By Valentine Faseemo
The first time I came across the name Hushpuppi sometime ago, I immediately knew he must be a shady guy. I believed so because I knew long time ago that Hush Puppies is a brand of luxury shoes that only someone trying to hide his identity will adopt such as a name.
Meanwhile, my findings about him later confirmed my suspicion that he’s a criminal and one of those giving Nigeria and Nigerians a bad name abroad. It always pains me whenever I have to defend myself as a Nigerian. And as painful and frustrating this is, I never get angry about being put on the defensive because I know for sure that some Nigerians are indeed crooked. The saddest part of their crooked ways is that they have an army of enablers in both high and low places.
A mere visit to his Instagram page will reveal this enabling point. Before his arrest, he had over two million followers on Instagram. Many of these followers see him as role models while many others are there to always beg him to “bless” them with giveaways (money). It’s quite unfortunate that all any (shady) person needs to do to gain Nigerian followers on social media is to simply institute a “giveaway” culture. (I leave the sad story of the damaging culture of “giveaway” for another day).
The most annoying set of his enablers are the so-called Nigerian celebrities. I’ve always said that Nigerian so-called celebrities are some of the most fake, hungry and empty headed set of Nigerians. Unfortunately, many Nigerians don’t care about values anymore anyways. After all, who values help? These celebrities glorified Hushpuppi so much that unless you don’t have a social media accounts, you would have come across his name one way or the other.
Another set of his enablers that I find most unfortunate are the journalists who endlessly wrote about him and made him “popular”. In all this, none of them found it necessary to carry out investigation on his real name. Neither do they care about how he made his money. Or to even find out what his qualifications are. All these didn’t matter to them. Some of his enabling journalist friends even joined him in insulting hardworking Nigerians. In fact, they did not insult only hardworking Nigerians, they insulted their fathers.
Finally, the moral of this post is that in as much as the story of Hushpuppi’s arrest is a welcome development, the fact that he lived a celebrity life is an indictment on all his enablers. From the so-called celebrities, politicians and journalists who constantly gave him airtime to the over two million Nigerians who were following him on social media, you were all his enablers and inspiration who gave him the audacity to be so openly proud of his criminal activities. If only you have not constituted yourselves into his cheerleaders, perhaps he would have been reluctant to be so audacious to be insulting hardworking Nigerians and that would have also saved Nigeria and Nigerians the bad image his story is currently giving millions of honest Nigerians all over the world. I really hope it is not too late to reevaluate our values and priorities.