Truth is all we claim we want. But truth is what we never seem to get. In this profession called journalism, truth has been a casualty. Why? Because we are preoccupied with facts, not truth. Historians also reel with anxiety over the real. Lawyers cringe at its temple.

But truth is a perpetual victim. It is a victim of war and peace, the faithful and renegade, heroes and villains, old and young, saints and fools. Yet for most times, we are overwhelmed with facts. At home, office, on the streets, facts toss us around. In his novel, Hard Times, Charles Dickens introduces his tale by mocking our genuflection to facts instead of truth. “Now, what I want is, facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but the facts. Facts alone are wanted in life…” begins this Dickensian classic.

But man craves not fact, but truth. The matter came up last week when Father – now Bishop – Matthew Kukah unveiled a book, Witness to Justice. The restless and erudite cleric wrote the book as his own version of the narrative of the truth and reconciliation effort that informed what became known as the Oputa Panel. The body was set up by President Obasanjo to seek answers and succour to the questions and wounds of our history.

The Owu chief, ever ready for grandiloquent mischief and anti-climax, became the major impediment of the initiative. The body never got the force of government it needed, and funding was a great burden. Bishop Kukah does not sound like or carry the mien of one who laments. But facility with words betrays such subtle, steely men. Both in the book and at the launch at the Sheraton Hotel in Ikeja, Lagos, he demonstrated how the panel seemed fated to failure. It occurred to me that was the case with all of the Owu chief’s exaggerated offerings from war on corruption to NEEDS. The Oputa Panel secured funding from elsewhere. Why did OBJ do that? It must be his way of diverting attention. This was OBJ who never paid tribute for once to the sage Awolowo and would do nothing to acknowledge his historic benefactor Abiola, without whose tragic passing OBJ would not have ascended the throne. The man will spend out his life in perpetual envy of both men. He cannot match their stature.

He had wanted the panel to look at a shorter, safer period between the 1980s and 1999. But he bowed to pressure, so it covered the sweep of our wrinkles and tragedies from 1966 when we stepped into the forbidden waters of fraternal rage and bloodbaths. It was clear OBJ was not comfortable with a larger canvas. Hence when the body was done, no white paper, no pat on the back. It has become a monument to wasted officialdom. It is one of the major cynical projects of the Obasanjo presidency.

The panel is important because its scalpel went deep to the wounds of our being. Did the Igbos not have genuine grievance over abandoned property? Is that not part of its narrative of alienation in spite of Gowon’s “no victor, no vanquished?” Where is the autopsy report on Abiola, what has happened to our angst that we kept silence as officials from another country presided over poisoned tea? Who killed Dele Giwa, Bagaudo Kaltho, et al?

One of those who presided over Abiola’s poisoning, a fascinating damsel, basked in her reward in one of the top diplomatic offices in the world. Who were the prostitutes who fooled Abacha into death? Do we have a right to know? These are facts, but they could lead to truth. The battle of the Ogonis, the fractious fraternity of the storied people of the Niger Delta, is gaping at us. Or Odi, Zango Kataf…

What of the western region crisis, the schism still deep between the Pro-Awo and pro-Akintola forces, whose reverberations still rankle the Southwest today? In my days at Obafemi Awolowo University at Ife, I walked out of a bank in town to see the bloodstained brow of a woman running on a lonely road. I was asked to return to shelter in the bank. Ife and Modakeke were on the boil again. Thank God, peace has returned to that part of the country. The absence of true healing exploded the Itsekiri-Ijaw conflict into militancy as the foot soldiers had to transform from tribal goons to phony revolutionaries. What of the coups and the innocent families, the distortion of reality as in when Rafindadi revealed that the film of horror that IBB showed us to demonise Buhari was actually of self-indicting drug pushers.

But it was not about facts alone. It was about history. We have often carried our lives as if we can always move on and forget the hurts. Memories carry them and pass them across generations.

The crisis in Plateau is a crisis of memory. The crisis of the Niger Delta has been a crisis of memory. The crisis of who the true Awoists are is a project of memory. Last week, a bomb ravaged the police headquarters and it was attributed to Boko Haram. If we have resolved the issues of inequity in the past, if we had made resources for education and economic empowerment possible to their parents, shall we now be talking of bombs and Boko Haram? We had that little experience with zoning, where PDP and Jonathan pooh-poohed the idea only to go back to their own vomit of zoning after the presidential polls. With the FOI Act, is it time to dig all those up, so we can confront what we fear!

“To imagine is to misinterpret,” wrote Harold Bloom, a celebrity literary critic of the Western canon and anxiety of influence. What he meant was that everyone appropriates the past and interprets it to suit themselves. The past is never past. We imagine it, and that is why we have different views of it. That is still difficult to determine what the truth is, and that was a question I propounded to the cleric. He quickly referred to the question that Pontius Pilate asked Christ: “What is truth?” Christ had said he came to testify to the truth.

E.H. Carr made his career with the title of his famous book, What is History? We don’t refer to the history of anything but a history. Every story is a version. No one has a monopoly of the past. So why have a truth and reconciliation panel where truth is not sacrosanct? Bishop Kukah referred to the South African example. He attended a conference on the matter in South Africa and the conclusion was that it did not resolve deep wounds, and if it had Zuma would not emerge today as the nation’s leader.

But when the hearings began, the Oputa Panel received tons of petitions. As Shakespeare noted, truth that is sunk into the earth shall jump out. In spite of apparent futility, they come out to express their positions, to unveil skeletons buried in their souls and our past. We need to have them even when it seems no big healing happens.

The zeal for it must not be played down. It provides catharsis to those who have pains deep for years. Catharsis could lead to a need to act. It is therapy without a cure. But it is a beginning. We crave it because it is action without being an action. Let people talk freely about the past. Election campaigns are a foil against secrets, especially if it is free. Democracy can help when elections are free and fair. People can vote their pains and hopes. Elections helped to heal America over the civil war. It is healing Northern Ireland and the old communist strongholds of Europe. Bosnia, Russia, India approach their many wounds at the polls. Even South Africa is better in spite of Zuma. It is a gradual process. It begins with one voice and one sigh.
http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/columnist/monday/sam-omatseye/9889-to-heal-our-wounds.html

Another brilliant piece by Sam Omatseye.

The style and depth of his writing is always breathtaking. He's definitely not only the most fearless Nigerian journalist, he's the most most knowledgeable and sophisticated journalist in Nigeria.

The Yoruba aptly sums it as 'Otito koro'; the truth is bitter.