OP-ED Opinions 

Femi Adesina: Our Bootlickers Are So Clever By Half! By Kunle Wizeman Ajayi

One Professor Femi Olufunmilade; the Director of the Buratai Centre for Contemporary Security Affairs at Igbinedon University, Okada has signed a “save-my-job” piece defending Femi Adesina; President Buhari’s media co-aide who is facing yet another shame of taking orders and glowingly defending one of the bosses he had famously penned against.

Adesina is on the hot seat facing same public mess as Festus Keyamo who had to work as a junior minister under Gosdwill Akpabio, the same ex-governor he led the EFCC prosecutions against earlier when he used to pretend as an activist lawyer.

Olufunmilade tries so much to appease and wish “both Prof. Gambari, our father, our teacher,  and (his) brother, Adesina, a good working relationship in the service of President Buhari and Nigeria.” The professional praise-singer and media jobber who wrote our “First Lady, First Lover” book of tributes to Stella Obasanjo is well known for his back and forth “media dramas” and professional hustlings. Olufunmilade is a metaphor of what the Yorubas call “alagbe”- a bard without discipline who would praise and defend anyone once you are spraying the money and favours.

Only an alagbe would posit in a paragraph that Adesina was correct to have blasted Ibrahim Gambari in his “Gambari: The Slap Next Time” over his appointment by late President Yar’adua to lead the Niger Delta Amnesty Programme, and in the next believes that it doesn’t matter for a “professional journalist who owes the reading public his honest views” to years later be able to “work smoothly with anyone, not the least someone he disagreed with on just one issue in a fleeting context”.  


Only an alagbe would call Adesina “a God-fearing man with strong convictions” who wouldn’t have accepted to be media aide “from Abacha had he transmuted to a civilian president before God called him suddenly!” The same Adesina and Shehu Garba had spiritedly defended Buhari for saying Abacha was not corrupt!? 

Boot lickers have no principles and can work for even the devil once their pockets are stached. If not, a principled Femi Adesina should have resigned on the appointments of Gambari as Chief of Staff for till date, the Niger Delta is in gory pains over the destruction of its land and wealth by our rulers and the multi nationals. Only actors got amnesty, but the carcasses of the wicked old is still ravaging the Niger Delta just as Buhari’s promises to clean Ogoni and some other oil producing lands of gas flaring and other environmental hazardous creations of the multinationals; remains a fake promise!

I agree with Olufunmilade however that Adesina should be able to work smoothly with Gambari in the further looting and systemic destructions of whatever is left in our commonwealth. Afterall, both are birds of a feather. Gambari used his brilliance to defend Abacha and will employ same to defend Buhari. Adesina also jumped to limelight defending Orji Kalu (an Abacha/Obasanjo trained ex-governor of Abba state still cooling off in jail for corruption), and has been defending Buhari. Fascist intellects would always defend fascist governments!

Adesina is truly “working with President Buhari as a matter of conviction in the patriotic mission and integrity” of further messing up Nigeria to the effects that today the country lacks the capacity to handle covid-19 and hunger viruses parading the logjam we are facing in pains. Olufunmilade should save us his long and loud shouts in the wilderness of misfits and hypocrisy. 

A people cannot continue to live in the denial of its threatened existences. It is clear and audible to all that what we need is a country that will work for the majority and not a few elements cabalizing corruption and impunity while using military force and divisive tools like religion and ethnicity to keep millions in political and economic logjams. 

The best is for thinkers to stay principled and see beyond their pockets. The attack of Adesina on Gambari during the Yar’adua era was never for the good of Nigerians inspite of its timeliness; it was in service of Orji Kalu and other paymasters who used the public anger then to go against one of theirs only to support another. This is unlike Omoyele Sowore who attacked Gambari on June 12 in “The Undisgraced Collaborator” and till date still stands against same man and the fascist hegemony stoutly.

 Many jobbers are out there today as columnists and social media influencers writing for their pockets and private ambitions. They blow hot today and blow so cold tommorow. These elements are consciously promoted by our rulers as they know bootlickers are morally worse than harlots. 

Let me conclude this response by urging that media aiding is nothing bad. Only that it has to be done by principled persons for principled public servants. Happily, the late Adebayo Faleti, acting as the King’s bard in the classic movie “Saworo Ide”, after seeing the chiefs chasing away querying journalists; sang “yo maleyin, oro yi o maleyin” meaning that “this will backfire; this issue will have repercussions.”

Never a stale tale with “sound and fury”, it is embedded in practical consistency; fascism will fall flat when the people rise fully and unitedly; no reunion of the league of bootlickers will stop the revolutionary slap next time!

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