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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nTrump and President Muhammadu Buhari are two of a\nkind, not least in their penchant for deliberately fostering and promoting\nwedge issues and divisiveness as tools of entrenching themselves in office. The\nidea is to groom their supporters into becoming mindless robots precluding them\nfrom any sense of objectivity and reason ;and encourage them to judge issues\nsolely on the basis of we versus them, blind loyalty and fanatical support. In\nNigeria today, this mentality has been overtly and covertly nurtured with crass\ndiscrimination and unprecedented nepotism in public policy thrusts,\nappointments and patronage.The poverty of this culture is the license it\ninherently gives for the exploitation of public office for corrupt enrichment\nand empowerment. Integral to the logic of overt and deliberate discriminatory\npractices in government policies and conduct is the imputation of individual\nappropriation of such preferments for personal gain and benefit. Why else would\nMele Kyari from Maiduguri succeed Mohammed Baru from Bauchi as Group Managing\nDirector of NNPC? In a situation in which President Buhari from Katsina State\nis the substantive Minister of Petroleum and his Chief of Staff from Maiduguri\na Board member?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With this pattern of placements and distribution\nof appointments in nearly all (what Nigerians call, in the idiom of corruption,\n\u2018juicy and lucrative\u2019), ministries and parastatals, MDAs -the conclusion to\ndraw stares us all in the face. And so, whatever lip service is publicly paid\nto fighting corruption-should be understood as meant for the consumption of the\ngullible public-as everyone in the loop rightly second guesses. Just play it smart,\nif you can and if you can\u2019t, be smart enough to make a preemptive move at the\nanti-corruption agencies and the courts. But we are in the age of globalisation\nfrom which Nigeria can run but cannot hide. And so while the President was busy\ngratifying himself as a model of integrity and avenging angel of corruption in\nthe metropolitan capitals of Europe, the Transparency International was\nunveiling a contradictory annual report in which the truth of how deep Nigeria\nhas sunk in corruption is laid bare for the world to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second layer of the syndrome is that it is in\nthe nature of power politics that all presidential palace courts consist of\ninsiders and outsiders. At the attainment of power, the immediate\nsociopolitical circle (of the President) comprising family, close friends,\nproteges, professional colleagues and political trouble shooters constitute the\ndefault inner caucus- with reasonable margin for cooptation, membership\nproscription and time out. As the going gets tough, those of the president\u2019s\npersonal staff who do not belong to the insider inner caucus begin to feel\nvulnerable and easily dispensable. They see less and less of their principal\nand get less and less assignments and inevitably, the redundancy psychosis sets\nin. The first and most critical symptom of this pathology is the exhibition of\nthe desperate need to overcompensate, to be catholic than the Pope, royalist\nthan the king and caliphate than the Sultan.The unravelling is further revealed\nin the scurrilous sycophancy of elevating their principal to the status of a\ndemigod and relentlessly advertise their willingness to advocate and defend the\nprincipal with, as the cliche goes \u2018the last drop of his blood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the general manifestation but when you\nisolate the phenomenon to a specific instance, in this case the Buhari\npresidency, the malady is escalated in direct proportion to the tendency to\nreduce the office of the President to a personality cult.The more a president\nfeels and acts insecure, the greater the latitude of the personality cult or\ncabal culture to fester and magnify. On top of his insular and parochial\npersonality, the protracted and intermittent indisposition forced by the\nfragile health of the president doubly reinforces the personality cult\nsyndrome. The phenomenon is critically characterised by paranoia and hostage\npolitics. And the exercise of power and authority are arbitrarily wielded by\nindividuals and officials with no formal appointment and those whose official\npositions do not correspond to the magnitude of control and influence at their\ndisposal.The common vocabulary in vogue in the lingua franca of such an\nenvironment is called the \u2018need to know basis\u2019- which was the operative phrase\nduring President Buhari\u2019s prolonged medical emergency stay in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most prominent casualty of this phenomenon in\ncontemporary Nigeria is, of course, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. Haven been\ncured of his earlier grand illusions of his true measure, he seems to have come\nto terms with the reality that there is a difference between what the\nconstitution says and what the President and his powerful surrogates determine.\nHow does a Vice President announce in the morning that there is no truth to the\ninformation concerning the retention of newly recruited staff in his office and\nhe is contradicted by the office of the President in the afternoon?.This is the\nfraught and expansive sea of intrigue in which Mr. Adesina is floating without\nanchor and in which he is clearly out of depths. Hence, the increasing penchant\nfor remorseless mendacity and impetuous eruptions into bile and blunder. What\nfollows are a sample of his vituperations and give away symtoms of his\noccupational disorder:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAkin Oshuntokun appeared on Channels television\ntoday and made the false claim that a bomb blast had gone off earlier in the\nday, killing about 88 people in Maiduguri\u2026 Apparently, enemies of peace and\nprogress had expected a return to the infamous past, thus Osuntokun appeared on\ntelevision with his bag of lies\u201d- This was a press statement he issued on a\nprogramme I participated on Channels in which I spoke in English not\nPortuguese. Could I have suddenly developed cognitive deficiency? I double\nchecked with Channels, they were equally flustered that such falsehood could\nemanate from Adesina within hours of the appearance in contention. When I\ncalled him, he was blissfully confident I made the attribution. I then realised\nsomeone was certainly suffering from cognitive disorder but that patient was\nnot me. I gave him time to recheck the authenticity and called him back.\nCompletely without remorse, he waved away the false weighty allegation he made\nand rebuffed- but you lied on the figures of the casualties in the non bomblast\nviolence<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAncestral attachment? You can only have\nancestral attachment when you are alive. If you are talking about ancestral\nattachment, if you are dead, how does the attachment matter?\u201d This was the\nresponse Mr Adesina to the grief of the victims of the homicidal Fulani\nherdsmen terror in the Middle Belt region a while ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere was a time that there were five, six, 10\nbombings in a day in this country. If you hear Nigerian media, if you hear\nsocial media particularly, even if you hear some international agencies, you\nwill think that it is all over in the North-east. It is not. The people living\nthere will tell you that the difference between now and 2015 is the difference\nbetween heaven and hell.\u201d Below is a testimony to the \u201cheaven\u201d of Mr Adesina by\nthe British House of Lords<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMore than 5,000 Christians have been killed\nsince 2015, with 1,000 murdered in 2019. The Global Terrorism Index in 2016 and\n2017 named Fulani militia as the fourth deadliest terrorist group in the world,\nwith only Boko Haram, ISIS and al-Shabaab being accounted deadlier\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe ignore him, reasoning that when a mind is\ndiseased, there is hardly much you can do to point such soul to decency. It\nremains impervious to anything not from the very nether region of hell\u201d \u2026.Thick\nskulls and sick minds keep repeating falsehood even when their follies have\nbeen repeatedly pointed out\u201d This was Adesina\u2019s choice language on Shaka\nMomodu. Yet he proceeded in the same breath to pontificate \u201cFoul language is\noften evidence of poor breeding\u201d!<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThose of us who believe in Buhari will follow\nhim from Cape to Cairo, while those who don\u2019t believe are welcome to their\nunbelief. Momodu is in the latter group. How do I know?\u201d How does a writer who,\nright from the title of his write up and all through the body of the same write\nup, indicated Momodu as the embodiment of unbelief in Buhari-thereafter asks us\n\u2018how do I know Momodu belongs to those who don\u2019t believe in Buhari\u2019? Can you\nsee the conspicuous manifestation of our diagnosis of Mr Adesina?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Akin Osuntokun In a manner of speaking, I sympathise with the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr Femi Adesina. He appears to be labouring under the burden of the distress…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[92],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-polity-politics-governance","tag-femi-adesina"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/towncryyers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Shehu-Garba-Femi-Adesina-and-Laolu-Akande.jpg?resize=766%2C436&ssl=1\")
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