I had the great opportunity of reading in manuscript Adventures Of A Guerrilla Journalist by Babafemi Ojudu.
This is definitely not a review of that remarkable book which is beyond doubt the outstanding bestseller in Nigeria today.
My mention of the book here is an endorsement of Ojudu as a man of his words as opposed to the miserable sycophants and lickspittles dominating the Nigerian scene today.
I was once a colleague of Ojudu in the guerrilla journalism days of murderous General Sani Abacha, though some of our comrades back then would rather want to make me vanish and thus airbrush me from that part of our nation’s history.
A quote at the end of this piece would do justice to the matter of airbrushing unwanted ones from history.
It is just as well that Ojudu’s book is being released just after another bestseller – Dele Farotimi’s Nigeria And Its Criminal Justice System that put a deep stab on Nigeria’s powers-that-be.
Nigeria needs Ojudu and Farotimi, not my erstwhile comrades-turned-sycophants dancing juju music on the corridors of power today.
For the sycophants of the moment, any opposition to the wanton policies of the government amounts to being unpatriotic.
But then, Samuel Johnson had as far back as 1775 stated: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
The new-fangled scoundrels preaching patriotism can defend anything – such as the devaluation of the ordinary Nigerian at the expense of the leader’s expanding vault of yacht, presidential jet and super-duper escalade.
Obviously working in cahoots with the government, the evil ones can easily turn any criticism from defamation to cyberstalking, whatever that means.
The prisons and detention camps are already getting filled up not unlike during the time of military dictatorship, but the sycophants are only throbbing in songs of praise.
Government by buying people is the order of the day, and the yes-man newspaper can offer the “man of the year” toga on a platter of dough.
I guess it was from the mouth of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe that I heard these words: “History will vindicate the just.”
While waiting for the verdict of history, the sycophants can continue with their unrelenting praise songs for the lion of power who can do and undo.
One of my favourite novels is The Master and Margarita by the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov.
Part of the blurb of the novel reads: “The devil makes a personal appearance in Moscow; his retinue includes two demons, a naked girl and a huge black cat which talks, walks upright, smokes cigars and is a dead shot with a Mauser automatic. Some of the devil’s pranks are sheer anarchic fun, more often they are chosen to bring out the worst in everybody. When he leaves, the asylums are full, the forces of law and order are in disarray and the population is haunted with feelings of guilt and shame…”
The guilt and shame would always come later after the exercise of insane power, but it suffices to stress that the new Nigerian of today is a magician whose minimum wage cannot buy a bag of rice.
How Nigerians survive is simply beyond my nous, as it will forever remain quite unfathomable to some us not gifted with the raging sycophantic brouhaha.
The bootlickers and toadies of Nigeria deserve their places in world history.
I guess my readers can be able to name that Nigerian power flatterer of the moment who can match Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda.
Being a sycophant can have a killer twist in the tail, just like the case of the pathetic peasant during the evil reign of Emperor Caligula in the old Roman Empire who sycophantically vowed to kill himself once the emperor recovered from an illness – and who was then ordered to fulfil his vow by Caligula after he had recovered!
For sure, sycophancy is a terminal disease.
I did write about the airbrushing of people from history at the beginning of this piece, and I think the best example I can find is from Czech writer Milan Kundera’s novel The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting:
“In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on to the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was the great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.
“Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close by him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.
“The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.
“Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history, and of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on that balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”
History, I fear, may eventually be unkind to the teeming Nigerian sycophants as nothing will remain of them – not even the fila on the leader’s head!
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Image: Copilot remixed