Femi Fani-Kayode says: "I don’t need the approval or support of anybody. This is not a football match, it is an opinion. Did they understand the meaning of the word opinion? And people are entitled to their opinions and in civilized, pluralized societies, people ventilate their opinions and I am putting it to you that nobody has put a better argument of this matter than me when it comes to the issues concerned. I am looking forward to a person that is in support or against me that can put a better argument on these specific issues. And each of those essays is pretty good. I have been writing for 20 years, they were pretty good, they made the point. The problem here is that many of our people don’t like to say what is on their mind. But I am not like that, I always speak my mind and that’s why with me, sweet or bitter, you will get the truth. I am not like most of our people who will pretend saying something here, saying something in another place. You know very well the articles I wrote painted the mind of every single person in this country about how some of our people behave, particularly the Yorubas, but how many of you will say the same? But I don’t play like that, I speak truly and it is important to speak the truth in order to avoid conflict in the future. It is when you refuse to speak the truth that you are courting disaster and possible violence in the future. You know why? If we don’t say these things and speak up, we will not be able to resolve our differences. We are making what I call the ‘Zik mistake’, I am not attacking Zik, but I will explain what I mean. When Zik and Sardauna met, Zik told Sardauna ‘we should forget our differences. Sardauna said ‘no, we should understand our differences’ and he was absolutely right. Unfortunately though, majority of Nigeria took Zik’s position which is that we should forget our differences and move forward as if we had none. And that led to terrible conflicts in which many people were killed in the first republic and then, the civil war in which so many people also died. That was the price we have to pay for not understanding our differences. If we had followed Sardauna’s advice and not Zik’s advice at that time and had tried to understand our differences and had tried to understand one another those terrible things would never have happened. And I am afraid that the same thing is happening today. We are pretending as if we had no differences and we are courting danger and disaster. And that is why it’s important when people get up to make very provocative comments, statements and assertions about the rights of other ethnic nationalities in their own areas and we react to it in a very vigorous manner, somebody will get up and say we have no right to do that. And that’s absolutely absurd. It should be the other way round- people that come to our part of the country should be sensitive to the fact that they are visitors and guests and that is not part of the country where they actually come from and so, they should not behave as if they own the place or build the place from their own sweat.".........
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 23:36:44 +0000
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