Open letter to Femi Fani- Kayode Tiko Emmanuel Okoye When the whistle was blown for the commencement of political activities in 1998, you pitched your tent with the All Peoples Party (APP). This was quite in the cards as majority of the friends and associates your illustrious father acquired towards the end of his life on earth were ultra-conservative northern elements in the Northern Peoples Convention (NPC). The presidential candidate of the APP and the Alliance for Democracy (AD), Olu Falae, eventually lost to the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Olusegun Obasanjo, in the 1999 election. Either by acts of omission or commission, it became your lot to constantly unleash scud missiles against Obasanjo on the pages of national newspapers. You accused him of committing all manner of unpardonable sins of governance. In fact, if it was strictly left to you, you’d have had him impeached several times over! Not too long after, the wily retired general decided to pull a fast one on you by hiring you to be his hatchet man. And voila, the scales immediately fell off your eyes and it dawned on you that Obasanjo was actually “a very competent leader and national hero”! In his recent book, My Watch, Obasanjo describes a well-known activist (now a senator), who “wittingly or unwittingly began to do the bidding of the lurer” and in the process the erstwhile firebrand, now “called and coiled,” sacrificed not only the “fire” in him, but also the “brand.” You had a penchant for accusing the Yar’Adua/Jonathan administration of messing up all the good work Obasanjo did. During this time, your new friends like Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Muhammadu Buhari were always right and correct, no matter what they did or didn’t do. Together with your former colleagues in the Obasanjo cabinet and fellow members of the opposition party, Nasir el- Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu, you gave the PDP and President Goodluck Jonathan no respite in your write-ups. When the then national security adviser to the president, General Andrew Owoeye Azazi (rtd), broke protocols and shockingly told Nigerians to “blame the rise of Boko Haram attacks on the PDP (because) the problem could be traced to PDP’s politics of exclusion in the north,” you famously quipped in your newspaper article of 28 April, 2012 that, “Even the dullest among us will surely be able to appreciate the deep implications of this very serious allegation coming from the man that is charged to guide and advise the President on national security matters.” Yet, as soon as you patched up your differences with the PDP and Aso Rock Villa, the scales again fell from your eyes and the same Femi Fani-Kayode who wrote these things is now busy pontificating about the APC and Buhari’s alleged support for Boko Haram! With the benefit of hindsight it’s crystal-clear that your comments in the New Telegraph of 14 December, 2014 are completely self-serving. It’d indeed be interesting to know what Obasanjo thought of you after you metamorphosed from his virulent critic to fawning bootlicker. Did he also consider you “called and coiled” and having irreversibly lost the Fani Power brand in you? The way you’ve been carrying on with your “APC is a Muslim party, APC is a Muslim party” mantra, are you saying in effect that it has similarly dawned on you that your father and his boss, Samuel Ladoke Akintola, were wrong all along in their bid to forge a political partnership between the Yoruba political elite and intelligentsia with their ultra-conservative Muslim counterparts the north – ostensibly aimed at allowing the former play ‘mainstream politics’ – and that Awo was right in vehemently opposing the gambit? If your answer is in the affirmative then I demand a public apology from you for two important reasons. First, what your father and SLA, among others, started ultimately fostered sadistic killings of millions of innocent Igbo men, women and children as well as the ‘abandoned property’ syndrome. Second, as the good Christian you profess yourself to be, you ought to know that God promised to visit the sins of the fathers up to their third and fourth generations. If your answer is negative, then please just stop the noise-making! An Igbo adage warns that a person who has skin rashes does not engage in a lengthy handshake. It isn’t in my duty to respond to your recent hatchet job on Buhari that has gone viral on the social media. Suffice to say that it was wrongheaded for you to disrespectfully ask if Buhari regards “Christians as human beings.” Here’s a supposed fundamentalist Muslim who equally chose an irrepressible fundamentalist Christian in the person of Rev. Tunde Bakare of the Latter Rain Assembly as a running mate in the 2011 presidential election. If that doesn’t spell R-E-S-P-E-C-T for Christendom then I wonder what else does. “A fly, sir,” averred English essayist and poet Samuel Johnson, “may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.” I totally disagree with you that “a Buhari Presidency will be a disaster for our country, a danger to the Christian community and clear evidence of the final victory and triumph of Boko Haram and jihadists over the Nigerian state. It would also represent the end of Nigeria as a nation.” If that happens, where would you run to – the Republic of Oduduwa? The sage almost everyone later described as “the best president Nigeria never had” was a victim of a similar orchestrated campaign of calumny but Nigerians are now wiser and would refuse to be swayed by scaremongering. Rather than pointing fingers at perceived enemies and saboteurs, you should be helping the president’s campaign team determine how someone who procured a historic pan-Nigeria mandate in 2011 ended up three years later presiding over a nation that’s never been so divided along ethnic, religious, partisan and regional fissures. The same people who massively voted for him then have now morphed into promoters and supporters of Boko Haram! Our elders say that a man who sees everybody as the reason for his calamities will mistake a goat for a lion. But the even bigger wonder is that the Presidency and Muslim leaders in the PDP have not thought it wise to call you to order for the potentially highly inflammable political fires you’re stoking with your flippant religious bigotry. Permit me to conclude by adding that you’re beginning to irritatingly sound like a broken record player with your constant flip- flops, arguably occasioned by ‘stomach infrastructure.’ My prayer is that since you’re still a young man with a very bright political future, you won’t allow yourself to be deceived into believing that you’re best- suited for hurling jaw-dropping abuses at political opponents. It is a trite saying that a girl who becomes over-conscious of her beauty will end up marrying her father’s servant!
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:38:44 +0000
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