Dear Chimamanda, what a beautiful nonsense you just penned to the President of America, Joe Biden! It was a portrayal of angst by an unrepentant tribal bigot trying assiduously to whip up sentiments by appealing to the American public! As much as you try to discredit the electoral victory won by Tinubu, you and your co-travellers will not succeed. Lobbying for cancellation of the election or howling jeremiads on the streets of Washington D.C by attempting to be a back-alley abortionist of people’s will and currying international support will all amount to an exercise in futility.
You and your ilk have caused so many problems in Nigeria that you should be ashamed of what you just wrote. In 1993, it was one hellish scoundrel called Arthur Nzeribe who quickly formed ABN to brazenly scuttle and torpedo the freest election conducted in Nigeria then. This time around, your are in the fray to do the same, treading the famished, inglorious, perfidious, labyrinthine, serpentine, deathful and dastardly pathways that Arthur Nzeribe once trod with a mission to set Nigeria ablaze again. You will not succeed in your devious enterprise.
Your tribal and fillial appendage with Gregory Peter Obi is well understood as blood will ever be thicker than water, but for you to pen a nonsensical gibberish with the sole aim of overriding the victory of Mr Tinubu, it is too pedestrian, disingenuous, malevolent, irresponsible and condescending. Your overrated candidate came a distant third in that contest and the earlier you realize that, the better for you. Your Obiscopic lenses through which you narrowly, myopically and parochially viewed the election would soon break into minute useless shards with banal hues. If you know so much about politics, why not put your hat into the ring? You just have whittled down whatever miniscule respect some people may have had for you thus far and many would start seeing an inveterate ethnic champion in you, henceforth.
Ever heard of force majeur? Why didn’t
you read the account of why INEC jettisoned the initial plan of real-time transmission of the results? Why are you more catholic than the Pope? Why are you belittling, insulting, assailing and assaulting our intelligence, sensitivities
and sensibilities through your invective-riddled submission to President Biden unconscionably? By trying to pen repetitive allegory and obfuscate the whole process, you are nothing but a dangerous, uncharitable, over-venerated specie giving a tacit support to an unruly chauvinist brigade hellbent on pulling down the country just because one trading fellow with unscholarly English and dirty past did not win. You hobnobbed with like minds given to depravity to concoct lies as gallop polls in the run-up to that exercise so as to browbeat some undiscerning minds into a transparent subterfuge —believing that your candidate would win. It was in the public domain that your kith and kin tried all manners of dirty tricks through hacking to rig in your candidate so that you would later shout hurrah, the election result followed the pattern of your doctored gallop polls which you had bored us with ab initio. Online activism does not win elections. Somebody failed woefully to appeal to a huge segment of the population in the entire north and won only within his enclave, and rather than see this as a true reflection of the people’s will, you busied yourself throwing incendiary adjectives all over America to carpet everybody in Nigeria so as to throw away the baby with the bath water as if we were still a colony of the West. The earlier you borrow yourself some sense the better.
You and your people want to emasculate everybody and plunge this nation into another blitzkrieg of unimaginable proportion, you will not succeeed this time around. Working in cahoots with some strange bedfellows or with those of same toxic and cacophonous cerebra to, yet again, annul that election is an invitation to anarchy. If you feel you are in a safe sanctuary in the USA and can throw or dart some dangerous goblin on Nigeria to breed hate, division, anarchy with fatal and cataclysmic consequences, remember, your people will also be affected too.
That election defied many odds. Many governors lost their states to the opposition. Even the President-elect lost his firm grip on Lagos. Mr Buhari lost his Katsina base while El Rufai’s political wizardry could not win him Kaduna, yet you are busy pooh-poohing and sacrilegiously puncturing and discrediting the whole process as a sham or charade! How dare you! That election may not have been the best but in few places where there was violence, the people stood solidly to exercise their franchise. Did you have an inkling of what transpired in Obi’s immediate enclave in the east? Many APC apologists were either killed or prevented from voting. Were you cerebrally on sabbatical break when the election that produced President Biden plunged America into a never-seen-before orgy of violence with fatalities recorded? With a whiff of hindsight, was the election annulled on that premise? Ironically, it is the product of that election that you are obsequiously kowtowing and genuflecting for with the sole aim of consigning Nigeria into a pariah state again. Where Obi won in his precincts with some APC voters disenfranchised and some paid the supreme sacrifice, you never rationalized it as a heinous crime but in other places where he lost glaringly, you wanted the whole exercise cancelled. This is nothing but sheer ambivalence. Late Prof (Eze) Chukwuemeka Ike wrote that only a foolish fly follows the dead into the grave. The ealier you extricate yourself from those inanities, jejune irrationalities and incongruous permutations and come to reality, the better for you.
No amount of writing will reverse the collective will of the people. As a fellow who wrote the account of the civil war that claimed millions of lives, built valleys on their cheeks, made them pot-bellied and a caricature of anything human, you should know better that writing effusively to cause chaos is a height of unpatriotism. If in the events you cause another civil unrest, it would be too late to plead self-exculpation and self-abnegation your ill-thought out writings would have caused. Obi lost that election glaringly and there is no way you can dress a vassal—festooning his ambience, adorning him with costly ornaments and apparel— through malcontent depositions, he will remain a vassal and never a prince.
Dr Dele Afelumo is a practising physician.
