When Kuli Kuli loses its savour
Kulik
kuli was also the Friday back page column of Mr Femi Adesina in The Sun.
He has since then become a lead spokesperson for the second coming of a
dictatorship under General Muhammadu Buhari. With lucid style, the column contributed
to national discourse. There was an echo of truth in its lines.
The
past half a decade has however helped show Adesina for what he is, as he now
writes and speaks for “the inside”. Does this have to do with
supernatural powers, abi na demons in Aso Rock that like (to waste) our
local snacks?
Just
a few years back Reuben Abati informed the world of these spirits and their
taste for boli, the plantain snack which is supposed to help turgidity
of that thing between your legs, or which could be used to describe the thing
in itself. Now we know that these
demons know how to chew and spit out kuli kuli in all its lost glory as
well.
Last
Thursday’s Sunrise Daily programme on Channels TV was one of the moments
that showed how chewed up this kuli kuli has become. Adesina’s
shamelessness, cloaked in a garb of arrogance, was displayed for all to see -
as he sparred with Tope Akinyode of the Revolutionary Lawyers Forum on the show.
The
topic was the #August5thProtest to commemorate the first-year anniversary of
the launch of the #RevolutionNow campaign of Coalition for Revolution (CORE).
Adesina first dismissed the revolutionary protesters (which included parents
and grandparents whose homes and workplaces have been demolished by government),
as “a sprinkle of young boys and girls” and then described the protests as
nothing but “an irritating child’s play”.
As I
watched him talk, I couldn’t but remember another caricature of a character so
full of himself like Adeshina, who described Omoyele Sowore as an
“inconsequential” young man in 2018. That was Mr Adebayo Shittu, during a public
affairs radio programme in Ibadan. In his inimitable gutter-like style, Shittu
huffed and puffed like a deranged pig. He soon ended up on the dunghills of
history.
It
is understandable that Shittu might not be familiar with the biblical phrase
that “what has been hidden from the wise and the prudent, will be revealed to
the babe and the suckling”. But what can we make of our genteel pastor who has
no problem with the regime he serves beating up and arresting “children”,
instead of standing up to say “let the little children come to me, and do not
hinder them”?
Such
verses might not be in Adesina’s version of the slave bible. Neither are there
is there any verse that speaks to justice. He is clearly a law and order sort
of hombre. “The government will do whatever is right, whatever is required to
maintain peace”, he once said. Of course, he knows he has blood on his hands.
The government has repeatedly done what is “right” to maintain the peace, on
the corpses of Shi’ites, IPOBists, protesters and at least 30 young women and
men killed for contravening the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.
The
right-wing of a kuli kuli-brained spin doctor does not only stand for
law, order and governmental peace of the graveyard. He also has an over bloated
sense of self-entitlement. He blasted Channels TV for pairing him with an
“irascible” and “irrational” “young man” who “does not understand”, insisting
that henceforth, he should be informed of whomsoever he would be appearing on
air with. This was after the programme’s anchor had taken him on for “talking
down” on the protesters who are Nigerians with rights as citizens, including to
protest.
Barrister
Akinyode replied with a sense of decorum that should put the self-opinionated
presidential spokesperson to shame when he said: “We have to forgive Mr.
Adesina and the Buhari government for all the things they speak. They don’t
understand these things. They are bereft of the fundamental workings of
democracy and the rule of law. They don’t know what protest means; they can’t
appreciate it.”
Indeed,
Adesina has no truck with democracy, revolutionary or otherwise. His disdain
for Nigerians bothers on the legendary. Time and again, he has dismissed us as
inconsequential subjects of the General and commander-in-king he his doomed to
serve.
His
problem is not so much about “irritants” being mere sprinkles or showers. Dismissing
Nigerians as if we were mere wrappings of groundnut is his stock-in-trade.
We
can recall him pointedly telling Nigerians off when we asked to know the ailment
which kept General Buhari in Britain for over 100 days in 2017. Adesina did not
only tell us that the president could govern from anywhere in the world, he
also told us that it was not our business to know what the president was
suffering from. And who bore the costs for treatment of the ailment that we don’t
know till date, and related costs of course? Tongue-in-cheek, the presidential
spokesperson said he had absolutely no idea!
Apart
from co-guests on air, like Tope Akinyode, callers on phone-in programmes have
likewise faced the ire of Adesina’s Beelzebub-like tongue. In response to being
called out for treating Nigerians as toilet paper with is words, Adesina
described such citizens as nothing but “angry Nigerians”.
To
this kuli kuli spin doctor, the fact that Nigerians are deemed to have
voted in General Buhari as president is not, in his words, “carte blanche for
you to lead the man around by the nose”. For him, Nigerians that expect their
president and public officers in general to be accountable to them, and express
such view in the clearest of terms, are “hateful people, envious souls”.
The
otherwise pastoral gentleman literally gave up one of the four squares his god
is supposed to occupy to his more corporeal master in Aso Rock. For, as he
argues, those who rail against his boss would even criticise his God if they
were to get to heaven. Who, or what he actually worships is his personal
business, and how uncouth the words he chooses are, says more about him than
about Nigerians whom he e-washes with lather of spittle.
But he
shouldn’t kid himself or insult the memories of Peter Tosh with thinking he can
take or throw blows, simply because the dog he is has an armed bandit-in-chief
of an owner behind him. Leaders of the Coalition for Revolution today and many
other Nigerians put their lives on the line to fight for a more democratic
society when we resolutely fought against military dictatorship under the
Buhari, Babangida and Abacha juntas. We took blows and mobilised the mass to
throw revolutionary blows back. And mind you, we started as “sprinkles”.
There
were several journalists who with their pens, and on the barricades stood
unequivocally with the people. Adesina was not one of them (little wonder that he
“cannot appreciate” what protest is, or revolution as a process and not merely
an event). This might partly account for his apparent turn to becoming the
lapdog of “our” own equivalent of a Louis Bonaparte at Aso Rock. A barking
lapdog that would ask us to “calm down” while his boss fiddles away like a
parody of Nero, as Nigeria burns.
The
seemingly progressive articles he churned out in the kuli kuli column did
not flow from his bone marrow, because he never walked the pathways to
destinations of which he talked. And there is nothing supernatural about Aso
Rock which makes spokespersons to begin to jambla and “yarn opata”.
The dynamics of that centre of anti-people power merely strips the embroidered
husks of empty words off the ugly souls of bootlickers like Mr Adesina.
This
kuli kuli has lost whatever savour it appeared to have had. Like the lapdog
turd it now is, “it is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and
trampled underfoot.”
Baba
Aye is a Co-convener of Coalition for Revolution (CORE). He was a member of the
National Implementation Committee (NIC) of the Campaign for Democracy (CD) and
a former National Convener of the United Action for Democracy (UAD)
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