AHIARA DIOCESE IN CROSSHAIRS: THE REAL STORIES …28 [EXCERPTS FROM A BOOK IN PRINT]

Chapter 11: Injuries of Injustice [ii]

An Igbo proverb that gained popularity in the aftermath of the crisis in Ahiara Diocese states that a naghi egbucha ihi nkwu ghara na-igbute osukwu - There is no way a heap of palm fruits would be cut and gathered together without one of them turn out to have a chewable one whose kernel is soft enough to chew [Osukwu]. Or, a heap of palm fruits must have within it a chewable one. The implication of this proverb is that if a thorough search had been made among the large pool of priests from Mbaise, one Mbaise son could have been appointed the bishop of Ahiara Diocese. And since it seems that this thorough search was lacking, an injustice of enormous magnitude was therefore done to Mbaise people with the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke from far away Awka Diocese as their bishop.

A consequence to the above point is the fact that the neglect of the large pool of priests from Mbaise in the selection of the bishop of their home diocese is an unfair vote-of-no-confidence on all Ahiara diocesan priests. It is a selection that diminishes the reputation of Mbaise priests among their kith and kin. It also destroys their self-esteem and lowers their morale for the apostolate. And if the selection of Msgr. Okpalaeke of Awka Diocese makes the priests of Ahiara Diocese suffer in any way possible, then it is a terrible injustice. It is even an injustice to the bishop-elect himself who would be condemned to be working with priests lacking in zeal for the apostolate as a result of an appointment they regard as a humiliation.

The priests who were bypassed in the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke had done nothing to deserve their treatment. They had worked hard in their priestly apostolate. Even though their aspiration had not all been to be appointed bishops, it is injustice to make an appointment that would portray them as never-do-wells and people who were incompetent in their apostolate. And such an impression if given, as it had been done with the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke as bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese, would be utterly a malicious lie. An appointment that creates a lie about a people is a terrible injustice. The appointment of Okpalaeke as bishop of Ahiara Diocese creates the impression that Mbaise priests are incompetent and not up to the rank of being appointed bishops over their own people. And this is a terrible lie and a great injustice because it states what is not true and harms the priests’ reputation in the process.

The appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke was considered a slander and blackmail throughout Mbaise. It was viewed as a way some enemies of Mbaise people wanted to tell the world that the large number of priests produced by Mbaise people were good for nothing. In other words, that singular appointment was construed as stating to the world and the Vatican, “do not mind the large number of priests coming out of Mbaise, they are no good and none of them has what it would take to lead any diocese anywhere.” This was a very painful inference to say the very least and could’ve been made only by enemies of Mbaise people. And it is a terrible lie. The only one Mbaise who was a bishop, Bishop Victor Chikwe, was universally acclaimed one of the best bishops in the history of Nigerian Catholicism. So to give a false impression that among the large pool of Mbaise priests no one could be found to succeed and replicate and even surpass the achievements of the late Bishop Chikwe, the first Mbaise priest to be made bishop is a terrible lie and a grave injustice to the priests and lay faithful of Mbaise.

If Ahiara diocesan priests have no skills to lead the church in their home community, they cannot be judged fit to lead the church of any other diocese. This is because the easiest church to shepherd is the one you are at home with; the one you grew up with, as the popular Igbo saying goes; the Church peopled by those whose smell of the mouth you know and they know yours. If a people are adjudged incompetent to run their homes, how can they be found competent to run another person’s home? Anybody considered incompetent to run his or her own is adjudged incompetent through and through. And should such a judgment turn out not to be true, then it becomes a terrible injustice to the one so judged.

But anybody making this kind of a judgment about Mbaise priests has to be considered a liar through and through. This is because from 1945 when the first Mbaise person became a priest in the person of Edward Ahaji Nwoga, Mbaise priests have been consistently considered among the best throughout the world. Even till today, most Mbaise priests working in the Americas, Europe and in the continent of Africa are usually believed to be among the best throughout the world. How come these Mbaise priests praised throughout the world are considered good for nothing in their home country? It has to be that the people who are making the judgement are prejudiced and corrupt, and their judgement has to be terribly flawed and unjust.

Another clear evidence of injustice in the selection of Msgr. Okpalaeke is in the process the announcement was made on December 7, 2012. It had been said that the Apostolic Nuncio to Nigeria, Archbishop Augustine Kasujja first called Msgr. Theo Nwalo, the administrator of Ahiara Diocese and alerted him to the fact that the Holy Father was going to announce a bishop for Ahiara Diocese after the angelus at 12.00 Noon on that same day. He wanted the administrator to get the news first from the Vatican radio. But when the administrator told him that he was already scheduled for mass at that very hour, the Nuncio promised to send him the document of the appointment by email. And that was how the information of the appointment of a bishop for Ahiara Diocese was brought to the people of our diocese.

To the best of our knowledge, this procedure by which the bishop of Ahiara Diocese was announced seems unprecedented in the history of the Catholic Church. There had hardly been a time in our memory in which a people were asked to wait for the news of the announcement of their new bishop from a Vatican Radio. There had hardly been a time in which the Papal Bull announcing the bishop of a new diocese was sent to the people of the diocese involved via an email. There had hardly been a time in which the people of God were asked to search for the news of their new bishop from the internet.

All these go to show the level of contempt and disdain in which Ahiara Diocese was held by both the Apostolic Nuncio and the Office of Evangelization at the Vatican. For the people manning these offices, Ahiara Diocese did not deserve the traditional courtesies that are usually extended to dioceses whose bishops are being announced from the Vatican by the Holy Father. There is no denying the obvious impression that the Apostolic Nuncio to Nigeria, the Ugandan-born Archbishop Kasujja, had absolute disdain for the people of Ahiara Diocese. And whatever motivated him to be that disdainful of the people of Ahiara Diocese has to be sinful and dreadful injustice to his victims, the people of our diocese.

By tradition, the officials of dioceses receiving new bishops usually get advance notices and many a time have responsible leaders of the Church come to the dioceses and make such announcements public exactly at the very hours the Holy Father would be announcing them from the Vatican. But the Ahiara Diocese’s case was completely different. All the officials who could have handled the announcement were blindsided. The metropolitan of Owerri Ecclesiastical Province and the CBCN president had all confessed that they were all kept in the dark in both the choice and announcement of Msgr. Okpalaeke as bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese. All these go to show that the people of Ahiara Diocese were never held in high esteem at the Vatican. And whatever led the Nuncio and his bosses at the Vatican to be such disrespectful and contemptuous of the people of our diocese has to be prejudice and injustice.

The people of Ahiara Diocese did not deserve to be so treated by anybody in the Catholic Church. They have always been very loyal members of the Catholic Church. During the reign of their late bishop, Victor Chikwe, they were consistently adjudged the most loyal and united diocese in Nigeria. Why should they be humiliated by the process that produces bishops in the Catholic Church? Why would a Christian try to disrupt a wonderful evangelization network the late Bishop Chikwe put in place in Ahiara Diocese before the Lord would call him home by importing a bishop from far-away Awka Diocese who had no idea of how the diocese was set up and how it was meant to operate?

But our people have a saying: E lelia nwa-ite, ya agbonyuo oku – when a little boiling pot is overlooked, neglected or left uncared-for, it boils over and quenches a burning fire. And this is what is happening right now in Ahiara Diocese. The people of the rural Diocese of Ahiara were embarrassed and insulted in the process of appointing their diocesan bishops and like an overlooked little boiling pot, they have chosen to boil and spill over so as to quench a burning fire of the Catholic Church in Nigeria. This is what injustice harvests for any people!

Another point of the injustice done to Mbaise people in general is that it became clear to most people from Ahiara Diocese that in Msgr. Okpalaeke they were not getting a first class candidate but a reject from Awka Diocese. Intelligence report and live witnesses from Awka Diocese provided conclusive evidence that Msgr. Peter Okpalaeke was a candidate who was previously rejected by the overwhelming majority of his colleagues in Awka when his name came up as a strong candidate to replace their former bishop, Simon Okafor, who was retiring. Many priests and lay people from Awka narrated the story of how the priests of the diocese trooped out en masse to confront the same Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Augustine Kasujja, and got what was seen then as the proximate announcement of the appointment of Peter Okpalaeke as the bishop of Awka squelched and reversed.

Hearing this part of the story, many people in Mbaise considered it an affront of the highest order and a terrible injustice to send to Ahiara Diocese a candidate who had been previously rejected by his own people when many candidates of the highest integrity abounded in Ahiara Diocese one of whom could have been appointed as their bishop with lots of celebration. As a result of this fact, the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke suffered from the very start because he was seen as a reject from Awka Diocese. Those who could have easily accepted him on the principle that “Rome had spoken and the case was over” could not accept the fact that perhaps they had been given a second-rate bishop who was previously rejected by his own people.

Another instance of injustice became overly glaring when Professor Amadi-Azuogu produced his charts and graphs to demonstrate that while Awka Diocese had already five bishops serving all over Nigeria, Ahiara Diocese had zero. This was seen as the mother-of-all-injustices. Ahiara Diocese has priests numbering more than six hundred as well as a Catholic population of about a million spread all over the world. Awka Diocese could not match or produce a better number in any of these indices than Ahiara Diocese. The question was how come they have five bishops and we have none? Nobody has been able to answer this question convincingly till this very day.

It would become clear that the only reason why Awka Diocese would have gotten that large number of bishops to Mbaise people’s zero is because they have godfathers and Abrahams working in their favour at the highest levels of the Catholic Church. So, the decision was that Awka Diocese could use their money and leverages to secure as many bishops as they could get but they have no moral right to snatch the bishopric of the home diocese of the Mbaise people. They could flex their muscles elsewhere but not in Mbaise land. Mbaise people do not doubt that Awka people have a longer reach as far as authority is concerned and are better connected with the affairs of the Catholic Church than themselves. But they say it loud and clear; “use your advantages elsewhere and not in our own mother’s kitchen.” You cannot defeat a man in the arena and you want to defeat him again in his own mother’s kitchen. A man would rather die than to surrender his mother’s kitchen to an invader, as the saying goes.

Perhaps one of the most vexing injustices in the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke was the fact that it was generally seen as a terrible injustice and a calculated embarrassment to the legacies of the venerable Bishop Chikwe. There is one thing which Mbaise people everywhere overwhelmingly agree on. And that is Bishop Victor did a marvellous job in Ahiara Diocese as her first bishop. As The Right Rev Monsignor Theo Nwalo would relate during his sermon on October 10, 2013, during the funeral of Very Rev. Monsignor Donald Sonde Okoro, at the start, Ahiara Diocese had nothing. The first equipment the diocese used at the beginning was all donated. Mbaise priests then rallied round and donated stencils, typewriters, desks, chairs, ball pens, cyclostyling machines, notebooks, etc. for the diocese to start. All the buildings housing the first offices of the diocese were make-shift and hastily built. The diocese was built on faith, hope, zeal and enthusiasm of Mbaise people.

It was from this basis that the diocese would grow to the enviable height it attained during the nearly twenty-three year reign of Bishop Chikwe. The late Bishop Victor Chikwe worked with lots of dedication in the rural diocese of Ahiara Mbaise. According to Msgr. Nwalo, the desperate nature of the diocese at the beginning led to Msgr. Ignatius Okoroanyanwu describing the new diocese as “Tuturu Fuchaa” literally meaning “pick up and clean up” [yourself]. At the beginning the diocese was like an outcast. Priests of the other dioceses made the new diocese an issue for jokes and laughter. It was believed to be a still-born diocese that would crash in a long run. Out of prejudice not many people gave Ahiara Diocese any chance of surviving. We were all a laughing stock.

As a result of the destitute nature of Ahiara Diocese at the very beginning and the way it was being scorned at by many detractors of the Mbaise people, the priests and lay faithful of the diocese took it up as the challenge of their lives to make the diocese a success story. They wanted to make it work at any cost whatsoever. And from that humble status the late bishop built it up to become the envy of the Nigerian Church. Bishop Chikwe built the diocese from the scratch and brought back many souls to Jesus Christ and his Church. His diocese was superlatively organized leading to many other dioceses sending down their representatives to come and understudy the methods and secrets of the success of Bishop Chikwe.

The people of Mbaise saw the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke all the way from Awka as a very subtle and false declaration that Bishop Chikwe failed in Ahiara Diocese. Any impression that the hard work Bishop Chikwe had put in to raise the diocese to what it is today was a fluke has to be a terrible injustice that cries to the highest heavens for a redress. And yet that was the way Mbaise people had seen it. They thought that by appointing an Awka priest to the seat vacated by the late Bishop Chikwe, a statement of utter neglect of those the bishop had trained for more than twenty years was being subtly made in which it was being implied that the premier bishop of Ahiara Diocese failed. And for every Mbaise person such an impression must be repudiated in its entirety by whatever means available. The people of Mbaise believed that the only way they could uphold and preserve the great legacies of Bishop Chikwe would be to repudiate the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke. And that was what had made the revolt a popular movement. The people saw in Msgr. Okpalaeke a symbol of a lie that was being told about Mbaise people and their premier bishop. And they decided not to take it.

Along this line, the people of Mbaise believed that it was a terrible injustice to jettison the names of the bishopric candidates made available to Rome by Bishop Chikwe during his more than twenty two years of shepherding the flock of Jesus Christ in Ahiara Diocese. According to the requirement of the Canon Law which the late Bishop Chikwe was an expert in, every three years a diocesan bishop was obligated to send down to Rome three names of priests he believed in his heart could be appointed bishops either in his own diocese in the case of any eventuality, or in other dioceses. As a canonist Bishop Chikwe fulfilled this requirement to the letter. Every three years he sent three names to the Vatican. And after twenty two years he must have sent in at least ten to fifteen names to the Vatican in fulfilment of this canonical requirement.

To say that none of those men submitted to the Vatican by Bishop Chikwe in his twenty two years of apostolate in Ahiara Diocese qualified to be named a bishop seems a terrible slander of the great work of Bishop Chikwe and an injustice to those so nominated by him. If the great Bishop Chikwe did a great job in administering his diocese when he was alive, as everybody in Ahiara Diocese believes he did, did that great work not extend to the picking of the right candidates that could be made bishops in succession to himself and other people? And if he made what he believed to be the right choices of bishopric candidate, why would his wishes not be respected or at least be given a priority attention? The outright neglect of Bishop Chikwe’s choices in preference for an import from Awka Diocese smacks of injustice to his people and an insult to his person. That was why the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke was bitterly resisted in Ahiara Diocese. The appointment bore with it a symbol of insult on the person of the great Bishop Chikwe and a humiliation of the people of Ahiara Diocese.