Today’s Gospel Came A Little Earlier… It Came Yesterday!

Yesterday, we read Soludo’s treatise on “the purpose and price of disruptive change”. It evoked an unusual feeling of brokenness from a mass of people who are agreed that our society has come to the point where all we need is intense soul searching.

Soludo once shared a story, and for me, there is a lesson in that story that exposes public complicity to value degeneration. Now, here is the story with two scenarios;  first was about a certain community that elected its leader who, prior to his assumption of office, was a low income owner of a Volkswagen beetle car. Few months down the line this leader acquires for himself a Toyota SUV invariably from the pool of public contributions earmarked for community development. Soludo queries his audience, “What should the community do to this leader”, and the responses ranged from one capital punishment to another. None spared this leader any respite, not even the possibility of a plea bargain.

The next story was about a certain University Vice Chancellor (VC) from same community who, prior to his appointment, drove a Peugeot 406 saloon car. He finished his tenure as a Vice Chancellor with loads of reforms in the institution that repositioned it for better growth. After a 5 year tenure, this VC continued to drive this Peugeot 406 car, lived in his modest apartment and went back to his teaching career. Again, Soludo asked his audience, “what do you think about this Vice Chancellor?” Many of them in the room chorused that the man MUST BE SICK  IN THE  HEAD.

This is the dilemma of reforms and expectations. How we expect financial probity and inexplicable ostentation in one breath typifies our collective drift, and shared “purposelessness”; culminating in the wrong premises we reach in our choice of leaders. The question now begging for answer, especially to Ndị Anambra, as Soludo continues to set the tone of what to expect from March 17 is, “What Do we want?”

For me, I think it’s good we _*Come Work with Soludo!*

– Mazi Ejimofor Opara writes from Awka, Anambra State.