He
made the remark halfway through his keynote address at a fundraising
event organised by the Parent Teachers Association of Loyola Jesuit
College (LJC), Abuja, towards the building of a memorial staff residence
in honour of 60 students of the college who died in the 2005 Sosoliso
plane crash, and for the first time in many hours, the audience laughed.
This
expression of mirth was a significant event, a vivid change of the
pervasive mood. The audience had not been in a jolly mood, neither did
they merely have the dispassionate, attentive countenance of listeners;
they had been mourning. They had been ruffled by a series of depressing
images. Pictures of 60 LJC victims of the crash had been shown on the
projector, pictures of Kechi Okwuchi, then a student of LJC and one of
two survivors of the crash, before and after the accident was shown, and
later a video in which she addressed the gathering. And in the hall
were people particularly affected by the event, relatives and friends of
the victims and LJC staff; people who do not need a formal gathering to
be reminded of the tragedy but had gathered all the same to be formally
reminded of a tragedy.
The
situation demanded that they be sober, but Bishop Kukah was not going
to be just another sequence in a dark narrative. He came up stage and
removed the cloak of melancholy covering the room, first with a joke
about his unfulfilled desire to join the Jesuit order of priesthood. The
hilarity was at this early stage tempered with self-control, as they
were yet to recover from the poignancy of the preceding stories. Only
sounds of chuckling could be heard. But in time there would be
full-throated laughter.
He
said that the organisers had more or less summoned him for the event,
giving him no option to either reject or accept the invitation/command
and confessed that he just finished editing his speech in the car on his
way to the venue; a warning that he might be rambling a bit till his
time was exhausted. But his speech was far from prattle.
He
was speaking on the effects of air disasters on national development
and had arrived at the Segun Adeniyi quote by way of digression and
anecdotes, as is common among men of eloquence. Plane crashes he said,
returning to the subject, were not greater than, but equal to seemingly
common place tragedies that are paid no attention, for instance the
death of an infant from malaria, the death of a rural woman in
childbirth, the unnamed victims of numerous road accidents, fatalities
from infernos, building collapses, etc. Considering the composition of
the audience, it takes some measure of courage and being Bishop Kukah to
make such a statement.
Returning
to the trivial, he likened pilots to nurses in their use of deceit in
calming clients in difficult, even hopeless situations; nurses, for
instance, assuring patients just before giving them a jab that
everything is fine and pilots telling passengers same in the most
turbulent conditions.
Bishop
Kukah loves to talk and he knows it. “I decided to take responsibility
for speaking because I couldn’t find a speaker,” he said once in Abuja
at a roundtable on the implications of freedom of expression. And people
love to listen to him. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” he said at the event.
Who wouldn’t listen in awe to a priest that references Leo Tolstoy in the same sentence as he mentions Schindler’s List? Shakespeare is cheap but to quote accurately the first line of Anna Karenina is jaw-dropping, eye-popping awesomeness.
His
speech, as it progressed, provided many cues for laughter and it became
increasingly difficult to hold back. The options were to join in the
amusement or hold in the humour and burst out at an incongruous hour,
jerking hysterically. In any case, there is nothing against laughing
with eyes still moist with tears. After all, emotions are mutable.
By Ladi Opaluwa
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