Why Was Plo Lumumba Exited With Obasanjo’s Book, My Watch?

Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba wrote a serialized appreciation of Obasajo’s My Watch, in the Saturday and Sunday Standards of 14th to 15th February 2015. Thewrite-up was in an exited tempo. Lumumba displayed how the book had been a palpably exited read to him. It obviously led most people that are schooled in matters of literature and history of Nigerian politics to be questioning the selves; why is Professor Lumumba flabbergasted with Obasanjo’s book?

This obviously can lead one to the selected works of Mao Tse Tung in the chapter on Yunen Forum on literature and culture, This is where there is Mao’s famous line that; if you believe everything you read you better don’t read. Yes, it is true, not everything Obasanjo wrote in My Watch, is a cauldron of Veritable and believable truths and pot pouri of culture, art as well as anthropology, the way Professor Lumumba colorfully argued in the serialization. The point is that Obasanjo’s book is just average in all perspectives. Its precedent research and style of literary communication does not go beyond human efforts of Obasanjo to a pot-pouri of anything in terms of literary value.

Lumumba picked out the argument (on page 87) that, Satan uses three instruments delay, disbelief and doubt, onto which humanity succumbs only to its condemnation to abyssimal fate. This line stunned and appallingly thrilled intellect of Professor Lumumba, given his version of its presentation in the serialization. But no; this was a technical goof. It is not the manner and culture of literature to react or respond to literary information with such emotion of happiness. Philosophy of literature calls such mistakes as fallacies. And Francis bacon, the logician would have called this self delusive and axiomatic response to literature as an idol of happy exercise. What I mean is this; an intellectual as a manufacturer and producer of literature has moral and professional duties to protect himself from self deception as s/he equally protects the self from externally generated delusions. A remote example is within the manner in which professor Lumumba reacted to the concept of Satan as presented by Obasanjo in My Watch. Literature does not treat the concept of Satan with absolutism, the way Professor Lumumba denoted in his serialization. Satan is an outcome of culture and concentrated religious imagination. The Hebrew imagination of Satan only became central point of references because of imperial benefits the Hebrew and Jewish culture enjoyed from European imperialism. But Satan as a concept of Jewish culture and literature has its historical roots in the Bible. In the epical book of Genesis, in the fictitious and versified drama of Job as written by Moses and also as a psychotic experience of Jesus Christ when his internal feelings or thoughts tempted him to eat a stone as bread, to jump from the roof of the church and go for glory of property instead of worshiping God.

But on a counterpoise; isn’t the second coming of Jesus Christ an experience of delay? Is St. Thomas’s religious virtue not based on his doubt of Christ’s resurrection and lastly, is Moses’s meticulous leadership not based on his mauverick questioning of God’s instructions? The answers to these questions can be constructed from rudiments of logic; disbelief, doubt and delay are not purely instruments of Satan, they are also tools of critical thinking and good decision making.

It will be another fallacy in this situation to indicate that thoughts about Satan are only peculiar to the Jewish culture and religious consciousness. No. it is a universal psychological experience. This then puts ProfessorLumumba on a further intellectual duty to read or re-read Homeric literature of the Greece, at least both the Iliad and the Odyssey. He will again come to the pataphysics of satanic mode of existence. In the Iliad he will see the satanic lure of Alexander otherwise known as Paris, into a wayward military behaviour ending up intocollective military jeopardy and damage of his community. And in Odyssey, he will come face to face with duo satanic chimerical of the Cyclops and the calypso. This can finally provoke Professor Lumumba to have a disjunctive or indecisive intellectual situation into a personal soul search of the dimension that; is satanicexistence a spiritual condition or selfish human behaviour?

If it is obasanjo’s delve in matters of governance that flabbergasted professor Lumumba then it is also worth to mention here that Obasanjo is not a theoretical or practical saint of governance. There are diverse mattersof governance and leadership that pique his personal history in political leadership of Nigeria he has not addressed in this book. Firstly, Obasanjo’s federalist role in the Biafra War and how the federalist dealt with rights of prisoners of war from the Igbo community is not explained. His hallmark argument that the media in Africa is the enemy within is not discussed and neighther has Obasanjo justified the argument anywhere else. The economic fate of Nigerian women and youths did not clearly feature in the book. Nigerian culture of cybercrime and drug trafficking is equally not addressed in General Obasanjo’s book. Thus, for the sake of building up intellectual preparedness in relation to management of governance and democracy in the developing world, Obasanjo’s autobiography, My Watch,has to be read along with other works but the light of prudence in Wole Soyinka’s words in You Must Set Forth by Dawn that Obasanjo in a serial liar.

Some more autobiographies that I can suggest for you in this juncture my dear reader are many. But on this year’s cart I can suggest; Raila Odinga’s Flame for Democracy, Lee Kwan Yew’s From Third World to the First World,Jewarhalal Nehru’s Discovery of India , Kwame Nkrumah’s Revolutionary Path, and last but not least, Colonel Murmar Gaddafi’s Escape to Hell. If you can be able to read these books, then you will also help me and very many other students of literature and politics in asking yourselves; why was PLO Lumumba fussed with Obasanjo’s Book, My Watch

Alexander Opicho writes from, Nairobi , Kenya