Tag: Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan

About a decade ago while researching for a class I taught at the University of Colorado, I stumbled on an arresting narrative. A woman had a baby in a stroller at Trafalgar Square in London. She carted the baby around and an onlooker was taken with the charms of the little one.

“Your baby is very beautiful,” remarked the onlooker.

“You haven’t seen anything, yet” replied the mother. “Wait until you see her pictures.”

The mother had imposed a new reality on her baby. The baby was not what you saw in flesh and blood, but what technology had wrought. What the dark room had configured, what the click and flash and the angles of the camera had brought to life. We now have two eyes. The one that sees everyone without the mediation of the machine, and the one that the machine has made.

I could not but wonder at this when I got hold of the book, In Tune with Destiny, Dr Emmanuel EwetaUduaghan. I saw, rather I ogled, from page to page and I started to see whether technology was trying to impose one reality over the one that was there. I mean the truth, unvarnished.

But I saw, too, that though it is described as a pictorial biography of Governor Uduaghan, something else moderated the pictures. Words. Words are powerful but as the cliché goes, pictures cannot lie. Of course that cliché preceded the technology that distorted pictorial realities.

But the power of words in telling reality, especially the ones that pertain to the clarity of vision, came from the testimonial zeal of one of the greatest craftsmen ever of the English language. Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness and Nostromo,  spoke about what he did with words.

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.”

From going through the pages, I observed that the authors of this package did not only want to make us see, but also to make us feel. For what is the point of vision without sentiment? How do you see the picture of the governor at two years old, with a small, multi-coloured cap, and a pair of eyes of an alarmed and astonished infant and not wonder what he was thinking?

It is not just what we see, but what that sight makes us feel. That is what makes us human.

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched,” remarked another writer, Helen Keller, “they must be felt with the heart.”

This is a book of 239 pages that tell the story of one man and his odyssey of six decades.

During this period, he was with the father, was without his father, enjoyed mother for two years and loved his mother. He was raised by a grandmother, a woman with an imperial dignity, in another village called Mosogar. He lived in a village without electricity, roads, pipe-borne water. Time was determined not by clock but the cock with three crows in the morning signifying different activities. He tapped rubber, set traps in the bush for game, dipped into the river to catch fish with bare hands. His right hand could not touch his left ear when his mates went to school. His brilliance, however, beat the rules for him. He wanted to be an accountant but became a doctor. Nobody thought he could be a party nominee for governor, but he won not just the party primaries but the state elections; not once, not twice.

He married his heartthrob who shared the same family background, both fathers in military, both parents separated, both minorities. His heartthrob first thought he was short at first sight because she pictured marrying a tall man. He won the heart of her brother and mother and everyone else in the family circle before Roli Nere Tuoyo. She said she was a female chauvinist, but she thanks God that “God touched me positively and I relaxed to give it (the suitor’s advance) a deeper thought. Then something struck me. I realised he is someone I can truly respect, which is not in my character to do, no matter who he is and what he does.”

The pictures of their wedding, you need to see that. The bridegroom with his long neck and lean face is not the one you see today. The bride, whom he described as usually in trousers and was like a tomboy, looked quite mellow in tranquil elegance in the photos. Marriage had done a miracle. Roli Uduaghan herself says she submits to her husband in all things, according to the prodding of scripture.

What else shall we know? That as a medical doctor he struggled and, as one of Roli’s relatives put it, he packed his Volkswagen Beetle over slope so that folks could help push it to start. They married, he a doctor and she a teacher, with the beetle as a family story.

Listen to this: “In the course of the courtship, each time they both rode in the Beetle car, there was a usual amusement: Roli would, for reason of the fact that the Beetle had no back door, adjust the front seat backwards and place her legs on its dashboard and, thereafter, adjust the small side window to let in air directly towards her. Shortly afterwards, she would burst into a prayerful song to God to give her and her spouse an air-conditioned Mercedes car in place of the Beetle car.” That prayerful song remains a refrain of sentimental gratitude in the family today.

We see pictures about his public life, especially as governor, a lot of it. Is it when the President,Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, hands him the coveted Commander of the Order of the Niger, or when he crouches before respected H.I.D Awolowo, when he gives a present to Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. We also see pictures of him at work in government, commissioning projects, meeting with political titans like Chief E. K. Clark, or with his fellow governors in the south-south like ebullient Godswill Akpabio. We see him with southeast governors like Theodore Orji, the Ochendo. With traditional rulers like the Olu of Warri and the Ooni of Ife.

The pictures show him in tune with all, those in his state, those in his ethnic group, and those outside. The pictures show a man at peace in his skin.

In spite of the plenitude of pictures, there are two things that the pictures cannot carry. One of them are the key moments of his childhood in the village. I remember conducting an interview with Governor Uduaghan barely a year after he became governor and I asked him his favorite viewing delights. He pointed out Nollywood movies and the reason was that the settings often reminded him of his childhood. But we do not have the picture of him trying in vain to let his right hand touch his left ear, although we see a picture of an adult Uduaghan in the book performing the feat perfectly. We do not have the picture of him tapping rubber, catching fish in the river, playing soccer with his sisters looking with admiration. We do not see him in class.

Recently, when Brigadier BenjamenAdekunle died, we learnt that he polished the general’s shoe during the civil war in Sapele. Since then when I saw him, I looked over at his shoes to see how they shone and whether he still did it himself. But we don’t have the picture of him and the general who always insisted that the young Emmanuel should shine his shoes. We see him paddling a canoe as governor but one would have loved to see him do that as a young villager.

In a wonderful forward from President OlusegunObasanjo, GCFR,  he described Governor Uduaghan as “not only calm and indomitable; he is also firm and indomitable – he is indomitably firm.” Testimonials came from almost everywhere about his sense of calm and serenity, from his wife, his daughter Orode, and his colleagues and fellow governors. But no picture can capture such temperament. Only words did. That is one of the weaknesses of pictures.

Words collide with pictures in this package. In some instances, the picture tells nothing until the words intervene. For instance, I tried to study the countenance of his mother, Cecilia and had a clue when she is described as calm. His father, Edmund was a polygamist and at one time he visited his frustration outside on Cecilia and she discovered that it was because a woman had turned down his advances. Cecilia went to beg the woman to accept so she could have peace at home. The story does not tell whether Edmund had his wish and Cecilia her peace.

The preponderance of pictures and the attempts to match words to vision is one of the delicate assignments undertaken in this book. It succeeds in some areas. Where it has challenges is whether it tries to delve into the areas of policy and governance. The words try and the pictures say a few things but it can never serve as a substitute for a cerebral undertaking.

But the pictures have told many stories that have saved the imagination. Readers will pick their favorites. Is it two-year-old with alarmed eyes, or Roli and Emmanuel Uduaghan face to face, eye to eye, forehead to forehead? Or the wedding photos, or the Beetle car impression? There are many.

The package in a variety of colours keeps interest alive and we also see the quotes and interviews presented with aesthetic dexterity.

But quite a few errors can be sighted. The first quote in the book and the first sentence of President Obasanjo’s forward could have been better read. In one of the pages, Governor Uduaghan’s father was called Desmond instead of Edmund.

As a work of six decades, more than half of the photos took place in his years as governor, a lopsidedness that may arise from an absence of either research or paucity of photos. If he grew up in a village without electricity and pipe-borne water, then we know why pictures could not be in abundance. If he grew up in an age of internet and selfies, there would have been a suffusion of pictures telling perhaps too much detail.

In all, this is a wonderful effort to document a life, in pictures backed by words. I therefore recommend this book as a story of a man who transcended  the odds and has lived an exemplary life. The story continues. I, therefore, present this book to you all.