GETTING FEMI-FANI KAYODE OUT OF MY BRAIN

By James Ibechi

Yesterday a friend on social media syndicated a piece of critique of President Muhammadu Buhari by Femi-Fani Fayode (FFK). Another dear friend sent me an SMS suggesting I read it because it reveals how FFK’s mind works. But as I tried to click the link a lady-like voice in my head said, “I would prefer not to.” I tried to click again and the voice said: “No thanks. I’m full.”


Since the EFCC clamped FFK into prolonged detention albeit he has since been released, over the Dasukigate saga, FFK has taken up an amazing amount of my brain space with his writings against Buhari. My brain has apparently decided that it’s not interested in devoting more neurons to that guy’s articles. There’s nothing more to be learned about FFK’s mixture of ignorance, jaundiced journalism and narcissist brickbats of Buhari APC-led Federal Government. Every second spent on FFK’s blusters against Buhari is more degrading than informative.
Now a lot of people, like my friend Ade Joseph Otor, are clearly still addicted to him. My Twitter feed is all him. Some people treat the FFK’s obsessive criticisms of Buhari as a good Amala food they’ve been eating in Yoruba land for months. For some, FFK’s bashing of Buhari has become educated-class meth. They derive endless satisfaction from feeling morally superior to Buhari.
But I thought I might try to listen to my brain for a change. That would mean trying, probably unsuccessfully, to spend less time thinking about or reading FFk’s bashings of the Lion of Africa and the Nigerian moral compass (Buhari) and more time on questions that surround the Buhari phenomenon and this moment of history, instead.
How much permanent damage is FFK doing to our unity as a nation of diverse ethnics and nationalities? Have Nigerians really decided they no longer want to be a united country with a special mission to spread unity around the component nationalities? Is dividing the nation now the lingua franca of politics so the opposition PDP’s only hope is to match those like Nnamdi Kanu’s embers of disintegration with its own?
These sorts of questions revolve around one big question: What lessons are people drawing from this FFK debacle reading him and how will those lessons shape what comes next?
It’s clear that FFK like his late father – for those who know about him – is not just a parenthesis. After he FFK quits the earth – lemme not say dies – or quit writing the kinds of things he is writing, things will not just snap back to “normal.” Instead, FFK represents the farcical culmination of a lot of dying old orders — demographic, political, even moral — and what comes after he quits the earth life will be a reaction, for those who are reading him, against rather than a continuing from.
FFK’s brickbats against Buhari are a daily affront to my sensibility, a guy who nakedly loves corruption, who boasts, who objectifies graft and was temporary imprisoned for it though not sentenced, a hypocrite because he acknowledges no standard of propriety other than that which he feels like doing at any given moment.
Is it such a bunch of moral disgrace that he is that you think has moral right to upbraid a Nigerian moral and patriotic compass as Buhari?
I really want to get rid of FFK in my brain.