I’ve got news for President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Reuben Abati, Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode, Mrs Ngozi Okonjo Iweala and others in their ilk who have denied – or may be planning to deny – the welcome Wikileaks breeze that has exposed their fowlish rumps: Wikileaks is infinitely more believable, more credible than Nigerian officials.
I’ve got news for President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Reuben Abati, Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode, Mrs Ngozi Okonjo Iweala and others in their ilk who have denied – or may be planning to deny – the welcome Wikileaks breeze that has exposed their fowlish rumps: Wikileaks is infinitely more believable, more credible than Nigerian officials.
To put it more bluntly: I believe Wikileaks. I do not believe these Nigerian officials. As a rule, I never believe Nigerian officials. I have written time and again in this column that wherever and whenever a Nigerian official stands accused of gross inadequacies in the province of moral mettle and ethical capital, that official is guilty until proven innocent in my book. No apologies. It would be madness to give anybody in Nigeria’s rulership circuits the benefit of the doubt. I have the irresponsible behavior of Nigeria’s political elite in fifty years of atrophied postcolonial nationhood and statehood to support my position.
If I was ever tempted to accord some consideration to the inchoate protestations of what clearly has emerged as a confederacy of denialists led by President Jonathan, the operative metaphor, symbolism, and body language that they have deployed to deal with the grievous national embarrassment occasioned by the Wikileaks revelations, all combine to affirm Julian Assange’s profile of the Nigerian political class. A country’s entire political class is profiled as unpatriotic, unprofessional, irresponsible, garrulous, charlatanish, prurient, clueless, ribald, and disorganized; they come across in the cables as juvenile because they need to be permanently babysat by American officials in their handling of matters of Nigerian statehood and dignity. And what better way to respond to this than to evoke the atmospherics of beer and beer parlour as your instinctive metaphor? When the talk on the street is that there is too much Sapele water ruling Nigeria from Aso Rock, you counter such talk with beer and beer parlour talk. When rumour has it that you are a meat thief, what better way to dispel the rumour than to be seen playing with goats and rams in the village square?
The recourse to the casualness of beer and paraga language when the occasion called for a measured and sombre presidential mien as the first step in demonstrating a ridiculed political elite’s capacity for introspection and self-reflexivity is, of course, not unexpected. The opposite would have been unusual. That, after all, is how our friends run Nigeria. And we should also not be surprised that our confederacy of denialists is now asking us to believe that how they run Nigeria is how their more cerebral and more professional American babysitters also run America. Caught pants down behaving like nocturnal animals, running to the American Ambassador at midnight to drink beer (ah, that beer metaphor again!), spill Nigeria’s state secrets, and say nasty things about one another, our ridiculous friends are now asking us to believe that these American diplomats, fully aware of the fact that some of their reports may even make it into the presidential daily briefing in Washington and form the basis of America’s national security permutations, would just up and make up all those stories from thin air! It never happened! It wasn’t me!
And who better to scream louder than all the other members of the confederacy of denialists than our friend, Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode. Screaming into the space of national discourse has been his forte since his Obasanjo years. But a country is truly in trouble when a clown like Femi Fani-Kayode gets to ask the public to believe him. A country is in trouble when a clown like Femi Fani-Kayode gets to frequently invade the public sphere with his odoriferous presence. But, eh, there is this thing called democracy, this thing called free speech. We must therefore defend Mr. Fani-Kayode’s right to vigorously insult our intelligence and bet on our legendarily fugacious memory every time he rushes out. It wasn’t me!
But we must also remind Mr. Fani-Kayode that his Yoruba forebears probably had him in mind when they claimed that “omo atiro to ra bata fun Baba e, oro lo fe gbo”. Or don’t you think that the child of a cripple who goes shopping and returns home with shoes for his crippled father is hungry for an earful? So, when Mr. Fani-Kayode runs to town asking that we believe him, we must remind him, ever so gently, that he has come again and we are ready for him. We must remind him that his denials after every act of irresponsibility go for ten a kobo. We must remind him that Facebook is a long-term venue of his denials and antics. We must remind him that even when he rushed to delete stuff, he wasn’t fast enough for internet-savvy Nigerians who already downloaded and stored the fruits of his Facebook truancy. It wasn’t me.
And so it was with the story of Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode’s daughters. He posted pictures of his own daughters on Facebook showing dangerously under-covered geographies of the female anatomy. And when the inevitable scandal brewed, he rushed to town issuing denials. And so it was with Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode’s Facebook back and forth with Saminu Turaki over matters relating to the supply of geographies of nubile pleasure to President Obasanjo in Aso Rock.
When the inevitable scandal brewed, he rushed to town issuing denials. And so it was with Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode’s statements and counterstatements during the recent bilateral exchange of insults between OBJ and IBB. When the inevitable scandal brewed, he rushed to town issuing denials. “I was misquoted”, “My account was hacked” – these two statements are to Mr. Fani-Kayode what Ghana must go is to the Nigerian official. They have become leitmotifs of his post-Obasanjo political life. He is a career denialist. It wasn’t me.
And so goes the grind. Even those who had previously cited Wikileaks approvingly when the revelations came in handy against their political opponents suddenly ran for cover under the umbrella of beer and beer parlour metaphors when the tide changed –salam aleikum to Mallam Nasir El Rufai. Sonala Olumhense, that inimitable jostler of our memory, reminds us of the truly funny and pathetic case of Dr. Reuben Abati. Apparently, Dr. Abati no longer likes Wikileaks.
Never mind that on January 4, 2011, Mr. Abati penned a glowing editorial to announce Julian Assange as the Guardian’s Man of the Year for 2010. Said Abati: “the WikiLeaks publication and the emotional reaction to it, has exposed the continuing hypocrisy of so-called leaders of the civilized world. The reaction by the US authorities for example has been most revealing: the State Department became uncommonly agitated and also engaged in name-calling.” Hmmm, a man is allowed to change his mind and we must grant that fluidity to Mr Abati but do now speak of his boss’s “emotional reaction” to Wikileaks? Has the “continuing hypocrisy” of Abati’s boss been exposed? It wasn’t me.
Not done, Abati concludes his flowery editorial thus: “For being the lightning rod for a reassessment of all of these and for the sheer, transformative impact of WikiLeaks in 2010, Julian Assange is our Man of the Year.” More questions for Abati and his crew of presidential handlers: shouldn’t people who have gone to town with a “transformation agenda” approve of the “transformative impact” of Wikileaks? When did “transformation” become beer parlour talk? It wasn’t me.
We are too far gone down the road of mediocrity in the handling of the Wikileaks scandal by the Nigerian authorities. Serious issues have been trivialized beyond measure by those concerned. We cannot at this point expect them to raise the level of discourse beyond beer and beer parlour talk for they cannot offer what they do not have. But if Nigerian officials must beer this embarrassment, is too much to expect them to at least get their beering right?