By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
These are very dangerous days in Nigeria.
“These are times that try men’s souls,” as the founding father of American independence, Thomas Paine, wrote in The American Crisis.
In very recent history, people did not speak out in time until the Hutu/Tutsi mayhem overwhelmed Rwanda.
It is incumbent on me to now call out Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy, on his recent pathetic ethnic baiting that can only end up pitching one ethnic group in Nigeria against the other in an orgy of flagitious violence.
There is the nationwide protest that has been bandied about across the country, and Bayo Onanuga emphatically states: “The protest planners are also the same people who were instigated by IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu to launch the destructive ENDSARS protest in Nigeria in October 2020.”
Even a mentally retarded child cannot put out this hokum in the hope of convincing the public that a body that is not wholly accepted in the Southeast has ended up getting all Nigerians to indulge in a protest.
According to Bayo Onanuga, “ENDSARS began as a genuine protest by youths against the Police Special Anti-Robbery Squad, notorious for its high-handedness. IPOB members planning to extricate the South-East region from Nigeria infiltrated the protest and hijacked it for their own agenda. Lagos still bears the scar of the malicious destruction until today.”
It of course serves the wretched purpose of Bayo Onanuga to lap up his obsession with Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, to demonise the Igbo people as per spreading the hashtags: “EndBadGovernance”, “TinubuMustGo”, and “Revolution2024”.
Bayo Onanuga is obviously so intelligence-challenged as to understand that he is actually turning Peter Obi into a superhuman being by allotting all these powers to him.
The greatest danger is the utter damage that Bayo Onanuga is unleashing on Nigeria as a country in this lowly tosh of attempting to harm the Igbo people.
For God’s sake, Bayo Onanuga now bears the toga of an adviser to the president of a multi-ethnic country.
Let me laugh a little by remembering a quote from the former great editor of Sunday Times, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, “A ministerial toga is no magna carta for mandibular walkabouts.”
But this is not a laughing matter because Bayo Onanuga is not up to par as a student of history.
Bayo Onanuga has a piteous and tragic history as an ethnic bigot intent on wiping out the Igbo people – if he can.
Let’s hear it from the very mouth of the baleful Bayo Onanuga: “I owe no one apology for ethnic slur against the Igbos – they are threats to Yorubas.”
Please before we reduce this matter of mass Nigerian hunger to an Igbo-Yoruba slugfest as dredged up by Bayo Onanuga, let me illustrate the celebratory worthiness of ethnic comradeship that makes Nigeria cherish-worthy here.
Recently, my brother journalist, Madu Onuorah, was abducted in Abuja by some dubious policemen who came from the Southeast and driven all the way to Abakaliki via Enugu.
I made an outcry about the abduction, and before I could spell “Police,” Femi Falana, SAN, had taken up the case and sent a fellow SAN to effect the release of Madu Onuorah only to learn that the police had already released the abducted journalist.
This is the higher ideal of pan-Nigeria beyond the ken of Bayo Onanuga.
For the information of less-bigoted Nigerians, I left a job where I had been given money to found a thriving Nigerian newspaper to accept half the salary I was being paid to work for a newspaper headed by Bayo Onanuga.
It was the prize I was determined to pay toward the actualisation of the June 12 mandate of Chief Moshood Abiola, and I survived all the bombs and bullets of General Sani Abacha, a matter Bayo Onanuga is well aware of.
Monetary wealth, social position, class, title and whatnot do not mean anything to me, and when I was leaving the media company being run by Bayo Onanuga I donated my last salary to them – even as I was koboless!
The poet Odia Ofeimun is my witness, as well as the maverick banker Ifeanyi Uddin.
I don’t think that clear headed Nigerians would allow themselves to be distracted by the Goebbels-like tactics of Bayo Onanuga as to feed mass hunger with irresponsible and unfortunate ethnic baiting.
A tear for the lickspittle Bayo Onanuga and his diabolical paymasters.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author