Dear Chimamanda,
It was a beautiful nonsense you just penned! It was a portrayal of angst by someone who should remain neutral but instead, you, with inordinate Philistinism, tried 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 the cancellation of the election or howling jeremiads on the streets of Washington D.C while some in Nigeria are perfecting all their strategies to be another latter-day back-alley abortionists of people’s will will all be too inimical to the progress and renaissance of Nigeria of our dream. Trying to curry international support against the election that passed the integrity test of the NBA and adjudged free and fair but with a room for improvement by many impassioned observers will all amount to an exercise in futility.
Why would you choose to toe this line? I contorted my head in despair reading your piece when—with a flint of nostalgia—our perilous past flashed through my mind. Down the memory lane, in 1993, a roving dark spectre hanged over Nigeria. Playing the devil’s advocate reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Dennis Brutus, Arthur Nzeribe quickly assembled many scoundrels to form a conglomerate called ABN which had an unholy alliance with that gap-toothed General to brazenly scuttle and torpedo the freest election ever conducted in Nigeria in her chequered history. This time around, your are in the fray to do the same, treading the famished, inglorious, perfidious, labyrinthine, serpentine, dastardly pathways that Arthur Nzeribe once trod with a mission to set Nigeria ablaze again. This is not an enterprise you will win.
Your tribal and filial appendage with Gregory Peter Obi is well understood as blood will ever be thicker than water, but for you to pen that gibberish on the international turf with the sole aim of overriding the victory of Mr Tinubu, I dare say, it is too pedestrian, disingenuous, malevolent, and condescending. The whole piece was cunningly choreographed as a smear campaign to appeal to a wide audience in order to get the election outcome outrightly annulled. Your candidate came a distant third in that contest and the earlier you realize that, the better for you. Your Obiscopic lenses through which you viewed the election may yet break into minute shards incapable of seeing any 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 a repetitive allegory and obfuscate the whole process, it smacked of nothing but an unprofitable venture—a wild goose chase— giving a tacit support to some unruly chauvinist brigade hellbent on pulling down the country just because their candidate did not win. In any election, there has to be a winner. The loser must take the outcome with equanimity, go back to the drawing board and perfect better strategies to win next time. But, to plunge the country into a conflagration just because someone lost an election smacks of savagery. You hobnobbed with like minds to concoct lies as gallop polls—better left to their imagination—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 in ululation that 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 west of the country 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 or a lackey of the west. The earlier you know that the train has left the station, the better.
Your write-up was capable of riling up tribes against each other and you knew that the Obidients had, before now, threatened fire and brimstone should Peter not win the election and plunge this nation into another blitzkrieg of unimaginable proportion, this is not a script to act with success. Working in cahoots with some strange bedfellows or with those of same toxic and cacophonous minds, 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 a 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 while the Obidients, with gruesome glee cavorted to songs of victory, 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 and mudslinging 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 that your ill-thought out writings would have caused. Obi lost that election glaringly and there is no way you can dress a vassal—festoon his ambience, adorn him with costly ornaments and apparel— through malcontent depositions, he will remain a vassal and never a prince.
‒Dr Afelumo is a practising physician