Home OPINION COLUMNISTS Melaye, Fayose, Fani-Kayode: The 3 Nigerian Muckrakers, By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

Melaye, Fayose, Fani-Kayode: The 3 Nigerian Muckrakers, By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

Yusuf Ozi Usman

At any given time in the life of a society, especially, as wide and diverse as Nigeria, there would always be one, two or a few individuals who can be described as completely anti-establishment.

In fact, it doesn’t matter immediately on what premise such characters take their anti-establishment from; all that matter is either that their emotional make ups disagree with certain system or personalities within the corridor of power or they are just plainly mischievous.

Looking at it from this angle, the social anti-establishment crusaders would therefore, not be amenable to conventional reasoning and or rational argument.

It is within this parametre that I locate the three characters – Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State; Senator Dino Melaye of the Kogi West Senatorial District and ex aviation minister Femi Fani-Kayode- that have occupied some aspects of the nation’s political space since, or even at the herald of the coming of President Muhammadu Buhari to power, and by extension, the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Of course, while Fayose and Fani-Kayode show a great deal of loathsomeness of Buhari/APC from the prism of opposition, as they belong to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that lost the Presidency in the 2015 election, Melaye is fighting specifically, his home state governor, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, from within the same APC.

Even though there is only one tread that runs through the characteristics of the three muckrakers, but each has a unique definition of what tickles his sense of revolt.

ayodele-fayose-4

Fayose is likely fighting blindly, without recourse to any form of rational reasoning other than selfishness and machorism, if I may be permitted to use the word. As a matter of fact, Fayose presents a picture of a primitive Africa man’s show of strength and in particular, the average Yoruba man’s way of flexing muscle just when there is sign of quarrel simply to scare away the opponent…which late music maestro, Fela Anikulapo Kuti would call ‘SHAKARA.’

Those who know him testify to the fact that Fayose had had cause to insult former President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba elder by all standards, and at another time, he, the same Fayose, would go on his knees to beg Obasanjo to forgive him. Unconfirmed report had it that despite all the hateful comments he had made on President Muhammadu Buhari, including death wishes, he had looked for ways of getting to the President to beg for forgiveness.

Fayose, who had formally abused a hell out of Hausa Fulani, recently gathered the same Hausa Fulani in the government house at Ado Ekiti to assure them that he was very friendly.

In a nutshell, Fayose is a complete picture of the old order in the Yoruba circle, where barking was given more prominence over biting, believing that barking would keep the enemies or opponents at bay. And make them fall in line according to their wishes.

Fani-Kayode

But, for Fani-Kayode, his hatred for anything Hausa Fulani is pathological. He has this complex around him that no one can do anything better than him, and, indeed, that Hausa Fulani are too uneducated (even if they have PhD), too unenlightened (even if they spend most part of their lives in advanced countries) and too archaic (even if they live more sophisticated than him) for them to rule this country.

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Indeed, Fani-Kayode, and the drunken, deranged Niger Delta creek leader, Alhaji Mujahideen Dokubo, see and regard Hausa Fulani as other colonial masters simply because they have the number to determine who rule this country in democracy, which, of course, is a gift that no one can do anything about.

Fani-Kayode doesn’t believe that anyone from the North, anywhere in the North, has the requisite ability to be President of this country, an irony that he hates to live with: that an average Northerner is more politically matured than an average politician from other parts of the country.

His madness and hatefulness towards Hausa Fulani is so pronounced that he possibly could be going to bed daily, praying that he would wake up the following morning to find that they are all perished.

In all such mind setup, Fani-Kayode too has no tangible reason to turn himself into an ethnic hate in open market.

Dino Melaye 2

And for Dino Melaye, of course, everybody knows that he started well with governor Yahaya Bello, obviously, with the hope initially, that the old order, of God fatherism would be reinforced, where he would be consulted by the governor for every major governance decisions.

But when the governor appeared to have shoved him aside in matters concerning selecting government functionaries and governance general, Melaye turned violently to something else.

In other words, Dino Melaye embarks on public waltzes with the governor as a way of protesting against his being so dumped and rendered irrelevant.

Of course, because the governor himself is a green horn in the area of governance, he went down to his level to dig it out, engineering his recall from the senate by his people.

Of course, there are people like the three muckrakers across the country; people who see nothing right in any government headed by those they already have preconceived hatred for, either as individuals or as in ethnic group they (such leaders belong to). Those others are not as vocal as the three muckrakers.

In any case, if you remove the three muckrakers from their trade, and silent people of similar political standing with them from the political scene, things would go dull. The terrain would be populated only by what you may call praise-singers which can turn an average leader into a dowdy.

Their noise and tantrums in public space, therefore, can never be over quantified. They are even better than those who resign to the cocoons to carry out the same hateful political boil up, either alone or in group. [myad]