Femi Fani-Kayode, Doyin Okupe, Reuben Abati, Olisa Metuh and company earnestly asked Nigerians to vote for Goodluck Jonathan. In their gratuitous quest to feather their nests, they declared and perpetuated with unusual gusto, a harmful war against new President-elect Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC). They lured Nigerians to wage infinite wars with truth and wisdom, asking us to establish ageless monuments to Jonathan in the spirit houses of flaws. These comic characters and presidential court jesters prayed that Nigerians re-elected their principal at the March 28 polls. Simply put, they wanted us to save their jobs. Thank God we didn’t.
We listened to their eloquent drivel, incoherent rants and wanton justifications of President Jonathan’s reelection bid with a stunned combination of stupefaction and physical revulsion.
It was a daemonic aria, a flight of decadent will and imagination. Of this pathetic gang of vanishing minds, Fani-Kayode was simply a cipher. Shamelessly, he imposed himself in our psyches and the travesty that passed as Nigeria’s government of transformation. Fani-Kayode thus particularised his contributions with terrible and uncanny detail, threatening our sympathy for his plaintiff principal, President Jonathan. No doubt, the former aviation minister is a gifted propagandist of the chthonian order, a metamorphosist adept at clothing dross as gold and masking terror as succour.
The scene prefigures the transition or ‘transformation’ if you like, of the Nigerian citizenship from gradual decline to irredeemable degeneracy. Few days to the presidential elections, Fani-Kayode and company urged that we forget the Chibok girls. They wanted us to forget the NNPC scam, $9 million illicit arm deal, immigration job scam and death of innocent, jobless graduates. They wanted us to overlook their principal’s tacit approval of Stella Oduah’s aviation cash fraud. They wished that we forget Otehgate, devaluation of the Naira, rising PMS pump prices and scarcity of fuel. They urged that we applaud the shady sale of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN, declining standards of education and health services, bloody bomb blasts, thousands of unaccounted corpses and the persistent scourge of Boko Haram.
In this prevalent osmosis of death and despair, Fani-Kayode attempted to justify that which is unjustifiable: he mounted the soapbox, garnishing prevalent ills with bouquets of insolence and desolate wit. His love of grandstanding and pretensions to candour rankle an ominous note even in retrospect. Fani-Kayode, tangled with President Jonathan’s reelection dream, perpetuated a piteous portrait of President Jonathan as a pregnant mother gasping to deliver a dead embryo through tentacles of mental and physical complications. The vain and narcissistic borders of the reelection dream eventually burst through and the delivery’s tragic essence springs from the brutal contrast between President Jonathan’s pitiful vanity and Fani-Kayode’s catastrophic melding with his dream, till it got delivered as stillborn. It’s like the holocaust and the apocalypse.
Thus President Jonathan today, stands at ground zero, incinerated by the hate flames frantically fanned by Fani-Kayode and the presidential gang of apologists and petty loyalists. It was instructive to see Fani-Kayode brazenly tow the path to infamy to a pathetic end; even as Nigerians joined the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to count the votes and it became glaring that his principal was being trounced, Fani-Kayode continued to propagate a pitiful campaign in defense of President Jonathan claiming the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate was leading by about three million votes. It defies common sense and wisdom still, that, at that point Mr. President hadn’t seen through the bluster and deceit of Fani-Kayode and his gang of loyalists.
Now that President Jonathan has lost the election, it will be interesting to see what will become of Fani-Kayode. Will he truly stay put in the PDP and keep faith with the party in its feeble quest to bounce back or will he resort to his usual ways and pitch his tent with the new political power bloc, APC?
Fani-Kayode is a poseur. No doubt he has a sense of persona and becomes visibly embarrassed particularly when reality punctures his bauble as was the case when he suffered widespread condemnation and ridicule over his misguided utterances about Igbo women; not to forget the shame and regret that coursed through him when the APC released a mosaic of his passionate denouncement of the PDP presidency and the party in general.
Having failed to insinuate himself within the ranks of the APC, enjoyed a lifeline when President Jonathan, for reasons that defies logic, appointed him as the Director of his Media and Publicity campaign team. Predictably, he let go of reason and launched himself as a missile severally, against new President-elect Buhari and the APC. There is no use reproducing the hate campaign he propagated against the APC and Buhari, what is noteworthy at the moment, is his silence. Fani-Kayode has lost steam, his mortifying zeal and irrationality. It is even more instructive to see top chieftains of the PDP come out to denounce him and his appointment as President Jonathan’s campaign chief on national TV.
Hence for Fani-Kayode, the dissembling begins. As he frantically await the Federal High Court ruling – which has been adjourned till June 18 – on the money-laundering charges instituted against him, Fani-Kayode will continually dwell in a jailhouse he witlessly sauntered into, goaded by his fantasies of invincibility and delusions of grandeur.
In Fani-Kayode’s pitiful fate subsists valuable lessons for all seeking to tow his path. Nothing corrupts; nothing disintegrates a man’s character as the principle of moral agnosticism. That is, the idea that one must be tolerant of anything and that ingenuity consists in never distinguishing good from evil and taking sides. It is obvious who profits and loses by such a precept, isn’t it?
Fani-Kayode put himself on trial every time he opened his mouth to speak yet he failed to devise a measure of checkmating every propaganda and irrationality he so desperately projected in the interest of his principal. Bolstered by the culture of amorality and intellectual hooliganism that the outgoing presidency shamelessly perpetuated, Fani-Kayode arrogated to himself, the freedom to utter any sort of irrational judgment and expected to suffer no consequences.
He failed to understand that the things he condemned or extolled actually exists in the objective reality that is open to the independent appraisal of others. The values he projected has overtime become the essence of his socio-politics and being.
In the long run, Fani-Kayode, though he was employed to do the PDP’s filthy job, ended up as a dirty liability to the PDP. The most prescient portrait of President Jonathan is found in the tantrums of men like Fani-Kayode. Fani-Kayode shamelessly validated the vicious obsessions, violent impulses, moral weakness, hubris and inevitable self-destruction of the outgoing presidency via his unguarded vituperation. His distressing executions were variously punctuated by flashes of delusion as he tiresomely posed as an intellectual, to imbue the same ruling party and presidency he once castigated, with hollow sophistry and pretensions to wittiness.
Few years from now, in his twilight to be precise, it would be amazing to know the thoughts that would run Fani-Kayode’s mind amok as he mounts a feeble struggle to tame or make peace with the demons he joyously summons today. He would probably wish he heeded the subtle counsel of morality and the caveat of objective reality.
NATION
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