Prof Ibrahim Bello-Kano on Wiseman Festus Keyamo

I present today two out of the numerous responses that found me after the essay on Festus Keyamo appeared here last Friday. The responses are particularly electrifying in different ways as you shortly shall find out – dear, dear readers. The first response gracing the column now is from a reader in the South East geo-political territory who wishes to remain anonymous. I endorse the code of anonymity which I hereby oblige him – even though his account is in no way irritating. The second reader I am also quoting word-for-word has appeared here in the past. He is a highly radical Professor of Bayero University, Kano, who suffers no fools gladly – and treats no one he disagrees with strongly with kid gloves.

I hope Minister Festus Keyamo, the junior minister of our central labour ministry, and you my readers, our ever-watchful compatriots, will find today’s contributions positive. Of course, you will find interesting why Professor IBK’s stands as it stands in the title. His sharp submission is a certain and surely useful shorthand for what many patriotic compatriots will call Fine man and Boy Fine Festus Keyamo’s new identity as the column adumbrated last Friday. We hope Festus Keyamo will soon become Wiseman Festus Keyamo after reading us today. I say: easy, helpful and happy reading.

Reader Anonymous: Sir Afejuku, a very good day to you. I wish I could control my emotions to avoid expressing how deeply I was touched emotionally by your words of wisdom and piece of advice of naked truth undiluted to Festus Keyamo in your “Festus Keyamo: A hole of an argument.” I wish Keyamo has the wisdom and ability to understand what you meant and mean still by that, not just literally.

My brother, I did not know you before now, and I still don’t know you, but I call you a brother because you have what it takes to be called a brother and that is “wisdom and passion for truth that bears integrity.”

Can you see the reason we are where we are today as a nation? This is just how Nigeria is being run by the government and virtually everybody in it. Personal interest matters and nothing else is to the government and those in it. Our problems are not natural because the country is naturally blessed. Sometimes, yes, sometimes …. I cry for Nigeria. It’s very unfortunate what we are doing to ourselves in the name of politics.

Truth is sweet and heavier than any object, and anywhere it drops darkness shakes uncontrollably and in disarray… I want this country to work for all of us the people as we have no other one to call our own. Nigeria is our home, and no one else can build this country for us if we the people don’t build it and make it work for us. Keep speaking the objective truth. Only the truth shall set us free, my brother.

Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano: Thank you for your masterly demolition job of Festus Keyamo’s petty and infantile attacks on ASUU members and the Nigerian lecturership. Keyamo, the ex-radical activist, the guy from a back-water village in Delta State, a village which, I read somewhere, still doesn’t have a decent main street, a modern drainage or sewage system. Keyamo is just one out of many fine radicals who, once they joined the state machine, became servile functionaries of it. The academic psychological literature is full of “analyses” of hitherto radical activists who are now willing tools of the corrupt and unaccountable state machine or an insensitive political administration. If he ever went to University and got a first Law degree and still found it expedient to denigrate his former lecturers, one would wonder how he could so easily forget that he was the product of the university system.

Little wonder that he could or did, in fact, forget that he would never have held a high office in or been functionally useful to, the Buhari Administration or the APC itself had he never attended a university or had never got an academic degree. Thus people like Keyamo are the typical infantile state-idol worshippers, the willing tools of mischief against good or noble causes once those causes threaten state privilege or those of its parasitic officials who routinely and conveniently forget their humble origins.

The historical literature is full of the tragic stories of old state psychophants who ended up either being ditched by the very state machinery they served or were swept away by their own very hubris. As Henry Thoreau once said, an intelligent and independent-minded person does not willingly do the bidding of a corrupt Prince. Keyamo has sold his soul to the Devil, the one at the head of a lazy, unwilling, incompetent, and insensitive Dinner Table. Of course, Keyamo hopes to keep his subordinate seat at that Table come June 2023. But he’s yet to learn the tragic lesson of betrayal from an un-impressed state machine which has no logic other than that of its own self-aggrandizement.

Hubris, arrogant over-simplification, infantile political bootlicking and selective amnesia have not yet helped anyone (in the long run). Nor would all this help Mr. Fetus Keyamo, the ridiculous petty official who hopes to keep his allegedly cool corrupt privileges induced by malignantly decent men and women, the hypocritical, debased and devilish cream of Nigeria’s intellectual resources.

Now the columnist cannot but appreciate IBK, an unblemished ultra-radical critic and commentator of Kano, and Mr. Anonymous of “Biafra” who believes in one Nigeria. If Disputant Festus Kayamo wants us to label or re-label him as Wiseman Festus Keyamo he should retrace his steps and re-learn to walk, fly, glide and travel with us as you my good readers “catch the pulse of wisdom that flows around you and it becomes a part of your consciousness like a dance of perfection.” Festus Keyamo should become a wise man by jettisoning now this regime of darkness in your country my country our country where Alas! wings of birds are powerless and dead. But the chopping minister will not hearken to any wise counsel. He will not. He is too far gone. Yes, he is too far gone. He is no more a masses-man. But that is not my problem or yours. His new cross is his new cross. Let him carry it as he chooses. Thunder!!!

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.