A Letter So Uncouth

President Umaru Musa Yar'Aduia

By Maimuna Sabongida
Permit me space to react to the ranting of one Oteniya Kayode Rufus, which appeared on your Viewpoint page last week. Rufus apparently delights in disparaging his opponents simply because he has failed, in-spite of his deep poetry and self-acclaimed vision for Nigeria to help Nigeria grow.
I have followed his writings over time and I continue to be baffled by the merchandise that he brings to the market place of ideas. It is easy and comfortable for people to blow hot and cold just for the sake of it, but when people lose all sense of decorum while doing their cynical master’s bidding, one begins to wonder if the muse has not deserted its own. There is no denying the fact that Rufus Oteniya writes well, but writing inchoate and pejorative criticism can be destructive when they are not unavoidably instructive and beneficial to mankind.
Let me explain. I have read several dispatches of the said writer and seen that he practices the style that reduces our most talented writers to beggars and hero-worshippers. They are either awarding exalted lives to those who pay their pipers or desecrating those that they do not like. It is sad that such talent could simply go down the drains for a mere mess of pottage. Besides, haven’t enough people, including some from this paper, written letters to President Yar’Adua, even as recently as last April?
The last time I read Oteniya Rufus Kayode, he was writing Posterity Peephole on Gani Fawehinmi, the deceased legal luminary. He made a saint of Gani so much that angels would have wished for a swapping of identity with the mortal. He wondered aloud and expressed his regrets openly about his lamentations over the demise of the lawyer. I was aghast because I have seen tributes before but I had never read one so vain. He wrote that “Chief Gani was my hero, my love for him was beyond limit. I held him in very high esteem so that he could never go wrong in my sight. I wasn’t just a fan of his but a fanatic, etc”. There are those who look at others with such eyes that easily generate the bandwagon effect. In the society in which we live today, some people out of sheer cowardice simply adhere to rules that could make them puke in private just to secure acceptance or to belong. But they know not how much damage they do unto themselves. Oteniya is such a voice.
Or why would one seek recognition with the following words for example, “of what good were the sweet things I wrote if he couldn’t read, of what values were the sweet words I said if he couldn’t hear and of what values were the emails and the attached register if he couldn’t browse.”
But his sycophancy did not end there. The following words depict the writer as a run-of-the-mill miscreant, for example, “I will not wait any longer to allow “Wole” Soyinka and “Chinua” Achebe know how much I appreciate their literary works and their contributions to the society. I want to help them peep into posterity to have an insight of what it holds for them. I don’t want to wait till anytime later, not till Governors Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi and Babatunde Raji Fashola are no more in their State houses before I allow them a peep into posterity. I’ll write about the good jobs they are doing in their respective States.”
But his venom suddenly spews forth with the mention of other politicians with whom he shares nothing in terms of pedigree, origin, ideology and ursprung. It is scandalous. He picked pockets of northerners and lined them up for clinical execution, without minding their impact in society. Turai Yar’Adua, for example, has just launched herself into the world of people sweating it out with the dreaded disease called cancer. Does Oteniya Rufus care? Dikko Inde of the Customs has denied for the umpteenth time that he is not an in-law of the president’s wife. Why do literate people fail to see this? Is it so hard to come to Katsina and count all members of Turai’s family, if only to ascertain once and for all the veracity of the ignorant claim? Can anyone in this country just decide that Fashola is Adedibu’s in-law and continue to write it without being told how foolish he is by the Nigerian media? So why do knowledgeable writers bandy those foolish misrepresentations and misconceptions without shame? Is it not nauseating?
If anything needs to be said about Abdullahi Dikko Inde, in spite of efforts by his detractors to pull him down, it is that the Customs has woken from its slumber under Dikko and it is now augmenting the revenue base of the country by up to N400billion since Dikko took office. Let us keep sentiments and hatred out of the purview of governance if we are talking development.
But a take from the author himself, in his letter to Yar’Adua published in last week’s issue of The Source nails it. Oteniya demonised the president and associated him with all things evil. He refused to see the giant strides that Yar’Adua is taking in certain critical areas of development, inspite of his ill-health and disposition. He prefers blindness to the ovation that accompanies the giant strides Yar’Adua is taking in the Niger Delta. Instead, he takes pot shots at the president and denies him credit even for his baby steps in some sections.
The worst is when he showed preference for Obasanjo with whom the entire country was weary. Obasanjo may be blamed, he says, “for forcing you into power in your dying days but…” This is like playing God by another name. Who told Oteniya that he could deny some people the right to be sick? I am disgusted by such muckraking and utterly disappointed that such a guy finds space in an honourable magazine as The Source. His lack of hoot for everything libelous also smacks of mischief and my only advice to those who render him this help to advertise his advocacy is that they had better cut the crap and let people be.

Maimuna writes from Anguwar Rimi, Kaduna.