Weep not, Chimamanda Adichie, by Dele Afelumo
Dear Chimamanda, I just watched the interview you had with CNN‘s Christiane Maria Heideh Amanpour where you doubled down on your dastardly attempts at throwing lethal punches at everybody and everything in the wake of your serial losses at the polls and tribunal. To you, only your chauvinist Obidient brigade and labour party faithful were with angelic visages wearing sartorial garbs of innocence, regality, moral rectitude and piety who should be venerated and obsequiously gifted our royal diadem. This time around, your salvo was laced with incendiary adjectives against the personages of their lord justices in their recent affirmation of the electoral victory of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. For that judgment with all the imprimaturs bearing all the insignias of unprecedented jurisprudential precedents, all you could spew out in your moment of rage were its shabbiness and shoddiness. Through this latest obloquy, you have once again, demonstrated your aversion to treading the path of honour, virtues and dignity. Your vituperation was preemptive of the final adjudication at the Supreme Court to tie the hands of our revered justices by smothering their hard-earned reputation into submitting to your warped dictates. You were only trying to be clever by half. With shameless smugness and contemptuous arrogance, you threw flaks at the painstaking efforts of the revered justices without any iota of legal knowledge to arrive at your inelegant descriptions when you even confessed not to have read the judgment in its entirety with an open, unbiased mind. The corollary to your infantile and puerile nattering is: any judgment which will declare your Obi-god the winner of that contest is fair and acceptable and vice versa. By letting out putrid excrescences from your poisonous tureen once again, you have stirred the hornet’s nest and vigorously rattled our quiet cages with your shallow, hollow and self-conceited importance after your letters to President Biden failed to achieve their devious objectives. In Yoruba aphorism, only bastards do point to their parents’ houses with their left fingers. Your conduct pre-and post-election held earlier this year in Nigeria left much to be desired and you are still sorely bitter that your candidate was roundly trounced. Your unfortunate and unholy dalliance with the Obidient League propelled you into a ferocious maelstrom of political gangsterism with an ethos of moral entropy enveloping its whole anatomy.
Only an undiscerning watcher would have been flummoxed at a Chimamanda ministership had Obi got the nod to superintend over Nigeria. Weep not, Chimamanda, if wishes were horses, every beggar would ride with gusto. Every day portends different prospects, so says oracles and diviners. Who knows? You could make the cut in future, but definitely not with the anachronistic, dystopic and famished pathways you are supersonically racing on. Ditto to Aisha Yesufu, the inveterate and corrosive human grenade excoriating unblinkingly anything anti-Obi in her wake and mouthing invective-riddled statements ubiquitously, especially on X—etymologically, the new hybrid variant of Twitter, feeding fat on pecuniary gratifications of her huge unsuspecting followers with same warped, toxic, belligerent and dangerous ideologies. Ngügï Wa Thiong’o, the vintage Kenyan novelist who authored _Weep Not, Child_ definitely had you both in mind in his post-colonial epic novel where Njoroge—the main character—could not enjoy a university education against his wishes.
In medical Physiology, there is a concept called all-or-none-law where a motor unit of a muscle must receive a stimulus of sufficient quantum to make the muscle fibres contract maximally in unison. Any stimulus below the required threshold will never evoke a response in the muscle unless the threshold is attained. It’s either the stimulus is high enough to evoke that response or the muscle fibres remain placidly relaxed. Obidients of all tapestries seemed to imbibe that concept hook, line and sinker. To the Obidients, it is either Obi or nobody else. The serpentine nests of these brusque, bullish, bestial mutants were daring with their motif of desperate Armageddon set to be unleashed on any dissenting voices—be it on social media mired in dark mythopoeia or elsewhere. Concerning the man you wanted to foist on Nigeria, behind the façade of make-believe pietistic mantra and holier-than-thou mien, is an entity well-ensconced in moral vacuity and intellectual swindles with his past slathered in symphonic range of disapprobation. It is not inscrutable to know that behind that sonorous, feminine proselytization is a man whose sinews and viscera are ingrained in melancholy and fantastically soiling his fingers with the king’s broth while he held sway in his State. To the Obidients, Obi is a reincarnation of the supreme God himself with never-seen-before Messianism. Every person other than Obi is wearing a spangled ornament coloured with luciferism. This is disgustingly and disquietingly disturbing in a multicultural, multireligious country such as ours. Exorcising that spirit of Obidism is proving an arcane and herculean expedition to them. Some renowned academics were also caught in that web of Obidism and infamy with offensively unparalleled political flatulence by concocting lies brazenly and distorting facts and figures with gruesome glee to massage the bestial egos of their scallywags. Chief Akin Osuntokun salved his loins in blighted conscience when he recently said on ARISE television that all the Gallup polls preceding the presidential election in February gave the Labour Party unassailable leads! Really? How pedestrian could an erstwhile ambassador be? That statement,—lacking all empirical facts and intellectual objectivity—was an egregious assault on the psyche and sensibilities of all discerning Nigerians who voted according to their consciences for candidates of their choice. The unfortunate assumption that the doctored Gallup polls would be sin-qua-non to the very electoral actualities was vitiated by the lacuna in their reasoning faculties and hence, the usual resort to phantom ‘stolen mandate’ drivel by the vociferous hotheads of Obidism. The bubbling strength the Obidient’s quasi-fanatical mongrels deployed to the electioneering and the prevailing realities yawned ever wider than anticipated and they were ready to leave tales of woes, regrets and schisms on the lips of all other Nigerians that refused to be browbeaten into their transparent subterfuge as they arrogated to themselves the stakeholdership of the country. They were far detached from realities and their uncouth tongues spared no one, irrespective of societal and international clouts such revered avatars commanded. The ghoulish movement had—and still have—a sick fascination with topsy-turvydom and snafus, not minding leaving a cataclysmic tale of horrors, deaths and arson in the aftermath of their devious enterprises.
Of late, their desperation to pull the country down at all cost in the comity of nations made them solicit the services of a fiery, divisive anti-establishment loony and former UK Member of Parliament, George Galloway—who no sane minds take seriously in the UK— to deride our President baselessly. Because their Obi-god was not in the saddle, the country must be smashed to smithereens at all costs! America’s MAGA and northern Ireland’s Sein Fein would gleefully want to learn from the irascible, rapacious Obidient vanguards. The unfathomable length the unpatriotic zealots and archetypal devils can go is better left to our conjectures. They failed to know the mystique of our Nobel laureate’s refusal to pander to their whims and caprices. Perhaps, they needed the ingenuity of a rocket scientist to make them realise that Professor Wole Soyinka and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu fought tooth and nail in the trenches to enthrone the democracy the Obidients are kowtowing for the military to torpedo today. They are the latter-day unscrupulous thieving woman in the Bible who stole the living baby to replace her dead one and wanted King Solomon to kill both the dead and the living babies for legal fairness.
Such was the infernal wind of Obidism and its roving spectre of sardonicism and Philistinism that many gods of men turned their pulpits into political arenas and were feeding bunkums, lies and vitriols into the throats of their ever-submissive, brainwashed, unctuous acolytes with oily veneer of excessive obsequity slathered over them. Brother Jero’s abhorrent charlatanism in Wole Soyinka’s _The Trials of Brother Jero_ paled into insignificance going by the monumental spiritual frauds and voodooism perpetrated from the hallowed pulpits of our living God manned by prosperity-driven, self-adulating gods of men. With an air of cockiness and finality, many of them pronounced with fiats that Obi would win remarkably and manifestly from their human intelligence but with false attribution of such to our living God who was watching all with guffaw and reserving His wrath for all agents of iniquities who spoke when he did not utter a single word! And God said, depart from me, ye workers of iniquities. Theirs is akin to one troubled character in the Bible called King Saul, who was livid at his desertion by God and started running helter-skelter consulting witches at Endor to grant him a pyrrhic victory against his adversaries. Some howled jeremiads ad infinitum and predicted doom, gloom and blitzkrieg hovering over every precinct of Nigeria then.
Our pulchritudinous Chimamanda, have you ever heard of one Ms Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar? The West made her popular, lionized her as a beacon of democracy, beatified her to high heavens, and gifted her a Nobel prize on a silver platter for her tenacious efforts at emancipating her people from the tyrannical clutches of the military. They propelled her to stardom—just the way they are doing to you now. They financed her every effort to upstage the old order of military adventurism and liberate her people. It seemed an impossible mission until they coached her into playing along, cavorting the macabre dance of the military so that the khaki men could, one day sympathetically relinquish power to her. She went overboard, looked away and vacillated while the no-nonsense goons had a field day visiting horrors on the Rohingya Muslim minorities. Aung San Suu Kyi even defended the daylight near-total ethnic cleansing. Thinking she had done a lot for the military to cede power to her, she contested an election and was coasting to victory until the military gave her the shockers of her life. Her election was not only annulled but she was herded, once again, into her home, never to enjoy her social life in her solitary confinement, tethered to a spot. Today, Aung San Suu Kyi is no longer a prisoner of conscience but a hermit wallowing in obscurity. Her western paymasters left her in the lurch as she had then become surplus to requirements through her idiotic support for the military bent on utterly exterminating a whole minority ethnic group. The West speaks from both sides of the mouth. It is the same mouth they use to describe the fitting appropriateness of a crown that they will use later to lampoon its unfitting contortion to an angle—to suit their whims and caprices. If you destroy your homestead while enjoying the cosy ambience of the Western countries, a time will come when they won’t save you from the sharp teeth of wild, wily lions roving to devour you.
You were not even sincere with Obi thus far. If you were, Obi would still not be making his trademark elementary grammatical blunders at every twist and turn. You should have sat him down and with utmost frankness, made him know the appropriateness of the usage of ‘have’, ‘has’, ‘had’ and that words like Economics and Physics, even though they have ‘s’ as their last letters, they remain single words and never to be pluralized as Obi has been regaling us with. Go and watch his CNN ONE WORLD interview anchored by our delectable Zain Asher on 16th September 2022. His serial grammatical gaffes were glaringly decipherable by impassioned stylisticians not given to frenetic political demagogueries as were wont his excited unctuous followers. Obi’s deployment of “he have’, or “they has”, are shockingly and legendarily embarrassing for a university graduate, former bank director, and former governor of his ilk jostling for the presidency. People like you should have purged him of those grammatical infractions, flubs, solecisms, malapropisms and quirks, no matter how long they had stuck to him like bees to honey. Lastly, sever that umbilical cord of Obidism, purge yourself of the serial inanities you have embarked upon, extricate yourself of all the vestiges of anti-Nigeria diatribes and toe the line of honour to etch your name in gold in the annals of our history as a country. East or West, the home remains the best. As I once wrote to you, the words of our revered Eze (Prof) Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike of blessed memories are apt here: only the foolish flies follow the dead into their graves. Your charity should begin at home and not from outside. Enough words are for the wise.
Dele Afelumo is a physician and can be reached via Email at drdeleafelumo98@gmail.com, +44 7438 982413 on WhatsApp.
