Pathetic Story of The Housefly

Tunde Olajumilo:
Ordinarily, there is no basis for mentioning Sam Omatseye in a context where the name of the Ondo State Governor, Dr Olusegun Mimiko, is conceived of, let alone mentioned. Mimiko is a global brand while Omatseye is a Lagos clown, an aspiring nobody. But Nigeria is one peculiar country constantly under the siege of columnists purveying blind allegiance and aspiring to be moulders of the public consciousness. The difference between Mimiko and Omatseye - is too far and too profound to
expect that the erudite ideologue in the Ondo Government House, who recently addressed the United Nations on the landmark Abiye programme, will bother to respond to the inanities spewed by an individual who lacks respect for anyone except the political master on whose behalf he desperately forges an existence.

In a profound sense, Omatseye’s latest diatribe on Governor Mimiko “The whitlow and the quisling”(Monday 14 October), a follow up on his July 13 drivel, “Mimiko: Whitlow of the west”, does not merit any detailed response since the cleavages in which his mind is trapped are in the public domain. But then, as the Yoruba allow, one may call a lunatic a prospective husband, if only to obtain a right of way. In the former doggerel, Omatseye took his colleagues to task for “gleefully serenading”

Governor Mimiko “ in the last election” and failing to report that he “ has been owing salaries of the civil servants and local government workers for months.” The clumsy premise immediately leads him to this mysterious conclusion: “In the five fingers that represent five state governors, Mimiko has earned his place as the whitlow of the west. He cannot say his master Jonathan is not paying him allocations, because good lackeys and lapdogs deserve sweet bones.’’ In the latter doggerel, he calls Dr Mimiko “the best PDP chieftain in the Southwest, the impostor, the one who goes about as a Labour Party wheel horse.”

As a writer who delights in name calling, Omatseye can of course afford to call the governor of a state “a lackey, whitlow, an impostor and a lapdog” since name calling is the proof of a barren intellect. But by attacking perceived political enemies of its employer, for which he caused a media war with the family of the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, from which he can never recover, just two years ago, demonstrates once again that the writer is not equipped with the capabilities to learn from experience. In his book, Reason in Common Sense, the novelist, George Santayana, declared: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It is indeed not surprising that a public commentator who often vaunts his former status as a lecturer in a backwater American university routinely goes to press without carefully researching his topic. Even academic discourse that is supposed to be a higher level discourse is manifesting the strains of hollowness. As Professor Isodore Eyo, observes in his Preface to Eucharia Onyeizugbo’s Reviving the Empirical Tradition in Nigerian Psychology: “The empirical tradition died. Those in the system lost interest in, and the motivation for, vigorous research. They have since been reduced to the practice of recycling unverified and sometimes unverifiable ideas, and this unfortunate practice is now becoming entrenched as an academic tradition.’’

But of course, facts are of no use to a poetaster. The July staff verification exercise in Ondo State which informed the former doggerel had just one major goal: to fish out officers above 60 years old, those who have spent more than 35 years in service as well as those who falsified their credentials, so that the state government could bring in fresh blood for more productivity and efficient service delivery. However, the 16,042 staff that had then been cleared after screening had received their salaries and are being paid as and when due.

Can anything be plainer, except to the wilfully blind supporters of criminality? In the Monday doggerel, Omatseye descends on Honourable Opeyemi Bamidele, a member of the House of Representatives who in fact won a senatorial seat but was schemed out in the abracadabra style of the defunct ACN, for his ambition to be Ekiti State governor, calling him “a lackey of a lackey.’’ Since the details of the treatment given to Bamidele in Ado-Ekiti during the declaration of his governorship ambition are in the public domain, there is no need to bore anyone with the story.

While not holding brief for Bamidele, however, it is no surprise that Omatseye and his party members consider the lawmaker’s ambition as treachery. The defunct ACN, a party of anarchists and pretenders to progressivism, has not been able to transmute into a democratic outfit in spite of its name change. Yet, if Omatseye looked closely enough, he would have discovered that Bamidele has the backing of his own employer, in whose cabinet he served as a commissioner. Indeed when Bamidele was suspended by members of the defunct ACN in the House of Reps, it was Senator Ahmed Bola Tinubu who rose in his defence, asserting his right to an ambition. Obviously, Omatseye must have wrongly read the mind of his employer to know that the House of Representatives member may not be alone in his quest to govern Ekiti. But then the Igbo know too well the story of the foolish housefly which follows a corpse into the grave. And so Omatseye is everything that he imagines those he attacks to be, and his future is buried in the foolishness of today.
Tunde Olajumilo, a legal practitioner, wrote from Lagos