Pride and pettiness

 You could measure a man’s depth through his handling of irritations – warranted or not – by his linkages.

On 13^th August, this year, United States President Donald Trump got a question at a media parley on his country’s experience of the Covid-19 pandemic that left him off-beat. But he managed to hold his famous bile. Senior White House correspondent of The Huffington Post, Shirish Dáte, had raised his hand casually and was recognised by Trump, who never liked the pen tribe or made pretences about it, to ask his question. Dáte, however, broke from the conventional line of questioning to pose a simple, but cutting question: “Mr President, after three-and-a-half years, do you regret at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people?” Trump was visibly blindsided and struggled to get his bearing by asking the reporter: ‘All the what?” Dáte was not fazed, he rather dug in calmly, saying: “All the lying, the dishonesties.” You could see Trump yet straining for a handle as he further asked: “That who’s done?” Dáte, who earlier this year wrote a lengthy piece about Trump’s ‘Ministry of Untruth,’ doubled down and riposted: “That you have done.” To this, the president was lost for an answer, paused momentarily and moved on to another journalist for the next question.

To be sure, President Trump, with his ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ hounding of the American media, and sometimes physical manhandling of journalists isn’t the best contemporary example of liberal media culture. His relevance here is how under the circumstance, he restrained his virulent instincts and did not shut down the press conference or ask that Dáte be thrown out. He got the point apparently that journalists must do their job, if atimes irritatingly.

Jane Austen titled her famous romantic novel published in 1813 Pride and Prejudice. If she played the seer like George Orwell did with his Nineteen Eighty-Four, she might have produced another work titled Pride and Pettiness with a lead character like ‘Short Fuse’ Femi Fani-Kayode. The former aviation minister is not just grossly primitive in media culture, he is a poster boy of antediluvian arrogance. No public figure in this country ever displayed such depth of primitivism as he did with journalists in Cross River State penultimate week, and he has much to learn about decency of conduct in a liberal space.

Many things do not add up in Fani-Kayode’s self-assigned mission of inspecting projects in different states across this country, and it is beyond begging the question that he is being bankrolled for the publicity spree. Actually, if that question wasn’t raised sooner than later, he should have written off Nigerian journalists as a congenitally dumb lot, and he would be perfectly on point. The former minister said he’d been going round the states on non-partisan basis to inspect projects by respective governor, and had already been to Anambra, Zamfara and five others since the end of Covid-19 lockdown. It is legitimate to ask in what capacity, since we do not run the British parliamentary model where he could’ve been shadow works minister? Not even that he is a principal officer of opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to be in reckoning for such role.

Still, nothing matches the indecorum of the tantrum thrown by Fani-Kayode at the media conference he called in Calabar to celebrate the infrastructure strides of Cross River Governor Ben Ayade. At that parley, attended by correspondents of major media houses and moderated by Ayade’s media mouthpiece, the ex-minister flew off the handle when Daily Trust correspondent Eyo Charles asked who was funding the projects inspection and media junket, bristling: “What type of stupid question is that? Bankrolling who? Do you know who you are talking to?” Glaring sideways at the event moderator sitting close by, he said he wasn’t taking further questions from Charles. “What type of insulting question is that? Which bankroll? To do what? Who can give me money for anything? Who do you think you are talking to? Bankroll what? Go and report yourself to your publisher.” The governor’s spokesperson and the embattled correspondent assayed pacifying the angry ex-minister, but he was too riled to bulge. “I could see from your face before you got here, how stupid you are. Don’t ever talk to me like that,” he yelled at the reporter.

‘(FFK) is not just grossly primitive in media culture, he is a poster boy of antediluvian arrogance’

To take a step back, Trump is a sitting POTUS (President of the United States), yet he took Dáte’s deliberately affronting question in stride. Fani-Kayode has only been a two-time ex-minister and former presidential spokesman, and he wouldn’t brook perceived insult by a journalist. But that is just by the way; more important is to fact-check his assertions. “Don’t judge me by your own standards. I have been in politics since 1990. I am not one of those politicians you think will just come…I have been locked up how many times by this government. I have been prosecuted, unlike most of these politicians you follow for brown envelopes! I spend, I don’t take and I am not a poor man, I have never been and will never be,” he yelled at beleaguered Charles. His venomous rant left the targeted journalist and others at the media conference so stupefied they could not muster further questions, upon which he himself abruptly got up and left the room. He later apologised, but his equivocation left that apology too hollow.

The reality, though, is that Fani-Kayode’s odyssey in public life was never like he made it out to be. He has never been consistent in disposition or political convictions. He came into political office as Special Assistant on Public Affairs to former President Olusegun Obasanjo – a job he got by having previously been a fierce critic of Obasanjo, hence his appointment being Obasanjo’s tactical manoeuvre to plug his throat. He did the job of spokesmanship so unexceptionably that when he was nominated for ministerial office in 2006, he had to apologise to Nigerians, especially those he crossed while discharging his assigned duty. “I was Mr. President’s armour bearer, and I regret having offended anyone in the course of protecting the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria,” he told senators who grilled him for more than two hours before his confirmation as minister.

Not that his loyalty to Obasanjo was unqualified. In the course of his shifty alliances from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC) and back to PDP, he was spokesman for the re-election campaign of former President Goodluck Jonathan and, in that capacity, took on Obasanjo for his opposition to Jonathan. In February 2015, Fani-Kayode branded Obasanjo reckless for alleging that Jonathan was planning “Gbagbo treatment” for Nigeria in that year’s poll. “It is vital that we consider his motives for this latest outburst and his credentials as a leader and elder statesman,” he said of Obasanjo. Years earlier, September 2013 specifically, he had advised Jonathan to beg antagonistic Obasanjo and forgo his speculated 2015 presidential bid, without which the crisis in PDP would not abate. When Obasanjo was subsequently reported saying Fani-Kayode is “a smart boy; provide him food, he will eat and then sing for you,” he was coming from a universe not characterised by someone who gives and never takes.

Even the claim by Fani-Kayode of having been locked up and prosecuted was not as he made it seem. True, he was detained and prosecuted, but not for his convictions by the present administration; it was rather by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) over a N4.9billion fraud allegation against him that is yet to be sorted out in court.,

If truly Fani-Kayode is funding his projects inspection tour and accompanying media fest out of pocket, I would have challenged him to go to Lagos State where he would not be guided or funded by the government that is presently fighting a defining battle containing the Covid-19 pandemic. But I ain’t even taking issues with him in the present matter. I would rather charge journalists that next time he shows up in your sphere, drill him to no end about how he got the money of his own he is spending and his tax profile with the authorities.