Criticism is quite a cheap enterprise. It is available for everybody to embark on. It costs little or nothing to criticise. It only requires a little digging, right timing, right location and right target.
The procedure is effortlessly elementary. Simply pick your man; he could be Goodluck Jonathan, if you are a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Or if you are a Bill Clinton, go after a certain Barack Obama who you feel is not doing enough to make your wife president in 2016. Study his habits. Find out what people like about him. Or simply pour a jar of tar on his strong points. Then apply the tar brush. Keep that smile to hide the mischief. Behave as though you’re polishing his integrity when in fact you are waiting for the appropriate time to strike. Then unleash the venom in double ration.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, in The Shadow of the Wind, defines criticism as the words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice, or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.
There is nothing to suggest that criticisms are bad. Or that those who criticise are devils. They are not. Never mind Dale Carnegie who says in his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, that “any fool can criticise, complain and condemn – and most fools do.”
I agree with the good old Abraham Lincoln that: “He has a right to criticise who has a heart to help.” The problem actually is that those being criticised see nothing good in even the purest criticism. They see attack.
Funny enough, politicians always demand what they call constructive criticism. But as W. Somerset Maughani says in Of Human Bondage, when people ask for criticism, they are indirectly asking for praise.
My belief that criticism has some sweet point is validated by the unbeatable Norman Vincent Peale, who once said that the trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
Criticism, however, has a way of making heroes out of ordinary people. It sometimes acts as a shield or what the Bible calls a wall of fire against even the strongest enemies. That means worst criticisms, if properly handled, can confer status on unlikely persons.
When Atiku Abubakar, our media-friendly former Vice President, took on his boss, Olusegun Obasanjo, during the failed third term project, he became a hero, even to people who did not like his guts.
Every criticism has a motive. Every critic has a mission. The mission could be patriotic, or selfish. Every criticism represents something good or bad or profitable to either of the parties. The profit may not be immediate; but it is certain.
There is also no doubt that you must stand for something – good or bad, positive or negative – to criticise or be criticised. Winston Churchill once asked rhetorically: “You have enemies? Good! That means you stood for something, sometime in your life.”
As Criss Jami once noted, the purpose behind criticism determines its validity. Those who care criticise where necessary. Those who envy criticise the moment they think that they have found a weak point.
Politicians love drawing blood. They use criticisms as the sword. They do this quite often and with so much mischief that even when they mean well, people still read unfavourable meanings to their motives.
A few days ago, Aminu Tambuwal, the smiling Speaker of the House of Representatives, revealed how, out of respect for his “uncles and senior brothers”, he decided to dump his ambition to contest the presidency of Nigeria; though his friends and colleagues had already bought the nomination form for him. What a wasted investment!
Tambuwal assured his supporters that except for the change of mind, he was fully prepared, willing, determined, available and armed with the requisite plans to undertake the mission of rescuing Nigeria from “institutionalised corruption, gross incompetence, greed and divisiveness”.
Those words leave me worried. If Tambuwal is right, and I think he is, what has he done presently with all the legislative powers at his disposal to rescue Nigeria from “institutionalised corruption, gross incompetence, greed and divisiveness?”
Must he wait until he becomes the president of Nigeria before fighting these vices? He has been a part of the system at the highest level, as a Speaker and chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Is he just waking up to this reality just because he has left the PDP? Or is this criticism just for the sake of it?
In a newspaper interview in 1939, Churchill noted that criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary because it fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop. I agree with him.
I love Tambuwal’s criticism of the system; but sir, I’m not in love with your holier-than-thou attitude. I prefer you use your political might and exalted position to fix the system from the inside, instead of engaging in mischievous popular-stand grandstanding, or waiting until you become president. What if you never make it to the presidency? Please drop the tar brush and start from where you are.
