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Fani-Kayode’s strange nightmare

Uh-oh, here he comes again, this time with a red-hot red herring. Deacon Femi FaniKayode - I shall preserve space henceforth by simply calling him FFK, in tune with our new love for initials - has all but gone back in the political direction he came from. A few months ago he had loudly announced his departure from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), calling it “an evil” and his membership of the All Progressives Congress (APC). He had travelled to the North to confer with like minds in Kano and Jigawa government houses, comparing notes with Governors Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso and Sule Lamido, among others, about what should be done to dislodge President Goodluck Jonathan from office. But from all indications now, FFK has gone full circle and now we are just waiting for him to announce his reasons for returning to the ruling party.

But what could have gone wrong with FFK’s APC membership? According to him, he has had a strange dream that the APC is going to present a Muslim/Muslim ticket and “they will simply confirm it”. This might just have been a nightmare, however, because having woken up, FFK has in another breath conceded that “the party (APC) leadership itself has not expressed such an intention..... the matter still remains in the realm of speculation.” So, why is FFK disturbing us with this red herring in matters that are still “in the realm of speculation”?

With FFK, there is always a pattern - and it is anti-North and anti-Muslim. You cannot be “an unapologetic Yoruba nationalist” and love the North or Muslims. A few years ago, Vanguard had carried a couple of articles in which he had blasted former President Olusegun Obasanjo for giving in to the Muslim North. Shortly after, Obasanjo brought him into the government, first as an assistant on public affairs, and then a minister and this ended the combat. Now, a chain of “rather strange and curious event”(s) is underway, and in a twist not unexpected of the Jonathan administration, the EFCC has announced that it had been acting silly by going after FFK and questioning him about millions of naira allegedly laundered in his last post as Obasanjo’s Minister of Aviation. According to EFCC now, no such money was stolen during FFK’s tenure in the said ministry. FFK has suddenly gone on to accuse APC of planning a Muslim/Muslim ticket in the 2015 presidential election; he has visited President Jonathan in the Villa after which he had conferred with his “egbon”, the Chief of Staff, probably “to seal the deal”.

But what is it that has changed to warrant FFK’s return to the PDP? Nothing, I dare say. Minus his red herring, here is the ruling party’s record: prize for the most corrupt regime culminating in the missing $20b; less than 4,000MW of electricity which has earned us the sobriquet “the giant in the dark”, notwithstanding billions of dollars “invested” in the energy sector; burgeoning insurgency in the North East, slowly spreading to the centre of the country; 24% unemployment rate dramatised by the death of the under-representation of Muslims in the membership of the so called national conference. If truly the president had asked the Sultan “why it was that the Muslim governors of the North West do not sponsor members of their Christian community to pilgrimage in Jerusalem in the same way that they sponsor the members of their Muslim community to Mecca” as a counter to the issue raised by the Sultan, that is quite a shame. First of all, whether in the case of Muslims or Christians, it is not a right for any of them to be sponsored on pilgrimage whether to Mecca or Jerusalem or Rome, and even if the President doesn’t know this, FFK who claims to be a lawyer knows that. It is therefore bizarre for the president to demand that people, anybody, is sponsored on pilgrimage, instead of warning officials against misusing public funds. Secondly, the president says he has conceived his conference as a forum where Nigerians should discuss how to live together; the question is which faith will sustain the logic that in a Nigeria with “at least 80 million Christians and Muslims on both (sic) sides of the divide” (according to Femi FaniKayode himself) the two faiths have unequal representations at crucial negotiations leading up to the realisation of a peaceful, prosperous and indivisible Nigeria as the membership