TUTU

Hi, a lot has happened lately and the brief period of silence from Swipel may appear like we don’t care. Of course we do! After reflecting on the work of Dr Mukwege in the last post, we want to dedicate this to one African as well as world legend who turned 84 recently. Desmond Tutu has garnered prestigious accolades and awards that simply mentioning his name is enough for a Japanese school girl/boy to nod as if you are talking about his/her grand dad. To his contemporaries, this friend of Nelson Mandela has not only offered us famous quotes to mention when motivating a crowd, his role against Apartheid, poverty, HIV, unilateralism, Iraq war, his support for Tibet, Palestinian cause, church reform, gay and women rights, climate change initiatives, migration, truth and reconciliation project in South Africa and many more has been remarkable. All his services, speeches, lectures and books to advance the cause of freedom and human rights are a lasting legacy that this planet would have looked differently had it not been because of this man of God.

You see, what many also forget is that Tutu is a man of God like no other. He is a man of prayer, yes; but he is also an individual with unshakeable disdain for inequalities and oppression such that he would challenge the perpetrators irrespective of their colour of skin and status in society. He has proved that when he denounced white minority rule (Apartheid) and continues to speak out against what he sees wrong under the South Africa Black majority rule.

Now, as the number of earlier affluent white missionaries across Africa dwindles leaving their financially poorer home grown counterparts to take over the control of Church institutions, such a changing of the guards has had an impact on the availability of resources. Needy men of God have to rely on donations from the so-called people of faith including greedy politicians. Bishops’ ordinations come with spanking new 4X4 motors, glittering dinners and sealed envelopes with undisclosed figures which, in most cases, go to unchecked personal bank accounts. If the help is not from secular institutions, some would do dodgy dealings like falsifying priests’ signatures to obtain money from other church institutions.

As pay back, the men and women who are supposed to side with the people unashamedly bite their tongues and condone the oppression they claim to denounce. While accepting gifts with one hand, and at the people’s hour of need to denounce repressive regimes, they use the other complicit hand holding press briefings to the media that the church does not do politics. This is not to say there are no exemplary Church ministers like TUTU whose ill health will may alter his voice but his actions and words will continue to reverberate across time and space.

Join Swipel in wishing Desmond Tutu a belated Happy 84^th birthday and good health!

The man who mends women

Yesterday, an article about a Congolese Doctor Mukwege who helps women in the rape capital of the world (Eastern Congo) appeared on the Mill Hill missionaries site with a trailer of a documentary about the work of the Nobel peace prize nominee Dr Mukwege. Below is my response to the mill Hill Missionaries’ article.

“Thank you for posting this. As Congolese, let me be the first to admit that ‘the DRC now is a broken state where the logic in most cases is so twisted that the majority of people including the educated would attempt to convince you that white is black, Monday is actually Tuesday and that sleeping with your own daughter at gunpoint is as normal as it can get’. To me, leadership is the answer. That said, I cannot fail to wonder and ask this: ‘have all the years of modern education, evangelisation etc., only come to this?’ Asked in another way, you could say ‘have education and evangelisation also taken a tumble in the same way that African leadership has?’ or ‘shouldn’t Mill Hill and all the others be rushing back with twice the speed that their first pioneers did?’

Whatever your answers to those questions are, a Congolese born Dr Mukwenge, whom I discuss in my book ‘The Unexpected Homecoming’ can serve as an inspiration. For me, ‘the man who repairs women’ becomes the local/indigenous incarnation of what God for Congolese, and dare I say for most Africans, is: the God of justice, Njakomba or Njekomba in some places. And what that means is that the ESCHATON (end of the world), which is a greater vision than the fear me and you may experience for being falsely branded the enemy of the state, is HERE and NOW and not in some distant cosy end of times.

Here we go: what can be done by you and me to make the HERE and NOW (Eschaton) a reality? I say, it is the people that care the slightest and do the bare minimum who could have the biggest impact. That’s why I say once again ‘Thank you for posting this’”.

BANG and $20 billion is gone!

$20 billion is how much is alleged to have gone missing at one time in the Nigerian oil ministry during Goodluck Jonathan presidency (for full story, click here). A mindboggling sum of money that even if a tenth of it were spent on security, may be and just may be the school housing the #ChibokGirls wouldn’t have been attacked at all, let alone the girls being abducted and separated from their loved ones for what feels like eternity even to those whose hope to reunite with the girls is and should still be alive. May be not, a critic might argue as terrorist organisations have struck lucky in places where even more eye watering amounts of money have been spent on security. We will never know for sure but the point is mismanagement of public funds costs the common people incalculably!

To put things right, President Buhari has used his reputation as a corruption bulldozer to place himself not only in charge of the country but also in charge of the lucrative oil ministry. The assumption is that ONLY the strongman himself can clean up the mess that was left by the previous administration. Call me a cynic but, even for the best of intentions, no person should be elevated to a point where they replace the system.

You see, when Nigerians trusted their men and women to lead them, they bled financially and the $20 billion hole could just be the tip of the iceberg. The hunger now is for stronger institutions and President Buhari has had his first few months in office without a full cabinet presumably busy putting in place a rigorous system of checks and balances that would tell the nation the heartbeat of the public treasury the second they want it. Now the partial list of his 21 member cabinet has just been released and Nigerians have taken to twitter to express their thoughts regarding what is trending now as #TheList. Many, it seems, are disappointed with the profile of the recruits. One concern that Swipel would like to highlight is the fact that President Buhari seems to have put a junior minister in the oil ministry that will be headed by none other than himself (Full story here). A glaring admission that the new broom isn’t sweeping differently, the system is not efficacious enough and still needs ‘providential’ men/women, like him, to take charge.

The thought of the oil minister Buhari having his ministry’s accounts audited by ruling party dominated houses of parliament and crosschecked by President Buhari himself is not criminal but it feels rather incestuous. The danger is for it to become an exclusive domain of the President unless he goes out of his way to make oil ministry accounts available to the public and even opposition party who should have the right to scrutinise them every step of the way. Wait and see but Swipel’s case for renewed leadership in Africa has already been made in a previous blog (click here for full story).

A Religious Coup?

You need not take up arms, like in Burkina Faso etc., to be branded a coup plotter. Just tell the whole world who you are: that you are a gay monsignor who has been living with a partner and you will have unnerved the establishment and should be prepared to face up to the consequences. But it’s not as simple as that. Monsignor Krzystof Charamsa’s timed coming out, it is claimed, was done with the intention to generate media attention and put undue pressure on the synod of bishops gathered in Rome to reflect and shape the Catholic Church’s teaching on Family Life (full story here)

Pope’s Francis’ meeting with anti-gay marriage activist Kim Davis in the US and now this spectacular internal crack of discontent will only serve to open a can of worms that will portray the Catholic Church as out of touch and living in the Middle Ages.

“Who gives majority old white [single] male club the right to legislate on the majority whose lives are diametrically different anyway?” some might ask. But a rebuttal might sound like this ‘what makes you think that your question is that of the majority anyway?’ or ‘can you absolutely vouch for there being an institution has representatives coming from all segments of your society?’ The answer is probably No. Not all our members of parliament are male, female, young, old, black, white, transvestite, able, disable, gypsies, etc., and yet we rightly or wrongly claim to speak on their behalf.

The fight for equality will and should continue. But, you see, the problem this Synod faces is not so much its old, white, single male dominated register. It’s rather the reliance on human experiences of family life that they would have gathered from their faithful from all corners of the world combined with the reliance on the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This is when acquired knowledge meets revealed knowledge and in that spiritual big bang, the world can only hold its breath and expect the unexpected.

Just take divorce as an example and mind your eyes as the sparks between doctrine and daily life go haywire. An abusive, not to mention all the other ills of marital life, relationship becomes unbearable that divorce is the only option on the hand and you have ‘what God has united, humans must not divide/separate’ (Mark 10:2-16) on the other. Artificial contraception, remarriage, same sex relationship, Catholic clergy’s unofficial relationships etc., are not immune from becoming a bone of contention during this Synod.

One can only hope for a good collision between the divine and worldly where what is divine is worldly and vice versa!

‘Just motivate them’ alone won’t do in leadership!

Dr Travis Bradberry is the bestselling co-author of ‘Emotional Intelligence 2.0’ and founder of TalentSmart. In one his regular postings, he has this to say:

Leadership is the art of persuasion—the act of motivating people to do more than they ever thought possible in pursuit of a greater good (for full story, click here)

This is great stuff and refreshingly appealing considering the negative effect on organisational productivity if leaders weren’t persuasive and didn’t invest in motivating those who work for and with them. Whether we are dealing with teachers in classrooms, nurses in hospitals, lawyers in courtrooms, journalists in newsrooms, and technicians in factories, happy and motivated workers do make a heck of a difference between the returns of this and that organisation or GDP of this and that country.

But in as much as Dr Travis’ sound reasoning should shape the actions of all those in leadership positions, it is nevertheless time to place it on solid ground for the 21^st century world. Since it is a world of honourable, frail and coward individuals alike, it feels as though some pieces of the jigsaw are still missing. It cannot just be enough to say “leadership is the art of persuasion—etc.,” in a world where an ISIL commander holed up in some dungeon is capable of using similar principles of persuasion to awaken a morbid instinct to kill innocent lives at a place near you and me. If that is worrying, it is equally worrying to think that all we can do to our nurses, teachers, doctors, all workers and indeed citizens is to turn them into clock machines ticking zealously for the greater good. Yes Dr Travis’ thinking is right but more needs to be done!

With ‘FS Model Leadership Initiative’ to be launched in due course, I hope to engage the world with a new way of being, acting as leaders and followers within organisations of any kind. This is only a developing project and I invite you to share your thoughts on whether you agree or not with my brief analysis.