By Sam Amadi
I am not an expert on treason or toxicity, but I am in love with the ‘ObiDients.’ They are an inconveniencing lot because they refuse to accept the excuses and arrogant nonsense of the so called elite.
Many ‘ObiDients’ are more intelligent, patriotic and sensible than those who either claim Emilokan, other feudal or class prerogatives.
How democratic are these lot who are putting down the ‘ObiDients’ if their idea of democracy is to make false statements and never get pushed back? If that is their conception of democracy or public reason, then they have not understood democracy.
By the way, I have not heard about the ‘ObiDients’ heckling anyone or refusing people their right to speak. You speak. They speak. They may speak more irreverently or more forcefully.
That is not a problem. Many who now put them down made their marks while shouting down authorities in more fiery and indecorous language than the ‘ObiDients’ now deploy. Soyinka is a famous bully. People freeze before him even when he’s dead wrong because he is Nigeria’s only Nobel Laureate and an exceptionally brilliant man and globally respected intellectual. He remains irreverent and often hawkish and bruising in his critique. Who can ever forget his indecent and undignified attack against Patience Goodluck, a mother and First Lady of the nation?
We all cower before Soyinka in spite of his less than brilliant political discourses and navigations. But here are irreverent people who don’t care about precedents or antecedents but will subject every statement to their own idiomatic or syntactic critique. What is wrong about that?
That is democratic. The credo of the ‘ObiDients’ seems to be “In God we trust, every other person must receive a retort.”
That is democracy. That is not a cult. If it is a cult, then it is a counter-cult to the prevailing cult of self-serving elitism.
Dr. Sam Amadi, a former Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), is the Director of Abuja School of Social and Political Thoughts.
