Festus Adedayo’s failed belittling of Adewole Adebayo: A case of spurious generalization! 

“No matter what stories others tell us, their actions will always reveal their true intentions.”

 – Charles F. Glassman

Just yesterday I came across an article written by ace columnist, Festus Adedayo, titled “Nasir El-Rufai and The Philosophy of Nothing”.

Even before you start reading the article, the title already betrays its malice aforethought.  Historically, columnists, like  littérateurs and, even, philosophers have been pivotal to shaping public opinion and coursing pathways to innovative ideas and ideologies that helped societies rediscover and redefine themselves in order to realign their sociopolitical realities to contemporary trends.

They are the self-appointed conscience of society. They are,  oftentimes, knowledgeable with a vast repository of sociological and scientific hypothesis for societal navigation. This earns them considerable esteem wherever they practice their literary prowess. They are a delight to intellectually inquisitive minds who feel refreshed by the sophisticated insights that they deploy in enlightening society.

Writer-philosophers/thinkers contributed immensely to birthing the Enlightenment that gained traction from the 17th century, although the craving for higher knowledge began about a century earlier.

Revolutionary intellectuals like René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Isaac Newton, were particularly important in giving birth to the Enlightenment in Europe through their regnant writings.

It eventually spread to the United States, where it won great converts like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson who pushed vigorously for American nationalism and and a just society where the citizens had a  say in how they were governed and who governed them.

The Enlightenment valued knowledge gained through rationalism and empiricism, concerned itself with a variety of social ideas and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, equity, fraternity, constitutional government, and the formal separation of Church and state.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of my ultimate favorites, and Thomas Paine were among the writer-philosophers of that era whose fiery works provoked revolutionary combustions in the 18th century. Rousseau’s writings were among the triggers of the French revolution that terminated the oppressive monarchical system in France via the 1789 mass revolts. His indelible work, The Social Contract, extensively interrogated the purpose of government and its essential responsibility to citizens. No longer should a ruler claim divine sovereignty to rule the people at whim. A situation of “l’état est moi” as pompously selfacclaimed by Louis the XVI became anathematic to the sensibilities of the people and totally spurned.

From around the mid-80s, Nigeria’s journalism witnessed a dramatic transposition from its lethargic reportage of “as the government says it” to a golden era of investigative journalism that significantly upset Nigeria’s media landscape.  Dele Giwa and his team of intrepid media gurus imploded on Nigeria’s journalism scene with a variant of journalism that completely transformed it into volcanic activism.

The Newswatch magazine, founded by Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu, Dan Agbese, and Yakubu Mohammed, began publishing in January 1985, with its first edition distributed on January 28th. It immediately became the highest circulating newsmagazine in Nigeria due to its constant exposé of the rot in government and society at large. This made the military government of the day so uncomfortable that several attempts were made to shut it down. But Newswatch had garnered enormous population of readers that treated it like a holy book of sort. Every newspaper reader in  Nigeria, including yours truly, never wanted to miss any edition of the publication. I still have some editions of the magazine in my study till date.

Newswatch became the flagship of Nigeria’s journalism. This wasn’t just because of its regular scoops, but also the perspicacious  feature articles penned weekly by the editors. As a student then, I read Dele Giwa, Dan Agbese, Ray Ekpu,  and Yakubu Mohammed religiously.

Their writings combined literary  sophistication with an educated use of the English language. Dele Giwa was particularly ingenious with his unique style of masterful, elegant play on words and captivating insight. The other three were no less polished in their exceptional art of penning articulative articles. The quartet became a reference point of courageous, knowledgeable, and professional journalism in Nigeria. They blazed unprecedented trails that many media establishments are still struggling to verge on today decades after Newswatch had hit bad times and rested. Dele Giwa and co wrote passionately and patriotically even at the risk of their lives. Dele Giwa was to eventually pay the supreme price with his life on October 19th 1986 when he was letter-bombed by suspected agents of state.

Festus Adedayo is one columnist that displays something close to what that quartet represented in Nigeria’s golden age of journalism. He writes with the ferocious adamancy of an intrepid patriot committed to articulating Nigeria’s social realities as exactly they are. He comes across as an intellectually resourceful journalist with a deep ocean of knowledge and sociopolitical historicity. He is someone you could say knows his onions well. I’m a big fan!

But the article I referenced above seems to expose a different side of this celebrated columnist hitherto unknown. While I believe that he substantially served Malam Nasir El-Rufai a well-deserved portion of what’s due to him,  his attack on Adewole Adebayo was not only preposterous but  absolutely ill-informed. He claimed in that article that he knew next to nothing about Adewole except for the third-party information he had gotten from fellow journalists, yet he went ahead to form a precipitate opinion about a man you knew next to nothing about. He based the totality of his opinion of the man on just one television interview which he latched on to condemn him to political perdition.

Festus attempted a character assassination of Prince Adewole Adebayo by what philosophers describe as ‘fallacy of hasty generalization’ when he wrote that.

“Adewole Adebayo, 2023 presidential candidate of the PDP had come on an interview session on a national television. I had heard of his trumped up brilliance from journalists who earlier interviewed him. At that interview session, gradually, Adebayo defrosted all those superlatives with which he was robed. By the time the interview session ended, in place of a huge turkey with huge feathers I expected to encounter, I was left with a species of hen Yoruba call “Adiye opipi”. This type of hen is known by a unique characteristic of featherless wings. Adebayo came across as this and much more. I saw a man who delights in a horse ride that takes place on the back of a cockroach. When you see such politicians, your mind races to a spent cannister”.

Reading that article from beginning to the end, you don’t need a crystal ball to see political jobbing unfolding. I have my issues with former Governor El-Rufai because of his controversial statements about Christianity that I find awfully reckless and his admission of paying terrorists which many interpreted as equipping them to fight against the people of Southern Kaduna who are predominantly Christian. As if to confirm the anti-Christian allegations against him,  he arrogantly made a fellow Muslim his running mate for his second term. These, inter alia, are things I find unacceptable in El-Rufai’s political profile. So, I have no energy to spare in defence of Malam El-Rufai.

However, Festus Adedayo’s article written against him and Adewole Adebayo smacks of a paid political blackmail – a hatchet’s job,  so to speak. El-Rufai only recently decamped from the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC to the Social Democratic Party, SDP while Adebayo Adewole’s political profiles seem to be gaining exponential momentum of recent. He is also a member of the SDP, perhaps one of its oldest members. Therefore, something fishy is going on. There have been coordinated attacks against the SDP recently and that’s no surprise at all. I’m not a member of the SDP – not yet.

It is an open secret that the presidency has been working at an overdrive to turn the country into a one-Party state where only the APC will be the only surviving political Party. We see this in the manners in which sponsored and unending crises are ravaging opposition political Parties since after the 2023 general elections. The People’s Democratic Party is today like a hen perched on a rope with the consequence of both the hen and the rope getting into a continuous yo-yo dance of collective discomfort. The cause and the instigators of this aren’t farfetched.

Ditto the Labour Party. Since during and after the 2023 elections, LP has been enmeshed in an endless circle of leadership crises with all fingers pointing in the direction of the powers that be. All these shenanigans are geared towards inflicting maximum damage on the capacity of the opposition to organize prior to the 2027 general elections and contest effectively against the APC. It is a brutal political chessgame contrived by ferocious political wolves hellbent on holding on to power no matter how much they are rejected by Nigerians. It is a case of cold-blooded political butchery of  opposition Parties with targeted fatal strikes through the application of the enormous machinery of the state.

It is within that context of the planned political annihilation of the opposition that sponsored articles against opposition figures with promising political leverage to upset the APC in 2027 have been surfacing with much aggression lately. Rogue columnists are smiling to the banks executing contracted hatchet’s jobs in the service of antidemocratic goons by throwing away established culture of decorum, decency, integrity, intellectualism, and professionalism in newspaper column concept.

Adewole Adebayo might not meet the standards of loquacity or garrulousness expected by Festus, but he sure communicates deep and uncommon insights on relevant issues of the economy, security, international diplomacy, leadership competence,  and allied governance issues.

Prince Adewole is far from the naked neck/turken (adiyẹ òpìpì) that Festus tried to robe him in.

He is as an astute international lawyer and highly successful businessman with a global network and considerable networth, possesses a formidable intellectual cubage that is cinch for anyone to see except for the deliberately mischievous on the payroll of implacable adversaries.

As a presidential material, Adewole’s young age, his no-baggage ID, clean records as an incorruptible patriot, a visionary with a revolutionary mindset, his cultured mien, native intelligence buoyed by a brilliant educated mind, his sharp faculty for effortless interrogation and disaggregation of seemingly complicated sociopolitical subects, his unassuming persona, and an indubitable, genuine passion for a Nigeria that works for all and sundry are inimitable by his political contemporaries – and adversaries alike.

It is only rogue columnists who don’t carry out a thorough research on individuals before slagging them off who can attempt to belittle a giant in full view. The Yoruba would say “àjànàku kọja mo ri nkan fìri, ti a ba r’erin k’a sọpe ar’erin”. Meaning,  an elephant is bigger than a mere silhouette, if you see an elephant you can’t mistake its identity. But in the brazen business of professional blackmailing and character assassination, an elephant could be likened to a rattus osgoodi,  the smallest rat in the world.

That is the tragedy of intellectual roguery.

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