Former Commissioner for Special Duties, Ideh Tony F. E. Nwaka, has congratulated his former boss, Dr. Emmanuel Eweta Uduaghan, the immediate past governor of Delta State on his 67th birthday anniversary.
Nwaka, a former Commissioner for Education and Agriculture and Natural Resources took to his verified Facebook page, to pour encomiums on the elsewhere governor whom he said would continue to remain a rally point in the state.
Dr. Nwaka, who owns several literary books to his name including “Shadows and Nothings”, a 263-page book, chose literary elements to send his birthday message to the former governor.
Hear him: “Happy birthday, Your Excellency, as you mark 67 years today. Sir, I had intended to script a more glowing tribute as would approximate the significance of today’s occasion but, seeing that it might be overly colored by political sentiments, in a time that even the most valiant must tread with trepidation, I have taken to the more illuminating pathway of literature to celebrate you today. Hereunder are applicable excerpts I have pieced together from the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
“A best seller may be forgotten within a year and a low-sale book remembered for centuries. A great literary work is thick with meaning, layer upon layer, and some layers are more sharply articulated than others.
“Unlike a theater audience, a reading public is not easily defined. One must not mistake the various social circles concerned about literary work for the mass of actual readers, whose size, composition, coherence, and group consciousness vary with each book.
“A literary work, insofar as it survives its time, is permanently reinterpreted and redigested by various groups of readers. Those synchronic or diachronic layers of meaning which are added to it together form its true historical personality.
“This reinterpretation may bring out a latent significance of the work of which the author himself may not have been aware of or add an unsuspected meaning that can even replace the original one.
“Many books have a tremendous but short-lived and localized success. Others, in contrast, starting from a comparatively narrow acceptance, continued for centuries to call up wider, deeper, and stronger responses.”
According to Nwaka, “Indeed your footprints, Dr. Emmanuel Eweta Uduaghan, will continue to call up wider, deeper, and stronger responses. God bless you as you celebrate your new age today”.
Ide Tony F.E. Nwaka, Ph.D.
