August 16, 2013
Fani-Kayode: The bitter truth about a bitter man
Former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode
Mr. Femi Fani Kayode’s sequel, “The bitter truth about the Igbo”, which appeared as a three-series article in The PUNCH earlier
this week, did not disappoint in the least. We must remind ourselves
that this article is part of Fani-Kayode’s efforts to prove that Lagos
is Yoruba and that any claims to it by any other indigenous group is
spurious. Part of his method was to trivialise the contributions of any
other group to the development of Lagos, preferring to ascribe this
development largely to the genius of the Yoruba. In an earlier response,
I had sought to show that Fani-Kayode’s efforts in that direction were
not successful. I showed that his claims and argument were neither
grounded in history nor in economics, and that it was indeed so easy to
puncture those claims.
The problem with Fani-Kayode’s
concluding article on this issue is that it runs out of ideas and
abandons the issue under review after the fourth paragraph and only
returns to it in the last four paragraphs of the article. The contents
of paragraph 5 (paragraph 5 begins “That single comment, made in that
explosive and historic speech…”) up to the end of paragraph 13 are
hardly relevant to the issue under discussion. Let us remind us what the
main issue is using Fani-Kayode’s own words:
“Permit me to make my second and final
contribution to the raging debate about Lagos, who owns it and the
seemingly endless tensions that exist between the Igbo and the Yoruba.
It is amazing how one or two of the numerous nationalities that make up
Nigeria secretly wish that they were Yoruba and consistently lay claim
to Lagos as being partly theirs.”
How relevant then is the diversion to
the political history of the National Convention for Nigerians and the
Cameroons, the 1966 coup, the Ironsi regime, the pogrom, the civil war
to this issue of who owns Lagos and who has contributed to its
development write-up? How does this advance the debate? How does this
elucidate the key issues under discussion? I doubt very much that they
do. What they certainly succeed in doing however is to rouse emotions,
enflame tempers, to whip up sentiments.
Even here, Fani-Kayode’s use of
history is suspect, since his historiography is very selective. If
anything, however, in the deployment of this elective historiography, he
comes across as an apologist for the killings of the Igbo in the north
and as an ethnic-driven revanchist historian out to even out scores with
an imagined enemy. Revanchist and ethnicity-sodden historiography are
poor and demeaning pursuits as the prisms of bitterness, revenge and
ethnicity which come with them soon trap the historian, blur his vision,
dull his criticality and destroy his objectivity and capacity for
detached interpretation. The “history” we are thus presented in
paragraphs 5 to 13 is replete with instances of these.
In succumbing to the appeals of this
type of historiography, even if he was doing this as part of his ongoing
efforts at rehabilitation with a view to regaining entry to his
“tribe’s” confidence, Fani-Kayode does himself and his country a great
disservice.
He does himself a disservice because he ends up with an
article where more than 55 per cent of its contents (55 per cent again!)
are of doubtful relevance to his declared purpose. And because he fails
to identify what is relevant and what is not, he ends up saddling his
article with major problems of cohesion and coherence.
He does his
country a disservice because he presents a history of a difficult part
of her history that is deliberately flawed and skewed by his selective
use of sources and by his uncritical interpretation of events and
casting of persons – Ironsi is a coup plotter, Igbo indiscretion was
responsible for the pogrom unleashed on them in the North, the Igbo
provoked the civil war – all of which are examples of a flight from
intellectual rigour, mono-causal analysis, faulty attribution and one
dimensional thinking, and all very painful, pernicious and debilitating
ailments in persons they afflict. It bears repeating that good
historiography is about balanced sources.
To rely on sources that only
support the case one is pushing pushes one away from doing history on to
the slippery slopes of ethnic jingoism, “clan hagiography” and
propagandising of the cheapest sort. This is what has happened in this
article, and it is indeed a tragedy for Fani-Kayode.
I believe that
this tragedy has arisen less from a fundamental lack of intelligence on
his part but more from his allowing himself and his mind to be shackled
and blinkered by bitterness.
Fani-Kayode sets out hoping to write
“the bitter truth” about one ethnic group and ends up clumsily splaying
the reality and truth of his own bitterness in public for an amused
world to behold and laugh at.
As he navigates this current discomfort he
has created for himself, he once again deserves our compassion and not
our condemnation.
•Dr. Ihebuzor is a development specialist based in Tanzania
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