Olusegun Obasanjo: Letters can be symbols of hope
By Nzube Nlebedim
IN My Dear God: Letters to God, a collection of personal essays, readers may feel they are reading a religious pamphlet or a liturgy. But on closer observation, the book reveals a different, less clichéd intent. In the main, what we glean from My Dear God is a mental picture of two men – not only famous Bible characters – who have lived largely successful lives, have traversed the world, but who listen to the voices calling them back to where it all started: in God. This collaborative text between former President of Nigeria, Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo, and retired cell molecular biology professor, Mark Nwagwu, is marked by reflection into the past and the contemplation of the present. The reader may learn useful lessons from the hopeful present and flamboyant yet chequered pasts of two magnificently accomplished Nigerian men.
There is much to say about the uniformity of purpose both men exercised to write this book. They are a two-man choir, both whispering pleasant music in the orchestra of melancholy and hope. Obasanjo describes hope as “one tangible factor of all even that makes life worth living.” He shares an important story in the 34th letter. In it, Obasanjo reflects on the time he spent in prison in Nigeria, when he was jailed by then head of state, General Sani Abacha, over allegations of involvement in a coup. Obasanjo reflects on the traumatised state of Nigeria under dictatorial and autocratic leaders ruling through the machineries of a junta. In prison, where Obasanjo stayed from 1995 till the death of Abacha in 1998, Obasanjo gave his life to Christ. He narrates his role in prison as a giver of hope to the other inmates. And this is the general idea of the book: the waiting on hope. It is through hope we refuse to fail. In Nwagwu’s poem in that chapter, the masterful poet and philosopher intones: “in my uselessness I returned your love in broken baskets.” Both men, through this, recreate a legacy of deep deference to their God to whom they now give total dedication.
The dynamics of leadership and power is a tasking duty. Leadership creates at its core a mirror to see through the fragile delicateness of humanity. Through the privilege of authority, it is easy for a person to fall back on those who stood with them, to revolt, to turn their back on God. Obasanjo says in the 48th letter, “my dear God, give me nothing that will make me forget you.” And yes, as much as it is easy to forget God, it is also expedient to keep in the line of gratitude. Forgetfulness is tantamount to ingratitude to God. Nwagwu, in the same letter, calls out to God for the gift of remembrance. Martyrdom becomes the ultimate price for absolution to God. Martyrdom is the “first Christians,” Nwagwu says. Martyrdom is the picture of Lawrence “roasted on a grid iron.” Martyrdom is Atilla the Hun, Marie Goretti, Thomas More, and Maximilian Kolbe. Nwagwu’s tone is subdued, and it dims the stuttering lightbulb of glee and joy in the book. Obasanjo and Nwagwu speak in whispers to each other. They are seasoned marksmen, generals, burnt by the fire of life. This book, then, may provide some revelation. You might be right if you call My Dear God a prayer book, for indeed it is a book of prayer, whispering into the ears of God.
In “Rituals After Death,” the 23rd chapter, Nwagwu uses the metaphor of a ball game to contemplate the relationship between God and man and death. “The game is over, we’ve played our last shots,” Nwagwu says. The end is inevitable but completely open-ended. The person who passes through the world reaches, inexcusably, the end of the line, that “last shot of life, and “my best shot ever.” Obasanjo narrates witnessing the preparation of a corpse for burial. The rituals are unnecessary, he says. What matters in the end is where the soul goes to. He confesses his belief in the afterlife. It is this belief in continuity after the end that pushes the living to provide what may be useful for the dead in their next passage. Obasanjo, however, cautions against the focus on the passage itself than the preservation and resting place of the soul. Eternity beckons on all, and humanity is cursed to answer when it calls.
Through their reflection on death, both writers cast their minds back to the beginning. In order to contemplate the present, it is also often necessary to negotiate the past by returning to it. Obasanjo narrates in the 24th letter his upbringing in his village where “the only means of entertainment for children was moonlight plays, riddles and folklore.” “But now all have changed,” he says. Such change is the expected consequence of time. Time unravels things and changes them. Obasanjo describes his efforts to improve the lack of his village, wherein lies the marker of his origin. He sends emissaries to supervise this mission, one they eventually achieve, but not without internecine disputes. The disputation emerges from Obasanjo’s noble need to keep the church tradition without changing any of its original ideals. Obasanjo is nostalgic and therefore possessive of the church as a repertoire of his life’s worth. Some things, he infers, do not need to be changed. In the same way, Nwagwu sojourns to Obetiti, the “Hearth of my heart,” where “we can learn new laughters.” Home is the core of a man’s being in the end. Everybody comes from a home, and all are compelled in the end to return to it. Some obey. Some do not. In the end, home is something of a digital rather than an analogue construct. It is universal rather than monolithic. It follows us wherever we go, but it is to their primal origin that “Olu and Mark” return to at this point of their lives.
Stripped of their world-weary armour, both men refer to themselves as simply “Mark” and “Olu” at the end of each of their letters. This is perhaps the easiest proof of their surrender to God and their acknowledgment of their powerlessness before their maker. But these men are far from being powerless. It is this truth that foregrounds their vulnerability and makes the book a most sincere one. The work is completely stripped of the self-acclaim in Obasanjo’s My Command, or the robust and kind rhetoric of Nwagwu’s Dreams Dance. In those books, both men wrote about their lives, but mostly in terms of their own personal outlook. In My Dear God, however, Obasanjo relieves himself of his worldly command, and Nwagwu’s dreams dance only to the tunes of God. The two men, both eighty-four at the time of the book’s publication, come naked and repentant at the end of their tall, ambitious lives.
“What is the End”?, the final and 52nd letter in the work, provides both answers and questions. The writers fortunately raise more questions than answers, largely about the options of an end. To Jesus’ last statement on the cross, “it is finished,“ Obasanjo responds that “it was finished but not over.” There can be a winning of the battle but losing of the war; for while there seems to be a definite ending, endings are not always so definite. Nwagwu says, “in the end is the beginning, there is no end/there’s always a beginning, but from where.” There is only the transition from “one lake to another lake: from one shore to another shore.”
Obasanjo and Nwagwu have done something significant with My Dear God: Letters to God. The book renegotiates the perception of the image and worship of God. God is not so far away, they say. He is close, they say, ready to read these letters. He’s not far from his creation, and they can speak to him through the channel of prayer, sometimes for rededication and often for thanksgiving.
If both writers said everything about who God is to them, they do not mention that God can be a seed of love planted in the heart of man. And although the seed of God may delay in growing to the surface of the soul, it is there still, waiting, feeding and preparing for the day of blossoming. The seed of love had been planted in the hearts of both writers a long time ago; Obasanjo from the Baptist Church “which we all knew and we were all born into,” and Nwagwu, from his early baptism in the Catholic Church. Alas, these seeds of life have blossomed, and we are feeding from mighty trees.
* Nlebedim is the founding editor of The Shallow Tales Review, and author of At Night Men Take the Lonely Way Back Home, a collection of thirteen personal essays on time, roads, and roots