AHIARA DIOCESE CRISIS: THE UNTOLD STORIES…21

Explosion of Initiatives … [ii]

One of the greatest benefits of erecting a diocese in Mbaise land would be quickly realized a few months after the installation of her first bishop in the person of Bishop Victor Adibe Chikwe. The first fruit borne in the new diocese was a brand new initiative regarding the floundering apostolate to the youth and young adults in the Igbo heartland area. It turned out that the new bishop, Bishop Victor Chikwe had a spectacularly new initiative aimed at addressing one of the malignant problems of the post-civil war Church in Igbo heartland. It was the problem of youth acquisition of skills for life. This had resulted in the outbreak of all sorts of social problems. His unveiling of his wonderful initiatives in this regard would immediately open people’s eyes to what they had been missing since the Irish missionaries left the shores of the Igbo heartland area in January of 1970.

Since the end of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, which had resulted in the expulsion of the Irish missionaries from the Igbo heartland area, real apostolate to young people had almost been non-existent. Young adults who returned from the war empty-handed and completely demoralized as a result of the war’s negative outcome had little or nothing to fall back to along the lines of skills they would need to live a full human life in the world. Youth desperation and restiveness of the period were pathetic and heart wrenching. It had called for leaders with vision but there was hardly any in the horizon. The civil authorities were as visionless and clueless as the indigenous Church authorities of the period.

The new leadership of the Catholic Church which had become completely indigenized was almost bereft of ideas on how to address the problem of lack of skills among the teeming population of young people who were roaming about in search of what to make a living on. The traditional Catholic Church leadership which used to be a trail blazer on the issue of preparing younger people for their future during the missionary period was suddenly not there anymore. It dawned on people that that creative and pragmatic Church they used to know and love had gone with the expelled missionaries. In fact, with regard to empowering younger people with skills and directions for life, the post-civil war Catholic Church in the Igbo heartland area was AWOL. Leadership on that all-important problem was not there! The Catholic Church of that period was heavy on symbolism, ceremonials and authority but very light indeed on initiatives and creativity.

Even the great initiative of rehabilitating the wounded and physically challenged war veterans which the Marist Brothers of the Schools had begun in Uturu Okigwe at the end of the civil war was hardly well supported by the leadership of the Catholic Church in the heartland area. As a result the great idea of the Marist Brothers in Uturu Okigwe could not quite address the problem of lack of skills among the post-civil war young adults. So, it can be said that the apostolate to the young people was not a priority of the leadership of the Catholic Church that took over from the missionaries immediately after the civil war.

Yes, there were then and as it is now, some flamboyant youth programmes such as conventions, seminars, workshops, cultural celebrations, get-togethers, etc., organized under the auspices of the Catholic Youth Organization of Nigeria [CYON], the truth is, there had hardly existed any sustainable programmes initiated by the post-missionary Catholic Church to empower the young adults of the Igbo heartland area until the arrival of Bishop Chikwe on the scene. All the former youth programmes were heavy on gestures aimed at creating an impression that there was a thriving youth apostolate in the heartland area of Igbo land. They were hardly an honest effort to address the acute problems of the terribly embattled post-civil war young people in the Igbo heartland area.

The resultant effect was skyrocketing crime rates, broken communities, exploding social ills, total loss of discipline and vanished ethos of hard work and industry among the young adult of the Igbo heartland. Not finding anything to depend on for their living, many young people resorted to committing crimes and disorganizing the society. As the indigenized Igbo Catholicism appeared to abdicate her responsibility of arming the younger generation with skills, the audacious ones among them resorted to crimes such as armed robbery, kidnapping, advance fee fraud [419], telephone and internet scams, etc.

Perhaps the real tragedy with regard to the absence of a viable youth apostolate in the Igbo heartland area immediately after the civil war was that it marked a complete break with the wonderful legacies of the Irish missionaries. The Irish missionaries were second to none in preparing young people for their future. No other place was this more evident than in Mbaise land. Shortly after the erection of St Brigid’s Parish Church in 1933, one of the obsessions of the great Irish missionaries of the period was the erection of a skills acquisition institution in Ahiara. And that resulted in the establishment of St Joseph Technical College in Nnarambia Ahiara [Present-day Ahiara Technical School Ahiara, Ahiazu-Mbaise LGA].

St Joseph’s Technical College was among the first few technical colleges in Nigeria. Her counterpart institutions were Yaba Technical College which has long transformed into Yaba College of Technology, the Technical College in Enugu which perhaps metamorphosed into the present-day Institute of Management and Technology, Enugu, and another technical college in the North. Out of the three or four earliest technical colleges in Nigeria only St Joseph’s Technical College Ahiara - today’s Ahiara Technical School failed to graduate into a diploma or degree-awarding institution. Ahiara Technical College, one of the foremost in the country and the first of its type in Igbo heartland area has remained a rural post-primary institution, and, in fact, a glorified carpenter’s workshop, till today. The pathetic story of Ahiara Technical School sums up the long history of discrimination against Mbaise people!

The tragic fate of Ahiara Technical School [former St Joseph’s Technical College] has to do with the perennial Nigerian policy of discrimination against Mbaise people. Since January of 1905’s ugly incident in rural pre-colonial Mbaise resulting in the death of a colonial physician called Roger Stewart, it has become the habit of every administration in Nigeria, whether secular or religious, to discriminate against Mbaise people and deny them their basic rights. Bishop Whelan and some Irish missionaries tried to address this terrible evil against Mbaise people, but the civil war cut short their ambitions and programmes.

When the Irish missionaries were sent packing after the loss of the civil war, the floodgate opened for all manners of discrimination against the people of Mbaise as is evident in every aspect of life in Mbaise land today. The current bishopric crisis in Ahiara Diocese proves conclusively that a zebra never changes its colour! Mbaise people are always scapegoated in Nigeria for no just cause. This obnoxious programme of scapegoating Mbaise people entered Nigerian Catholicism in the early 1970s and has not left till today. Rather it has continued to metastasize and wreak havoc in all aspects of Catholic life in Nigeria. “Injustice to one,” the saying goes, “is injustice to all”!

The issue of skills’ acquisition for the young adults was an Irish missionaries’ priority not just for the young adult males but even more so for young adult females. After establishing a technical school for the young males in Ahiara, the missionaries established some counterpart skills acquisition trade centres for young females in strategic locations in Mbaise land. The first of these was in Our Lady of Victory Parish Amumara Ezinihitte Centre, after its establishment in 1947 as the second parish in Mbaise land. And shortly after that the missionaries also established another trade centre for the females at Ogbor Nguru following the opening of Sacred Heart Parish, Nguru in 1948. For skills acquisition along the line of the teaching profession, the missionaries established a teacher training institution in St Patrick’s Parish Ekwerazu which eventually metamorphosed into present–day Ekwerazu Girls’ Secondary School, Umuokrika Ekwerazu.

All these efforts demonstrated how anxious the missionaries were to give life-enhancing skills to the youth of the Igbo heartland area. Young adults’ skills’ acquisition was of the highest priority among the pioneer Irish missionaries to the Igbo heartland area. They saw youth acquisition of skills as an integral part of their missionary evangelization of the area and also as an antidote to all manners of violent social problems. And by so doing they laid it down as both a tradition and a legacy of missionary evangelization in Igbo land. That is to say, in the view of the Irish missionaries who evangelized the Igbo heartland area, no missionary enterprise would be complete without the younger generation acquiring some necessary skills they would need to live their lives in full in the world.

But immediately the missionaries were expelled from Igbo land in 1970 the whole initiatives to help young people of the Igbo heartland area acquire some skills vanished with them. All the teacher training colleges and trade centers collapsed. Ahiara Technical College was seized by the Nigeria government who began manipulating it to punish Mbaise people. The whole programme of empowering young people with skills was destroyed. The indigenous Church leadership that was challenged by the misguided Nigerian government policy to think creatively about how to provide alternative skills to the youths was simply not there. The defeated youths returning from the lost civil war angry and demoralized were made to roam aimlessly. The result was a broken society.

The lame excuse and the unfortunate alibi invoked by the indigenized leadership of Igbo Catholicism at that time was that the government seizure of schools had handicapped them and made them incapable of thinking creatively on how to rescue their younger generation who were devastated by the war and the absence of skills for life. Unfortunately this happened at the most inauspicious time for both the young people and Igbo heartland in general. It happened at a time when all that the Igbo heartland area had needed was a skills acquisition programme for young people who were returning from a lost war devastated and demoralized. There was nothing they had needed more at that time than some skills to start rebuilding their lives.

Some 18 years after the civil war, there appeared a shepherd in Igbo heartland area who was endowed with some creativity on how to address the problem of lack of skills among young people. Bishop Victor Chikwe’s first priority in Ahiara Diocese was to address the absence of a meaningful youth apostolate in the new diocese. His primary interest was to give the youth of the new diocese some skills. And that was what he had set out to do when he established the first office of Justice, Development and Peace Commission [JDPC] in the new diocese. He appointed a very seasoned and dynamic priest, in the person of Fr Donald Sonde Okoro, to head it.

Bishop Chikwe’s idea of JDPC office was totally unconventional. He pivoted the office towards giving the youth of the diocese skills. Immediately the new priests’ assignment was published in February of 1988, Bishop Chikwe and the new director of JDPC set out to find some sponsorship in America and Europe for their vision for skills acquisition for the youth. Fortunately, some sponsors poured in to help. The JDPC office in Aboh-Mbaise started receiving in bits some foreign aids to sponsor young people in various skills they were interested in.

On his part, Bishop Chikwe convened a meeting of the Presbyterium of the new diocese and sold to them his ideas in that regard. He requested all the priests especially those in parishes to gather all the youth of their parishes and find out those who could be trained free of charge in various skills. The parish priests carried the great news back home. And many young people trouped out to be trained in various skills. The programme became a hit instantly. All over the place there were many young people training on behalf of the diocese in various skills. It was absolutely amazing.

As more sponsorship and aid kept pouring in for the programme, it was enlarged to include many more young people. Before long the entire Ahiara Diocese was buzzing with a viable skills acquisition programme for the young people. In many parishes young people were being passionately encouraged to take advantage of the opportunity and get themselves some skills for life. And many were responding positively to the appeal. As a result, there were many young people training as motor mechanics, Electrical technicians, carpenters, bricklayers, tailors, welders, etc both in Mbaise land and throughout the major cities of the Igbo heartland area courtesy of Ahiara Diocesan JDPC. Within a space of a year the entire Mbaise land now called Ahiara Diocese was put back to work because of the ingenuity of one shepherd in the person of Victor Adibe Chikwe.

Bishop Chikwe’s skills acquisition was spectacularly non-denominational. The programme gradually expanded to cater for even non-Catholics. Both Bishop Chikwe and the director of JDPC at that time, Fr Donald Okoro were not quite interested in making the programme exclusive to Catholics. Rather their interest was giving some skills to young people who were genuinely in need of skills. It did not matter whether such a youth was a Catholic or a non-Catholic. Once it could be proven through the parish priest that a particular young was in need of some skills, the programme expanded to accommodate him or her irrespective of his or her faith or non-faith as the case might be.

As this revolution on skills acquisition for young people was going on throughout Ahiara Diocese, onlookers outside the diocese were struck with wonder. Bishop Chikwe’s initiative in that regard was about the first time a skills acquisition programme was being initiated and campaigned for throughout Igbo land. Bishop Chikwe could have successfully claimed to be one of the re-inventors of skills acquisition programme in the post-civil war Nigeria. His vision in his new diocese was to recapture the ingenuity of the missionaries. And he did that successfully through a skills acquisition programme for young people of Ahiara Diocese.

As the programme blossomed in the diocese, governments at all levels and other dioceses watched with admiration. It did not take long before some copycats of Chikwe’s programme began springing up in both the secular governments and other dioceses throughout Igbo land. Even though a few were too embarrassed to acknowledge the miracle that was springing up from a little known diocese they had previously derided and lampooned as rural and unworkable, a great many came to Ahiara Diocese to learn and reproduce in their respective dioceses the successful skills acquisition programme that was transforming the lives of many young people in Mbaise land.

To be continued …