TUTU AND A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS

Despite the challenges facing the nation, this is one of the good times to be a proud Nigerian! President Buhari-led government has made me proud. The recent reciprocal reduction of Emirates flights to Nigeria from 21 per week to just once, in retaliation to UAE’s limitation of Air Peace’s flights to Dubai via Sharjar Airport, to one flight per week, has sent an assuring message that the federal government will go full length to protect the interests of indigenous airlines and Nigerian air travellers.

Gone After 90 years many of which were spent in service of others, South African anti-apartheid hero and world-renowned human rights icon Mr. Desmond Tutu breathed his last.

The ghosts of the inconceivable wickedness of the apartheid regime in South Africa, China`s highhandedness in Tibet, Israel`s heinous expedition in Palestine and in fact injustice everywhere must have breathed huge sighs of relief as the chest bearing one of Africa`s biggest hearts of all time rose and fell for the last time.

The grief in the encomiums and tributes paid to the humble priest of God from all over the world was unmistakable, for in a man of small stature but towering courage one of the most heinous systems of inequality ever known to men more than met its match.

Along with the immortal Nelson Mandela and a host of others who spent long years in South African prisons, Desmond Tutu fought apartheid to a standstill and in the process brought to birth the rainbow nation.

A man of the margins and a voice of the voiceless, he knew the fine margins of marginalization from his native South Africa and then the world over becoming in the process a megaphone which cried for accountability and justice against the world`s most discriminatory systems.

In the journey of peoples and countries, history has shown that men are capable of impossibly wicked inventions. When they feel like and when the unfathomable hypocrisy of the incredibly permissible international order allows, oppressive systems are foisted on minorities by powerful countries.

The world has borne horrible witness to many genocides. There have also been grave crimes against humanity in many parts of the world. Till this day, there is in place in some countries systems which crush minorities. The lessons of the Nazi regime and the Second World War did not sink into a lot of people.

It was against one of such systems embedded in the inherently evil apartheid regime in South Africa that Desmond Tutu came up and fought until it fell. Today, inequality however remains ingrained in the South African society.

Desmond Tutu also took umbrage at the predicament of Tibetans and Palestinians at the hands of China and Israel respectively. A man of the minorities, he knew what life was like under ruthless regimes that thrived on systemic inequality.

Today, the world continues to lurch about in inequality. In Africa, where providence deposited Desmond Tutu, corruption and abysmally poor leadership have continued to fuel inequality, plunging families and their children deeper into poverty.

The only thing many African leaders know how to do is how to ferret out funds belonging to their countries to offshore accounts. This malaise does not just afflict ageing African despots, some young African leaders are bringing their youth to bear on the kinetics of kleptocracy. More than ever, the future looks bleak for African children.

Desmond Tutu fought for an equal world free of discrimination and full of equal opportunities for all. In many ways, he left a world gravely sickened by its grotesque inequality a bit more equal than he met it.

But the task to end inequality and discrimination against minorities remain more urgent than ever. In many parts of the world, people that are in the minority either because of their religion, race or ethnicity remain too many for comfort. The plight of the Rohingya people of Myanmar readily comes to mind. As it is in Myanmar so it is with the Uighurs in China and the people of Tibet.

While he lived, Desmond Tutu showed the world that the vigil against oppression and inequality must be unerring and unending. The world must keep this vigil.
Good night Mpilo.

– Kene Obiezu, keneobiezu@gmail.com