Mbaka’s apology: Between rescuing the present and waiting to reverse the clock

As we mourn and moan about the increasing assault on the educational and economic assets of Enugu State by the current administration under the headship of Governor Peter Mbah, it has become important to interrogate Fr. Mbaka’s words of contrition. Should we dismiss them as water poured on a rock? Should we hope that perhaps there is a possibility to explore miracles, which the priest and so many like him are famed to be capable of performing, to reverse some of the many horrible consequential aftermaths of clerical proclamations on the state?

We will have time to debate these as much as we can, but to aid the conversation, I believe we need to share Mbaka’s “act of contrition” here. While rendering the apology, he hopped from Igbo to English and back, but I did the transcript in English for the sake of the flow of prose, and also for the benefit of thousands of non-Igbo speakers.

“Forgive us all the mess we have been making, We have offended you, people. We in the priesthood have transgressed. I am appealing for your forgiveness on behalf of all men of God. We have transgressed. The priests have desecrated the church. I apologise on behalf of the whole men of God, the whole pastors, the whole priests, and the whole bishops. I am not worthy to apologise for this but I am apologizing. Let the mercy of God descend because of what we did within this political moment – a lot of indescribable political brouhaha, political jingoism, and a lot of atrocities we manifested and buried the power of the sacrament beneath political forces, political hawks, and vultures. We cannot make progress, enmeshed as we are in these evils. Our sins were against God Himself. We transferred to man the Glory that otherwise belonged to God”.

While many may advise this statement to be ignored, given Mbaka’s tendencies or opportunistic obstreperousness, there are universal realities to commend further probes. It appears the church is becoming desperate in its proselytism given the increasing perforation of their doctrinaire by an increasingly curious congregation. The other day, it was ineffable Pastor Enoch Adeboye who apologised for saying those who refuse to pay tithes would not go to Heaven.

Christianity is hurtling down a cliff, and where lip service is perceived to slow the impending crash, those who think they occupy positions that could arrest the ill fate are employing every tool to ameliorate the fracturing impact of such a free fall. This is what I see happening, but before we get sucked into the discussion of the church’s fight to prevent its self-inflicted denudation, let us return to the raison d’ etre of this intervention.

While Fr. Mbaka’s apology may have elicited some measure of applause from the members of his congregation, it also raises some serious issues around the Christian concept of forgiveness and the importance of healing and restitution for the injured. It also brings to question the difference between forgiveness and genuine repentance. Does apology impel forgiveness? Does it also impose a duty on the person apologizing to take remedial steps towards healing and closure or is it a mere exercise in mere routine religious platitudes?

Let us bring this debate home as it affects Enugu State where Mbaka holds court as a Catholic priest of immense influence.

Groaning under the burden of suffocating taxation in this state are hundreds of thousands of big, medium, and small businessmen and women, many of whom may have been led by the church to vote for the current leadership that is taxing the people as if it is going out of fashion. Does Fr. Mbaka’s job end with rendering apologies or are there other expectations that may include mounting pressure on the government the church helped install for some form of softening of their vice grip on the throats of the people?

As things stand in this state, the cry is no longer about the cruel regime of multiple unreasonable and unrealistic taxation. The government’s policy on education has also directed cans of pepper spray into the eyes of an already beaten populace, and the only set of people who might convince the government about how obnoxious, perhaps regressive, their policies and actions are can only be the members of the clergy. I know that during the electioneering campaigns, Peter Mbah visited many churches, including Mbaka’s Adoration Ministry. Mbaka gave his seal of approval to the ambition of the then candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, and sealed it with these words:

“The Peter Mbah, that I know, turned pinnacle oil firm from one kobo to multi-trillion Revenue per annum. He is an employer of labor. if he can do that in the pinnacle oil, may God bless him for Enugu Land. Because he is the man whom God has brought out for us to support this time around, we give him prayer support. I don’t say he is a saint but I know he is a good man. Go to G.O University, he has built an auditorium there some years ago. Afo jukwara nwoke, Oke mmadu na afuta n. We are blessing His Excellency Governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi (gburugburu) for bringing a man like that out for Enugu land. It is one of the things he has done for Enugu State that needs to be applauded, that ought to be appreciated. I equally appreciate other contestants who stepped down for him. God will bless them. They are also good”.

Rather than apologizing to a people who are being so cruelly crushed, should Mbaka not be spending time to mount pressure on Mbah to rescind some of his obnoxious policies?

Fr. Mbaka built the reputation that he has today because he stood up to former Governor Chimaroke Nnamani over the ban placed on the use of motorcycles (okada) for public transportation. Mbaka stood for the people, particularly the poorest in the state.

Today, Mbah has unilaterally and without proper notice and procedures, shut down many private schools in the state. The ones that were spared have been placed on the taxation slaughter slab that has ensured that only the nouveau riche would afford the consequent astronomical rise in school fees. The church has maintained a disturbing silence since this death knell was sounded at the beginning of the term. In a state where the public school system is in shambles, it is worrisome that a governor is shutting down private schools.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating for the continuation of the mushrooming of private schools without addressing issues of standards. But in Enugu, many of the public schools are in far worse states than the private schools the government has been closing down. These schools, it must also be said, began to spring up because of the deplorable state of public schools and the failure of the government to standardise their schools and absorb the teeming unemployed teachers in the state. There are hundreds of public schools without walls and roofs. There are many others where the pupils sit on bare floors. I think the energy used in this apology should be channeled by Mbaka towards extracting remedies from the government on behalf of the people. That is when his apology would make sense and that is also going to make forgiveness easier.

You cannot be peering through the window and apologising to someone under the rain while your door remains locked. The remedy here is to open your door for him to take shelter.

I am also sure that Mbaka is aware of the SMART School marquee project the government has been using to dazzle the media since it came into office. Upon assumption of office, Mbah created this shining bubble as the next most wowing thing since Galileo discovered gravity.

Mbah’s SMART school was touted to be the revamp education needed in the state. One such school was meant to be built in each of the 260 council wards in the state. The strongest value of this project was the touted incorporation of IT teaching at such an early stage in children’s education.

I don’t know if Mbaka is aware that only one of the 260 of the promised schools has been commissioned and that one is located in Owo, the governor’s hometown. It is also not clear if Mbaka is aware that some existing schools in the state are being closed down to accommodate this SMART school initiative and that the students of such schools are being asked to join other schools without plans to absorb them.

Should Mbaka not be helping the people to find out why schools have to be shut down to accommodate the SMART School project? Should it not worry him that a state whose schools have progressed in dilapidation over many years is building new ones rather than investing the funds in rehabilitating and upgrading the existing ones?

I know that the Catholic church prides itself as the universal church and thus accommodates everybody, irrespective of social, financial, and other artificial stratification parameters. Rather than apologising, therefore, Fr. Mbaka should be engaging the government on what the SMART School project means to the moral principle of equal opportunity.

By saying this, I mean that at such a foundational stage of a child’s development, there is no need to expose pupils to different curricula. Every school should therefore be designed to be SMART and every child should not be denied the right to be exposed to such novel systems by proximity, space, or status. The school system should be the same across the state, the same way the priests serve the same quality and size of Eucharistic communion to everybody during Mass.

I understand the government is voting a dizzying sum of N183 billion for this enterprise, some N48 billion higher than the N135 billion budgeted for education in the 2024 fiscal year. If this initiative gups this sum, where is the government going to find the money to take care of other issued bedevillng education in the state and they are legion.

Jews, women, people convicted by the Inquisition, Muslims killed by the Crusaders, and almost everyone who had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church over the years. Known as the Mea Culpa, in Latin the list of errors on the late Pope’s list included sins of anti-Semitism, its silence during the Holocaust, discrimination against women, killings during the Crusades and also during the Inquisition, roles the church played during Slave Trade and role during the era of Burning on the Stakes among others.

I do not believe the Pope’s apology served any purpose other than informing the world that the church has evolved and no longer participates in or supports such barbarism. No remedy was presented by the church, and had that been done, it was incapable of resurrecting those who were killed during the period.

But Mbaka and his fellow priests (including the Bishops) who used the pulpit to campaign and enthrone the present administration in Enugu have the opportunity to avoid the “medicine after death” apology of the Papacy by taking real action that will impact the suffering citizens of Enugu today and not tomorrow.

Such actions can include everything from constructive engagement to mobilizing the people for civil disobedience. Anything that will either rouse the government’s sleeping emotions or force them to rethink should be on the table.

No one should tell me that the church cannot be involved in civil disobedience. They have done worse in my presence. On 2 August 2019, the Monsignors and Priests of the Enugu Catholic Diocese protested the killing of their colleague, Fr. Paul Offu. The priests marched around Enugu and breached the security of Government House, Enugu, flung the gates open, marched the grounds, and sat on the floors and steps of the governor’s office.

This action woke the governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, who revamped the security architecture in the state, stemming the rampaging kidnap-for-ransom and other violent crimes pervading the state then.

If priests could do this because one of their own was affected, they should do even more for the people whose salvation was the reason they became priests in the first place.