Dele Afelumo, A Tribal Warrior Responds To Chimamanda Adichie – SIXT-MEDIA LANE CONSULT
If you feel you are in a safe sanctuary in the USA and can throw or dart some dangerous goblin on Nigeria to breed hate, division, anarchy with fatal and cataclysmic consequences, remember, your people will also be affected too.
That election defied many odds. Many governors lost their states to the opposition. Even the President-elect lost his firm grip on Lagos. Mr Buhari lost his Katsina base while El Rufai’s political wizardry could not win him Kaduna, yet you are busy pooh-poohing and sacrilegiously puncturing and discrediting the whole process as a sham or charade! How dare you! That election may not have been the best but in few places where there was violence, the people stood solidly to exercise their franchise. Did you have an inkling of what transpired in Obi’s immediate enclave in the east? Many APC apologists were either killed or prevented from voting. Were you cerebrally on sabbatical break when the election that produced President Biden plunged America into a never-seen-before orgy of violence with fatalities recorded? With a whiff of hindsight, was the election annulled on that premise? Ironically, it is the product of that election that you are obsequiously kowtowing and genuflecting for with the sole aim of consigning Nigeria into a pariah state again.
Where Obi won in his precincts with some APC voters disenfranchised and some paid the supreme sacrifice, you never rationalized it as a heinous crime but in other places where he lost glaringly, you wanted the whole exercise cancelled. This is nothing but sheer ambivalence. Late Prof ( Eze) Chukwuemeka Ike wrote that only a foolish fly follows the dead into the grave. The ealier you extricate yourself from those inanities, jejune irrationalities and incongruous permutations and come to reality, the better for you.
No amount of writing will reverse the collective will of the people. As a fellow who wrote the account of the civil war that claimed millions of lives, built valleys on their cheeks, made them pot-bellied and a caricature of anything human, you should know better that writing effusively to cause chaos is a height of unpatriotism. If in the events you cause another civil unrest, it would be too late to plead self-exculpation and self-abnegation your ill-thought out writings would have caused. Obi lost that election glaringly and there is no way you can dress a vassal—festooning his ambience, adorning him with costly ornaments and apparel— through malcontent depositions, he will remain a vassal and never a prince.
