"Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist and will appear." ---Ralph Waldo Emerson.  BB
let me commence this letter with an enlightenment dint-dose of
metaphorical philosophia in man's mystical chemistry of existence and
essence. Call this what you will, but be sprightly wheeled away from the
weedily way-laying notion that it should boast its broad base in
biology or theology. All doctrines and theories are its offspring; it
requires no myths to be meaningful, no culture is needed for its
instructive accuracy. Yet, all myths and cultures, from it have drawn
their etymologies, scopes and functions. All books and schools, all
skills and fields, with it they boast affiliations, and to it they owe
their relevances. Stones and bones, sticks and spears, swords and guns,
temples and caves, churches and mosques, all in its protection early
minds had toiled. For it, ages were graded; powers were garnered, given
and questioned. And that its beautiful substance might be our rules,
laws and knowledge were made; and that their purposes may rob off well
on the central man, policing professions and insightful institutions
were created to identify its banes as taboos, crimes or illegalities.
This, in my unique and most intellectually and spiritually consoling
description I call Samaformism. And, Babangida, for this decent
doctrine-ideology via which Humanity Day was annually begun for man on
the 17th of March, 2007, for which healthcare and educational facilities
are being explored to be freely used by all, for which movement ought
to be restrictless or common joy ought to be shared by all, all lives,
including mine and yours, have been evolved and empowered to be.
As a growing child in the eighties, let me tell you how hero-crazy, heroism-addicted I was on a piece of Nigerian earth. Admiring our excellent actors and actresses from their guissepuous representation of warriors or warlords in inspiring epic movies, their causes and courage pillared in my soul, the sole-strength of hope in wholesome degrees and pedigrees that marked me out as a move maker among my precocious peers. No evening passed me by without gathering my little friends, all gladly clad in our different wears but common mood, poetically inspired for battles our different parents always prevented or incessantly ended with strokes of their curious canes. Oh remind me dear Lord, how many times mother's hands had been filled with blood because the sharp objects I, like a true warrior fortified against defeat, had hidden in the jungles of my small-sized shirts and shorts to house my passion in the childish illusion of heroism and victory mien of a mere child. And though I would feel bad that these blades and sharpened spears cut mother as she constantly washed for me, my sincere remorse never prevented me from converting more garbs into war rags, and from smuggling more 'weapons' into their corners, which always cut mother more. I loved knights and warriors, courage and freedom, their impacts and stories, a great deal! In later years, this fraternity with nobility and freedom, courage and heroism snowballed from movie characters to real life's constitutionally constituted and professionally coordinated soldiers who vigilantly and valiantly man the security of man in this region. Your picture was frequently among those which filled my heart with hope, and I loved you as my first known image of national spartanism. I would go to school, relaying some cock and bull stories about your physical and moral strengths. I told my more-trusting than gullible classmates how fine and dutiful you were, IBB; I said to them you could provide for Nigerians and fight any nation or international organization to a stand still, which oppressively attempted to engage the idea of ideal Nigeria with your mortal kicks and punches, guns and bombs. I unwittingly exaggerated our resources and argued the Nigerian soldier was invincible. These were my immature, yet true perception of all notable figures that I first knew in our nation's annals. A fine story farmer that I was, my young friends believed these rare and virtuous plants were true and possible with the over-bloated agriculture in you. I never meant to lie; I completely believed you possessed all these and more. They were the expectations and hopes from the wholesome soul of a trusting child that most children are. Then suddenly, a revolutionary realization of my misleading perception of your personality (like my maturely altered convictions of those movie stars of earlier years) in pharmacological scientia of cathartic psychological drugs, exposing some critical truth that my innocent infancy had mis-worshipped as noble feat, mutated my funny folly to phenomenal perspicacity that efficiently perceives and detects every smoke-screening moral and spiritual camouflages. First I observed only the fine fools around our home and school, whose best judgment maggots of carcass might be too intelligent to trust, praised your deeds. I suspected your disguised insincerity through the published symbols of your fans' naked dauncehood. Second, I noticed some disciplined teachers and exemplary elders in cross-fire arguments against your worthlessness. I was gradually becoming convinced of your standard moral sub-standardness through the consistent verdicts of dignified Nigerians who were never identifiable with ethical kwashiorkor, or direct dishonour. Third I saw your vivid pictures as a cun instructor, fraud elaborator and the nation's historic inspiration of euphemistic corruption; I saw the flakily faked moral mien that masqueraded a mind that was motivated for courage-dismembered Mephistopheles, a heart acting for the upkeep of hell's large flame, and a soul sold out in unprofitable mortgage of the lachrymal anguish of broken Nigerians. What class of an evil genius are you, IBB? Mortals who know not are innocent, but are inferior to the holders of things they don't. Those who know and still reign below the charms of the hope of what they know ought to be scolded at a rate untold. Noble and disciplined action, call it righteousness if you choose, is the only acceptable proof of whatever we believe and know. The man or woman is depraved and base, whom knowledgeable awareness befriends but elects to reign in the kingdom of the optional vanities of all that ignorance and sabotage provide. Besides, by burying evil actions unacted, no man ever ruined his own future. And, to learn before, or in anticipation of life's challenges is the best timing of knowledge. Those who learn in the face of challenges learn truly but at the expense of deadly personal sacrifices; those who learn after it already lose the fruits of the challenges their feeble power fall for. But no matter when we learn, and irrespective of the consequences of this season, we must learn still, and apply this learning to the noblest calling of knowledge-the well-being of the traumatized world. You it was who banked on the indisciplined-tolerance of Nigerians of the time to overthrow the Buhari/Idiagbon's malediction-importing administration. Throughout your reign, governance dividends were lean, and as if for famine you forcefully lorded it over our sovereignty and explored our territories, you replaced several mighty errors with more pronounced epochal, epochal frauds. Several citizens were severely sacrificed to sustain the unpopular rituals of your demonic morals. Your countlessly eclipsed crimes and terror-reforms Babangidaized Abacha who willfully Abachanized Nigerians! Through the gentle strokes of weakening hunger and spirit-diminishing hopelessness, thousands abandoned the Nigerian space for the grave, insanity, crimes or foreign places. I was nine in 1985, but my unnarrowable brain can never net-off the oven-effects of your maniacal policy via Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), the landmark insincerity of your empty, supercilious unification projects, the implied indoctrination of theft and massive institutionalization of corruption, the depraved legalization of vandalization, the heroic looting of our integrity, resources and promises, and the robustly insane annulment of the freest and fairest election in all of our tortuous history. IBB, you are a meretriciously imperious man. You told Nigerians you were stepping aside in the heat of the 1993 June twelve election crises as if you were so certain of coming back to power. Do you think of the possibility of Nigerians cornering you cheap wit, or of death, or even of the God you confess faith in at all? All of the public interviews you had granted have been displays of your ignorance and arrogance. You would not apologize for the wrong done; contrary to what you said when you came to power as a youth, that power belongs to the young, you later held that Nigerian youths are foolish and irrelevant to the leadership of their fatherland. At what age did Gowon, Obasanjo, and you rule Nigeria? And I challenge you to prove to the world, how exactly you are better than the worst of the Nigerian youths. The leader who squanders chances of general survival at the ritual point of expedience and realism is worse than the supremely supine youth whom socio-economic despondency precludes from living an ethically excellent existence. You are a fool of the first order. You are a betrayer per excellence. You must have been struck with a psychotic inanity of the most aggravated species! You are a hollow billow of nature's empty negations. You are the wreckless exception to heaven's outstanding beauty. Your spiritual worth dangles between zero and one percent on the Spiritometre of out joint essence. Taken out of your stolen material wealth, your head and heart, plus all other organs you boast as a human beast, serve no purpose attributed to an average mortal of logic. You are a waste to your kinsmen and race, and a major inspirer of hate in a convalescing age of joint aids and love. Being the leading logic of the devil, your essence is the fashionable immortalization of Nigeria and all that is good on the planet of man. Let it be recorded in the books of beauty-conscious historians that unless you change by revealing the sleazes and evils you had fostered in Nigeria and apologize for them, I who blunderously loved you as a child, now wholeheartedly detest you as an adult. Why not? You were given the chance by fate to fan flat the lethiferous hurdles on the survival path of your people. It was a rare privilege that Nigerians heartily welcomed you in 1985 despite your coming to our revered throne through a process frowned against by our civilization and moral taste. You, along with Olusegun Obasanjo, Sani Abacha, Mohamadu Buhari, Abubakar Rimi, Earnest Shonekan, OluFalae, Arthur Nzeribe, Maurice Iwu, Bode George, Tafa Balogun, etc. etc., are the worst maledictional anathema in the long annals of Nigeria. Your dignity-absent scholars have said that they defend you "…for the good reason a sane man would defend late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief Anthony Enhahoro, and late Chief Ajibola Ige-whose infamous war doctrine of hunger and starvation are instruments of war" was well-articulated to General Yakubu Gowon during his prosecution of the civil war and which drove a million of Igbo children to their untimely grave. He understands the politics of Nigeria of yesterday, today, and probably tomorrow, and he would probably play very crucial roles in determining the political course of the country." I have no doubt in my mind as well that the civil war was Nigeria's most horrible dance in naked moral and ideological cluelessness before the world (if this was what patriotically pains your accolades); and all those who have supported it with their planned theatre of mindless executions-Gowon, Awolowo, Obasanjo, Ojukwu, Enhahoro, etc. etc.,--no matter how unimpeachable they seem to us, shall have the columns of their guilts in our history. But note that a withdrawal of support for that war is not an express approval of secession. The Nigerian union is not a burdensome political phenomenon to be endured or preserved at all cost; it is a cherished redemption-temple to the construction of which every citizen submits a plan. However guilty these Nigerians are for the roles they played in the civil war, none of them, I boldly assert, was as meteor-devoid as you, who destroying the most beautiful electoral resolve of one of the most diverse nations of the world, insist they are foolish enough to deserve a worse political nightmare in your proposed accursed return. Neither Gowon nor Ojukwu ever insinuated a return to any of Nigeria's political thrones after the civil war. Contrary to what your spiritually waned apostles of political come back say of you that, "So I say to detractors: hate him, dislike him, abuse him, disabuse him; one thing that is prevalent about him is his propensity to disarm your aggression with his gap-toothed smile and humility. This is unprecedented in a former president. The man is not an actor but a soldier's soldier", you are a man of fake frankness who neither says what he feels nor feel what he says. Your gap-toothed smile is a mere expression of some tragodia in unparalleled sadism. You are a deeply committed adherent of active arrogance showcased in passive form. You feign humility to disguise your cruelty and spit fire to appear courageous to the easily scared. You represent for all the taught military theories and tactics in our strong army, a soldier of cowards. For, who but a cowardly soldier, neglecting the honour of ideal strength, wins by means of deception and lie, complicity and duplicity? The Athenians and the Spartans announced before they attacked any of their enemies, winning still; the English found it unethical to attack the defenceless. But all of your battles, because you have read the unpalatable likes of Greenian and Machiavellian theories of survival by deceits, you had waged through the weapons of pretences and empty smiles. Your drafted-for-shame loyalists also cited some newspapers and Nigerian personalities as supporting and praising your all. The press praise (August 29th, 1985-The New Nigerian; August 30th, 1985-Daily Times and National Concord) was intellectually based on ill-judgment, blunderously based on trust. These newspapers and journalists, in their shallowness-blessed assessment, thought you were a rational man who had come to fill their nation's air with the perfume of freedom after their draconian, dictatorial handling by the duo of Buhari and Idiagbon. They believed you were in power to serve as the corner-stone of needed structures that would usher in the triumph of civilized human liberation over undemocratic democracy and iron and blood policies of the military adventurers before you. Professor Wole Soyinka was quoted among those prominent Nigerians who believe in you: "I like Babanginda's personality, sense of honour and the sincerity in his ambition. He is a sincere leader with commendable listening capacity." I strongly suspect that these words are not Wole Soyinka's; they ought not to be. And if they are, they must have been created when the charm of your spiritual deceit had a strong hold on the loving laureate. My suspicion of that Soyinka might have sympathy for your fairly fastidious folly in 2004 occasioned my Letter to Professor Wole Soyinka published on Nigeriaworld.com that time. In any case, beauty, truth and justice are the reasons celebrities and personalities enjoy the respect of the masses; no Nigerian shall leave undishonoured by Nigerians, who offers any known form of intellectual, spiritual or political assistance that fosters the confident enthronement of any popularly despised corruption mogul, nation divider, or morality resenter as leaders in Nigeria. While Wole Soyinka is yet to make a categorical disavowal of his support for the you we all know and see, Abubakar Umar(Ex Governor of Kaduna State) cannot be held down by "IBB had 99 percent of followersip in the military; he was the kind of General whom I could follow into battle blid-folded." This gallant soldier followed you when he thought you were worthy, and honourably withdrew his loyalty when he discovered you were evil. He did not only kick against your annulment of the June 12 election results, he was countlessly seen at critical scenes, fighting against your cohorts' social sins. This man of the people was not just mad at Shonekan, he dared the acrimonious Abacha in all that daring portends. To your disappointment I know, Abubakar Umar has been a regular fire-spiting commentator in the affairs of Nigeria since your historic derailment. I laughed as I read from your plaudit publishers that you cried for having to cancel the June 12 election. You? Cry? Interesting1! For how long? And if your tears meant that you were to potentially regret that annulment, why, why did you go ahead to still annul? Just why did you not de-Rubicon that tear-inviting decision, even after execution? Or was it too late? Okay. And why not apologize to Nigerians, explaining the surrounding circumstances that warranted the inevitable annulment? Why your "And even now, we make no apologies for the decision…"? IBB, you are a self-assuring fool that covets the impossible mask of a genius! The youths whom you so eloquently debased and calumniated have resolved to abort, not just your atrocious political goals, but also your relevance in their nation's history, no matter how hard you try to inflate your place. Your uttered insult in the following words, "Young generation can't rule Nigeria because we have seen signs that they are not capable of leading this country and so we feel we should help them. May be they are not given the proper education. That is why" exposes to your political failure as well. "Your failure as son is my fault as a father", the far-sighted Roman Emperor tells Commodus, his son in a well scripted and professionally directed and acted epic movie titled Gladiator. The Nigerian youths would have been thoroughly educated if you had not replaced basic facilities of learning with the Advanced Fee Fraud (419)! There would have been more sages among them if you had not wielded our political power for the astronomical enrichment of yourself and your criminal cabal. Learning more from their deeds than from their speeches, a nation's youths are always a reflection of what their leaders are. These youths too-and this is why the ones in your Fans Clubs now pretend to believing in you-see and like the idea of a 50-room, hilltop palatial mansion. They love to ride on the best fleet of cars and jets, they want to steal (like you and Obasanjo) with pious impunity, they love immunity against pretty justice. The leaders so far, part of which you are, have historically left them with no nobler choices! You who were freely fed, clothed, housed and instructed with Nigerian resources and will had the stinking gut to blockade their survival that you might dance on their mass grave of failure? Does this make sense to your so-called genius? Even despite these, few Nigerian youths manage enough to intellectually develop themselves to see the level of rots your moral aridity, hundreds of baboonish men and women in your unenviable category, had designed as legacies. I can see you have begun the shameless, crazy course of spending the stolen wealth and the vampirous will on your clearly hated candidacy: you have created groups on facebook, twitter, tagged, and yahoo websites; you are taking the advantages of their diplomatic insincerity and the moral and material poverty of unconscientous countries, columnists, and youths to make the world feel that Nigerians believe in you. You are forging alliances with nephews and cousins of the devil who prefer to sacrifice their future to satisfy their present. The political future that you and other myopic and ungodly few had lubricated with the grease of greed and deceits now rolls for your unprincipled patronage, and you have no internal strength with which to resist the perniciously saturating temptations. You now wish to resume your demented duties of properly plundering and further vandalizing Nigeria! Even in their graves, MKO Abiola, Kudirat Abiola, Gani Fawehinmi, Fela Anikulapo, Dele Giwa, Pa Alfred Rewane, Ken Saro-Wiwa, etc., detest your return; Okey Ndibe, Omoyele Sowore and Malcolm Fabiyi campaign that you may fail; Bamidele Aturu, Tunde Bakare and Balarebe Musa believe you are a fool; Abubakar Umar, Kennedy Emetulu and Akin Iwilade see you as an object of farce. Have you read "I am not quite sure that Nigerians can stop him from exposing himself to ridicule. He has been lucky that he is not in jail now. His coming out to contest will provide an opportunity for Nigerians to deal with him squarely…" from Femi Falana? Now listen to me: from Kano to Maiduguri, Zaria to Calabar, Kano to Ile-Ife, Port-Harcourt to Sokoto, Ibadan to Bauchi, Ikire to Jega, Nnewi to Benin, in all nooks and cranies of our tiny largeness, Nigerians abhor the idea of your return as their president. And I would not need to inform you of this if the electoral process is sane enough to relinquish the last say to us electorate. The man whom the foolish and the undisciplined respect, he is not great; the mortal whose life and logic appeal to the simplicity of the common and the complexity of the highly placed, he is our hero. Your name and deeds are ruinous relics of the devil's hold, be told. You are a genius of some special folly incomprehensible to all that is beautiful in our world. Genius makes proud when it is useful; the enigmatism advertises itself, which is committed to the demystification of a nation's befuddling troubles. IBB, you are an unspecial specialty of all negative varieties, a farcical human spirituality, and a one-man battalion buffoon and a bestial bully! In any promising war of words, conjunctions first betray the ambition of rhetoric. But with the lasting loyalty of verbs and adverbs, adjectives, nouns and pronouns, the joint tears and disapproval of Nigerians against your return to Aso Rock will fly these curses to the abode of absolute fructification in case you refuse to give it up in all that giving it up implies to logical reasoning: IBB, may your life's joy jilt your end with no remorse! May your best qualities cater to the needs of your disgraceful exit! May all columnists, sociologists and historians hit you harder than Samuel Doe, Idi Amin, and Adolf Hitler! May the invisible drums of innocent Nigerians' blood you have needlessly spilled fill your spiritual well at the detriment of the required water of spiritual comfort! May your dishonest mien turn a toxically mesmerizing mess that maims your greatest aims! May your glory nauseate at the arrival of the seat you so shamelessly hope to occupy! May the bone and muscles of millions whom you have mercilessly murdered with your military tactics and political evils pile up into unbreakable pillars that barricade your stolen honour at the most critical moments of your soaring! May your soldierly courage be at the mercy of the most cowardly cowards! May you and your cash-won supporters die in stinking gutters! May all of your spiritual, intellectual and political strategists and accolades (within and outside Nigeria) have their bread of honour maximally buttered by indignity! May any politician-believer in Babangidaism and Obasanjoism (here or in any part of the globe) perish in fatal losses! May your evil ploys against them never diminish the elegant spirits of all Samaformistic anatagonists! May all your exhibited metaphysical immunity and psychological pretence against Nigerians' collective protests, tears and curses sponsor your tragic death! May Aso Rock be eternally disquieted until Nigerians, and not any unpopular, immoral clique, decide through the power of the ballot, those brave and moral leaders that rule Nigeria! And unless justice and universal harmony that enhance survival and dignity of all earthlings are not the essence of Samaformists and prophets, these trailer of curses shall locate and determine your tear-filled existence for as long as you breathe God's air, within the furious flash of our planet's numerous eyes! ---- A Nigerian living in Nigeria, Mankind Olawale Oyewumi is a philosopher, teacher, writer, humanist, activist and Samaformist. The acclaimed writer of SONGS OF THE LAW and IMMORTAL INSTRUCTIONS, LETTER TO IBRAHIM BADAMOSI BABANGIDA was first published in 2010 and was included in the creatively written chapters of A GIFT TO NIGERIA AT FIFTY edited by him. Here is the link to the whole book: This piece was published today in commemoration of the June 12, 1993 Presidential Election won by MKO Abiola. | |||
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