By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi Everyone who isn’t a victim of the current fascist mass hypnotism in Nigeria know...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
Everyone who isn’t a victim of the current fascist mass
hypnotism in Nigeria knows that Bukola Saraki was the target of a carefully
executed and well-funded rigging assault by the Buhari presidency. For
instance, a few days before the February 16 election, which was suspiciously
canceled at the last minute, the Directorate of Security of Services swapped
some State Directors of Security (SDS) in some states for what a source told me
was a plan to manipulate the electoral process in favor of Buhari and against
Buhari’s opponents.
I shared screenshots of the postings on my social media handles
and on my blog on February 13. I pointed out, for instance, that, “Bassey
Eteng, who is the DSS' Director of Operations (equivalent to DIG Operations in
the police) is going to lead election operations in Kwara State. (They decided
that they must wrestle Kwara State from Saraki in view of his centrality to the
Atiku campaign).”
Again, three days before the rescheduled elections on
February 23, at least two security sources told me Rafiu Ibrahim, Saraki’s
protégé who represents Kwara South in the Senate, would be arrested a day prior
to the election, among other things that came to pass, which the sources wanted
me to publicize on Facebook and Twitter. At that point, frankly, my enthusiasm
in the election had waned considerably because I’d known at that point that it
was all a grand, prodigal charade, so I didn’t share it.
Saraki was the object of a vast, single-minded, concentrated
federal assault. Nevertheless, he became an even easier target because of his
own avoidable vulnerabilities. They are two.
The first is Saraki’s arrogance. His notoriety for
overweening hauteur, particularly toward the people of Kwara State, is
legendary. He routinely humiliated even people old enough to be his father out
of pure, perverse self-conceit. One of my townsmen who was a professor here in
the United States and who returned home to “give back to the community” a few
years ago shared with me an experience he had with Saraki that captures
Saraki’s imperiousness.
He said Saraki asked to meet with elders of the Baruten
community in Kwara State, which included the area’s four emirs, over a
contentious issue regarding political representation. In light of his age,
education, and exposure, the professor was prevailed upon to be a part of the
delegation. He said the delegation arrived at the venue of the meeting on time
but that Saraki didn’t show up until several hours later.
When he arrived, he didn’t apologize for his lateness,
didn’t establish eye contact with anyone in the delegation, and proceeded to tongue-lash
every one of them in the most humiliating manner because he was miffed that they
had the impudence to oppose his political choice for the area. Then he stormed
out in a huff. The professor said many old men in the group felt so humiliated
and so crushed that they literally wept.
I don’t recall if this incident happened when Saraki was
governor or senate president, but this sort of insufferably overbearing
arrogance and cultural insensitivity defines the contours of his relational
dynamics with the people of the state—when he is not seeking their votes, that
is. Someone also called my attention to the fact that Saraki’s political
associates from Kwara State are often so subdued and so intimidated in his
presence that they don’t even sit on the same chair with him. In several photos
that I’ve seen, they either squat obsequiously or sit flat on the floor while
he sits alone on the chair with imperial airs.
To be fair to Saraki, this attitude of elite superciliousness
toward people thought to be socially subordinate is a Nigerian malaise. Nigerian
“big men”—and “big women”—seem to derive the cultural basis of their
superiority and dominance from inferiorizing people who are below them. The
degree of severity to which politicians inferiorize others may vary, but none
is exempt from it.
Nevertheless, Saraki’s own arrogance is aggrandized in Kwara
State, particularly in Ilorin Emirate, because it complements a strong,
well-oiled, if reactionary, nativist delegitimization of his Ilorin bona fides.
His political opponents from Ilorin have caused to percolate in Ilorin a
narrative that he isn’t really from Ilorin and that he isn’t even a Muslim.
Many Ilorin people have come to see him as a Lagos Yoruba carpetbagger who is
only masquerading as an Ilorin man but who nonetheless can’t help but evince
the age-old contempt southwestern Yoruba people have toward Ilorin people.
When Premium Times reported Ishaq Modibbo Kawu,
director-general of the National Broadcasting Commission and Ilorin native, to
have said in a closed WhatsApp group that the ancestral provenance of the
Saraki family isn’t locatable in Ilorin, I wrote a two-part series on August 18, 2018 and on August 25, 2018 titled “Ilorin
is an Ethnogenesis: Response to Kawu’s Anti-Saraki Ilorin Purism” to point out
the historical inexactitude of his
claims.
Most Ilorin people who responded to my interventions agreed
with my historicization and sociological characterization of the Ilorin
identity and saw merit in my condemnation of Kawu’s ahistorical Ilorin nativism,
but almost all of them said what delegitimizes Saraki’s Ilorin bona fides isn’t so much the
notion of his ancestral provenance as his cultural disaffiliation from the
people.
They pointed to the fact that when his child got married
recently, he did a wedding ceremony that was completely culturally alien to
Ilorin. It was an avoidable self-delegitimization that rankled a lot of Ilorin
people. They also say he doesn’t speak the Ilorin dialect of the Yoruba
language and that, in spite of his vast wealth, he neither has any investment
in Ilorin nor even a home outside his family house and the post-governorship
house built for him by the Kwara State government.
I have not independently verified the accuracy of these
claims, but they circulate widely and fuel a simmering discontent against him
among Ilorin people who are hypersensitive both about the cultural boundaries
of their identity and any hint of snobbery toward them particularly from southwest
Yoruba people. Olusola Saraki, Bukola Saraki’s dad, artfully navigated these
unspoken but nonetheless consequential cultural minefields.
People who wanted to shake off the senior Saraki’s grip on
Kwara politics also called to question his ancestral connection to Ilorin. AbdulGaniy
Folorunsho Abdulrazaq, northern Nigeria’s first lawyer and father of the
current APC candidate for governor of Kwara State, famously
said he knew Olusola Saraki’s father, known as Muktar Saraki, to be
from Abeokuta. But his nativist delegitimization of the senior Saraki didn’t
stick.
It didn’t stick because although the senior Saraki also
studied medicine in London and grew up partly in Lagos, he immersed himself in
the Ilorin cultural universe. He spoke the idioms and vernaculars of the
people. He was modest, down-to-earth, and generous. His religious piety didn’t
come across as forced and politically motivated. In short, he was indistinguishable
from the very Ilorin people Abdulrazaq wanted to divorce him from.
Bukola Saraki didn’t learn this basic skill in what I call
protective cultural mimicry, that is, the skill to embody and reflect the
cultural singularities of your immediate community so you don’t stand out like
a sore thumb. That was what rendered him vulnerable to the electoral onslaught
of the hawks of the Buhari presidency. In other words, Saraki’s Ilorin cultural
immunity was weak, which made him susceptible to an opportunistic presidential
infection during the election.
Related Articles:
No comments
Share your thoughts and opinions here. I read and appreciate all comments posted here. But I implore you to be respectful and professional. Trolls will be removed and toxic comments will be deleted.