Yes Mi Lord,
Keep on trucking.
Let the Green Eagles fly
Let the cocker spaniel continue to lie
This is the Holy Month of Ramadan
This is the Holy Month of Tarawa of the Holy Quran
I should just like to make the little correction, that in response to this question Bernard-Henri Levy said, "…what is required from a Jew is not to believe but to study…."
_______________________________________
During the heady days of Salam Rushdie's rise to fame, the furore over his "Satanic Verses" and the death fatwa that was hanging over his head which caused him to go into hiding ( it cost the British Taxpayer more than £1 million a year to protect him) after a meeting organised by the Swedish Section of PEN – I had a brief exchange with Torbjörn Säfve at the junction of Rådmansgatan and Hollandargatan. The Parthian shot from him was, "Is there anything that's so holy that we can't talk about it?"
More music: Bel Assy – by Soukouss Gentlemen
On Wed, 29 Apr 2020 at 12:13, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:--Well its been revealed some of us are the real insolent ones.
Why wont we let the sleeping dog lie.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Cornelius Hamelberg <hamelbergcornelius4@gmail.com>Date: 29/04/2020 08:12 (GMT+00:00)Subject: Re: Sv: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Psychology BehindtheUnexpectedBeatification of Abba Kyari
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Lord Agbetuyi,
You are possibly feeling a little under the weather? Doldrums? I commiserate with you. Me too, I'm mourning with Mallam Abba's daughter and taking her appeal seriously, when she says, in the name of common decency, PLEASE !! Allow My Father Rest In Peace!
The world is more complicated than we think – as Hamlet said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Life is not so easy: consider:
Kperogi: " I'm one of the reasons thousands of Buhari's media trolls were employed"
Right now, I'm feeling like a twenty-year-old world champion in chess, the king of the castle. I'm waiting for my opponent's move. Mind you I would never dream of having a clash with the always cheerful ( great sense of humour) the ebullient, effulgent Pius Adesanmi - God bless him. Why should I? There was no cause. And furthermore, he wasn't into self-exaltation or unmitigated insolence.
It's Simple Simon psychology. We know how it is: In Freetown, Sierra Leone of those days, whenever there was a feast, from nowhere the vultures would descend, alight on the rooftops, they would arrive in droves, or is in flocks the correct expression, to feast in the chicken entrails. As Diop accuses in another instance, "You knew all the books you did not know love". In a similar mode the scavengers don't want anybody to desecrate the sacred memory of their own geriatric fathers that were probably born in the Chinese year of the monkey in the last century. Some people harbour their resentments, bear grudges and without remorse or any restraint they want us to believe that it's in good conscience that they want to violate our cultural norms and with impunity are keen on ventilating their ill feeling and their discontent, are keen on taking their revenge by disturbing everybody's peace y at the very start of the holy month of Ramadan, the Month of Mercy, in the middle of the Harmattan Season they will not allow those asleep in their eternal rest, to rest in peace. Now, if an Oyibo acted like that, we would probably accuse him of racism, a mortal sin, but what do we say when it's like black and night? BTW, "rascal intellectual" would be a playful jab at someone like Voltaire. Or someone stronger. They say that an idle mind is the workshop of the devil. I also came to a similar conclusion after reading another diatribe in the New York Times, entitled "The Scholar and the Rascal"
Of relevance to what follows here below is this anecdote : Someone asked Hillel the Elder to teach him the Torah, while he was standing on one foot ( the rest is commentary: Go study!
Now that I have just watched the Swedish television programme Babel, which was actually recorded on 29th Oct 2017 and in which BHL presented his book The Genius of Judaism, indeed The Genius of Judaism! I'll have to expand the rather concise report that I conveyed to you and the forum, re- the question that the interviewer asked Bernard-Henri Levy: - " Do you believe in God?" and he replied – "That is a question for Christians – we Jews, we read the texts! "
Well, it was a very interesting circa twenty minutes interview of an intellectual from whom there is much to learn and to think about:
This was the presentation (my rough transcription)
"So, you write books, you talk about current issue like Brexit, you go to war zones like Libya and Bosnia, you make films about the Kurdish Liberation struggle, you're an activist, a philosopher and an author. What would you call yourself?"
BHL: An intellectual. This is probably in the French and in the European tradition, what an intellectual is: someone who commits his way of assembling words for the salvation of the world, of others, of calls which seem to me to be great. You just evoked the Kurdish struggle - they are not only struggling for their liberty, or resistance, they are struggling for you and for me, for our children, for our countries, against ISIS they were the first one and the only ones to make rampart against Daesh , in the two first years and I feel such a sorrow today, I'm just coming from back there, to see how they are abandoned now by those whom they have helped, with such bravery, and courage, so this for me is a cause which deserves at least my support and I hope the support of a lot of people.
"What does it mean to be Jewish?"
BHL : (a little further in answering that question) : " the key to all that, the beating heart of my way of acting in this world is probably in this book ( a few sentences later) the real centre of the book is, the transmission, the heritage, the core values addressed to all of humanity, not only to Jews which is found in the Jewish texts – this is for me the most important ( a few sentences later ) it took time for me to get aware of what the Jewish texts, the Torah and the Talmud could bring to the philosophical reflection, trying to commit itself in the world… and the book tells that."
One of your children asked you, "Do you believe in God? "So, do you?
BHL: I will give you the same reply that which I addressed to my daughter. It is not a question precisely for a Jew. The key question is not to know if you believe or not in God – this is a Christian question for sure, it is the greatness of Christianism to raise the question of belief, to embrace the idea of God in a sort of physical or mystical communion. This is not Judaism. What a Jew says, from Maimonides to Levinas is that was is required from a Jew is not to believe but to study. , is not to communion but to understand, creed, but intelligence, that is what the Jewish text says and this is one of the differences , probably between being a Jew and being a Christian; both have their greatness, both have their way of addressing the world and going through it.
He is then pressed to answer the question: Do you believe in God?
BHL: I would reply, there is a brief reply by Hemingway, he was asked the question, do you believe in God? – and he said, "Sometimes, at night". Hemingway was not a Jew but it was a very Jewish reply.
BHL then talked briefly about "the part played by Judaism in building the European spirit
A little further in the conversation: Jonah was on a mission to Nineveh (which compared to today's Libya and Ukraine) … The most enigmatic and probably the most important prophet of the bible is probably Jonah, because he is the only one who addresses himself, not to the Jews, not to his people but to the 70 nations and the worst of them which is in Nineveh , and this experience of a Jew who is asked to go to the great city of sin, the city of evil, this for me is the core of Judaism. You have two ways of being a Jew: To deal with a narrow community, and to try to address or to plant the seed of Judaism in the rest of the world – this is my way of doing, as a committed intellectual
Do you doubt yourself?
At every minute. I would not write what I write in that book, which is in praise of doubt, questioning, in praise of this act of the mind which always believes that the truth is more complicated than it appears, without doubting at every minute. Ten years ago I was in Afghanistan when I received the news of the murder, of the beheading of a brave American journalist called Daniel Pearl – at the minute I heard this news I decided to put my feet in his footsteps, I decided to go to Pakistan. I decided to go as far as possible to the mouth of the beast and to understand who he was, who killed him, why he was skilled: I just felt that this is what I had to do and I did it. I spent two years of my life, back and forth to Pakistan; I published his book, Who killed Daniel Pearl? – probably the most difficult thing to do for a Frenchman, for a Jew, and for a journalist, which I am in a way.
He was asked about the need for philosophy.
BHL: Without philosophy, you are condemned to a sort of quantitative mathematical, materialistic and absurd conception of the world. In the age of the internet for example which provides such freedom, but in a way, a freedom that can turn to the opposite – you have friends, you count your friends and may continue, you have no friends you connect with people and you have never been as disconnected… philosophy to reflect on what proximity is, what friendship is, freedom means can help to make our path in the wildness, the bushes, of the internet, of the Big Brother Internet; you need philosophy for that… that's what the inventor of philosophy, Plato said, connecting three parts, the heart, the brain and the desired.
--On Mon, 27 Apr 2020 at 23:35, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--I would have thought myself that unprovoked attack on Oga Cornelius warrants an apology. Its ip yo an attacker yo verify their ibformation before launching an attack
Thats what accurate intellectualism is all about and that is what restrain in the face of provocation is all about for AN INTELLECTUAL and not counter attacks.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.-------- Original message --------From: Salimonu Kadiri <ogunlakaiye@hotmail.com>Date: 27/04/2020 20:00 (GMT+00:00)Subject: Sv: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Psychology Behind theUnexpectedBeatification of Abba Kyari
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I wrote Adieu Abba Kyari and, somewhere, therein I referred to a post on this forum sometime in 2019 where an author whose name I withheld wrote of the now deceased Abba Kyari as follows : Abba Kyari, President Buhari's geriatric and morally stained Chief of Staff …. Supporting my description of the writer as a rascal intellectual, I averred that I thought Abba Kyari was an 80-year-old man only to now know on his death that he was 67. To err is human and which is why heaven should not fallen because the moderator got the message mixed up. In the mixed up the moderator attributed the expression, a rascal intellectual, as having been penned by Cornelius and mistakenly associated it to the person of Farooq Kperogi, even though no such name was ever mentioned in the write-up titled, Adieu Abba Kyari. We all get *whiteout* a times just as the moderator did when he wrote, "Cornelius just called Farooq a *rascal intellectual* a very offensive label, but were Farooq to die today, he becomes a compassionate analyst!!!" Culturally, a youth who, scornfully addresses his senior as a geriatric and morally stained in Nigeria is regarded as a rascal lacking home training and pointing it out can never be offensive as termed by the moderator.
Reacting to Professor Toyin Falola's erroneous reference to Cornelius as the precursor of the use of the expression, *rascal intellectual* on Farooq Kperogi, he, Farooq exploded, "Cornelius is another demented geriatric airhead whose email I have blocked and Who I have also blocked on Facebook because of his intolerably petulant ignorance and rank foulness. I didn't read the drivel he wrote in response to my column." Almost immediately after he vomited the above, Olayinka Agbetuyi, drew the attention of Professor Falola to the fact that Cornelius not the writer of a rascal intellectual and that the person who did it never mentioned any name. Thereafter, it ought to have been obvious to Farooq Kperogi that the expression, a rascal intellectual, was not in response to his cherished column and his name was not even mentioned in connection with the expression. If I were Farooq, I would have written to apologise to Cornelius because in our culture a youth who wants to grow old must never seize walking stick from an elderly person and throw it away. It is never a crime/sin to grow old and all geriatrics are not demented. Farooq self has declared that in his previous disagreement with Cornelius he had punished him with email and Facebook blockade. But this time around, Cornelius has done nothing wrong and anybody with self-esteem would just have apologize to him for the mistaken of identity.
Farooq Kperogi has told forum members that he had blocked the emails of certain people whose opinions on issues differ from his. At the same time he has asked the moderator repeatedly to expel from the forum those whose opinions are at variance with his own. Were Farooq a President of a country, all books that do not conform with his views will either be banned or burnt. Farooq is a monologue who thinks his pronouncement on any issue is the final. Thus a forum of this nature which is based on dialogue constitutes a nightmare for him. We all want a better World and indeed better Africa, therefore, all opinions should be welcomed in the debate until we can reach a converging point. I recall the post on this forum by Professor Jibrin Ibrahim titled, Drift Towards Chaos, dated 6 April 2018, being a communique from a Committee he had set up to inquire into how to halt the drift of Nigeria towards chaos. Farooq Kperogi flared up on one member of the committee thus, "What business does Yakubu Aliyu have being in this group? His name for me, vitiates the credibility of the whole group and disinclined me from reading the communique. Yakubu is an unapologetic ethno-regional chauvinist who is beholding to narrow fissiparous loyalties. He is a disreputably vile, visceral and unthinking propagandist for the incompetent Buhari's government. I distrust anything he is associated with." Any normal person will observe that Farooq Kperogi underrated the intelligence of his readers by not revealing why Yakubu Aliyu was an ethno-regional chauvinist and propagandist for Buhari's government. Regardless of what the communique contained Kperogi rubbished it just because he disliked the person of Yakubu Aliyu and he wanted readers to accept his views without question.
Farooq Kperogi is always doing to others what he does not want others to do to him. On 8 June 2019, Farooq complained about what IBK wrote and quoted him thus, "Deploy your views. Do not join that Farooq Kperogi who is a paid Atiku mouthpiece to denigrate eminent and respected academics." Kperogi stated his case thereafter, "Here is an example of the sorts of libellous personal insults the moderator posts on this forum … I'll go ahead and institute a libel against this demented airheaded ignoramus called IBK …" Has Kperogi any medical certificate to buttress his claim that IBK is demented? Has Kperogi not committed quackery by diagnosing IBK demented? Yet he wrote to declare IBK demented and the moderator posted it. However, I am yet to see any libel suit filed by Kperogi against IBK, it was just a noise from a small cricket against a venom.Sometime in 2019, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju posted a request on the forum asking for member's help on a specific information about the Nigerian civil war. IBK responded harshly, "Toyin, When I say you are intellectually lazy people think I do not like you. Instead of you to do som reading you will start a collage of works of other hard working people and try to present them here as if you are doing some worthy academic work." Chidi Anthony Opara reacted to IBK's response to Adepoju thus, "IBK, Your proclivity to insults seem to be natural. Do you have to resort to insolence to make your point?" At that stage, Farooq Kperogi intruded saying, "For example, Salimonu Kadiri, Agbetuyi, IBK and some others do nothing more than throw childish insults at people, but when people react to their insults with superior venom, the moderator intervenes, calls for caution, and makes the victims look like the aggressors.For instance, just yesterday Toyin Adepoju asked an innocent question to the forum, but IBK's response was to call him *intellectually lazy* and it was posted. I would have missed it had Chidi not responded to it and wondered aloud why infantile insults are IBK's stock-in-trade." The main point in Farooq Kperogi's afore-quoted submission is that calling Adepoju intellectually lazy is an infantile insult. However, the following was what Farooq Kperogi wrote about now late Abba Kyari last year, "Kyari has unflattering reputation for physical and intellectual laziness and for down-the-line duplicity, so his hackneyed, intellectually malnourished harangue didn't surprise me." Ironically, we are here confronted with an unusual logic implying that Farooq Kperogi exhibited very high sense of maturity when he wrote to say that Abba Kyari was physically and intellectually lazy as well as intellectually malnourished but it was an infantile insult when IBK wrote that Toyin Adepoju was intellectually lazy!! I do not know what makes Farooq Kperogi to claim rights he is denying others but I am beginning to understand him from the point of views of psychologists when they talk about 'Low Emotional Intelligence Quotient (LEIQ)' and 'Low Social Intelligence Quotient (LSIQ)' of a person. Farooq Kperogi thinks of himself as a VIP not as Fela sang it (Vagabond In Power).
In his Psychology Behind the Unexpected Beatification of Abba Kyari, Farooq informed his readers : For instance, between 2018 and 2019, I repulsed invitations to meet with Atiku Abubakar or join his campaign. For this information to have any valuable meanings to his readers, Farooq must name, at least, one of the people that invited him to meet Atiku Abubakar and who was repulsed. Farooq Kperogi must be able to demonstrate or point to specific effects or advantages that his joining Atiku Abubakar's campaign would have had on the results of the election. This piece of information from Farooq Kperogi is unverifiable and therefore liable to be regarded as pure lie aimed at boosting his personality before his readers. Hear him again : Similarly, a few northern governors and a minister had told me they had arranged a meeting between Buhari and me to ''reconcile our differences.'' I politely rebuffed their overtures. Of what use is this information to any reader with his/her brain intact when Farooq concealed the names of northern governors and a minister who had arranged a meeting between Buhari and him? The story of differences between Buhari and Farooq that they wanted to reconcile originated from Farooq and ended with him. And as long as he does not share what the differences entailed with his readers, the information about his rebuffed reconciliation overture to him becomes a fable and a bluff. Let us read Farooq further : Sometime last year, a friend who is close to the inner circles of power in the Villa told me Abba Kyari had proposed to give me a "juicy" appointment that I couldn't resist but that a minister and a top Buhari aide who know me personally said I would not only reject the appointment. I might disclose it publicly. Common sense dictates that if Farooq really has a friend who is very close to the inner circles of power in the Villa, he will keep it secret to himself so as not to put his friend in trouble with the power circles. Farooq created a friend of his who is very close to the inner circle of powers out of fantasy as well as a minister and a top Buhari aide and his next postulation exposed him of living in make-belief world. He wrote : I don't know how true this claim (by the supposed friend) is, but the minister and presidential aide certainly know me well enough to know that my criticism of government isn't animated by self-aggrandizement. If I want to be wealthy from access to people in government, the Buhari regime is one government where I would have "hit it big." It is remarkable that Farooq's purported friend in the inner circles of power in the Villa did not produce any verifiable evidence to support the story that it was true that Abba Kyari had proposed to lure Farooq Kperogi with a "juicy appointment." Moreover, the story from the purported friend lacked credibility since the story teller failed to identify the specific juicy appointment that Abba Kyari had carved out for Farooq. What kind of juicy appointment did Abba Kyari proposed to offer Farooq Kperogi? The existence of Farooq's friend in the inner circles of power in the Villa, as well as his acquaintance with a minister and a top Buhari's aide is a symptom of an idealistic personality rendering him to so completely identify with the wish for fictional ideal self and forgetting that he is not that ideal self, he proceeds from his fictional heights to boast to his readers about how well connected he is in the government of Nigeria.Finally, Farooq elevated himself to the sky thus : …… I have an independent source of livelihood as a university teacher in America. You can't say the same of journalists (in Nigeria) who work for newspapers that don't pay salaries and that brazenly tell their reporters and editors to use their work ID cards as their meal tickets. Nigerian journalists, just like other professionals in Nigeria work under very difficult political and economic climate. Despite that, they still conduct and publish a lot of investigative journalism without which, we, the lay people could not have known about ongoing malfeasances in governance throughout the country. Farooq Kperogi says that he is contented with his independent source of livelihood as a university teacher in America but in one of his engagements with another person on this forum on Saturday, 29 October 2016, he wrote, "I write my language columns (in the Daily Trust) because I am paid well to do so." Farooq Kperogi should, in the name of honesty and transparency, tell his readers the total amount he earned as a columnist in the Daily Trust, while living in America and how much was the tax he paid to the Nigerian government for his earned incomes in Nigeria. He should also be honest enough to tell his readers if his back-page weekly column in the Nigerian Tribune is philanthropic or if it is, as prostitutes use to say in Nigeria, money for hand back na ground. With that said, I will end my submission by declaring that as long as intellectual arsonists are not successful in burning down words on this forum, I will continue to read as much posts as time permits me to do and I will always reject agents of deceit, their religion and their ethnic appeals if I encounter one.S. Kadiri
--
Från: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> för Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Skickat: den 25 april 2020 19:47
Till: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Psychology Behind the UnexpectedBeatification of Abba Kyari--May be Kadiri…
From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, April 25, 2020 at 12:46 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Psychology Behind the UnexpectedBeatification of Abba Kyari
Prof.
No! Cornelius did NOT call Farooq a rascally intellectual. Someone else alluded to a rascally intellectual without mentioning names.
But how could Farooq launch an attack on a reported post which he did not see from the report of a third person? If he had blocked the post of that person why attack him now?
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Date: 25/04/2020 16:04 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Psychology Behind the UnexpectedBeatification of Abba Kyari
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To buttress your point, read the ongoing eulogies on Chief Richard Akinjide who was turned into a pariah by political opponents for over 50 years. When he ran to become a governor, some people were looking for stones to throw at him. I knew him and his political opponent, Bola Ige, and incidentally both were related by marriage! Akinjide is now suddenly a good person! Haba!!
Indeed, reading the ongoing eulogies on Akinjide, I am happy for myself: that you all will say good things about me but you are just waiting for me to die!
Cornelius just called Farooq a "rascal intellectual," a very offensive label, but were Farooq to die today, he becomes a compassionate analyst!!!
TF
From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, April 25, 2020 at 9:53 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Psychology Behind the Unexpected Beatification of Abba Kyari
Farooq -
Thanks again for another interesting, albeit controversial write-up.
I have a different perspective on this whole matter and it is rooted in the Yoruba saying that, "Ìgbà a kú l'àá d'ère; èèyàn ò sunwòn l'áàyè." This simply means that humans are often deified at death; when alive, their imperfections are all that are seen, heard, and spoken of. This belief speaks to the hypocrisy of humans who would not sing praises of their so-called friends when those friends were alive but would start to blow the vuvuzela of their "niceties" and close affiliations to the friends as soon as they are dead. The questions to ask all those friends of Abba Kari would be where they were when Kyari was facing the barrages of criticisms of his obsessive compulsive monopolization of the Aso Rock presidential power. Where were they when the man was facing the fiery darts of endless criticism for flying out of the country in official state jets and marginalizing the Vice-President and cabinet members in decision-making? I bet, a good number of them were among the peddlers of those news and accusations (whether real or fake). But now, the "friend" is dead and the "gospel" of holy alliances and unparalleled fraternities must rend the air. We are no fools!
I think we Nigerians generally have a penchant for such behavioral deficit. I have read so much good deeds about dead Nigerians on our social media, which I never knew of such individuals in their lifetimes. You could not but resort into the American street lingo, "Gimme a break!"
Nigerian academics are the worst offenders of this culpable self-deceiving malady. Imagine the enormous amount of eulogies that rushed into our print and electronic media spaces as soon as announcements were made of the deaths of folks like Chinua Achebe, Isidore Okpewo, Abiola Irele, Akinwumi Isola, etc. You could not but ask, "Really? If these folks were so good and you were so close to them, where were you when for years they languished in pain on their death beds and no one, except close relatives, was there to lend them a helping hand?" "In your true conscience, when was the last time you had a real meaningful dialogue, or even mere talking relationship with that so-called "friend"? "Oh, did your close friend remember to tell you how much debts he incurred in the last ten years of his life, which may even be a part of his demise?" Now is time to praise him when he is gone? Arrant nonsense!
Look, I have no reason to disbelieve that there might be some genuine ones; yet, I dismiss almost all eulogies from friends who never wrote one line of their friends' positive deeds when alive with a wave of the hand. In fact, as far as I am concerned, many of those posthumous epistle-like eulogies would have probably lengthened the days of their friends or aded qualities to their lives if indeed the dead friends had read them or heard of such when alive. Many of those all-of-a-sudden friends belong in the diabolical pantheon of folks we call "Friends of Job", friends whom once you have, you no longer need enemies. Their posthumous writings are, in the words of William Shakespeare, "the unkindest cut of all!"
Michael O. Afolayan
On Saturday, April 25, 2020, 3:02:29 AM MDT, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Psychology Behind the Unexpected Beatification of Abba Kyari
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Many people are troubled by what appears to be a carefully coordinated cascade of cloying, revisionist, and, in some cases, outright mendacious posthumous rhetorical rehabilitation of Abba Kyari by people who had misled their readers into seeing them as disinterested sentinels of the wielders of power.
The summary of all the gushy Kyari tributes is basically this: Abba Kyari was an uncommonly kind, deeply intellectual, obsessively bibliophilic, fiercely loyal, hardworking, cosmopolitan Nigeria who had more loyalty to Nigeria than he had to his primordial ethnic, regional, or religious constituencies, and who didn't have even a fraction of the power and influence often attributed to him.
Every empirical evidence that contradicts the torrents of synchronized, saccharine, superhuman portraits of Kyari, his friends want the world to believe, is mere conspiratorial whisper that is wholly dissociated from reality.
Kyari, his friends imply, was a nearly flawless saint. Lack of access to him caused some people to unjustly demonize him. But his confidence in the favorable judgement of history—and of his boss, to whom he was loyal like nobody had ever been in human history—restrained him from correcting reputationally injurious falsehoods against him that took firm roots in the media and in the national popular imagination.
If my recapitulation of the tributes strikes you as annoyingly hagiographic, exaggeratedly mawkish, and overly disingenuous, it is because they really are. And they are dangerous for at least three reasons.
One, there is no one on the surface of this earth who is that perfect. Most people are smart enough to know that. People who peddle a narrative that a human being is untouched by any stain, and that evidence to the contrary is a consequence of "sponsored attacks," are two-bit spin doctors. It's worse if they're journalists.
Two, the minority of people who believe effusive, sanitized, pumped-up portraits of people often suffer self-esteem deficits. They vicariously compare themselves to the perfect person and come up short. They can't relate to perfection because perfection is not a human quality.
Third, when unassailable and irrefutably firm evidence emerges that contradicts the unrealistic idealization and deodorization contained in posthumous tributes, the reputation of the target of such tributes falls precipitously and irrecoverably.
Nonetheless, I know why people who personally knew Abba Kyari have chosen to venerate him after death. Personal access reveals a part of people's personality traits that is often concealed to the public.
The English proverb that says "Familiarity breeds contempt" is not always true. Familiarity can also activate warmth and deep connection. It allows some people to become captives of other people's charm offensives.
In the late 1990s, a senior northern journalist who used to be censorious of Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida finally met him for an interview. That meeting radically overhauled his opinion of the general. He told me—and other young reporters—that anyone who wanted to sustain his hatred and resentment of IBB should not get close to him. "You might go from hating him to loving him," he said. For some reason, those words have stuck in my mind like glue.
Personal familiarity with people changes perspectives about them. I can guarantee that people who have met Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau have a view of him that departs radically from the mainstream characterizations of him.
This might seem like a wild stretch, but people who want to engage in a guilt-free denunciation of Shekau for all his atrocities should do so now while he is alive because in the aftermath of his death, we might be deluged with a cornucopia of syrupy tributes from people who had personal access to him and who can attest to his charm, warmth, humanity, faculty of humor, pan-Nigerianism, and intolerance to injustice. We might read how he was misunderstood and maligned by people who didn't know him.
No one—not even Shekau, Hitler, Mussolini, etc.— is entirely bad. Personal, often privileged, access to otherwise notorious, reviled personages allows us to see their good sides. But should journalists court and cultivate the friendship of people in power to the point of becoming their spin doctors?
Anyone with even the most rudimentary familiarity with the ethics of journalism would know that journalists should not be chummy with the people they cover or comment on. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics enjoins journalists to "Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility."
Many of us who write critical commentaries about governance have rejected opportunities to have privileged personal access to the people we write about. For instance, between 2018 and 2019, I repulsed invitations to meet with Atiku Abubakar or to join his campaign.
Similarly, a few northern governors and a minister had told me they had arranged a meeting between Buhari and me to "reconcile" our "differences." I politely rebuffed their overtures. Sometime last year, a friend who is close to the inner circles of power in the Villa told me Abba Kyari had proposed to give me a "juicy" appointment that I couldn't resist but that a minister and a top Buhari aide who know me personally said I would not only reject the appointment, I might disclose it publicly.
I don't know how true this claim is, but the minister and the presidential aide certainly know me well enough to know that my criticism of government isn't animated by self-aggrandizement. If I wanted to be wealthy from access to people in government, the Buhari regime is one government where I would have "hit it big."
I know more people at close quarters in the regime than I ever did in any government in Nigeria. I admit, though, that it is easy for me to sustain my independence and spurn invitations to partake in the looting of the public treasury because I have an independent source of livelihood as a university teacher in America.
You can't say the same of journalists who work for newspapers that don't pay salaries and that brazenly tell their reporters and editors to use their work ID cards as their "meal tickets." For such reporters and editors, privileged personal access to people in power is an existential necessity. Their very survival depends on it.
The flurry of frenzied posthumous canonizations of Abba Kyari—and the revelations of the privileges that access to Kyari conferred— by supposedly detached, non-partisan journalists speak to the death of any pretense to ethical journalism in Nigeria.
Nonetheless, I'm generally an advocate for posthumous kindness to the dead, not so much because of the dead for whom such kindness is actually pointless but for the survivors of the dead. I lost my wife to a car crash in 2010. I can't tell you how much the kind words written about her sustained me in my most difficult moments.
Whatever Abba Kyari was, he left behind a wife and children who didn't make for him the choices that made him a byword for scorn and opprobrium. His family members deserve to read celebrations of his good deeds from people who are familiar with them.
In my December 3, 2011 column titled "Femi Kusa's Perverse Dance on Ibru's Grave," I wrote that "it's distasteful and insensitive to the survivors of the dead to so carelessly traduce their departed kin just days after his passing. Of course, clearly evil people who brought death and misery to large swaths of people are exempt from this consideration."
Abba Kyari was a public official who directly influenced public policy, whose choices had consequences for millions of Nigerians. I have no problems with people who traduced him in death even though I wouldn't do that, but I also have no problems with people who have chosen to celebrate the good sides of him that weren't available to the public.
What I have a lot of problems with is bending the truth to defend him, such as saying he had no influence in the Buhari regime, which is undermined by the fact that even serving governors, ministers, and senators want to occupy his position.
I also have problems with the demonization of people who are giving expression to their genuine angst over the untoward choices he made when he was alive. Kyari might not have been the devil, but he was no saint either.
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
School of Communication & Media
Social Science Building
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogi
Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will--
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