Showing posts with label Mahatma Gandhi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mahatma Gandhi. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 7, 2024

Fix Food First And Fast Or Forget It

 By Dele Sobowale

“There are people in the world, so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in form of bread”Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948

The great Indian leader and liberator made that remark before he was assassinated in 1948 at a time when his country, now divided into at least three nations, suffered from food scarcity worse than Nigeria is experiencing now. Certainly, it can also be said that there are millions of people in Nigeria today, so hungry that God cannot appear to them except either as a loaf of bread or a bowl of cooked rice. 

I was only four years old in 1948. So, I had to interview those far older than me to know how the food situation was like at the time – in addition to historical research. Surprisingly, Nigeria was then a net exporter of food at a time when almost 99 per cent of Nigerians were illiterates; when the University of Ibadan was just opening its doors to students.

Thursday, March 24, 2022

Lessons From W.F. Kumuyi’s Global Crusades

 By Banji Ojewale

It wasn’t fulfilling for Mahatma Gandhi,  a Hindu and father of modern India, to read the Bible and be challenged by Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

*From Left: Mrs Kumuyi, Pastor Kumuyi and another pastor in Ghana

The Lord’s lofty teachings touched him, as he believed they seemed to surpass his own faith’s call on man to a lifetime of exalted moral values. But Gandhi held that merely mouthing these principles was disingenuous, if it ended in the mind.

The outworking of the precepts of religion by its votaries must confer on it drive, dignity and distinction. He wrote in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, “…morality is the basis of things and that truth is the substance of all morality…A virtue achieves its potential only in its application and it ceases to have any use if it serves no purpose in daily life.”

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Buhari And Remembrance Of Things Past

By Paul Onomuakpokpo
As the first half of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration lurches into the twilight, it is refreshing that he has given us an opportunity to interrogate his intervention in national politics from another perspective. Beyond the well-worn exploration of Buhari as a profile in persistence, having taken him over a decade to chase a return to power, we can now attend to the   relationship between personal tragedies and national glories.
*Buhari
It is now clear from Buhari’s disclosure in Benin during his commissioning of some projects of the outgoing Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole that his tragedy of incarceration after his overthrow in 1985 as military head of state remains a stimulant for his quest for regaining power.  Buhari said that he spent 40 months in a bungalow in Benin after he was overthrown by some corrupt army officers. In fact, he said that the coup was a preemptive strike against his crusade against some corrupt officers.
From that crucible of 1985, through the next 30 years, Buhari might have realised the essence of engendering an equitable society. But as he tells us, such a society is not attainable in so far as it remains a bastion for the proliferation of injustice as evident in the complicity of the judiciary in the denial of his electoral victories on three previous occasions. Of course, Buhari’s quest for an equitable society after suffering injustice is not an isolated case. Before him, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, among others appropriated a sense of injustice inflicted by warped state powers to develop their societies.
Even back at home, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo was prised from prison to cobble together a dismembering nation. But in the case of Buhari, it is unfortunate that while his regaining of power after 30 years might have served a personal cathartic purpose, it is far from playing a significant role in his relationship with the need for the development of the country. For the danger that the nation faces today under the Buhari government is that at the end of his tenure, he would have succeeded in making millions of citizens to feel a sense of injustice and alienation from the society. This is the clear possibility that Buhari would engender through his policies and programmes.
If Buhari had truly learnt the lessons of suffering injustice, he would guard against fostering a sense of injustice. But does Buhari really have consideration for the need to ensure justice for others? Consider his  appointments  since he  became president. How have these ensured justice and the strengthening of the unity of the country?  In those appointments, Buhari brazenly favoured his northern part of the country. It is such nepotism that has thrown up a situation where from the National Assembly, the military, police, Department of State Services,  other security apparatuses, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), to other major government agencies, the heads are northerners.