[dropcap]I[/dropcap] watched the minister information and culture Lai (aka Lie) Mohammed’s ‘Politics Today’ interview with Seun Okinbaloye of Channels Television a few days ago and I felt sorry for Nigeria.
I couldn’t help wondering why Channels Television keeps offering its respected platform to this shameless old fool to beam, broadcast and perpetuate unadulterated falsehood to the Nigerian people and to tell specious lies. The whole thing is simply incredulous.
During the course of that interview he told one big lie after the other with such ease and without batting an eyelid. I really do wonder how this man sleeps at night. I guess such things come naturally to him.
I look at his face and all I see is an unconscionable and relentless shit projector and sewage propeller.
He reminds me of one of those filth-ridden open gutters in India’s City of Mumbai: all manner of unprintable and disgusting things flow in and through it for all to smell and see.
Everything about him, including how he looks, what he says, what he wears and how he talks stinks to high heavens.
Like Donald Trump once said about a notorious Mexican drug lord, “this dude is a bad hombre!”
He is the kind of person that would pass a lie detector test with flying colours over and over again simply because lying is his nature. He is possessed by what the bible graphically and aptly describes as a “lying spirit”.
The first salvo of lies that he told us during the course of the interview was that Sheik El Zak Zaky, the leader of the Shiite Muslim community in Nigeria, was being kept in a guest house with his family and that he was not in government custody.
He went on to contradict himself by saying that the Federal Government was keeping him in custody only because they were building him a brand new house that he would move into later and that the difficulty that they had was that no-one wanted to be his neighbour!
Finally he said that the courts had said that the Sheik must not be released until that brand new house had been built for him.
Needless to say, all three assertions are false. They are nothing but dirty and desperate lies, cooked up to justify the governments disgraceful and indefensible behaviour towards El Zak Zaky, his family and the Shiite Muslims of Nigeria.
The truth is that firstly El Zak Zaky and his family are NOT being kept in a private guest house and both he and his wife most certainly are in government custody.
They have both been badly wounded, they are in the custody of the DSS and, for just under the last two years, they have been held at the DSS Headquarters in Abuja.
Their lawyers and doctors have little access to them but once in awhile they are shipped to a secret government safe house for a short impromptu meeting with a handful of family members.
Secondly the Federal Government is NOT building a house for El Zak Zaky and even if they were this should not be a reason to keep him in indefinite and illegal custody and detention.
Thirdly the courts gave El Zak Zaky and his wife an order for unconditional release from the custody of the security agencies and his release order was not conditional on the government first building him a new house as Lie has suggested.
The truth is that the man and his wife have both been kept in illegal detention for almost two years, against their will and in total violation of all court orders.
Worst still throughout that period they have not been brought physically or produced by the intelligence agencies before any court of law.
El Zak Zaky was shot and blinded in one eye by the military whilst his wife was shot four times in the stomach at the time that his home was attacked and they were both abducted.
Over one thousand of his Shiite Muslim supporters were murdered that day and their homes were shelled, bombed and burnt to the ground. Since then both the man and his wife have been locked up in dingy underground cells and have been subjected to the most inhuman and barbarous form of psychological and mental torture.
These are facts that Lie refused to acknowledge in his interview and that the government that he serves seek to hide from both the Nigerian public and the international community.
Lie also lied about Col. Sambo Dasuki the former National Security Advisor to President Goodluck Jonathan. He said that Dasuki was being detained indefinitely because he would pose a threat to the Federal Government and to national security if he was released.
He went further to say that Dasuki had stolen 1.3 billion USD and that the government would not release him until that money was returned despite court orders to the contrary.
He did not tell us where the 1.3 billion USD was stolen from, he did not tell us whether it was stolen in cash, by cheque, by bank draft or by transfer and he did not tell us how he stole it. All he did was pick a figure from the sky and drop it.
He also said that as far as the government was concerned national security considerations were more important than court orders and that even though the courts had ordered Dasuki’s released on several occasions the government would continue to ignore such orders because they believe that he poses a threat to national security.
The fact that it is unlawful to disregard court orders in Nigeria had no bearing on Lie. The fact that there is no law and no constitutional basis or justification to keep Dasuki in detention against court orders is immaterial to him and to the government that he serves.
The fact that the allegation that he stole 1.3 billion USD is not only utterly absurd but also has no basis in truth or reality is neither here nor there to this wicked man and to those he represents.
The fact that Dasuki poses no threat whatsoever to anyone, least of all the Federal Government, matters less to this strange, conflicted and inexplicable creature that calls himself the Minister of Information and Culture.
The fact that locking up a man illegally and definitely, depriving him of his constitutional rights and freedom, denying his lawyers and doctors full access to him, traumatising his family and friends, putting his stunningly beautiful and deeply courageous wife Bintu through hell, refusing to allow him to attend his aged father’s burial and denying him the right to be in a position to prepare a proper legal defence for himself against his detractors and accusers in court means absolutely nothing to this pernicious liar.
No matter how low the government goes and no matter how barbaric, illegal and heartless their actions are in terms of the violation of civil liberties and human rights, Lie has proved over and over again that he is prepared to go on Channels television or anywhere else to defend them.
I am convinced that if Buhari ordered for the gassing to death or burning alive of every single opposition figure and their family members together with all his other perceived enemies, Lie would gladly attempt to justify and defend it and Channels television would be only too happy to accommodate him and grant him the platform to do so.
Worse still he is prepared to defend the consistently aberrant, cruel, wicked, deviant and ungodly behaviour of the government that he serves with nothing less than the most bombastic and obvious lies, wholesale mendacities, false accusations, malicious fabrications and notorious and skewered half truths.
He has no conscience, no feeling, no empathy for his victims, no compassion, no mercy and no milk of human kindness.
One wonders if a man that is prepared to treat others so unjustly and defend it publicly can ever make it to heaven? One wonders whether they believe in God and if so whether they have any fear of Him.
It is clear to me that somewhere in the equation madness has crept into Lie’s confused and irreverent psyche. He deserves to be pitied and, more importantly, he needs a lot of help and prayer. The sleazy job that he has been doing for the last two years has taken its toll and has got the better of him.
27 years ago when I first met Lie he used to be an absolute gentleman. Always wearing a smart suit and a crisp bow tie and always making concise and meaningful contributions to our many intense, contentious and oftentimes acrimonious discussions and public debates at the old September Club in Lagos, he was quite a sight to see.
He was a delight in those days. He was a man of his word, he always spoke the truth and it was a pleasure to be his friend. Sadly all that has changed.
In those days he was the affable and dependable “Lai” but today he is the truculent and cantankerous “Lie”.
In those days he was a man of unimpeachable honor and character who valued his integrity and reputation above all else but today he is a mere shadow and caricature of his former self.
He cuts a tragic figure that, over the years, found himself in bad company and that has degenerated very badly in terms of his virtues, his moral authority and his ability to stand for truth.
Simply put, he has sold his soul to the devil and he can now be rightly and accurately described as one of those that the Bible refers to as a “son of perdition”.
A Minister of Information and Culture that everyone hates, that no-one trusts, that no-one believes and that looks like a cross between an ageing chimpanzee and washed-up and weathered old scarecrow.
At least Shehu Garbage and Femi Adesina are a little bit more presentable and they try to be a little more refined, subtle and polished with their distortions of truth. Not so with Lie.
He is just a plain old-fashioned, crude, vulgar Goebellian propagandist and pernicious liar. Like his father Satan, there is no truth in him. He was a liar from the start and the father of lies.
The truth is that he should have been the spokesman for the Italian or Russian Mafia, the Turkish or Greek underworld, the Japanese Yakuza, the Chinese Kuomintang or one of the numerous Colombian and Mexican drug cartels and not the Minister of Information of Nigeria.
That is the sort of thing he was born do. I say this because deep down Lie is nothing but a cheap hood and a gangster.
He is a ghetto and gangster Minister who speaks for and represents a ghetto and gangster Government.
Femi Fani-Kayode is a lawyer, a Nigerian politician, an evangelical christian, an essayist, a poet and he was the Special Assistant (Public Affairs) to President Olusegun Obasanjo from July 2003 until June 2006. He was the minister of culture and tourism of the Federal Republic of Nigeria from June 22nd to Nov 7th 2006 and as the minister of Aviation from Nov 7th 2006 to May 29th 2007. He tweets from@realFFK.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
