We are all confrontational and ready to lance the over-inflated ego, pride, overconfidence and small godism of shameless, pompous, and arrogant politicians like Aregbesola.
By Taju Tijani
Nigeria’s Minister of Interior, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, was recently caught in the embarrassing fork of a clearly aggrieved Nigerian on American soil. Aregbesola, a Tabligh Muslim, oversees our correctional centres, internal security, and immigration.
Footage from the serious altercation showed Aregbesola in a restaurant helping himself to a plate of food. A lady was seen sitting and waiting for him to settle down and feast on his dish. Clearly the restaurant was clean, smart, and swanky. The American air of self-service ethos was everywhere and like others, our minister had to help himself without any aide dying to please the honourable minister. Honourable indeed!!
In the restaurant lurked Aregbesola’s heckler. A Nigerian of Yoruba extraction sprang into action and began to record an agitated Aregbesola. Yes, the minister acted like a true Ijesa man. He offered a stiff resistance, but the recorder on cell phone could not be persuaded. He rumbled Aregbesola and called him out.
The minister could only offer a weak submission, “You have no authority to record me.” The troubler responded by reminding Aregbesola that he was in the US – a land of free speech. “Joe Biden could not dissuade me from filming him”, the heckler insisted. Aregbesola’s lady companion joined in stopping the filming, but the selfie-driven Nigerian could not budge.
Mr. Aregbesola was quite shaken by the incident. He took his travel luggage and scuttled out of the restaurant like a rabbit. “Awon olosi, orope gbogbo iranu ti enshe ni Nigeria de ibi bayi ni”, the heckler said. In translation, “you mean people, do you think that your shenanigans in Nigeria would be allowed in the US?”
There was an eerie silence when the confrontation petered out and I reckoned that the dude who embarrassed Aregbesola must now be congratulating himself in downing a lightweight of Buhari’s cabinet.
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I saw Aregbesola twice. The first time was at Ikeja in Lagos. We had gathered to celebrate the 40th birthday ceremony of Iba Gani Adams before his coronation as the Aare Onakankanfo of Yorubaland. The minister looked dapper in white at the high table and exuded an air of superiority among his then Oranmiyan acolytes. There was fascination about his demeanour. An army of admiring mob surrounded him as a future star in the firmament of Nigerian murky politics.
I saw him again last year – April 2021. I was flying back to the UK. Aregbesola was inspecting immigration facilities at the airport. He gave a look of “hey I am here” at the passengers queuing to beat the passport control. No one gave him a knowing glance, despite his trademark distinctive beard.
I noted that incident. He wanted his ego inflated by us, but we ignored him as we do to many public figures in the West. We are not used to hero worshipping government functionaries. They are paid as public servants and are not meant to cast themselves as heroes to be worshipped like Lady Diana of Ephesus! This psychological warfare is still ongoing between diaspora Nigerians and visiting government officials who travel on assignment overseas.
The cult of hero worship common in Nigerian politics is incompatible with democracy as a form of governance. Hero may govern empires, theocracies and dictatorships but should be anathema to democracy. However, it is not totally immune to democracy as we have seen in the rise of Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s leader. Aregbesola also has built a cult of hero worship around his slim waist among his Osun followers. Staggered, shaken and discomfited that a Nigerian could call him out in faraway US was more than a culture shock to him.
Before him, we had Ike Ekweremadu who was beaten up in Germany and told to go home – a home he has helped destroy through corruption, mass looting and wrong policies that suit elite-minded fools like him rather than the people they govern. Recently, Ekweremadu’s political immunity was deflated in the United Kingdom and today he is an accused in a case of organ transplant that went awry. In Nigeria, Ike Ekweremadu would have overawed the judiciary with a combination of his cult figure and clannish sentiment which are ready armour among our politicians.
The infantile, beaten and broken Nigerian society could hold up the Opon Imo apostle as a political hero, but angry Nigerians in the diaspora despise politicians and see them as oppressors, thieves, wicked, looters, greedy, selfish, arrogant, lawless and demagogues.
In the West, we send off our politicians and public figures who fall fowl of the law in a woof. They resign without being pushed. In the UK, we recently defanged Boris Johnson as Prime Minister just because of a slight error of judgment – holding a party at Number 10 during the pandemic. Just that, and we made him pay the ultimate price of breaking own rule!
Now fast forward to Nigeria. On 5th of July 2022, the Kuje Correctional Centre was attacked by both ISWAP and Boko Haram terrorists. Over 800 prison inmates escaped during the attack with about half of them still at large. Those still at large include over 60 Boko Haram suspects. Without any push, Rauf Aregbesola as the Interior Minister should have resigned.
Without any shame, he carries on as Minister of Interior and like a Matador he distributes blames like confetti bar himself. The domestic complexity of our politics encourages Aregbesola to carry on as a Minister but not so in the West where leaders and heads are accountable for their assignments.
Therefore, a figure of shamelessness like Aregbesola will naturally draw the anger of Nigerians in the diaspora who are unhappy with the perfidy going on back home. Nigerians in the diaspora are in a hurry to see the political, social, economic, and cultural transformation of their society like their host countries.
Even after 23 years of democratic rearming, Nigeria is still being govern by intellectually weak humans with compulsive obsession for graft, stealing and high incompetency. Osun witnessed its own political pantomime last week. Ademola Adeleke, a comic, dancer and minstrel will now govern Osun State. He won through sheer cult hero worship rather than through strict political contest of ideas.
Nigerians in the diaspora are assuming the roles of vanguards and gatekeepers for good governance. The Nigerian political soil is just too barren to allow for accountability among elected public figures to take root. All of us harbour moral indignation against the shenanigans going on back home.
And that is why we are all confrontational and ready to lance the over-inflated ego, pride, overconfidence and small godism of shameless, pompous, and arrogant politicians like Aregbesola. We want to beat them up each time they venture out of the contraption of democratic backwardness called Nigeria.