Kperogi in an article published on Saturday added that it was most absurd in the recent Nigerian history how Nigerian presidential candidates shunned local media and jumped at neo-colonnial gatherings to seek acceptability.
A Nigerian-American professor and newspaper columnist, Farooq Kperogi, has criticised how Nigerian presidential candidates rushed to the United Kingdom’s Chatham House with the excitement of “giddy, little children to speak there.”
Kperogi in an article published on Saturday added that it was most absurd in the recent Nigerian history how Nigerian presidential candidates shunned local media and jumped at neo-colonnial gatherings to seek acceptability.
He lamented that this development suggested a cultural cringe in Nigeria and a new form of national low self-esteem and neocolonialism.
He wrote, “The increasingly central role that British think factory Chatham House is playing in Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election, which has seen most of our top presidential contenders trooping like giddy little children to speak there, is the most absurd extreme I can find in recent Nigerian history of a phenomenon that social anthropologists call the cultural cringe.
“There is rampant cultural cringe in Nigeria, and it is manifesting prominently in this election cycle. APC presidential candidate Bola Tinubu who habitually shuns all independent Nigerian news organizations and platforms that invite him for debates and discussions was the first presidential candidate to honor Chatham House’s invitation to speak about his plans for Nigeria.
“Peter Obi and his team were green with envy. They felt one-upped by Tinubu. Although, unlike Tinubu, Obi routinely engages with Nigerians, he needed the Chatham House stamp of approval to show that he, too, had arrived. When he was invited to Chatham House, his supporters celebrated it as if he had won the presidential election.
“Kwankwasiyya supporters also hyped Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso’s invitation to speak at Chatham House as evidence that he had overcome the real and notional marginality that had dogged his presidential aspiration, which had seen him and his spokespeople expending precious communicative energies to dispel insinuations that he would drop out of the race and endorse either Tinubu or Atiku.
“Atiku Abubakar is the only major presidential candidate who hasn’t (yet) honored Chatham House’s invitation to talk about his presidential contest. But the fact that he spoke there in 2017 and 2018 indicates that he has no philosophical disagreement with the humiliating cultural cringe that Nigerian presidential candidates speaking at Chatham House represents.
“Even INEC chairman Mahmood Yakubu showed up at Chatham House on January 17 to speak on INEC’s “Preparations, Challenges, and Priorities for Ensuring Electoral Integrity and Inclusivity.” I bet you that if Chatham House invites the entire Federal Executive Council to hold its weekly meetings in London to the hearing of Chatham House executives, Buhari and his ministers would be both honored and flattered for the “rare privilege.”
“This may sound like an outlandish exaggeration, but the late President Umar Musa Yar’adua used similar phraseology to characterize his visit to the White House. He was so overwhelmed by the splendor of the White House and the “privilege” to shake President George Bush’s hands— that he declared his visit “a rare opportunity” and a “moment that I will never forget in my life.”
“I had never seen such an effusively self-humiliating expression of gratitude, such farouche, dewy-eyed candor from the president of a supposedly sovereign country. His successors weren’t better.”
“This cultural cringe shows no sign of abating anytime soon because all Buhari’s potential successors are frankly indistinguishable from him when it comes to questions of national self-pride, as we have seen these past few weeks.
“As it stands right now, no Western nation needs secret agents to get our national secrets. Our elites’ egos are often flattered to no end when a white person—any white person—considers them “worthy” enough to serve as traitorous snitches against their own country.
“And that’s why they are routinely infantilized by the West. As a people and a culture, we have internalized a mentality of low self-worth and an unwarranted veneration of the foreign, especially if the “foreign” also happens to be white.”