Re: An Open Letter to Festus Odimegwu

 An Open Letter to Festus OdimegwuBy Leonard Nzenwa
I am very sure that we have not crossed path before. I am sure, however, that I have read a lot about you to offer a fair and balanced appraisal of the kind of person you are – a core professional per excellence that suffer no fools. You are wired to excel. Your world is that littered with impressive results. Anything that is not in tandem with success is crushed.  I am reminded that you are an Eze Gburugburu 1 of Igbo Land. An exulted traditional title that puts you almost on same stead with the legendary Biafran warlord, whose courage and tenacity to inspire the Ibos under the most inhuman condition remains unmatched. By an uncanny coincidence you still bear the ODIMEGWU name. What a coincidence!
Your domination of the nations’ brewery landscape for over a decade was so clinical to the point that your name became synonymous with the brewery company. Standing like an iroko tree, you dared competition to bring it on, and many buckled under your fire power. It was ovation – drumbeats and dances – that heralded your exit from that sector to the relief of competition. However, a certain bureaucrat politician who administers one of the States in the North, and whose known academic earned qualification is a polytechnic embossed HND certificate boasted that you were drunk with alcohol when you gave a postscript of your overview of the last national census exercise in Nigeria, and which puts the country’s population at 140 million – the current projection is 170 million. President Good luck Jonathan agreed with him! Anyim Pius Anyim believed him! They all too quickly forgot that you were a first class graduate. They forgot that if indeed, you were drunk, you wouldn’t have leapfrogged the brewery company to a sustained growth mode for years, both at top-level as well at other categories of the company.
What an insult! But don’t worry. This is Nigeria where anything under the sun happens: a country where you find illiterates, with no means of livelihood and legion of marabouts owning Oil Wells; where it is possible to change a man to become a woman overnight. Where a goat, sheep, camel can be counted as human beings. I mean the arid, uninhabited Sahara desert where life cannot be nurtured will, suddenly, in a fit of mystical amplitude, will produce millions of human beings. Yes, in Nigeria, a magician can become a legendary cleric, preaching and resurrecting dead souls; widely and wildly celebrated. Yes, where the population of men outstrip that of the women.
Yes, the Nigerian Population Commission, NPC, the body empowered to take responsibility of determining the nation’s human number, established then that men in Nigeria are greater in number: men 71.7million, women 68.3million. It is this body, which has produced controversial census figure since it was set up that you were requested to take charge. And you agreed. And when you did spot all kinds of irregularities – and being the professional you are with a conscience – you wouldn’t have any of that – to acquiesce that the population of men are greater than that of the women. Your heart bled. You spoke out with rage because your conscience was wounded. You believed Uthman Dan Fodio who declared in the face of lies, injustice and deceit that: ”Conscience is an open wound, only truth can heal it”. You shouted! But you had hardly done weeping, when descendants of the revered cleric silenced you, SHUT UP ODIMEGWU! Those women, girls and baby-girls that is everywhere can’t possibly be greater in number than men and boys, you were told. ” …seeing is not believing”, they intoned.
It never mattered to them that our schools enrollment, in real terms, shows 60:40 ratio if not more of women to men. Walk into any school across the country; whether it is primary, secondary or even tertiary institutions, you behold the face of our beautiful women like a sea. Visit the hospitals and you see patient intake ratio scaled in favour of our womenfolk. Look at our Innocent babies: for every one boy you see three to four girls are inviting you to come and embrace them. Our beautiful ladies are on our streets as bees upon honey!  But this is quashed by NPC; other sundry reasons as inaccessible terrain, lack of sufficient equipment and tools to navigate through impassable seas, mountain tops, valleys, thickets and deserts where Nigerians reside were advanced as reason why we had the March 2006 Census figure.
I am very sure that you never had Alhaji Samu’ila Danko Makama, your predecessor in mind when you gave your candid opinion, they nevertheless insisted that you set out to rubbish the ”good work” he did, and for this reason, you became morally, ethically and professionally unqualified to oversee the Commission. I am also sure that you jubilated that you were going to bring your wealth of experience from the corporate world, the private sector with its professionalism and breath of excellence to bear on your assignment. You had quickly set out to develop a blueprint and action program to sanitize one of the critical, wicked problems of the country. The dictum that a man who is unaware of the exact number of his children is incapable of feeding, planning or managing his family motivated you. All these faded in a twinkle of an eye!
I am sorry to inform you, Eze Gburugburu, that you glorified your naivety. You showed it clearly. In Nigeria, sir, you don’t speak your mind. You don’t speak the truth. You sell dummies. You must ensure that you are imbued with elastic capacity to turn white to black; you must have the skill to conceal motives of your heart. You must excel in fraud, a paragon of deceit. You must, in the literal sense, be a political, economic, social and even technological chameleon, all in one. What do you think has been the staying power of such gladiators like the Aninihs, the Jerry Gana’s, the Tom Ikimis and the Edwin Clarke’s? These men have excelled in this game because they understood the nature of Nigeria.
Truth, for them, as it is for most operators in the corridors of power is not constant. It can be twisted. That the population of kano outstripped Lagos, the commercial nerve center of Nigeria and the hub of economic activity in the country is ok. That many arid and semi-arid parts of the country’s’ population outstrip that of the humid, west coast area of the country is fine with them. Notwithstanding that this has turned to a novel demographic discovery and result that has given both students and experts in this field a lot of work to do. May be a new body of knowledge will emerge from their research to show how human beings prefer to migrate to arid, sub-Sahara areas than the more friendly humid, water belt areas!
Eze Ggburugburu Odimegwu, the only lesson, and only lesson for you is to learn how not to speak the truth when an opportunity of this nature is thrown at you in Nigeria. If it were possible, you would have asked the legendary late educationist and social critic, Tai Solarin. He was humiliated publicly in a national television.  In the showpiece, he looked befuddled and never recovered from that embarrassment. You need be happy that you were not served this dose. Please go back and reinforce yourself with a tongue laced with deceit. This is Nigeria!