By SUBSTANCE UDO-NATURE

“I found a Rome of clay, and I leave her to you of marble. Applaud me if I’ve played my part well” – Augustus Caesar

Dr. Udeme Nana has a way of creatively crafting terse titles for his clinical pieces that come with magical allure that can lure even those allergic to reading into reading. Like an ancestral village stream slowly coursing its way into a deep river with strong undercurrents, telegraphic titles to his essays look foxy and shallow on the surface but soon will sweep the reader along into cascading waves.

So, I listened to instincts on sighting the title, “oga, are you still doing this thing” (Guardian, November 19, 2023, as was forwarded to me by Mr. Anie Udoh via WhatApp). He dutifully always does this, cloying me with classic essays by classic writers because he knows I love reading classics. That way, he makes me a beneficiary of the Socratic advisory: “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall come easily by what others have laboured hard for”.

“Oga, are you still doing this thing” was Udeme Nana’s reflexion on the 85^th birthday of Obong Victor Attah. And it was felicitous and typical of a grateful man whose memoirs on the former governor cannot be faulted in its innocence. Let me please seize this space to commend the Uyo Book Club for always treating the world to a sumptuous intellectual banquet on every Obong Attah’s day. It has done this consistently with consistent impact and I can see the consistency escorting Obong Attah into grander years in a State where gratitude is enthusiastically endangered. Again, Thank you, Uyo Book Club for the therapeutic reawakening that colloquiums usually add to the essence.

However, although it is not our way because it is not about politics, I would wish by suggestion that articles on Attah’s special moments on the stable of the Club be collated for a publishable compendium. That’s what the Yorubas do so often for their paterfamilias and invite big men and women from Akwa Ibom who hurriedly would go on chattered jets to attend and steal thunder with banner headline donations, while a book launch in Uyo by a professor would be flooded by keke-riders, market women, hawkers and abokis as incidental dignitaries.

I personally do not celebrate my birthday. Nor do I judge those who do. But irrespective of the day, I freely would acknowledge Obong Attah as an open book of history. As a deliberate writer, I look beyond the momentum of his birthdays into what he intrinsically represents in the evolution of Akwa Ibom State, and Nigeria.

Agreed that there were others as good when Obong Attah governed the State, maybe even better than he was, but I dare to contend that he emerged on the scene at the best and worst of times, more by necessity than politics and personal ambition may have wanted. The State just needed a man of his stuff – a visionary, pacifist, strategic planner, self-contented and highly disciplined personality for the foundation-laying stage of a State so stupendously endowed, with foreseeable prospects.

Thinking of generations than the next election, Attah foresaw Akwa Ibom 500 years ahead and therefore patriotically committed the opportunity on hand to building a foundation that shall withstand vicissitudes and verities. That was the springboard. Even the blind, deaf and dumb can receive miraculous instant cure by merely confessing that 97% of efforts by governors after Attah has been on the concrete canvas of his vision, expertise, and statesmanship. Every era has its hero!

That has made us immune to a quantum of headaches today. For with what is nowadays, who knows, for instance, if the Resource Control battle, part of which ironic dividends has been the infection of successive leaders with chronic kleptomania and extravagance, would have been bargained away by someone in position of advantage for selfish personal ambition to become a demigod?

Upon that, to have their entitled say on Obong Attah, some have deployed sophistry to argue that if he was a governor later than the days he was, he would have behaved exactly the way his successors have behaved. And we know how they’ve behaved! No doubt, Akwa Ibom has been blessed with good leaders. But a stubborn truth remains that Obong Attah came into governance with a distantly different character and pristine mindset from those after him.

Are we saying Attah was perfect? No. Imagine that even the one instance he attempted to act like a typical Nigerian politician and latter-day governors collapsed upon his head like a pack of cards! That was in connection with his experimental succession plan through a son-in-law. Even in that adventurism was discerned Attah’s love for integration and humility in making personal preference an opportunity cost to public wishes.

I state without fear or sentiments that no governor after Attah comes any close to his steel quality of personal integrity and continence. Until he left office, record affirms, EFCC did not know the way to Akwa Ibom; and Aka Road, the very road to his village, was still like a footpath to the swamp. And since he exited office, no poor public perception of his modesty in the management of the people’s commonwealth and distribution of infrastructure has trailed him to his private life. He was inherently populist.

Even then, Attah does not incubate rat-mouth sycophants with huge incentives to make noise over his timeless relevance on the social media. His stainless legacy speaks almost literally. Therefore, writing about him comes naturally without reservations or fear of contradiction even from the most acerbic critic from the emerging fratricidal factions ethnic warlords are now fumbling to create in the name of tribe politics.

Curiously, Obong Attah’s 85^th birthday has thrown up one big question: How are you aging?

In 2020, gerontologists – those who study genetic metamorphosis or the aging pattern of humans – at the Stanford University School of Medicine, USA, came up with an avant-garde discovery. As was reported by a science writer, Hanae Armitage, in Nature Medicine of January 13, 2020, they told the world that there are four types of aging, namely, metabolic, immune, hepatic and nephrotic, as is determined by “ageotypes”.

The guinea-pig breakthrough which was jointly sponsored by Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine and the National Institutes of Health and Stanford’s Department of Genetics, comprised Professor/Chair of Genetics, Michael Snyder; Genetic Instructor, Sophis Miryam; Project Manager, Reza Sailani; Life Science Researcher, Kevin Contropols; Research Coordinator, Monika Avina; and a Professor of Genetics, Anne Brunet.

What was the cardinal conclusion? People age at different speed and ways and the main determinants for whether we age fast or slow are essentially our heart conditions and our lifestyle. No wonder Obong Attah ages slowly with grace! He has a good heart and lifestyle inexorably irrigated by wisdom, contentment, good conscience and goodwill – all of which have coalesced into a vial of elixir that cannot be found in any pharmacy in the world. This is a big secret the octogenarian has kept to himself over the years.

Some leaders are remembered by the size of their castles and automobiles or what they help destroyed. Some dread memories of their past. Some feel unsafe in hovering clouds of the present and dream of a future in utopia for fear of cumulative bad records stalking them to their bedrooms. But Attah is celebrated and remembered for what he built and left to grow. Blessed therefore is this great statesman who in the present sees himself in a safe future on account of his past.

Arc. Obong Victor Bassey Attah makes youth hungry for the beauty and comfort of meaningful dotage. He talks and acts with the wisdom of age, and of the ages. Providence certainly reserves longevity exclusively for great minds like Obong Attah, such that even as he is aging, he is not old.

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