Gimba Kakanda
In all, even if playful, attempts by me to pun the many gimmicks of the former presidential aide and minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, in our social media networks, I was warned, advised to redirect my interests to more profitable public discourse. He’s a politically isolated man, and of course incapable of protecting the electoral power of any serious people and party, permanently engaged to whatever pulls him out of isolation, and attract the attention of the people and, especially, the Establishment to who he really is, as I’ve heard many of them say, a drug-abusing desperado.
To refer to the politics and principles of Fani-Kayode as controversial is an undeserved praise, for controversy is often our perception of the things we do not really understand. Nobody misunderstands this former minister. For a man who wrote, without shame, actually ungratefully, that he had “intimate relationship” with women who are now other men’s wives, women who have now attained social relevance and political prominence, women who are now mothers training children to whom they hope to be seen as behaviorally perfect, women who are now role models and mentors to the younger generation, just to illustrate that he’s not bigot, because the ladies are from the ethnic group he was being accused of hating, there is only one adjective that accurately qualifies him: petty.
That the Fani-Kayodes have found themselves in the position of power where their decisions were relied upon for a policy to be implemented is a scary realisation; they are responsible for this ruin that is our heritage. Their rise to relevance is a proof of the dangerous political opportunism in practice in Nigeria, one that favours a clique that comprises family and friends of the family whose principals were once in charge of an affair in the country.
In his latest attempt to confuse himself, in a long, incoherently verbose essay, “Goodbye Nigeria, Welcome Oduduwa Republic”, he took us down a memory lane that only exposes his absolute ignorance of the trouble with Nigeria. He praises the Nigeria of Murtala Mohammed and Theophilius Yakubu Danjuma as the best, and of course he has every right to do so. He remembers the middle-class, and these are his family, “whose wealth once knew no bounds and whose middle class once owned the finest cars and properties in London, Paris and New York” He also does not forget the globetrotting beneficiaries of Nigeria’s corruption who “once graced the streets of Belgravia, Chelsea, Hampstead and Knightsbridge?”
Of the things that make a nation, or that are reminders that a nation has fallen, the former minister highlights that our “ancestors studied at Oxford and Cambridge as far back as the 1800’s” and that our “inhabitants and various ethnic nationalities once ruled vast empires” and that our “progenitors contributed so much to the traditions, religion and culture of Ancient Egypt”. Of course, Ancient Egypt! There’s no need debating his discipleship of Cheikh Anta Diop here.
Perhaps his most embarrassing psychobabbles are his quest to know “(w)hat has happened to our great intellectuals…” without even acknowledging that a Nobel laureate walks among us and that there are many sound intellectuals at our ivory towers who, like him, haven’t been favoured and invited for political appointments by the Establishment. Equally disturbing also are his demands to know what happened to “…our men and women of courage and vision who once, like a collosus, bestrode the world” in a time where the Jelani Aliyus, the Chimamanda Adichies, the Abba Gumels, to name just a few, have made marks in inventions, literature and Mathematics, respectively. Even at Facebook Inc., the owner of the social networking service, Facebook, where he amuses some “friends” and followers, Nigerian-born scientists and engineers are employed to contribute to this evolution of the world’s biggest online community. That we have no institution to engage these masters of specialised disciplines for the development of our country is a failure of the generation in which Fani-Kayode, and even his father, is a contributor.
But in his thesis on a dysfunctional nation where he, a threatened intellectual, propounds the reason we must see the existence of Nigeria as useless, Fani-Kayode does not mention a single plight of the members of the lower-class, who are the actual victims of mis-governance by the elite of which he is a member.
What bothers Fani-Kayode cannot be the “born to rule” posturing of the northern elite referred to as “the northern oligarchs” with whom he is close friends. What bothers him is obviously the fact that he’s outsmarted in this political equation in which he has neither regional nor national value. His only value as a Nigerian is the fact that he’s the son of a Big Man who had afforded his schooling at Redbrick institutions, easy wealth, globetrotting and, more than these, automatic membership of the Establishment.
Ours is a nation of one-hundred-and-seventy-point-something million cowards of which only the negligible and statistically powerless “point-something” are patriotic. This is why I feel that we deserve what’s happening to us. A functional nation is not built by amens and tweets alone. As a representative of the new generation, my dream is to see Nigeria rescued from the Fani-Kayodes who have employed ethnic, religious and regional sentiments to keep us perpetually against one another. May God save us from us!