His masters' voice

New African, Jan 2008 by Ankomah, Baffour

"John Sentamu is a world-class showman who is divinely inspired... [He] is an accomplished media performer who never wastes a sound-bite or photo-opportunity. It would be wrong to say that he acts or speaks first and thinks later - he is too clever for that. But he is a man of instinct. Those instincts are rooted in principle and when he speaks, it is with the absolute moral authority of a leader" - Liz Hunt, The Daily Telegraph, 11 Dec 2007.

What a shame that an African can be so lost! Archbishop Dr John Sentamu, the second highest office holder in the Church of England, is now reduced to only - "a world-class showman [and] accomplished media performer who never wastes a sound-bite or photo opportunity". It is a huge insult to the son of the Ugandan soil. Is this the sum of his whole worth? A mere "showman" and "media performer"? They will next call him "a spin doctor" or even "a follow-follow". Jesus Christ, the Saviour and Lord that Sentamu claims to serve, must surely be shaking his head in Heaven seeing such a talented African making himself so cheap, even a laughing stock!

Sentamu's latest "performance" - whipping off his clerical collar (the adoring British media described it as a "dog chain") and cutting it into pieces live on BBC TV, and vowing never to wear another one until President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was out of power, would go down as one of the saddest days in African history. A day an African of Sentamu's standing allowed himself to be used as a diversion from a crucial EU-Africa Summit in Portugal where the continent, for once, stood as one and refused to bend the knee to European chicanery.

And Liz Hunt of The Daily Telegraph wants us to believe that Sentamu "started to cut the collar into pieces with a pair of scissors that just happened to be handy". Come on, since when did pairs of scissors "just happen to be handy" in BBC TV studios? I have been to a few BBC studios over the last 20 years, and pairs of scissors don't just happen to be handy there. You plan to make it handy. Either Sentamu asked for it before the programme started or he brought it from home. In which case a security issue arises - how did he get the pair of scissors through the stiff security at the BBC without being detected? - unless, as Liz Hunt reports, "some have dismissed it as an organised stunt", which, sadly, paints Sentamu in his true colours!

The other day when Sentamu made similar remarks about Zimbabwe in front of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he was said to have just "dropped by" No.10 Downing Street - on a Sunday. But only the downright gullible will believe that the whole event was not choreographed to appear (as one Son of the African Soil put it), "as a chance drop-by of a holy man on the home of one of his flock. Come on, let us be serious! You don't just drop by No.10 as if you are alighting from a train at Victoria Station. I know the rigmarole of minding schedules of leaders." Sentamu even went on TV thereafter to reinforce his message. And in the UK, you don't just pick up a phone and tell a TV station that "my name is Sentamu, I want to come on your programme today. Expect me at 11 o'clock". It doesn't just happen like that. But ... well ... let's leave Sentamu aside for a while and tackle other matters. We will come back to him in a jiffy.

Our friend at the Commonwealth Secretariat, Brother Don McKinnon, has finally called it a day and decamped to his farm down under in New Zealand. Last year, when New African reported that his tenure as Commonwealth secretary general had engendered - in the words of seven Commonwealth staff members who came before an official Investigation Panel set up by McKinnon himself - "a climate of fear" at the Commonwealth secretariat in London, his PR Office, again headed by an African (another Ugandan!) tried to rubbish our story and the magazine itself.

And so it happened, thank God, that just before McKinnon's second term as secretary general ended in November, Prof Victor Ayeni, the Nigerian senior staff member at the centre of last year's Commonwealth story, who contended that he had been subjected to discriminatory treatment on the grounds of his race and nationality, won his appeal before the Arbitral Tribunal of the Commonwealth Secretariat against McKinnon's "unlawful" refusal to renew his contract. The Tribunal's judgement, given in October, could not have been a stronger rebuke of the abuse of power at the Commonwealth HQ.

"The discretion of an administrative authority is not absolute," the Tribunal said in its 26-page judgement. "... While it cannot be disputed that the secretary general, as head of the Commonwealth Secretariat, is entrusted with the overall responsibility for the employment of staff and in the discharge of other responsibilities, he has to discharge those responsibilities within the fundamental parameters which the Agreed Memorandum together with the Staff Regulations and Staff Rules as laid down in the HR Handbook have prescribed... we are satisfied on the evidence before us that the discretion was not properly exercised... Consequently, we must find that the refusal to renew [Ayeni's] contract was unlawful and that decision is set aside."