Rufus Okeke – Roof, for short – was a very popular man in his village. Although the villagers did not explain it in so many words, Roof’s popularity was a measure of their gratitude to an energetic young man who unlike most of his fellows nowadays, had not abandoned the village in order to seek work, any work, in the towns. Roof was not a village tout either. Everyone knew how he had spent two years as a bicycle repairer’s apprentice in Port-Harcourt and had given up of his own free will a bright future to return to his people and guide them in these political times. Not that Umuofia needed a lot of guidance. The village already belonged en masse to the People’s Alliance Party, and its most illustrious son, Chief the Honorable Marcus Ibe, was Minister of Culture in the outgoing government (which was pretty certain to be the incoming one as well). Nobody doubted that the Honorable Minister would be elected in his constituency. Opposition to him was like the proverbial fly trying to move a dung hill. It would have been ridiculous enough without coming, as it did now, from a complete nonentity.
As was to be expected, Roof was in the service of the Honourable Minister for the coming elections. He had become a real expert in election campaigning at all levels – villages, local government or national. He could tell the mood and temper of the electorate at any given time. For instance, he had warned the Minister months ago about the radical change that had come into the thinking of Umuofia since the last national election

  read each passage and answer the question that follow
The great herald of things to come was Ezekiel, not only in the sense that he predicted the future, but also became in the manner and content of his prophetic ministry, he foreshadowed many of the important religious developments, which were characteristics of the age after the Exile.

He, rather than Ezra, was the founder of Judaism. He not only pointed forward; but as well shall see, he represented some of the great elements in Israel’s religious past.
The book which bears his name is outwardly impressive in its orderliness and symmetry and in the careful chronologic al arrangement of its contents. It purports to present the record of prophecies uttered in the Babylonian Exile between 593 and 571 B.C and for long this was not seriously questioned. Even when other prophetic books have been dissected and assigned to sundry authors and editors, this book continued to be regarded by most scholars as having come into its entirety from Ezekiel. Then came a period in which many extreme theories were advanced , assigning much of it to other hands or presupposing complicated processes of editorial revision, or dating the book to a period much later than the Babylonian Exile, or maintaining that Ezekiel’s ministry was not exercised in Babylonia but in Palestine, or at least was begun there. Such theories have been subjected to damaging criticism and are now somewhat discredited. The account of Ezekiel’s ministry and teaching is based on the view that he lived and worked among the exile in Babylonia, at the period indicated, and the bulk of the material in the book comes from him, though, like other prophetic collections, it owes much in its complication, arrangement and transmission to prophetic disciple