AHIARA DIOCESE IN CROSSHAIRS: THE REAL STORIES …11 [EXCERPTS FROM A BOOK IN PRINT]

Chapter 4: Why Mbaise Again?

From that very day the appointment of Msgr. Peter Okpalaeke was announced to Ahiara Diocese and to the whole world, there began running throughout the length and breadth of the diocese an undercurrent of introspection, second-guessing and even agitation about what was considered the terribly deteriorated fate of the Mbaise people throughout Igbo land and Nigeria as a whole. There quickly developed a consensus opinion among Mbaise indigenes that they were not being fairly treated by both the civil authorities and the Catholic Church hierarchy in Nigeria. It became a common sight for priests and lay people alike to reel out the many injustices that had been visited on Mbaise people throughout their history. It appeared as if the whole Mbaise people were asking with one voice; “Why us now?”; “Why Mbaise people again?”

Unfortunately, it would not take long before a counter-current to this self-pity attitude would erupt among some Mbaise people. This counter-current claimed that Mbaise people were in fact their own worst enemies. Many people both within and outside Mbaise were quick to tell Mbaise people that they themselves were perhaps the architects of their own misfortune in Igbo land and should have only themselves to blame on whatever befell them in Igbo land and in the Catholic Church in particular. It got to the point that one of the Anambra State bishops in Owerri Province would tell the Ahiara diocesan priests during a rowdy meeting with the bishops of the province on December 21, 2012 that Ife na-esi ndi Mbaise isi di fa n’ime [Whatever is producing the stench about Mbaise people is in fact deeply buried in their hearts and souls.]

Taking a cue from this rather abnormal situation, many priests and lay people began pointing accusing fingers to one another. This was a season for mistrust, mutual accusation, recriminations and self-criticism among a great many Mbaise people everywhere. Many claimed quite openly that Mbaise people did not love one another; that Mbaise people everywhere were always quarrelling and back-biting one another; that the people of Mbaise hated the progress of one of their own; and that they would prefer to help other people progress rather their own kith and kin. According to this school of thought, it was such group of Mbaise people who would rather have a junior Awka priest become their bishop rather than have one of their eminently qualified sons and brothers as their bishop.

Not a few people claimed that it was this unfortunate trait of the Mbaise people that was being exploited by their competitors to defeat and hurt them every so often. Many were citing concrete examples of where and when many Mbaise sons and daughters in secular governments, companies, market stalls and even in parishes and religious congregations ran each other down and or engaged in titanic battles to destroy one another thereby opening the door wide for their enemies to knock their heads together and defeat them.

According to this line of thinking, it was this situation of mutual mistrust and hatred among Mbaise priests that had opened the door for their competitors from Anambra State to cash in and seize the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese that was supposed to be their birthright. Many Mbaise lay men and women claimed that it was because of the fact that many priests had destroyed one another with their petition writings that the bishopric of the diocese was given to a foreigner. The popular belief then was that the good bishopric candidates from Mbaise who could have easily been appointed bishops were subsequently run down and destroyed by their fellow brother priests from Mbaise through petition writing.

For many people from Mbaise, anybody crying about the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke in Ahiara Diocese was only shedding crocodile tears and treating the symptoms of a disease rather than the disease itself. According to them, the dangerous disease eating up the hearts and souls of Mbaise people was that of mutual hatred and envy of one another. For people in this group the appointment of a priest from Anambra State as the bishop of Ahiara Diocese should be seen as rather a positive way the good Lord had chosen to call Mbaise people back to their senses and to the basics about how they should relate to one another if they wanted to return to position of relevance in both the Church and in the civil order of Nigeria.

This indeed was a season for blame game. There was a lot of blame to go round a million times among the Mbaise sons and daughters as we tried to come to grips with what had struck us. Mbaise people everywhere appeared hysterical and could not easily get over the inherent injustice entailed by the appointment of Ebere Peter Okpalaeke as their bishop-elect. They could not understand what had necessitated the giving away of the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese to a younger priest from Anambra State when Mbaise land had more than a hundred priests who could step in and be counted among the best bishops in Nigeria.

Every where a group of Mbaise people gathered, they engaged in nothing but the business of excoriating one another and their brothers and sisters from Mbaise. Many of the senior priests of the diocese were bombarded with text messages blaming and cursing them out for allowing such a thing to happen. One of the priests lamented the fact that on that December 7, 2012, when the announcement was made, he received many text messages that simply began with “shame on you priests for letting Mbaise people down”. The priests of the diocese were being singled out for blame on the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke as the bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese. Our diocese that used to be described with all the positive superlatives during the reign of Bishop Chikwe was being cast as if it had overnight turned into a hellish Bedlam where everyone was perennially at each other’s throat.

These counter-currents of recriminations would play out in a dramatic fashion on the floor of Maria Mater Ecclesiae Cathedral, Ahiara, on Monday, December 10, 2012, being the day the administrator, Msgr. Theo Nwalo, had gathered the defunct pastoral council of the diocese from all the parishes in the diocese to announce to them the appointment of a new bishop for the diocese. Immediately he finished reading the letter of the appointment from the Nunciature in Abuja, a section of the lay people in the audience broke out into a mock singing and dancing which ultimately revealed the boiling anger in the hearts all Mbaise people. The lyrics of the song would say it all. It was a complete mockery of what Mbaise people had purportedly become in the wake of the appointment of Msgr. Ebere Peter Okpalaeke as their bishop:

Leekwala ihe I mewe onwe gi eeh

Leekwala ihe I mewe onwe gi eeh

Leekwala ihe I mewe onwe gi public assault n’okporo kolta n’ama Owerri.

[Behold what you are doing to yourself. Behold what you are doing to yourself. Behold how you’re publicly embarrassing yourselves on the tarred roads of the streets of Owerri].

As this drama unfolded on the floor of the pastoral council, I was embarrassed, humiliated and shocked, to say the very least. I had asked myself; how did it come to this? How have the Mbaise priests descended from the pinnacle of respect to the bottom under in which they had become an object of caricature and ridicule by the lay people? How is it that the famed Mbaise land has become an object for mockery songs?

The whole situation had appeared unreal to me. I remember asking myself whether we could not do any better with ourselves in the face of what was being seen as a provocation of no mean proportion. Could we not hold ourselves together and act responsibly in the face of what we consider a great provocation? I questioned. Why is it that this singular appointment is touching such a raw nerve in Mbaise land? The way Mbaise people were reacting to the appointment would cause me a lot of sadness.

First, I was unhappy with the way Mbaise people were taking the shock resulting from the appointment of an Awka priest to head the diocese of Ahiara. I told myself that Mbaise land would not be the first place a foreigner was being appointed to head a Catholic diocese. If anything, appointing bishops to head dioceses outside their home communities had become the norm in Nigeria and not the exception since the days of the missionaries. What was it with our people that they should react as if the world had come to an end because of a single bishopric appointment? I had asked myself.

Second, I was quite convinced that Mbaise people and their detractors everywhere were exaggerating the so-called lack of love and mutual hatred among Mbaise peoples whether in the civil society or in the Church. I believed that despite what had happened Mbaise people were far better off than they were being painted, or, they were painting themselves in the eyes of the world. I told myself that it could not be true that the reason why the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese had been given to an Awka priest was that Mbaise priests and the lay people had devoured their good candidates through petition writing. Having been around for many years since returning from America, and having been a keen observer of the events of the diocese since the death of Bishop Chikwe, I was in a vintage position to know whether there was any significant petition writing during the search for a new bishop for the people of Mbaise. I told myself that there was none of that. All through the search period, the whole diocese had been calm and resigned to their belief that a good candidate must be found from among the numerous Mbaise priests.

However, I had told myself that it was not possible to rule out completely the fact that a few individuals from Ahiara Diocese, whether officially consulted by the Nunciature, or not, might have made their views known to the Nuncio through petition writing during the search period. In fact, it would be terribly strange if there was no petition against certain individuals that were thought to be well positioned to be appointed bishops from Mbaise. Petition writing was an inalienable part of appointing a bishop. So it was not strange if there were some people that petitioned against some other people during the period of searching for one to be appointed the bishop of Ahiara Diocese.

On the other hand, petition writing was not altogether bad. It could at times be beneficial to a process like that of searching for a good candidate to be appointed a Catholic bishop. I convinced myself that petition writing was a part of the process of choosing a leader especially in the delicate offices of the Catholic Church that were mostly lifetime appointments. Petition writing sometimes ensured a thorough investigation of the world-be leader before giving him the office. In fact, petition could even become a positive force to prevent bad leaders from emerging. In the Catholic Church in particular, petition writing could be a result of troubled conscience that felt the obligation of helping the Church recruit quality leaders.

My conviction in this regard hinged on the fact that the Catholic Church with her two-thousand year experience in choosing leaders at all levels had a ready mechanism to deal with petitions. She would thoroughly investigate whatever petition was directed against any candidate she had interest in. And if she found the points of the petition to be true and valid, the candidate would become toast. But if on the other hand she found the petition to be false and malicious, she would go ahead with whatever she wanted to do with the particular candidate. In my thinking, such had become the standard procedure of the Catholic Church for the past two thousand years.

I was surprised that in the case of the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese petition writing was being seen as an absolute determinant of the fate of a bishopric candidate, meaning that once a potential candidate for the office of the bishop had one or two petitions against his candidacy, he would be automatically thrown to the dogs without any investigation. I thought the people who were propagating that kind of belief were largely ignorant of how the Catholic Church operated. I believed in my heart that if there had been petitions against some proposed candidates for the bishopric from Ahiara Diocese, they would have been thoroughly investigated and acted upon if found credible.

So, I would not agree that the so called malicious petition writing had any significant role to play in the denial of the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese to an Mbaise indigene. I believed that the decision to appoint an Awka priest the bishop of Ahiara Diocese had originated from the bias and injustices that had been visited on Mbaise people from the beginning of the twentieth century.

It would be this personal agitation that forced me into re-examining the whole history of the Mbaise people especially as it concerned Mbaise people’s embrace and practice of Catholicism. I had told myself that it would be worth finding out why Mbaise people were reacting so hysterically about the appointment of a foreign bishop to head the Catholic Diocese of their home land. As there was a thunderous chorusing of injustice with the appointment of Ebere Peter Okpalaeke as bishop-elect of the diocese, I wanted to find out why it had to be so. This was how my journey back in time in the life of Mbaise people would begin. It is a journey to find out why a single appointment was eliciting such hysteria among Mbaise people.

To be continued ....