By: Philip Agbese
Whatever stuff the Convener of Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) group, Aisha Yesufu takes must have either become cheaper or more concentrated given her erratic postulations on critical national issues. For the purpose of not placing her already over bloated sense of personal importance on steroids her other misfires in recent times would be ignored to focus on the most recent one.
In a series of tweets, Twitter gives that unanimity that makes people less circumspect; she asked that President Muhammadu Buhari remains in London where he is on medical leave since Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is doing a good job in his absence. Osinbajo is very competent for the job of course or he wouldn’t have been nominated to be Buhari’s running mate from among 180 million Nigerians.
As is always the case with celebrity activists, they tend to deliberately deploy words and terminologies in ways that hide their true intentions, Aisha Yesufu was cryptically asking for a different thing while making it appears as if she was speaking as a Nigerian that wants the best for the country. But she can only fool those followers whose sense of history and reasoning is limited to 140 characters at a time. Those that invest in learning would immediately see where she is coming from.
For her and the group she convened, the misery of the abducted Chibok Girls has been milked to its last drop of goodness; it has been re-invented, rebranded, repackaged and marketed in its various phases and a recent guided sortie over the area of military operation must have netted the final payout. Good entrepreneurs know when a product is at the end of its life cycle and, using research and development, introduce a new one to take its place. This crisespreneur knows something has to replace the BBOG brand so she is already thinking her own iteration of the Save Nigeria Group (SNG) of the Yar’Adua days.
Her suggestion that President Buhari should get the best brains to do the work while he supervises is trite. The President already does his work that way – the country did not collapse while he is on leave. If anything it gave insight into the mournful ignorance of those that Aisha puts on the streets,
“Even my business I run it that way. Get the best people to do the work. I strategize and provide vision while chilling out lazily,” she tweeted. So the less discerning troop to the street while she lounges at meeting venues after the protests to discuss the going rate of paid picketing.
Nigerians must be wary. Those innocuous tweets are fore sinister and are indicative of a predatory activist testing the waters to see people will bite the line she is feeding. She will either convene an entirely new platform or repurpose BBOG for the contract she smells in the offing. Fortunately for Aisha Yesufu and dangerously for Nigeria there many eager buyers of toxic ware – serial candidates who aim to make political gains if President Buhari abdicates, ethnic warlords who had been lamenting the sharing formula since the election was won and lost and operators of the corruption industrial complex who want to be back to business as usual.
For those on whose shoulders she will climb to pluck her next juicy fruits this is wishing them well in their choice to be the fodder for a career celebrity activist and crisespreneur.
And talking of crisespreneurs, those folks who wait for crisis situations to make ends meet, another one upped the crescendo in asking for President Buhari to resign. It would have been satisfying to take apart Okey Ndibe’s article, “A Humane Proposal For Buhari: Resign”. But what will be the purpose of joining issues with a man whose education, travels and global interactions has done nothing to remove ethnic bigotry from? Had he proven in recent times that his interventions have no ethnic underpinning, we know the ethnic group that detest Buhari as bloc, the problem of funded analyses still makes interrogation of his article a waste.
In the coming days, Aisha Yesufu and Okey Ndibe’s competitions in the paid activism and funded critiquing will troop out with their most ferocious pitch to jostle for market shares. It is up to the rest of us how we react to that development. The vultures must hover. Only that this time there is no carrion.
Agbese writes from the United Kingdom.
