Hunger: In defence of Bayo Onanuga

Presidential media adviser and frontline journalist, Bayo Onanuga, is in the eye of the storm. His curt, off-the-cuff, and seemingly unfeeling remark on a television programme last week — ‘I don’t see the level of hunger people are talking about’ — has earned him the rough edges of Nigerian tongues. He didn’t end there. The siege on the country by terrorists, bandits, and kidnappers, Onanuga suggested, is contrived by the media. ‘The way they report insecurity is as if the entire country is consumed’, he said. To Onanuga, the abduction of 39 pupils and teachers, and the maniacal slitting of Michael Oyedokun’s throat, are seemingly a mirage; perhaps just another of Shakespeare’s farcical plays.

Onanuga’s recent outing can be figuratively compared to two local varieties of vegetables. The Yoruba call them tètè and dágunró. By all standards, Onanuga is a Nigerian media icon. The history of the Nigerian press’s battle against military autocracy cannot be written without a sizeable chapter reserved for him and colleagues of similar persuasions, many of whom were martyred for the democracy we have today.

Tètè and dágunró are species of the same mother, with Siamese-like resemblance. However, while tete is an edible culinary recourse, dágunró is a harnful, punishing cuisine. Elders warn that attempting to cook them together in the same pot ends in disaster (Ìje tí e je tètè, e má je dágunró). That, to me, was what happened to Onanuga last week. How did a man who fought valiantly with his pen on the side of the people during military regimes now irreverently smash both dágunró and tètè with his molars? By cavalierly dismissing the widespread hardship and insecurity that ordinary Nigerians suffer, Onanuga seems to have mistaken dágunró, the Nigerians of military rule Nigeria, for tètè, Nigerians under Bola Tinubu’s suzerainty. To the Nigerian people, this felt like a friend plunging a dagger into their hearts.

This same dagger to the heart echoes the Ides of March on 15 March 44 B.C. When Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a conspiracy led by his trusted ally and protege, Marcus Junius Brutus, literature and history offered different accounts. Shakespeare famously invented the line Et tu, Brute?—And you, Brutus? But historians note that a popular rumour in Rome at the time was that a dying Caesar, struck by the ultimate betrayal, groaned in Greek: Kai sy, teknon?—You too, child?

That figurative question is exactly what the Nigerian common people asked Onanuga last week. His interventionist trajectory on their side decades ago belies his current offhand dismissal of their travails. When the Yoruba are pained beyond measure, let down, and colossally betrayed, they go pensive. From the stabs of their hearts emerge profound philosophical sayings. One of such is, “if the one restfully leaned on contemplates shifting from the comfort they offer, they at least should inform those who leaned on them, lest they fall face-first on the floor. This, they articulate as, eni a f’èyìn tì, bí ó ba yè, wíwí níí wí. Did Onanuga give ample notice that he had defected to the ranks of their suppressors? Another aphorism, which I reproduced a few weeks ago here, comes when they are anguish-propelled. Permit me to again bring it out of my scabbard. It is a rhetorical question. It is, “Broken bottle on our forehead, bludgeon on the back; Is this how they play comradeship at the Ede market?” Its parent word is actually, Òpáláńbá ń’wájú, kùmò l’éyìn orùn, sé b’òjú ti rí nìyí, t’áa fi ńje obì l’ójà Ede?

Or could Onanuga’s sin be more than mere betrayal? Beyond an inability to see naked insecurity and extreme poverty, could it be a failure to propitiate Èṣù, the god of the mouth; and the human mouth deity, which the Yoruba call Olúbọbọtiribọ? In Yoruba spiritual anatomy, the mouth is the Baba Ebo — the father of all sacrifices. It occupies a delicate position, balancing both the body’s ingress and egress forces. Just as no human bone is as strategic as the teeth – a la Ayinla Omowura – so is the mouth. The graveyard of political power in Nigeria is littered with bones of officeholders who run foul of Olúbọbọtiribọ by failing to give the mouth its cross-functional due regards. Those who despise the god of the mouth are cast in the sewage of history. Did Onanuga fail the mouth deity in this regard?

Consider 9 April 1992, when General Ibrahim Babangida proscribed the African Concord magazine. A publication by the magazine, which marked Onanuga’s 30th month as editor, had published a highly critical cover story titled “Has Babangida Given Up”? It questioned the military government’s sincerity. Earlier, Babangida had told editors of The Guardian, in an interview, that he was enamoured of Chaka, the Zulu warrior and Hannibal, the Carthaginian war General of the Second Punic War. Reminded by the astounded editors that both were ruthless, smilingly, his gap-toothed grin flipped open, Babangida reiterated that, regardless, he was in love with the deadly Generals. In that offending edition penned by another media icon, Dapo Olorunyomi, African Concord then concluded, “Will (IBB) the man who has pulverised the civil society and noble institutions make it”?

Thoroughly embarrassed, Babangida told the magazine’s publisher, his friend, Moshood Abiola, that only a personal apology penned by the impious Onanuga could bring back the Concord Press. Abiola then summoned Onanuga, demanding an apology to propitiate the gap-toothed god.

Rather than yield, Onanuga penned a resignation letter to Abiola, stating: ‘Journalism, especially the one to which I subscribe, is not meant to make the environment cosy for leaders of nations; it is meant to cause them sleepless nights… What shall I be apologising for’? When Onanuga and his friends went on to found TheNEWS, he declared their ideological underpinning by saying, yes, they were independent, but this ‘is no excuse for opportunism and spineless neutrality in the major issues that affect the wellbeing of the Nigerian people. We shall be partisanly (sic) neutral on the side of truth, justice and good government’.

Thirty-four years later, sitting regally as a media adviser to a principal who is eighth in the line of succession to Babangida, the military General, why would Onanuga eat dágunró and tètè with the same teeth?

In that same television interview, Onanuga was mealy-mouthed. While on one hand denying the harrowing fate of Nigerians, he advised civil servants earning N70,000 minimum wage thus: ‘If I work for government and I am earning N70,000, except I am crazy or dumb lazy, I will go and do something at (sic) the side to add to my income’. Does he know he was urging workers to run counter to Section 2(b) of the Fifth Schedule of the 1999 Constitution, which forbids “something at (sic) the side”, as well as the 2021 Public Service Rules, which prohibits most public servants, with few exemptions, from engaging in any other business?

 In the interview, Onanuga said: ‘We have been pigeon-holed into certain assumptions and conclusions’. Assumptions of hunger, conclusion of suffering? By this, he placed the people in a pigeonhole, rubbishing as non-existent the hunger and suffering of the same Nigerian poor he fought for, took barbs for and escaped military juntas’ death pills for.

 But, come to think of it, what has the pigeon (eyelé), got to do with a hole? The pigeon is a totem of fidelity, one of the most loyal animals on earth. The Yoruba believe that when a pigeon hibernates with a landlord, sharing meals and drinks with him, she will not abandon him on the day of his travail. In emergencies, pigeons even alert neighbours with their chirrups. So, why would Onanuga use this metaphor to torment ordinary Nigerians with their friend, the eyelé? If he says the prevailing national agony is contrived, could we logically conclude that the tyranny he painted of the military era was equally contrived?

Indeed, the graveyard of political power is filled with victims of Olúbọbọtiribọ. On 22 September 2017, presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu was similarly struck. The Muhammadu Buhari presidency, he announced, neither believed nor classified killer herdsmen as terrorists, but merely as ‘criminal gangs’. Later, in June 2021, reports emerged claiming the government had reached a truce worth N100 billion with Miyetti Allah, allegedly offered as ransom for wanton killings and kidnappings. Today, Nigerians see Buhari – God rest his soul – as complicit in the orgy of terrorist strikes we face today, as much as his hirelings dressed in media visors.

Take Alhaji Umaru Dikko, as another instance. As the powerful Minister of Transport under Shehu Shagari, amid widespread cries of poverty, Dikko infamously stated that he could not believe Nigerians were hungry because they had not yet started eating from dustbins. Dikko alone has the patent of the Onanuga statement.

Olúbọbọtiribọ similarly struck then-Colonel David Mark. At the height of his majesty as Nigeria’s Minister for Communications, in 1989, during an infrastructure inspection tour in Akure, Mark told debtors that ‘telephone is not for the poor’. It was seen as the ultimate symbol of elitism, class division, and disdain for the ordinary people.

The deity was equally unsparing of Mohamed Sa’ad Abubakar, the Sultan of Sokoto. As reported by the BBC on 29 July 2011, while fuming against a military crackdown on Boko Haram insurgents, Abubakar told a gathering of religious leaders, ‘we cannot solve violence with violence’. This was at a time when gallant Nigerian forces had brutally suppressed the uprising of the sect and killed its leader, Mohammed Yusuf. The Sultan even demanded that the five policemen on trial for Yusuf’s killing must never be given bail.

 Recently, First Lady Oluremi Tinubu fell victim to Olúbọbọtiribọ. Addressing the nation’s economic despair, she touted the ‘hope’ of granting women money to start roasting corn or making àkàrà and kúlí-kúlí. In an address to State House Correspondents last Wednesday, she said: ‘We’re trying to give hope, and to start àkàrà business doesn’t take a lot of money. To start roasting corn, or somebody even said kúlí-kúlí doesn’t take much…’ she said.

The remarks have since provoked nationwide outrage. This was the same woman who, a few weeks prior, mandated state governors of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to gift party women befitting vehicles, most likely SUVs worth multiple of millions of Naira. Did Nigerian women vote for her husband only to be tied down to a ‘renewed hope’ of frying àkàrà? Invoking the parallelism of literature that can be tied to this àkàrà frying”, we can conveniently say, for the Nigerian women in the hands of the First Lady, they are in a ‘from frying pan to fire’ situation. It reminded citizens of the ancient Yoruba saying about governmental duplicity: the same dog that tenderly feeds her own baby with breast milk ferociously hunts down the offspring of the grasscutter. Did Nigerian women vote for her husband as president only to be tied down to a renewed hope of bakers of kúlí-kúlí and àkàrà?

In saner climes, an infraction against Olúbọbọtiribọ earned its victims banishment from representing the people. Here, they are garlanded. Some say it is due to the highly burnished Nigerian short memory.

It reminds me of Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa. By 1964, the violent political crisis in Nigeria’s Western Region had escalated. Balewa, who projected the image of an “unworried” and “unconcerned” Prime Minister with his “ominous silence”, was pummeled by the Western Region media. It is the same way Bola Tinubu is harangued for worsening hunger and killings in Nigeria today. Balewa still projected a façade of insulation from the worsening fate of the West and of being someone who didn’t read newspapers. On a tour of Benin in June 1964, still feigning ignorance of the crisis, Balewa was quoted as saying that he could not judge the intensity of lawlessness in the West on the basis of newspaper reports of brigandage. Last week, Onanuga, also took sizeable slices of this Balewa omelette that precipitated blood when he said media reportage of insecurity and hunger was contrived.

Worse still, as Balewa departed Nigeria for Accra to attend a meeting of the Organisation of African Unity in October 1965, he was still quoted to have alleged that the violence in the region was contrived. While at the Ikeja Airport, he was asked by journalists what he was going to do about the fire raging in Western Nigeria. Successfully tucking his brother inside his flowing babanriga, Tafawa Balewa reportedly looked around and cynically declared, ‘Ikeja is part of the West, and I cannot see any fire burning’. That same fire consumed him on 15 January 1966. It was a case of a disease that would kill one which is always pampered and treated with kid gloves.

While Dikko’s unguarded comment on the state of the Nigerian people riled the public, it survived for three and a half decades before Onanuga plucked it from its inglorious rafters. Dikko’s was widely remembered as a symbol of governmental disconnect from the reality of the people. Like Second Republic Nigeria where politicians mismanaged the economy amid dwindling oil revenues, which resulted in mass suffering and extreme scarcity of basic commodities, Nigerians are back to this inglorious era. With Onanuga’s claim and Remi Tinubu’s condescending take on the development of the Nigerian woman, we may have heard the defining summary of the Tinubu government about Nigerian citizens’ plight.

As Dikko’s comment reflected the Shagari government’s tone-deafness to the people’s plight, Onanuga and Mrs. Tinubu’s have effectively summarised what the current administration thinks of its citizens. No wonder Dikko, who waited for Nigerians to feed from dustbins, was eventually given the dustbin treatment in December 1983 — abducted in London, drugged, and crated like a bin commodity. Olúbọbọtiribọ, it seems, smilingly takes its pound of flesh.

This is the only defence I can offer for my senior colleague in journalism’s fascination with Diko, Balewa and other victims of Olúbọbọtiribọ.