ENUGU NORTH LEADERS: May It Not Be For You Like Sen.Fidelis Okoro

ENUGU NORTH LEADERS: May It Not Be For You Like Fide Okoro 

The not so complimentary reactions trailing the demise of Senator Fidelis Okoro, a three term Senator who represented our Enugu North Senatorial district, were most paradoxical in the ways they were shocking and at the same time not so surprising, to our people. I had to reflect on the things I knew of him and those I just learned and shuddered in utter bewilderment, of it all.

And just like the burial homily, my writing is no more for the dead, even though he is the reason, than as it is for the living, who still have ears, eyes and minds to listen, see and reason out their lives, from the current travail of the dead. Of course, there is nothing anyone could ever say in praise or condemnation that matters anymore to Senator Okoro. 

So, like Mark Anthony's address to the Romans at the burial of Julius Ceasar, the many pained voices of our people regretting the missed opportunities in Fide Okoro's long years of selfish disconnect, should pluck out the heads of some of our current leaders from the clouds of aloofness they have been misguided into, by their praise singers and their own pride, to the realities of today and its nexus with their eventual dates with history tomorrow. 

Thus, as they pause to ponder it all, trying to pick the extinguished mystique of Okoro from where it now lay in ruins, where it could well be forever lost in the mud and ashes of history, the import and brutal lessons of this should not be lost on anyone, to avoid this kind of unpalatable aftertaste now fouling up his passing to sort of becoming an inglorious home call. 

When Senator Okoro and his generation emerged and held sway, they were few and in every way larger than life hence they were accountable to no one. He was arrogant, selfish and insensitive to the feelings of his community and constituency. Okoro behaved like a tin gods who held the people in indescribable contempt, and clearly showed them they deserved no good at all hence he could not think twice before casually dismissing a graduate kinsman who had sought his assistance for a white collar job with his now infamous 'nkashi' reposte, as he asked him who would remain to farm cocoyams if everyone went to work in the city.  

If our people are genuinely aggrieved about Okoro's selfish outing in the past, our youths are even more so against some of our current leaders who are equally insesitive and reckless. They hold them largely responsible for the palous state they have found themselves. Poor leadership had robbed their fathers of their yesterday. The same thing has all but taken their today and if care is not taken threatening their children's tomorrow. They know our people generally are perennial victims of the economic, social, and political dislocations the poor leadership of a wicked, corrupt, selfish, and conscienceless political elite had foisted on us.

But, if not for our stubborn predispositions to doing bad to those we lead, we always have enough time to do the good that would give us our post humus good names. That is the timeless lessons Senator Okoro, in missing this, offers us in death. This is because, as I always say, the best place to be buried, especially for a leader, is not in a gold studded vault, but in the hearts of his people. There holds the true promise of real eternity. And the golden memory they hold of their fallen hero is sure to sprout in their mind as that beautiful flower called FORGET ME NOT. 

#IamWordshot

#DemocracyGoodGovernanceAndAccountabiltyAdvocate