Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer - Artist and Educator Extraordinaire (1935 - 2009)

"A truly religious person shares consistently and constantly."



G. Djata Bumpus with Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer at an art exhibit in Amherst, Mass., during September of 2006. The photo was taken by retired UMass professor and former local NAACP chief Reynolds Winslow.

Dear friends,

Just last week, a memorial service was held for Horace Boyer. He was an exceptional man of Religiosity. When I last saw Clarence (he liked to be called by his middle name), we had run into each other at an art show in Amherst (MA). There was an exhibit of a collection of photos and paintings from a group of artists from Mississippi.

When we initially greeted each other, he pressed his finger against his lower neck in order to speak, I knew that that meant he had had a tracheotomy. Cancer had developed in his body. Still, Clarence (he preferred to be called by his middle name) was grateful for life. However, he was frustrated and disappointed that he could no longer sing. Unfortunately, I never saw him again, after that day.

Nevertheless, anyone who even faintly knew Dr. Boyer knew of his dedication to performing and teaching about gospel music. Moreover, he was an accomplished musician through both singing and the piano. He was also a longtime choirmaster and college professor.

Finally, he is not "gone"; rather, he has taken on a different form of existence for all of those he taught, all of those he loved. Moreover, as Clarence proved time after time: A truly religious person shares consistently and constantly.

A biography of him appears on the link below.

One Love, One Heart, One Spirit,
G. Djata Bumpus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Clarence_Boyer

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Dr. Ndibe on Anambra - Part 1

Anambra State for sale

By Okey Ndibe


Anambra State is about to relive its reputation as a theater of political perfidy. All over the state, there’s an air of great political excitement (on the part of the vultures also known as politicians) and of foreboding and anxiety (on the part of the indigenes whose lives are being turned topsy-turvy.

Quite simply, Anambra State is being put up for sale to the highest bidder. It’s a cruel, tragic sight.

A few weeks ago, the Peoples Democratic Party set the tone for the auctioning off of the state. The PDP, which boasts the largest collection of depraved men and women in the history of party politics in Africa, set the opening bid at N5 million. That’s just the cost of picking up a registration form to vie for the governorship of the state. Why would any man or woman dole out so much cash for the opportunity to seek an opportunity to become governor?

Well, because it’s not, strictly speaking, about governorship. The N5 million entry fee is to participate in a macabre ritual – the selling of a people’s collective resources to a single man or man, or to the lucky winner and his or her coterie of sponsors.

If PDP members were not daylight robbers, they would have rebuked their party for instituting such a scandalous price for the gubernatorial ticket. Indeed, one of the party’s leaders told me over the phone that the point of the high entry fee was “to discourage any Tom, Dick and Harry from aspiring to contest.”

Well, the party misjudged its membership and the lure of a governorship. Instead of deterring aspirants, the high fee served as magnet. The party had, by the exorbitance of the asking price, reminded every Okeke, Okoye and Okafor that there was a lot of lucre to be looted by the person who occupies the Number One position in the state. A lot of party members heard that message, loud and clear. As if to demonstrate their unwholesome goals, more than forty men and women paid the requisite cash to pick up forms.

Where did these bidders come from? What’s the source of their wealth? Does anybody believe that any of these forty-seven men and women earned the cash they paid in a legitimate way? Or, if some godfather picked up the tab, does anybody think any sponsor would advance a loan of N5 million to a candidate for altruistic, public-spirited reasons?

At any rate, is there anybody so naïve as to think that these million naira-candidates are driven by a passion for selfless, visionary service?

Sadly, the PDP is not the lone colony of loonies. If the other political parties were possessed of superior political wisdom, they might have mounted a withering assault on the PDP’s cash-and-carry approach to political office. Instead, the competition chose the role of imitators. Absurdity being infectious in Nigeria, the other political parties quickly priced their own governorship forms at the PDP level – or even higher. Which all means that, whoever is finally selected by Maurice Iwu’s electoral commission, the people of Anambra can count on one outcome: they will be squeezed and screwed.

As I write, there are reports that the PDP’s statewide congresses to elect the party’s candidate degenerated into an exercise in violence and fraud. Thisday reported that the process “was marred by widespread violence, thuggery, rigging and snatching of ballot boxes and election materials in most of the 21 local government areas of the state where the exercise took place.” It added: “Sporadic guns shots were heard in some areas during the exercise.” And then this sobering bit: “the election took place in only about 10 per cent of the 326 electoral wards.”

Make no mistake: the reign of violence and electoral heist within the PDP is a harbinger of what’s to come in the governorship (so-called) election on February 6, 2010. Anambra has been luckless since the dawn of this nascent – more truly, nasty – democracy. From the look of things, the streak of vapid leadership appears assured.

Clement Chinwoke Mbadinuju combined a knack for biblical declamations with a facility for disastrous statecraft. Chris Ngige established a populist tone by divorcing his grubby sponsors, renouncing former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s iniquitous designs, and making a significant push in road construction; even so, he was a usurper. Peter Obi, who won the 2003 election and worked admirably to reclaim his mandate from Ngige, has squandered his good will through hypocrisy and personal aggrandizement. Some powerful interests in the PDP are reportedly paving the way for Charles Chukwuma Soludo, former Governor of the Central Bank, to emerge as the party’s candidate. But Mr. Soludo, by many accounts a brilliant economist, has yet to explain his silence and inaction while insatiable and irresponsible debtors made a run on Nigerian banks. There’s also the disturbing fact that Mr. Soludo keeps the company of Mr. Tony Anenih, a man who exemplifies some of the basest political attributes.
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Dr. Ndibe on Anambra - Part 2

Soludo, the PDP, and impunity

By Okey Ndibe

If the Peoples Democratic Party is Africa’s largest political party, then it is also – by the evidence of its conduct – the largest concentration of anti-democrats on the continent. At each opportunity, the party displays a fundamental hostility to the most basic tenets of democracy.

The latest such demonstration came in the sneaky way the party handpicked Charles Chukwuma Soludo as its candidate in next February’s governorship election in Anambra.

In the beginning, the party invited aspirants to purchase governorship forms for the scandalous sum of N5 million each. It was the party’s clear statement that, should its candidate “capture” Anambra, the victor and his cohorts could proceed to treat the state as a personal fiefdom.

Far from dissuading aspirants, the high entry fee yielded a bazaar of forty-seven bidders. Each candidate knew what was at stake, the size of the loot to be carted away by the eventual winner. Nigeria is, after all, a place where governors can pocket hundreds of millions of naira of public funds each month in the name of “security vote.” Sometime ago, an American student asked me at a lecture to explain the meaning of security vote. I answered that it’s a peculiarly Nigerian invention that empowers public officials to – the oxymoron is apt – “steal legally.”

A party committed to the ideals of democracy would have seen the large field of competitors as offering an excellent opportunity to choose the most acceptable candidate through an open, transparent process. That’s not the PDP’s mode of operation. No sooner did the party’s would-be governors file their forms – accompanied by huge fees – than party chairman, Vincent Ogbulafor, began to sell them the idea of adopting one of their number as the “consensus” candidate. Consensus, a staple of the PDP, is an asinine and narrow concept that enables a tiny few of the party’s ample supply of “thieftains” to impose their choice.

It was no surprise that the vast majority of the candidates disdained Mr. Ogbulafor’s prescription. How do you justify collecting N5 million from seekers of an office, and then talking them into relinquishing their dream in the name of a nebulous idea called consensus?

Once it became clear that “consensus” was doomed, top officials of the PDP made the obligatory (seemingly earnest) pledges that the ward congresses to determine their governorship flag bearer would be a model of democratic credibility. The party even composed high-powered committees led by, among others, Speaker Bankole Dimeji and Governors Emmanuel Uduaghan and Gabriel Suswam, to oversee the process. These custodians in turn promised to be unimpeachable shepherds of the party’s internal process for determining a governorship candidate.

All of that high-minded talk was soon silenced by the staccato bursts of gunshots and the dreadful chants of war songs by heavily armed gangs retained by different camps. The people of Anambra had front row seats from which to gaze in bewilderment as the PDP once again remade democracy into a do-or-die affair, a fists-knuckles-and-guns monstrosity.

The signs were there from the outset. Not one of the party’s candidates –not even the supposedly cerebral Soludo – ever bothered to articulate a vision of governance, or to define a program of action to uplift the state if elected. Instead, the candidates went from dropping off their forms straight to recruiting gangsters to establish themselves as “serious stakeholders.”

That this depraved process should ultimately throw up Mr. Soludo as the party’s “default” candidate raises several deeply disturbing questions.

With the PDP so inflexibly resistant to democracy within its own ranks, what then would inspire hope in Anambra that the party would come ready to play by the rules in the governorship election on February 6, 2010? Or is Anambra fated for the Ekiti treatment, the treasonous misuse of military and police personnel and arsenal to ensure victory for the PDP’s candidate?

Governors Uduaghan and Suswam as well as Speaker Dimeji flunked the simple task of conducting successful ward elections in Anambra. How then are Nigerians to be confident that these incompetents can ever remedy the nation’s infrastructural and myriad crises?

Mr. Soludo’s tenure as governor of the Central Bank is undergoing an unofficial review, and his grade is not looking particularly stellar. Still, some say he’s a fine economist. One wonders, though, if he has a sense of history. For he ought to remember that many Nigerians lost their lives in the struggle to achieve democratic governance.

By all accounts, Mr. Soludo was catapulted by a cabal, including Tony Anenih, whose tenure as Minister of Works was a disaster for Nigerians (even if good for Mr. Anenih), and Dahiru Mangal, a rather shadowy friend of Umaru Yar’Adua’s. Mr. Soludo risks becoming one of the poster boys for the anti-democratic bastion that will be swept away sooner or (rather than?) later when Nigerians awake to reassert their democratic will.
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John Baer on Politics 101 conflated with Biology 50

"WE OUGHT to start sending sheep to the Legislature. I know you think we already do, but I mean for real. Hear me out..."

Dear friends,

It is amazing, at least to me, that Americans keep putting inept and uncaring politicians in office, term after term.

On the link below, John Baer of the Philadelphia Daily News makes light of the subject (pun intended).

Enjoy!

G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20090923_John_Baer__Send_in_the_sheep__put_the_lawmakers_out_to_pasture.html
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Black Church Puts All of Its Assets in Black-owned Bank

"Johnson said that this move represented a desire to contribute to the economic development of the African-American community. He also spoke of the warmth of doing business with a black-owned business.,,"

Dear friends,

On the link below is a beautiful piece by one of the Philadelphia Daily News' standout columnists, Julie Shaw. The story points to one of the ways that African American communities can truly develop ourselves by, through, and for ourselves. ENJOY!!!

G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20091015_Bright_Hope_Church_puts_all_its_money_in_black-owned_bank.html
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NFL Players Squash Limbaugh

"I am oh so proud of the African American football players who have crushed Limbaugh's attempt to further enrich his evil life through them..."

Dear friends,

Rush Limbaugh get so much air play, because he serves a clear purpose for those who run this country. It is: he is a complete hypocrite and moron who keeps those North Americans who listen to him in a constant state of idiocy. Moreover, I am oh so proud of the African American football players who have crushed Limbaugh's attempt to further enrich his evil life through them, by the former making sure that he did not become an NFL team owner. BTW, please feel free to leave a comment about this issue.

Ove Love,
G. Djata Bumpus
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Smith on Jails and Lotteries

"of cooperation ...we're starting to see among the states.
We reported yesterday that a half-dozen states have expressed a willingness to ease Pennsylvania's prison overcrowding by housing some of our excess inmates.
Right on the heels of that, we got the announcement that the people who run the Mega Millions game and the ones who put Pennsylvania in the Powerball lottery have agreed to get together so that every state that has lotteries can offer both multistate games..."

Dear friends,

With the "prosperity" of America's Crime Industry comes the successful Gambling Industry. This all, of course, feeds the Pain nad Misery Industry. Therefore, it should be no surprise then that our government has both The Patriot Act and Homeland Security in place. After all, at some point, all of the hostility that the aforementioned industries bring may backfire on those who are in power.

Nevertheless, on the link below, with his usual brilliant insight and analysis, Philadelphia Daily News columnist Elmer Smith helps us to consider the consequences just mentioned.

One Love,
G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20091016_Elmer_Smith__Jails_and_lotteries__Sure_thing_for_states.html
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