Ikhide Ikheloa toke to his Facebook page where he is called Pa Ikhide and lambasts Nigerian intellectuals for their ill-advised support for General Muhammadu Buhari’s candidacy. He may or may not have been reading this article by Wole Soyinka, The Crimes of Muhammadu Buhari when he decided to write this article.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] can count the number of Nigerian public intellectuals that are trustworthy on two fingers. And even those two I would be nervous about. ? They led Nigeria into this mess and now they are angry and spending their days yelling at Buhari. Buhari is fighting back with his minions using cheap blackmail and thuggery. But then many of the people that are now being blackmailed by their erstwhile APC friends are merely victims of their own perfidy, hoisted gleefully on their own petard.
Many of the PhD vuvuzelas and their poorly educated social media sidekicks who are now being hounded and humiliated by Buhari’s thugs perfected the art of blackmail and bullying and used it to try to maintain discipline among “the ranks.” Many reputations (mine included) were targeted simply because we refused to drink Tinubu’s burukutu. We are still standing and today they look sheepish. The first thing they must do, if they respect themselves and fellow Nigerians is to apologize for leading us astray. Until the, shame on all of them. I have to say, it is a great thing Buhari came along again; it demystified him and a lot of people, many of them allegedly highly educated. I have zero hope for Nigeria as long as these rented mourners are around. Let me repeat myself, with respect to Nigerian intellectuals, I can count those I trust and respect with two fingers… They should all go hang their greedy heads in shame. They have failed us.
Nigerian intellectuals are mostly lazy, self/serving merchants of sloth and malu droppings. Achebe says our problem is one of a failure of leadership. He is right; our intellectuals have failed us. Stop following them blindly like inebriated bees that fell into yesterday’s palm wine. Let me depress you further. We have had several “research institutes” since pre-colonial days. They have gulped hundreds of millions of dollars with nothing but loud talking “intellectuals” to show for it. You don’t believe me? Go to the websites of the Nigerian Institute For Oil Palm Research (NIFOR) and the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria. Nothing but broken links, trash talk and a yawning innocence of data. Na today?
Nigeria Institute of OilPalm Research
They should shut down every one of those colonial edifices and send everybody packing. Waste of money.
We may have hit rock bottom as Nigeria reels from a cocktail of incompetence, graft and buffoonery in the name of democracy, Those who knew Buhari’s sordid history, his dismal performance in the first coming, were irresponsible for sponsoring s return of hell. They should be called on it, instead of being praised for their dubious skills in writing long pompous essays criticizing the horrid state they hectored us into. The hubris is galling. If you are dumb enough to go to war again (!) with these characters, you deserve your hell.
It is true; in the face of tyranny, courage can be expensive.Those of us abroad, far away from the scene of the crime, can afford the courage. Those who compromised the integrity and future of Nigeria when (a lack of courage) was no excuse must reflect on why they did what they did. I am angry.
Let me be clear; it is hard to minimize Goodluck Jonathan’s contribution to this mess, he was incompetent and unfit to rule even a hut. But our people say when you are in a hole you should stop digging. Our thinkers and doers are postponing the structural work that must be done before we appropriate an alien method of governance. We urgently need a Marshall Plan. Structurally and culturally we are not ready for this democracy and our intellectuals and politicians know this. Instead, they set up a silly binary; Jonathan or Buhari and if you refused this perverse logic, you were mauled. Now they are the beneficiaries of their dysfunction. I am not weeping in my beer. If you don’t believe me, read Soyinka on Buhari, again.
Ikhide Ikheloa is a writer and literary critic. He is one of The Trent’s Elite Bloggers. He tweets from @ikhide.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
