Femi Fani-Kayode’s visit to the Igbo heartland and the address he delivered at the last-gasp administrative headquarters of the short-lived Republic of Biafra, Umuahia, on March 8 clearly had a three-point agenda: invoke painful memories of the 1967 pogrom among Ndigbo, incite them against Buhari and the North, and cause them to vote against the All Progressives Congress (APC) and its presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections.
The highly reckless speech of the media director of the PDP Presidential Campaign Organisation (PDPPCO) and the failure of the presidency and PDP leadership to rein him in constitute further proof that the ruling party and its presidential candidate are ready and willing to do and say anything just to retain power. This mindless determination, regardless of whether or not the stability of the nation and peaceful coexistence among the various tribes and enclaves are at great risk, is a real shame given that ruling parties in such less-endowed nations as Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Sierra-Leone and Zambia have lost and re-won cyclical elections devoid of the devil-may-care nuances and hair-brained plots this supposed giant of Africa has been subjected to over the years.
But what baffles me is that PDP chieftains of Igbo extraction and their guests reportedly roared with laughter and clapped with reckless abandon as they listened to a kid lecture them on a history many of them authored with their own blood. Fani-Kayode’s theatrical performance at Umuahia is abominably akin to a teenager taking it upon himself to describe to the father the events that took place in the labour ward when exiting his mother’s womb!
The doting audience very regrettably permitted itself to fall victim of the Machiavellian proposition that Fani-Kayode’s mandibular wakabout was strictly a vote-getting gimmick and therefore inconsequential, as long as it enables their candidate win the election. But, as they say in a particular area of the country, “na small sh*t dey spoil ny*sh”! This was exactly how the Germans succumbed to the twisted emotionalism of Adolf Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels – the outcome was World War II and its attendant atrocities and tragedies of humongous proportions.
And come to think of it, how old was Fani-Kayode when the tragic events he was narrating took place? He surely was no more than a toddler just weaned from his napkins, without a care in this world besides simply having fun with his many toys in the ambiance and opulence of the official mansion his family occupied in Ibadan when the head held sway as the deputy premier of Western Region.
Have Ndigbo so easily forgotten that it was exactly this same kind of treacherous dissimulation committed against the leader of their Action Group (AP) party, Obafemi Awolowo, by the likes of Femi’s father (Remi Fani-Kayode aka Fani Power) and Samuel Akintola that snowballed into the poorly executed military coup of January 15, 1966, the ‘counter-coup’ of July 29, 1966 – in which millions of Ndigbo were brutally massacred in all parts of Nigeria – and the civil war that lasted between July 1967 and January 1970, in which millions more died and properties worth billions of naira were declared ‘abandoned’ in a section of the nation?
They say lightening does not strike twice in the same place. But by failing to imbibe the hard lessons of our past history, it would seem some over-ambitious politicians of Igbo extraction are opening the door for the man-child to yet again set in motion a chain of processes that may needlessly set the nation ablaze; and there’s no prize for correctly guessing which tribe will suffer the most in any ensuing post-election violence, given that Ndigbo are the most widely dispersed.
Fani-Kayode even tried to sow a seed of discord among illustrious Igbo sons by pontificating, for example, that “Before Governor Theodore Orji became governor of Abia State, the state had the notorious title of being the nation’s kidnap capital. He came on the scene and, within a short period of time, reversed the trend, put an end to kidnapping and transformed the state into one of the most peaceful and safe, crime-free states in the federation.”
But it was actually during the early part of Theodore Orji’s administration that Abia inadvertently became the “nation’s kidnap capital”. The incumbent governor must be commended for ultimately putting an end to the menace, but it must be said that prior to that, the state had been very peaceful and safe under his predecessor, Orji Uzor Kalu, as Aba was home to the original Bakassi outfit that was exported to quell acts of brigandage in other parts of the South East. But that’s the kind of distorted history a Fani-Kayode knows how best to concoct!
I hate writing about the antics of Fani-Kayode because I’ve come to realise that he revels in attracting public attention – the more grotesque the better! His political career is eloquent testimony that Nigerians attach too much importance to labels and not content. But if that’s what an expensive elitist education at Cambridge University is all about, who then needs it?
Lest we forget, it was this same individual who called our very own Professor Chinua Achebe all sorts of unprintable names for rejecting the national honour bestowed on him by his then boss, and who went on in the same breadth to subject Ndigbo to highly insulting remarks? Fani-Kayode was the same man who cryptically warned that Ndigbo should tread circumspectly in the Nigerian polity else their huge investments in the western part of the nation where he hails from would be decimated.
He is the same man who questioned the intelligence quotient (I.Q.) of Ndigbo back in the days of a needless raging debate about whether Achebe or Professor Wole Soyinka was ‘more qualified’ to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tufiakwa!
For now, Fani-Kayode is well advised to shut up on Ndigbo and focus instead on the South West geopolitical zone where he hails from.