My hope is that you, Sam Omatseye, while not asking you to displease or abandon your principal can at least lend literary effort to building a new Nigeria we can all be proud of.
By Nnanna Ijomah
Rudy Giuliani, an American politician and lawyer was a beloved former Mayor of New York City. For his mayoral leadership and excellent handling of events during the 2001 September 11 bombing of the New York World Trade Center, he came to be addressed by his admirers as “America’s Mayor.” Later in the year he was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year and in 2002 he was given an honorary Knighthood by Queen Elizabeth 11 of Britain. In 2008 he parlayed his popularity into vying for the Republican Party Presidential nomination but did poorly in the primaries and decided to withdraw his candidacy.
In 2018 after a stint in private business, Giuliani decided to become one of former President Trump’s personal attorneys and that’s when his notoriety and downfall began. By 2020, he had become a full-throated Trump sycophant. Consequently his law license got suspended both in New York and Washington for election-fraud lies. What happened to Giuliani is a lesson for anyone who wants to be a sycophant and boot licker to an undeserving, political scoundrel and that lesson is that “when you sell your soul in the service of the devil, you don’t get it back.” It is a lesson Sam Omatseye should do well to learn from before he destroys whatever is left of his reputation and journalistic career in the service of Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The reality of sycophancy is that it does not really get anyone anywhere because in the end the beneficiary of the sycophancy almost or mostly doesn’t appreciate the sycophant. As a matter of fact, the sycophant is regarded worse than a beggar. Ever since Omatseye wrote and published his “Obi-tuary” piece, the reaction by millions of Nigerians has been swift and fast.
If I may address Mr. Omatseye directly in this essay, I will say, you’ve breached the ramparts of literary discretion and the walls of propriety that has hitherto prevented many in your profession from openly expressing hate and ethnic animosities. It is said that, “the standard you work by is the standard you accept.” The fact that you work for a paper owned by Tinubu makes your essay understandable, but it does not have to be. Hence, your write-up was a solemn mockery of what journalism is all about.
In your essay, there was a level of dishonesty, hypocrisy and duplicity not worthy of a literary giant like you. It was Nietzsche who wrote that, “Moral concepts of right and wrong don’t always belong to the intellectually superior” and I can’t agree more. Being Igbo I’m displeased, angry and disillusioned by your characterization of the Igbos and Peter Obi’s supporters as babblers, Facebook freaks and closet Biafrans who don’t love Nigeria. If I feel this way having never met you, I can imagine how Mr. Iloegbunam, who is your friend and former colleague, felt. It must have come as a complete shock to him that you harbored such thoughts about his tribesmen. I’m sure there are other Igbo “friends” of yours who can’t believe your acrimonious words about them all in an effort to please your principal. With that essay your real thoughts about the Igbos and your true character was revealed. What you’ve done is to put out an “all you can eat hate buffet” for the many ethnic irredentists out there all in the guise of trying to diminish the Peter Obi campaign.
Reading your piece, ( https://thenationonlineng.net/obi-tuary/ ) I am shocked that people like you continue to promote the false narrative and the fundamental fiction that the Igbos do not love Nigeria simply because organizations like IPOB and MASSOB have sprung up to demand self-determination – a demand born out of a feeling of exclusion and second class citizenship status, yet you do not equate the North with Boko Haram or the Yoruba with Oduduwa nation.
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I am also amazed that by your depth of debilitating ignorance you did not know that the Igbos are the only ethnic group in Nigeria that can truly say they consider every part of the country home. When it comes to their voting habits, they are also the least biased. Take the 1999 Presidential election for instance, the five South Eastern states gave Obasanjo, a Yoruba man over two million votes to ensure his victory over Olu Falae who was the preference of the South Western States. Again in 2003 they gave Obasanjo over three million votes despite the fact that their own son Ojukwu was also contesting.
They chose a Yoruba man twice, voted for the late Yar Adua and later Jonathan and Atiku. In all these elections they never sought out an Igbo candidate. The closest they came to having a skin in the game was Jonathan. Ojukwu’s participation in the 2003 election despite his huge loss was an affirmation of his faith and trust in a united Nigeria. As a former warlord and leader, Ojukwu’s candidacy signaled a reformed mindset and a message to the rest of the country that the hatchet of the civil war had been buried.
As a young University graduate in the early 1980’s I worked for the late Ikemba as a Special Assistant and I can attest to his commitment to a new Nigeria. It is the same message that Peter Obi’s candidacy epitomizes despite the IPOB separatist efforts, an organization whose leaders have already denounced him. Yet this is what you said about the Igbos among others, “They have transferred the temperament of their former master (presumably Nnamdi Kanu) into the new (meaning Peter Obi). And they have not spared any incoherence, any lack of finesse, and threats and tantrums, any show of rabid, primitive cants, or any ululations.”
You did not stop there. You went further to say, “They have abused, cursed, and thrown imprecations. They have hugged lies about their candidate. They have pelted lies about others. They have distorted material. Obi has turned out to be an excuse for every closet Biafrans to betray open emotions about Biafra without being accused of it.”
It is one thing to vilify a candidate and extol the virtues of your principal if any. It’s another to denigrate an entire people simply because they appear to be rallying behind one of their own for the first time out of a sense of pride rather than ethnic loyalty. I’m sure you have no problem with the over 12 million voters or more in the North who steadfastly voted and stood behind Buhari on three occasions. As Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe pointed out recently in a tweet, and if I may paraphrase him, “When the North show enthusiastic support for a northern candidate, they are not accused of being Boko Haram sympathizers and when the Yorubas show overwhelming support for a Tinubu candidacy they are not accused of being Oduduwa sympathizers, but when the Igbos show support for Peter Obi, suddenly they are Biafran sympathizers and they do not love Nigeria.
The hypocrisy is obvious and palpable. It is akin to giving a dog a bad name just to hang it. You claim they have pelted lies about others, presumably your principal, yet you did not say what lies. Which begs the question, are the rumors that Bola Tinubu’s daughter, Iya Loja, controls all monies and levies generated in all Lagos markets lies? That his son is in charge of a significant portion of all billboard money generated on key highbrow maintreets in Lagos State? That his wife, who happens also to be a Senator, is the official supplier of diesel in all Lagos State establishments? That his company, Alpha Beta, collects all the taxes for Lagos State? That he owns all the valuable real estates in Lagos State? That he helped pass a law allowing him to receive a favorable pension which includes a yearly change of vehicles not to mention houses in both Lagos and Abuja with domestic workers amply paid by the state? Are these the distorted materials you were referring to? By mentioning the South South voters in your epistle of hate you forgot one basic strategy in both local and international politics, which is “to do nothing to unite your foes.” In your distorted view of history, you seem to forget or don’t know that a sizeable portion of the South South population had never bought into the Biafra project, not in the past and not now, yet you decided to denigrate them as a bunch of people who cannot discern what is best for them and which candidate can best meet their needs and aspirations,
I quite understand your disappointment by the dismal prospects of your principal in his quest to be president and your apparent dismay at the growing popularity of Peter Obi and the burgeoning and astronomical rise of the Obi-dient movement. It’s no wonder you decided to do a whack job on Peter Obi by attempting to link him with IPOB, diminish his accomplishments as Governor as well as levy all manner of false and unverifiable allegations bothering on financial malfeasance. Instead of going after Peter Obi and his supporters you could have done better trying to sell your candidate to the Nigerian electorate, but again, I understand as you must have realized that you cannot sell a candidate whose health status is visibly in decline, his academic credentials in doubt, his real name in dispute and his source of wealth questionable. We all know Tinubu is clearly a victim of a recognizable, diminished sentience and cognitive presence whose hold on the voters in Lagos and the South West has been broken and the illusion shattered with the recent loss of the Osun State Governorship election.
The Obi-dient movement is like a wild river, the current of which you cannot and should not swim against. It is a movement and a candidacy whose time has come and hundreds of essays like the one you wrote cannot diminish its reach and impact. It is a movement spearheaded by Nigerian youths of all ethnic and religious backgrounds and that’s why it has been so effective. These are young Nigerians who have become suspicious of the system, resentful and most times angry with their govt at all levels, distrustful of their politicians like Tinubu and Atiku, hateful of their security forces, faithless with their judiciary, exasperated by the level of corruption and unsure of their futures. By supporting Peter Obi and the Labor Party, they believe they have found a candidate who is cut from a different political cloth and culture. A man whose ambience, depth of knowledge and incorruptible antecedents is worthy of their devotion.
Yes, a great number of the Igbo populace support the Obi candidacy, but they are not doing so out of ethnic loyalty as their voting behavior over past presidential elections have proven, rather they do so because they’ve found in him the same qualities that have endeared him to other sections of the country. By the way, does anyone in his or her right mind think the Igbos will show such fervent support for a Governor Uzodinma, Okezie or Senator Orji Uzor Kalu for the presidency just because they are Igbos? The answer is no! Therein lies the difference, which must put a stop to any talk of ethnic animus or loyalty.
In conclusion, I must say Peter Obi’s mantra is the belief that politics works better when it is geared towards mediating differences rather than perpetuating constant warfare, hence he cannot approve of any of his supporters threatening your life, mindful of the fact that ethnicism has been a lingering stain on our collective conscience. While your essay was an expression of monumental human malice on a group of people, I hope it does not make you look pathetic in the lens of history and your profession.
“Discretion”, they say “is a virtue without which other virtues aren’t at all’. Unfortunately, discretion is one thing you did not have in writing that essay, hence what you wrote was an act of political vandalism. The ideal of the moral universe demands and implores us all as Nigerians to change our political reality, not accept it while also demonstrating a deeper vision for reimagining Nigeria’s political system, its diversity, its structure and constitution. As a Nigerian living in the diaspora, I am finding it both gratifying and terrifying to be in this pivotal moment in our country’s history. Peter obi’s presidential fate lies in the hope that Nigerians of every ethnic group, religion and language by registering their concerns by way of voting will help set the country up for a renewal and it is my hope that you, Sam Omatseye while not asking you to displease or abandon your principal can at least lend literary effort to building a new Nigeria we can all be proud of. My unsolicited advice to you is this: DON’T BE A SYCOPHANT. Sycophancy does not pay!
- Nnanna Ijomah is a New York based Political Scientist and Analyst.
