom the Independent National Electoral Commission, said came fourth in the election), the total number of votes in the election increased to 950,952.

PDP said it “is highly irrational, unfounded, a provocative product of executive manipulation and a recipe for crisis, which should not be allowed to stand.”

The party added: “With the verdict, the Supreme Court executed a coup against the PDP and the people of Imo State as well as other Nigerians, and such must not be allowed to have a place in our democracy.”

On the heels of the judgement, PDP supporters had embarked on street protests. From Owerri, the Imo State capital, to Taraba, Anambra, Sokoto and others, the party mobilised its members and sympathisers to march against the judgement.

The party’s leadership, apart from staging the Abuja rally, also went to the embassies of the United States and France as well as the British High Commission, to submit a petition. It was equally at the United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU) headquarters in Nigeria for the same purpose.

But on February 5, the party and its candidate (Ihedioha) formally filed an appeal at the Supreme Court, asking it to review the January 14 judgement.

Chief Kanu Agabi (SAN), Nigeria’s former Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, who filed the appeal on their behalf, prayed the court to declare as “nullity the judgement delivered by this Honourable Court on the 14th of January 2020, in Appeal No. SC.1462/2019 and Cross Appeal No. SC.1470/2019.”

Imo State governor, Senator Hope Uzodinma, is the first appellant/respondent, while the All Progressives Congress (APC) and INEC are the second and third appeallants/respondents, respectively. Ihedioha and PDP are respondents/applicants.

Governor Uzodinma has as well, filed a cross appeal, asking the court to dismiss the PDP petition on the ground that it is status barred. He argued that the window allowed by law for election petition has elapsed.

PDP and Ihedioha, in their motion on notice, argued that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to declare Uzodinma as elected in “an election petition which was based on two inconsistent and mutually exclusive grounds, to wit, (i) that the 1st Applicant was not duly elected by majority of lawful votes cast at the election, the implication of which is that the majority of votes cast at the election were valid; and, (ii) that the election was invalid for noncompliance with the Electoral Act, the implication of which is that the election be annulled.”

They further argued that the apex court “did not have the jurisdiction to declare the 1st Appellant/Respondent as elected in the absence of any proof that the votes ascribed to him met the mandatory geographical spread stipulated in section 179 (2) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended).”

Further, the applicants contended that the Supreme Court “did not have the jurisdiction to declare that the 1st Appellant/Respondent met the constitutional geographical spread without providing in its judgement the reason(s) for that conclusion.

“The fraudulent nature of the additional votes was demonstrated by the fact that total votes cast as shown in the first appellant/respondent’s computation was more than the total number of voters accredited for the election and in some polling units more than the total number of registered voters.

“The fraud was also demonstrated by the fact that the result computed by the first appellant/respondent showed only the votes of the first applicant and the first appellant/respondent without specifying the votes scored by the other 68 candidates who participated in the election.”

To this effect, the applicants urged the court to hold that the judgement of the Court of Appeal, which dismissed Uzodinma’s petition as incompetent, continues to subsist as the appeal against that decision was not considered by the apex court.

The appeal was slated for hearing on February 18, but was later shifted to March 2, to allow both the respondents and applicants file their responses and replies.

The applicants are contesting the results from 388 polling units, which the Supreme Court relied on to declare Uzodinma winner of the March 9, 2019 governorship election. This amounted to 213,495 votes, which APC and Uzodinma believed, were unlawfully excluded from their votes during the election.

But PDP argued that exhibits 63RD1 to 63RD19 (which is INEC Forms EC40G) showed that there were no valid elections in the 388 polling units. INEC had told the court that the result from the 388 polling units did not originate from it.

The party’s argument on spread was that even if Uzodinma’s votes were allowed to stand, he did not get the spread in the required number of local government areas in Imo State.

To be declared governor of a state, section 179 (2) of the constitution stipulates that in addition to winning the highest number of valid votes cast in an election, the candidate must also secure 25 per cent of votes in two-third of the local government areas in the state.

Imo State has 27 local government areas. Two-third therefore is 18. PDP’s argument is that Uzodinma has spread in only two local governments, and could not be declared winner because he lacks the required spread.

But some advocacy groups argued that the court should rather order a rerun between the two political parties that have the highest number of votes (PDP and APC) since neither Uzodinma nor Ihedioha met the required spread. While Uzodinma has spread in only two, Ihedioha met the spread in 14 local government areas.

This is not the first time the Supreme Court is being asked to review its judgement. As a matter of fact, the apex court was approached on a number of occasions, asking it to review its earlier judgements. One of the most celebrated is the Johnson v Lawanson of 1970s. This was a case involving Kobina Johnson vs Irene Lawanson and others.

The Supreme Court, upon a request for review, regretted its earlier position that for a deed to be relied on by section 129 of the Evidence Act, it must be 20 years old at the date of proceedings. This was reversed to be 20 years old at the date of the contract.

Justice Coker who delivered the judgement, held that “when the court is faced with the alternative of perpetuating what it is satisfied is an erroneous decision which was reached per incuriam and will, if followed, inflict hardship and injustice upon the generations in the future or of causing temporary disturbances of rights acquired under such decision, I do not think we shall hesitate to declare the law as we find it.”

Consequently, the Supreme Court ordered that the appeal be re-heard by another panel of the justices of the Supreme Court.

PDP’s lawyer, in his final submission, reminded the jurists that “never in the history of this court have your lordships delivered a judgement which evoked the protest of the public. This one has. Therefore, we urge you, we appeal to you to take a second look at it.

“There is no doubting the fact that your lordships, being human, will from time to time fall into error. Prove to the world that when that happens, you will not lack the courage to correct yourselves. That is the unique opportunity that this case offers you.”

He further cited the case of Adegoke Motors v. Adesanya, where the Supreme Court stated that “it is far better to admit an error than to preserve an error.”

PDP is asking the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Mohammed Tanko and six other justices, who delivered the January 14 judgement, to recuse themselves from the panel that would review the judgement.

The party said its demand was based on Section 36(1) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which guarantees fair hearing to every citizen or entity in the determination of his rights or obligations.

“Furthermore, the time honoured and tested principles of natural justice, particularly that no man shall be a judge in his own cause is particularly relevant to this solemn request.

“Allegation of bias or likelihood of bias goes to the root of fair hearing. Denial of right to fair hearing is a logical consequence of bias in any proceeding before a court or a tribunal,” PDP argued.

Nigerian Jews And The Dream Of Their Own State

Hagadol Ephraim Uba. Image: Facebook

BY KATRIN GANSLER

OWERRI (DER STANDARD)--Synagogues have been growing in the southeast of the country for 30 years - but the Jews are not recognized by Israel

Nisach Bai Ephraim is shy. "I'm married here in the state of Imo and have a child. I'm in my early 30s and a housewife," she says slowly. In the small room next to the Owerri synagogue, a large fan hums, the noise of which keeps swallowing her voice. At noon, the humid, humid air in southeastern Nigeria is almost unbearable. The young woman only thaws when she talks about her belief. Judaism is wonderful: "This religion is the truth. I am very proud of my faith."

Nisach Bai Ephraim grew up in the neighboring state of Aba, where the vast majority are committed to Christianity. As a child, she therefore knew the feeling of being different, of not going to church on Sundays, of having no communion or confirmation celebrations. However, that was not a problem. "Everyone knew that I was Jewish. I grew up with it."

This is an exception in Nigeria. Synagogues have only been in existence in the south-east of the 200 million-inhabitant country for around 30 years. The northernmost are in the capital, Abuja, and a few have also been built in the metropolis of Lagos. Religion plays a crucial role in the country, and discussions about whether there are more Christians or more Muslims are part of everyday life and are always used politically.
"Lost Tribe of Israel"

At some point in the early 1980s, Hagadol Ephraim Uba could not do anything with it. Until he converted to Judaism, he was a Christian preacher himself. Today he is the chairman of the Association of Jewish Faith in Owerri. However, the fact that more and more people are committed to Judaism is not a trend, but rather a return. "We are the lost tribe of Israel. Moses should lead us to the promised land."

How many Jews there are in Nigeria is not clear. Some speak of 30,000, in Jewish circles the number of three million sometimes drops. However, they are not recognized by the Israeli state. On the African continent these have been the Beta Israel from Ethiopia since 1975. There are also Jewish communities in South Africa. In Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Rwanda, many people are waiting in vain for official recognition.

Whoever is not a child of a Jewish mother needs the Giur, the conversion. This requires several years of preparation with a subsequent examination before a rabbinical court. Praying in Hebrew and celebrating worship on Saturday the Sabbath is not enough. Recognition also includes the right to emigrate to Israel. This is made possible by the law on returnees passed in 1950.
Aid from the United States

Support comes instead from the United States. For example, the Kulanu organization based in New York motivates small Jewish communities around the world. It helps build networks and creates contacts worldwide.

For Hagadol Ephraim Uba there are numerous parallels between Israel and the southeast of Nigeria. "Israel is hated by the world, just like we are." In the Owerri synagogue, the parishioners have something else in common: they are all Igbo. With 30 to 40 million people, this is one of the largest ethnic groups in the country, which fought for its independence during the Biafra War from 1967 to 1970.

Voting on the Sabbath

To this day, the dream of having a state of one's own is great, because many feel disadvantaged by the Nigerian central government. This also applies to religion for the Jews of Owerri. "Unlike Christians and Muslims, we don't get any support from the state. Also in Nigeria elections are held on the Sabbath, Saturday," says Hagadol Ephraim Uba. Being Jewish is therefore also a political statement and above all a criticism of the government. (Katrin Gänsler from Owerri, February 20, 2020)

BOOK REVIEW: The Prayer Of The Birds

Image: Journal de Montreal

BY KARINE VILDER

With this second novel which risks shaking more than one, we can say that the Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma is really taking off.

Modestly titled Fishermen , the first novel by Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma was one of our biggest favorites of 2016. And we were obviously not the only ones to love it, since he entered the list of finalists for the Booker Prize. So what about this second novel, this time entitled The prayer of the birds ? Well ... in addition to bringing us back to the arid lands of Nigeria, it is also just a treat. Last year in the UK he was also one of the Booker Prize finalists!

The hidden face of Africa

But enough talk. Because to be able to grasp its essence, we must first specify that this book is completely off the beaten track.

You will discover it quickly enough by yourself in contact with its narrator, who would be the chi of a young chicken breeder named Chinonso Solomon Olisa.

Ever heard of chi? Welcome to the club ! From the first pages, it will however be clearly indicated that in the Igbo cosmology, chi is the spiritual being, the parallel identity which watches at all times over the host of flesh and blood whose life it shares.

So when this host one day prevents a pretty student from committing suicide from the top of a bridge, her chi will inevitably be in the front row to closely follow the very sad love story that will soon follow ...

A disturbing novel that allows us to travel far beyond the borders of reality without ever leaving the tragic fate of a man ready to do anything to please his beautiful.

----------JOURNAL DE MONTREAL

INTERVIEW: Okwui Okpokwasili With Tara Aisha Willis

Okwui Okpokwasili. Image: MacArthur Foundation

BY TARA AISHA WILLIS

Performance-maker Okwui Okpokwasili jumped on a call with Tara Aisha Willis, just ahead of the opening events of Danspace Project’s 10th anniversary Platform, Utterances from the Chorus co-curated by Okpokwasili and Danspace Executive Director and Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor. The Platform is built around the questions, “How do we weave a collective song? How can the voice and body be a site of resistance and transformation? How can we share artistic practices—between artists and between artists and audiences?” The month-long series will also include the New York premiere of Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s Sitting on a Man’s Head, a durational, improvised, and communal performance with a rotating cast, which takes on the first of those three questions.

Tara Aisha Willis (Rail): When did you start thinking about the theme and framework for the Platform as a way to think about performance, to hold a conversation?

Okwui Okpokwasili: I’ve been thinking about creating a collective sonic experience that’s durational and improvisational since my research for Poor People’s TV Room (2017), looking at embodied protest practices, particularly of women in southeastern Nigeria. There was one practice called “sitting on a man”: women come together and go to someone, usually a man, an official, or somebody who has done egregious harm. These collectives would go into the private space of a man and address their grievance with song, with dance—until he’s like ‘okay fine, I’ll do it, I’ll do it.’ I was interested in this idea of shared creation over a period of time, with a force of intention. A clear desire and a shared language, shared concern—I found it interesting to imagine having a group come together to, not necessarily address a grievance outwards, but address the community itself. Inward restoration. Improvisational spaces can wake up our own listening capacities, to feel and vibrate in the [distance] between [ourselves and] others. But also the question of a chorus. People talk about Fannie Lou Hamer leading a group of black folks in song when their bus was stopped by police after they attempted to register to vote—to start singing to gird people’s strength up. That sonic gesture is powerful and restorative. I started to imagine the space where you could create a structure for this to happen with the public in 2014: to strengthen and nourish the capacity to listen to yourself while also being in conversation and in communion with others, through a creative practice.

We’re all feeling a tremendous amount of grief and strain. The constant violence of the current administration. What they’re doing to undocumented folks crossing borders, behaving violently against people who are suffering and trying to escape from suffering. We know our wealth has created the conditions of that suffering. We can put our bodies on the line and protest, vote, try to spread the word. I just feel we need a space where we can hear each other, listen to each other. What’s the space in a song? There’s a space for a cry, for a laugh, for intuition.

In earlier iterations we worked with less quotidian movement phrases, but we’ve streamlined it—a slow walk, a slow movement through space. Gestures come out of what needs to happen to relieve yourself from where the blood may be flowing as you move slowly. We keep it as quotidian as possible. We still have turns and stops, things to do with the fingers; if you find somebody in the space you can mirror or echo them. There’s still—I don’t know what you would call [them]—strategies or principles we are developing. It’s a strange and beautiful thing.

Rail: It’s interesting, you blur how you talk about [your new piece, Sitting on a Man’s Head,] with the Danspace Platform.

Okpokwasili: It’s also not a piece—that’s so interesting, to catch myself. It’s a practice.

Rail: Both of these structures [Sitting on a Man’s Head and the Utterances from the Chorus Platform] hold these questions about sonic, physical, emotional strategies for coming together.

Okpokwasili: It all fits: Sitting on a Man’s Head is the anchoring practice for the main inquiry of the festival. There’s this relay of information: how we collaborate, work in communities, and sustain community.

Rail: The way you’re framing all of it around practice… It strikes me that we’ve had all these Danspace Platforms over the past several years that are historical—

Okpokwasili: Like Lost and Found.

Rail: And the Judson [Dance Theater anniversary] one and...

Okpakwasili: Reggie [Wilson]’s.

Rail: And also Ishmael [Houston-Jones]’s first one, the Parallels anniversary. But this one feels very present-tense. Even though it’s an anniversary year for the Platform, it’s very present: being here together, in ecstatic, oral, moving, sounding action. The present-ness of your performing and your work also dovetails with the past in its own way, with historical thinking and memory. With what can’t quite be retold. In an interview you did with Jenn Joy you said something about “visceral recall,” the labor of trying to remember an unclear past. I’m also thinking about the Saidiya Hartman book [Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)] that the Platform title refers to, that’s about the 1900s. How do you see the relationship with what comes before this present moment of gathering, in this Platform and in Standing on a Man’s Head?

Okpokwasili: [Hartman] interfaces and interferes with the archive and exposes a gap in the attempt to listen for young black women’s voices: to hear what they might be telling us beyond the framework of pathology that social workers, police records, newspaper articles impose. The gap in the failure to make space for black girls dreaming, the black girl imaginary. Her imaginative riffs are improvisations using the language people use to describe the girls, the rare speech she finds coming directly from their mouths, and her own voice—it’s a productive tension, the vibration between vocal folds necessary to produce sound. She operates speculatively, even though she has the foundation and facts of the archive. In order to breathe it into the present, she does this grounded speculation.

I think the body is now. It also holds this trace of the past. The body occupies multiple spaces. Given enough time, can you slip through or remove the layers of “now” and awaken something from the past? Some cellular information you can’t touch? That’s why I engage in slowness, taking time to do something over and over [in performance]. Your conscious mind can give way to something unconscious. When I research, I can’t find images online of women engaging in this practice of sitting on a man. What do you do when there are no records of the event? I don’t want to project anything onto it. But can I create a space where that [practice] remains in me, a part of my understanding? How can I—I hesitate to say meditate on it, but—

Rail: It’s like riffing, or imagining, or telling tall tales—

Okpokwasili: Right, and sometimes in a practice we feel that space of restoration, of taking care; sometimes it does feel like someone is screaming out, and you scream out with them or hold them. Sometimes I’m like, “could this have been what it was like? Are we hitting that feeling”?

Rail: So historical research, but into lived experiences of the past, and how those come forward. Would you place Sitting on a Man’s Head in a trajectory with Bronx Gothic (2012) and Poor People’s TV Room in terms of their relationship to storytelling or bringing historical research into the present?

Okpokwasili: Sitting on a Man’s Head is in the direct lineage of Poor People’s TV Room. Bronx Gothic also uses the body to stir up memory, but to strip away the layers put on since the occasion, the event of the memory.

When we talk about the African American experience, we think about the great rupture from the “mother country,” all that went into the creation of the condition of being African American. That’s not my lineage, I’m African, Nigerian, Igbo. My lineage is another part of the colonial rupture. Even if you stayed in the country, there was so much [memory] erased. I’m looking for a way to resonate with that path; I want to operate in the space of uncertainty—not necessarily how to undo the rupture, but to awaken something from before the rupture. That gap is a productive space to make work, but it’s also the only space I know. I look for [people to perform] and I look at their gap, and I go: “I recognize that; I don’t recognize that.” I look for people who are also reaching for something in memory—beyond ‘I remember,’ more like ‘I sense,’ or ‘there’s a possibility.’

Rail: That feels like a way of figuring out what voices need to be in the room over the course of the Platform, too. Maybe this is an impossible question to answer before it happens, but do you feel like that relationship to a past or precedent is going to show up in how the Platform conversations have been built?

Okpokwasili: People [involved in the Platform] have been looking back as well as forward, not afraid to imagine new structures grounded in research around the past. The ideas of “kin and care” and “voice and body” all come from previous Platforms. There is a lineage being followed, as well as transformed—I don’t want to say it’s indirect, but it’s an evolution. The incredible history [in Hartman’s book] around women in turn of the century cities—black women migrating from the south to urban centers, looking for liberation and having to make it themselves—from the chorus girls to the queer women “looking fine.” There’s a whole lineage shaping the space we’re operating in. How to resonate with that lineage while continuing to find what’s necessary now.

There’s a chapter in the book: “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.” I love that title. A woman lingering in the street or out at night would be arrested for violating vagrancy laws. They’d put them into these dormitories. The conditions were terrible and there was once a huge riot where women were screaming, banging on the bars, so loud people on the streets could hear it. That, to me, is inspiring. Hartman says her book is “the fugitive text of the wayward, and it is marked by the errantry that it describes. […] I have pressed at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape and possibility” (xiv). Pushing the limits of the archive. Errant speculation, rooted in the archive. I don't hue to the archive like someone with her scholarly bona fides. But I am trying to consider what it might have been to inhabit the flesh in the archive. To reverberate with what traces the archive left in that flesh.

Rail: [Hartman is] pushing on the archive in ways that are parallel to, or because of, how these girls and women are pushing on the rules and regulations around them. The method is parallel to the content.

Okpokwasili: She sees that they were engaged in a radical reformation of how one lives in a world that is not interested in your life, acts violently on you, doesn't make room for your imagination. To consider that a black woman coming from the South, barely a generation from enslavement… These are the acts of somebody who has a radical imagination about how to live other lives: the ideal is not a picket fence, a house, a job.

Rail: It's not even just about being in defiance of, or opposite, that ideal; it’s about expanding the whole terrain of possibility.

Okpokwasili: It's alongside. It's another artery.

Rail: That's beautifully put. You use a similar collection—making visible, audible, physical, fleshy—of these black women and girls’ voices, that precede the performance. It’s parallel to making audible a physical practice, collecting as a group in the present. Maybe there’s a third parallel to curating a platform where you're bringing together different people to have something to say together.

Okpokwasili: To bring all of those possibilities, methods, experiments, into—I don't want to say contention, but into closer relationship, direct transmission, in a cross-pollinating space. People have asked me, ‘what is your expectation for this Platform’? I don't have a desired outcome. I only understand that it's a practice for discovering and learning something I couldn't imagine before. Sparking a new question, a new possibility of thinking, being, and opening up to potential collaborators.

Rail: There’s also the two-volume Platform book. Creating a conversation around everything, before the actual event. And then an after-reverberation. Is that about processing how the initial conversation shifts?

Okpokwasili: It is resonant with the space we're trying to make. The first part resonates with past questions, events, moments from folks who have been connected to these [Platforms], where you bring them all together to grapple with questions. The “utterance from the choir” [in this Platform] is about bringing folks into relationship—what are the elements and possibilities of creating a choral node? The second [publication] will be what “happened.” It's not about creating a performance and having language around what it will be, the questions it asks. Rather, what is this deliberate space of being liberated from an end result or trying to project a meaning for that end? We know as practitioners and performance-makers, a lot of this language is created to give an anchor. But we also know it's not actually the piece as it unfolds in real time. I'm always in contention with this idea of art as an object. As a performer, you're always in relationship to the thing you make disappearing quickly after it's made. Improvisation is the ultimate in disappearance, an anti-authoritarian, anti-authorial space. When it comes to a practice, it’s outside my capacity to have one voice say what the anchor is: How does the catalog exist alongside these unfolding and transmuting practices? How can the catalog not be concerned with anchoring people in time and space around one idea?

Rail: I think about it cosmologically: each Platform’s curator creates a constellation, organizing ideas, bodies, and spaces. A temporary philosophy. So your mind—how you've been thinking and working—is infused across [the Platform], but it has a life of its own. We come to Danspace and live in that world for a while.

Okpokwasili: When you say “your,” you don't just mean me, it’s about the people that come in and are these constellations, in this universe. Shaping and reshaping those ecosystems. Instead of starting with a container, the core thing we’re working on is the engine at its center. Some people [in the Platform] are in conversation with each other and with the past. [For example,] I am looking at [Hartman’s] work and other people, [like Simone Leigh,] are also looking at [Hartman’s] work. It does feel like all these recombinations.

Rail: The “chorus” is a network of influence, different people picking up ideas. I hear you saying, “I've been studying this person's writing, and I’m looking at this other person, who's looking at that same person's writing.” It’s an endless rabbit hole in many directions at once.

Okpokwasili: It's interesting to look at Akwaeke Emezi's novel Freshwater, which is an exploration of being possessed by multitudes; that problem of the subject considered through a Western gaze. There are Ọgbanje children in traditional Igbo culture: those who have one foot in the spirit world and one in the earth world. Emezi writes this character who’s always in conversation with the “others” who want her to go back to that [spirit world]. [Within your] interior space, you aren’t alone. You’re in conversation with spirits [and ancestors]; you’re the manifestation of what’s come before. I remember my mother told me not to be an organ donor because when I come back in my next life I'll be missing that organ. She was raised Christian. But there were these residual things in her mind. I have an uncle who named his son, “the return of his father,” but then when he was born again as Christian, he changed that name because in Christian theology there is no return, no reincarnation. People living under Western principles are always on shaky ground. The interior, ongoing multitudes—that's the space I occupy. That's the work and reading I have been doing.

Rail: It fits into these parallels we're talking about, the present practice or action or vocalization refracting the past. And the method and the content reflecting each other.

Okpokwasili: How do we contend with being in a Western world that is trying to say “we are alone” or “we possess this land”? Here are the borders. Here's where we begin and you end. The whole colonial project is an exercise in extending the geographically prescribed body. The nation, not as land bordered by ocean, but as an idea projected around the world. That theft of resources, building wealth that excluded many folks who generated that wealth. Corporate bodies recognize no borders and can project themselves across space.

But this [project] is for individuals, human beings, for another sense of value: how we need each other to sustain each other. Protecting bodily integrity, but also opening up that body. Understanding the chorus, the flesh, the land-body, and the tributaries running through the “other” into you and back to the other. I'm interested in existing in those tributaries. It's essential right now. There’s always that question in performance. Your body makes a bridge to other bodies in a vulnerable, strange, unpredictable exchange. Their presence will do something to you and you’ll do something to them—collide with their histories and memories, while they're flooded with yours.

Rail: It’s specific to performance.

Okpokwasili: And to practice. I want more of that space. I was some years ago at [Min Tanaka’s] Body Weather Farm in Japan. Some of the practices we did, we would work in streams: we’d lie down and other people would move you, or you’d be up in a tree and people would call out prompts. What happens to your body when the wind comes through? It just opened me up for all of the elements you can dance and move with, from somebody's voice, the anchor of the tree trunk, or the ants you might feel crawling on your legs. That broke open something wide and wild for me in terms of sensation.

Rail: The practice comes into a chorus, a porousness with other people.

Okpokwasili: I had this experience working with Ralph [Lemon]. When we were working on Come Home Charley Patton, he said, ‘make a map of the postbellum and antebellum South using a table and a glass of milk.’ I don't even think there was a pen or a pencil involved. Making a map with these things, you’re saying, ‘how does my body experience fit in relationship with those objects?’ Abstracting, but also grounding yourself in a flesh-memory and not being concerned with the outcome, whether it reads a certain way. Being in the practice of imagining potential, and being unfinished. Trying to become undone from all the ways you hold your body, all that we hold as our self, to become something alongside or other.

Rail: It makes sense that you're having a hard time articulating it. It's what you were saying about the Platform: ‘I can't know what it is until it happens.’

Okpokwasili: I almost don't want to know what it is. That's a very simple thing I keep trying to elaborate on. That sense of being one among multitudes within yourself. Symbolically within yourself, but also outside of your body.

Rail: All you can do, and this conversation is an example, is repeatedly try to find ways of articulating something that's impossible to articulate. You refer to past examples or things you know, to ground it in concreteness. But none of them are the thing itself. Yet again, the method and content of this conversation are parallel.

Okpokwasili: The thing that I'm failing to elaborate or define is not a thing to be defined because it's not a thing. We did an iteration [of Sitting on a Man’s Head] in Houston, working with the artist-activators who are a core part of refining the practice. When we opened the practice to the public, you saw people who are like, ‘Oh my God, how the fuck do I get out of here? What is this?’ And then people who stayed and returned and returned. A group of women who were the godmothers of the child of someone involved in the practice left, and he stayed. I remember seeing them come back, like, ‘where's our godson that we came in with?’ It does nothing for many people. And then does everything for some. I would hope, with any performance, that it's not the same experience for everybody. I know what it does for me and the multitudes within me, my feeling of connection, but it’s absolutely not stable and definable.

Rail: I wrote down a quote from Hartman’s book about her subject matter: “…the radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls, which has not only been overlooked but is nearly unimaginable” (xiv). That “nearly unimaginable” thing is the zone you’re in here.

Okpokwasili: It’s the one I’m in and the one I love.

The Example Of Enyi Abaribe

Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe. Image: Facebook

BY CHIDO NWAKANMA

Courage is the word that first comes to mind as you contemplate the phenomenon and exciting trajectory of Enyinnaya Harcourt Abaribe, senator representing Abia South in the National Assembly. Courage came to mind as he spoke with love in his heart for his people on Friday, February 14, 2020. The event was the final obsequies for Eze Israel and Lolo Ugoeze Sally Kanu, parents of the leader of IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu.

Abaribe led a star cast of outstanding Igbo politicians that showed up bravely to identify with Nnamdi Kanu in the best exemplification of Igbo culture. Ndigbo end all wars, disagreements and quarrels in the face of death. Death is the price all men must pay, so our people see it as final and deserving of love to the survivors and respect to the departed.

I join in the salutations to Peter Obi, former Governor of Anambra State, Victor Umeh, Tony Ukasoanya, Empire Kanu, Uchenna Madu of MASSOB and all those high visibility persons who mourned with Nnamdi. Well done, Nzuko Umunna. Governors of the five states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo – victims of the cruellest vilification of IPOB- could not find the moral courage nor respect Igbo tradition to be part of the event. Governor Okezie Ikpeazu fixed the roads as a diligent host ahead of the funeral.

Enyi Abaribe stood up for the count as surety for Nnamdi Kanu when it seemed suicidal. Kanu, of course, went on to disregard the terms of his court agreement to the discomfort of the Senator. Presidential spokesman Garba Shehu deployed Kanu’s misbehaviour in his tirade against Abaribe only recently. Yet here was the man standing to represent his people at the funeral.

Such display of courage has marked the trajectory of Enyi Abaribe, the politician and Enyi, the man who stands by his friends through thick and thin, over the years. This 4th Republic commenced in 1999 with Abaribe as Deputy Governor to Orji Uzor Kalu. They soon fell out on principle. Abaribe would not compromise but chose the courageous path.

Twice the Abia State House of Assembly sought to impeach him in 2000, setting the building blocks for the shameful practice of houses of assembly doing a fool’s errand for governors. Ahead of their third attempt in 2003, Abaribe sent in his resignation by courier. He suffered a denial of benefits and perquisites of office, discouragement, and abuse for his stand.

He was the victim of the combined efforts of Governor Orji Uzor Kalu and his then Chief of Staff Theodore Ahamaefula Orji to bring him down and end his political career in disgrace. In 2007, Abaribe bounced back as a Senator, a seat he has occupied since then with repeated victories at the polls. His traducers then sought places in the Senate after doing so much damage to Abia State for a combined 16 years and earning their seats in the Evil Forest. Recent events must sound like justification. Ndi Abia watched in disbelief as they all took photos in the Senate chambers with the man, they sought to destroy many years earlier.

Enyi Abaribe has earned his honorifics. Ndigbo hail him as Mma Agha, the battle-axe. Others call him Otuonu after the movement he led for equity in Abia State. He is at the frontline in all matters concerning the Igbo and speaks without equivocation. He takes on pitched battles against an imperial presidency that seeks to portray as the act of an infidel any criticism of President Muhammadu Buhari. Many have retreated into silence even in the protected chambers but not so Enyi Abaribe. He represents in High Fidelity the idea of a Senator as a person who brings wisdom, courage and deliberation to matters for the benefit of society. Members of the Ime Obi, as the Igbo would call a place such as the Senate, ought to be fearless and bring vast experience and knowledge to their tasks.

We need more examples such as Enyi Abaribe in the South East, men of fortitude who can stand for their people as Nigeria travails under President Muhammadu Buhari. Steady hands, clear heads and courage are desiderata

Abaribe, an Old Umuahian, also brings training as an economist and private sector manager to bear in his contributions. Behind his gentle exterior is an inner core of steel and breeding. I stuck my neck out when Richard Ikiebe was to launch Voices Beyond the Newsroom by suggesting we invite the then Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Media. I reached out to him through my childhood pal and his trusted aide Uchenna Awom. A few days later, we got word that he would attend the event. On the appointed day, Enyi Abaribe flew into Lagos to honour his commitment. There was the additional reason of knowing Dr Ikiebe from many years in the past.

Courage is the choice or willingness to confront agony, pain, danger, uncertainty or intimidation. Moral rather than physical courage is the virtue best associated with man and speaks to the ability to act rightly in the face of widespread opposition, shame, scandal, discouragement or personal loss. Courage shows in the most challenging times as the Igbo philosophy recognises that mberede ka eji ama nwoke (Difficult situations reveals the character of the man).

We need more examples such as Enyi Abaribe in the South East, men of fortitude who can stand for their people as Nigeria travails under President Muhammadu Buhari. Steady hands, clear heads and courage are desiderata. Beyond crying at the shame unfolding before us, it is crucial to recognise exemplars such as Enyi Abaribe. Ji de nke ijei, Mma Agha. Salutations.