By Ola S. Sanmi
It is ceaseless angst across the nation that Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Lt. Gen. Tukur Yusufu Buratai became the focus of the latest article by the Nigeria’s odious and demented former minister of aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode (FFK). His cursed, unrestricted senselessness and confused emotions are unleashed on anyone his madness is prodded to hate any day. Visit the nearest psychiatric hospital and you decode the gist appropriately. FFK titled the article, “Buratai, Biafra and the Guardians of Empire Nigeria.”
It’s sometimes preferable to overlook FFK’s deranged ranting, because it’s difficult to completely cure an insane person. But a response to this one is spurred by the twisted intention to dwarf the credentials of Gen. Buratai, an internationally acclaimed icon in military circles and the czar of anti-terrorism campaigns, whose exceptional impact is unreservedly feted in Nigeria, Africa and the globe.
Any genuine indigene of Yoruba descent in Nigeria would be shocked to hear, read or watch FFK insult and abuse elders or everybody with such recklessness and impunity. It’s not permissible in Yoruba culture. But unfortunately, it is not debatable that FFK is not of Yoruba ancestry and his queer behavior is garnered from this perspective.
FFK is yet to disprove the deconstruction of his un-Nigerian genealogy by Engr. Fabiyi Rotimi (COREN), which was widely publicized in March 2015. It traced his roots to a Temne tribe in Sierra Leone, after his father was rescued aboard a slave ship from Sierra Leone in Lagos, designated for the slave market in the western world. And thereafter, his father was salvaged by the Nigerian Yoruba Bishop Ajayi Crowther. So, claiming ancestry from Ile-Ife is offending enough, but traducing the cherished traditional values of the Yorubas who picked him, a homeless boy on the street and breathe life into him is sacrilegious.
But FFK’s dilemma is not far rooted. With certainty, Nigerian prisons are not necessarily reformation homes. They are about the worse places of confinement of any person anywhere else, even for a day.
Those who have passed through the misfortune of a romance with Nigerian prisons end up with two paralyses – diminished reasoning and intellectual capacity. Also, a date with any Nigerian prison cascades you speedily to premature senility. FFK’s words and actions depict the comportment of an escapee lunatic from a psychiatric home in extreme deranged senses.
This appears to be the fate of FFK who has obviously been imperiled by the Nigerian demons of incarceration. His odious and polluted tenure as a minister in Nigeria has made him a jailbird in Kirikiri and Kuje prisons at different intervals.
Though naturally gifted in disreputable conduct, abusive utterances and mental imbalance, FFK’s jailing worsened this innate capacity for sound reasoning. Nigeria has many examples of jailbirds in the mould of FFK. But they are remarkably different from FFK because conscious of their weaknesses, they prefer to be more reflective and less vociferous, unlike him.
But FFK’s proclivity to abuse, insult and denigrate prominent Nigerian leaders confounds, but the least, befuddling, when judged on the pillar of his Nigerian prison experience. Every notable Nigerian leader has had a douse of his mental instability. He once publicized that former Nigerian President and his political benefactor, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo (OBJ) was an ingrate for stoutly opposing the 2015 doomed re-election of former President Goodluck Jonathan.
And when FFK became the Director, Media and Publicity, PDP Presidential Campaign Organization for Jonathan in 2015, and OBJ furiously tore his PDP membership card publicly, he said, “Such behavior is provocative and unacceptable.” In Yoruba tradition where he claims known artificialized ancestry, its rudeness and abusive for a younger one to use such abusive vocabulary to qualify the actions of an elder like OBJ.
However, before this hour, FFK at a book launch in Lagos once described the administration of Jonathan as bequeathing a legacy of “destruction and disaster” in the country. But when he became Jonathan’s bootlicker, he had to brazenly abuse an elder statesmen like OBJ for kicking against the political agenda of Jonathan in 2015. At another instance, FFK ironically agreed with contents of OBJ’s open letter to Jonathan about “bleeding Nigeria to death,” and canvassed for change. But when OBJ set the process of leadership, he became FFK’s deadliest foe because he was cozied in Jonathan’s bosom.
During the hot campaigns for the 2015 presidential elections, FFK said Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu; “… belongs in a sanatorium for the mentally unbalanced and a maximum security prison for the power obsessed rather than in any political party.”
This arrogance of an alien, habitated in Nigeria on sympathetic grounds once referred to President Muhammadu Buhari as a leader who has lost his senses. Typical of the often rioting demons in his system, FFK once branded the Igbos on an international news medium thus “…the Ibos of Nigeria are collectively unlettered, uncouth, uncultured, unrestrained and crude in all their ways…” But today, he claims to be in the vanguard of MASSOB or IPOB’s quest for Biafra. What pyrrhic love.
Therefore, when his tormented soul added to his list of traducers, the revered and internationally acclaimed soldier and nemesis of Boko Haram Terrorists (BHTs) in Nigeria, Gen. Buratai, Nigerians felt saddened that he was treading on the familiar path on another wrong side. FFK’s crude and barbaric instincts became unchained against Buratai because the latter advised self-serving and violent separatists camps in Nigeria to shelve the unworkable idea for the future, as today’s Nigeria does not embrace such hooliganism.
In FFK’s lengthy response to Gen. Buratai and the Northern oligarchy, he thoroughly misplaced and miscalculated history. His asinine postulations of facts betrayed him more as a foreign spy on Nigerian soil. But he forgot easily that the people he has chosen to caricature in his berserk senses have far better grasp of the history and the events he rehearses every time than himself.
An anonymous scholar in 2017 quieted FFK’s disingenuous historical outbursts on Gen. Buratai, this great soldier of history in these endearing words; “The man Buratai as holder of PhD in history is a better historian than the one-sided pedestrian collection of historical half- truths you represented. You have not ventured into even the simplest historical detail of the last Nigerian Civil War here at home, otherwise you would have realized there was ‘no victor nor vanquished’. There was only wanton destruction, human suffering and despair. You are miscalculating by presuming the willingness of those fictional Nigeria’s factional interests to go their separate ways.”
The jailbird undoubtedly has hazy recollection and disjointed knowledge about the Nigerian civil war. But the Mr. Anonymous has reminded him, to perish the thought that a victor emerged in that conflict. The dimensions of the war and the premise upon which it ended cannot be re-invented by FFK.
So, when a celebrated war veteran in the capacity of Buratai, advises the spineless groups in the Southeast and elsewhere in Nigeria, the counsel is informed by his historical knowledge of the truth. FFK is incompetent to concoct fraudulent historical collections to dare Buratai, an army officer who would ordinarily tutor him in history and particularly, about events of the Nigerian civil war.
Therefore, it is laughable when FFK claims passion and fondness for every tribe or region of Nigeria today, when he abused and reduced the same people to nothingness in his lunacy of yesterday. How could the Igbos, which his mutilated senses described as, “… collectively unlettered, uncouth, uncultured, unrestrained and crude in all their ways…” suddenly become his idols for the Biafran agenda?
When he got the undeserved appointment as aviation and later culture and tourism minister, how many Igbos or his adopted kinsmen, the Yorubas, or Middle Belters did he assist to make life better for them? Or, is anointing himself, the advocate of violence and ethnic warlord-ship for unwilling people the better life he is offering them when he has no mandate to render service?
Ordinarily, FFK should be the last person to accuse anybody of killings in Nigeria. His hands are conspicuously stained in the blood of the innocent Nigerians. He allegedly embezzled public funds voted for the improvement of facilities and upgrade of Nigerian airports, as minsiter. The resultant effect of failure to service these airports under his watch led to frequent fatal plane crashes. The air mishaps massively killed Igbos, Yorubas and every other Nigerian.
Yet, it could not assuage his bloodthirsty appetite. He proceeded in 2015 to partake in the Dasukigate’s $2.1 billion arms procurement fund by “fetching” large sums of money from it to promote partisan campaigns for Jonathan. The intention of purchasing weapons to fight insurgency in the Northeast was frustrated by characters like FFK. And the number of Nigerians Boko Haram terrorists murdered in cold blood as a result of his fraudulent actions with other collaborators, surpasses the isolated killings he frequently mentions in his lunatic outrages.
He once proclaimed that “…the cause of all the problems in Nigeria and the whole world are Muslims…,” and yet today, FFK sanctifies the extremist and violence-prone, Iran-backed, Shiites in Nigeria (IMN).
Nigerians know FFK has no conscience and that he is a Sierra Leonean, very ungrateful to Nigeria. But the privilege of domiciliary in Nigeria these decades and the hospitality, the good people of Nigeria have offered him should not be misconstrued and abused to the extent of boldly working for the foreign agents, plotting the destabilization of Nigeria. If Nigeria goes into flames, he will run to his home-country, Sierra Leone to take refuge. Aware of his roots, and excusing insanity, he has no mandate to speak for the Yoruba race or prod any other group in Nigeria on any issue or to instigate anarchy in the guise of separatism.
FFK should not forget this admonishment from the Holy Scriptures in Proverbs 6:16-19 thus; “There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.”
Sanni, an international affair analyst writes from University of Cotbus, Germany.
