FWD: Femi Fani-Kayode : The Irretrievable Breakdown of Marriage Between Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi
Cornelius Hamelberg
Cornelius Hamelberg
NIGERIA'S POLITICAL HARLOTS By S. KADIRI was followed by PETER OBI: A POLITICAL FUGITIVE AND VAGABOND By S. KADIRI .and now it’s about that famous duo once again, this time it’s The Irretrievable Breakdown of Marriage Between Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi by Femi Fani-Kayode
Their knives are out,
but we must lighten the tensions,
realign their best of intentions
Femi Fani-Kayode has a very good reason to be grateful to his benefactor, he also has a right to shout and to rave about him, he has a right to shower blessings on him too, has a right to even go overboard in being grateful, having just bagged a top appointment as Nigeria’s Ambassador to South Africa - appointed by none other than President Bola Ahmed Tinubu !
Alhamdulillah! Mighty Congratulations ! Mazel Tov ! Hallel-u-Jah!
Hark! the herald angels sing, "Glory to the newborn King !”
If President Tinubu’s smooth-talking, eloquent, praise-singing, soothsaying hagiographer is telling us the gospel truth, then the winner of the January 2027 Presidential election is a foregone conclusion, it is not going to be a another cliff-hanger Mother of all Nigerian Presidential Elections, if anything, it’s most probably going to be a walkover for the incumbent because, as his faithful, soothsaying hagiographer says, “No matter what you throw at him, he comes out on top.”
So Obi & Atiku, don’t even try throwing something at him, as if you don’t know the meaning of Boomerang.
It’s such a tantalizing headline, “the irretrievable breakdown ofAtiku Abubakar and Peter Obi’s marriage”. As a matter of sociological interest - for Diaspora specialists, the learned mostly missionary -educated Saro people are fond of quoting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds - perhaps no longer relevant here if indeed the marriage of these two leading lights of the now defunct PDP was never an ideological marriage to begin with. ( And by the way, according to the Quran , God does not like people getting divorced. )
Sure, even if they are now irreconcilable this is no time for levity, but the headline about such strange, incongruous, odd and unlikely bedfellows puts me in mind of that Simon and Garfunkel melody “America” which begins
"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together
I've got some real estate here in my bag"
Strange incongruous, odd and unlikely bedfellows.
So, who’s the husband, and who is the wife-y? Obi?
Can you close your eyes and imagine Sleeepy Joe Biden & Donald J Trump welded together as husband and wife - even as a political marriage of convenience in the United States ofAmerica, Trump of course, wanting to make his America ( his phallus) Great Again. As the late beat poet Allen Ginsberg - extraordinarily gay, said in his poem “America”, “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb ! “
Exactly the kind of unholy expression that would have been coming from any of the religious leaders ofIran to Donald J.Trump, if they were not so holy :
“Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb ! “
But here’ its Nigeria we’äre talking about, and the genesis of the palaver goes back to the 2022 Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential primary when it was time for Obi to capture the party ticket and Atiku couldn’t agree that it was time for Obi to be on top this time ( no more Missionary Position).
For most of us back then it was sympathy for Obi at that juncture
Cornelius Hamelberg
If my earlier comments seem to have been unduly influenced by Shakespeare’s Bawdy, today being Ascension Thursday, I repent of them and herein offer ( proffer?) my sin-cere apologies.
Thankfully, Leo Spitzer , the author of The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism 1870-1945 is still with us. Sadly, Arthur Thomas Daniel Porter III, the author of Creoledom, is gone, and Abner Cohen the author of The Politics of Elite Culture, is also gone. Chapter 4 of his “Elite Cultures" is about the Sierra Leone Creoles and is a good grounding background that throws some light on what I’m saying here.
Ibi Ibi - nah yawo heavy so !
Yes indeed, at weddings in Sierra Leone, some of the learned Saro who love to pontificate, often quote, 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, as a homily, and Shakepeare’s Sonnet 116 which I first heard delivered live and direct by John Rosolu Bankole Thompson ( a Saro stalwart) in his case it was in the classroom. I intuited it as an admonition at the time.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
…..
“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom “ … etc etc
This is what some mischief-makers sometimes say either before or after the damage or the crime that they intended to commit : ” I pray that they forgive me because, as usual, I mean them no harm, I wish them no ill and I come in peace”
Femi Fani-Kayode’s ominous title “The Irretrievable Breakdown of Marriage Between Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi” is an open invitation, a temptation, as the would-be respondents, commentators, friends and foes alike understand the potential for satire, ridicule, and some ribaldry so easily provoked by such a title.
Innocent questions such as when did Messrs Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi get married ?
And if Obi later on had the gumption to tell his Daddy ( not the one in heaven) that “It’s a religious war”, surely he had made a very fundamental mistake from the very beginning with the very idea of a Muslim-Christian or a Christian Muslim ticket, from his own Christian Bible point of view, how could he possibly have entered into any kind of marriage / Holy Matrimony with Alhaji Atiku, in defiance of Paul's commandment,
And, not so crazy, I daresay that the idea of One Nigeria is the ideal worthy of attainment, even if, given the Nigerian political landscape with Obi ‘s Igbo ethnic enclave in the East and Femi Fani-Kayiode’s Yoruba in the West, the main thesis of Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West seems to be still ringing true :
“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;”
The fact is that even the best of alliances can break, and, sometimes it gets , has got or as Americanos say “has gotten” to the point where, Fela : Everything Scatter
However, we / they ( Obi & Co) ought not to be so pessimistic or negative; that improbable marriage (Atiku’s and Obi’s) is not beyond reconciliations and redemption, in my view, that marriage ( of true minds) could be both amended and mended to attain to some of the ideals enshrined in William Blake’s revolutionary, romantic, prophetic, forward -looking The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Last word to Obi & Atiku, North, South, East, West,
- One Nigeria in mind , dear Pope Leo XIV is advocating
that Christians and Muslims live in peace with each other
A long time ago, One Love Bob Marley too : So Jah S'eh
"And verily, verily, I'm saying unto thee
Unite yourself and love Imanity"
'Cause puss and dog, they get together
What's wrong with loving one another?
Puss and dog, they get together
What's wrong with you, my brother? “
Ibrahim Abdullah
Cornelius Hamelberg
P.S.
From a sociological point of view, the ever growing bibliography about the Sierra Leone Creoles/ Creoledom would be incomplete without the following:
Robert Wellesley Cole’s memoir Kossoh Town Boy
The Krio of Sierra Leone and H. C. Bankole-Bright and Politics in Colonial Sierra Leone, 1919–1958 by Akintola J.G. Wyse
Akintola ( in our circles, usually referred to as AJG ) was my classmate at the Prince of Wales School from 1958 -1965 when we completed our A levels, and also my roommate at college, 1965 -1966. Circa 1961 , I gave him the nickname “Cromwell” when we studied that period of British History. Till now, I have never met a Sierra Leonean that was as honest, no nonsense and forthright as Akintola. He was a committed Methodist. We - he and I, and Abisodun Wilson - another classmate , had innumerable discussions and arguments during that period of our deep friendship, mostly about history matters and the ongoing local politics of that era - and on one occasion on 1962 - we had a fistfight - with boxing gloves on - no pugilism at our school, it was Queensberry rules.The boxing bout was caused by Akitola picking me up one morning before the start of our first lesson there I was, sitting quietly at my desk ,not disturbing anybody, when suddenly - I don’t know what got into his head, but he just got hold of the chair I was sitting on and lifted it - with me still sitting in the chair , raised it up in the air and turned the chair round a few times, I think,to show me just how strong he was. - in front of all our classmates. When he finally put me down, I punched him. The eventual boxing match ended in a draw - it was no "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" from me as we were both physically exhausted by the end of the third round. He was one ferocious bull , but since I had a longer reach, I managed to successfully ward him off for three rounds.
Akintola was teaching history at the University of Calabar and our other classmate from 1958 - 1965, Abimbola Sylvester Young was teaching maths at The University of Benin during the period I was in Nigeria, 1981-84…
If only Obi and Atiku could fight it out - in the ring - Queensberry rules… both of them capitalists - like Baby Bush vs Saddam Hussein -no need to go to war, and may the best man win. Ditto Trump vs Zohran Mamdani. I can imagine over there in Abuja
Alhaji Atiku with a mighty roar of “Allahu Akbar” and Obi on the left corner representing “The Blood of Jesus!”
I somehow feel that Olusegun Obasanjo and Femi Fani -Kayode are Saro people.Femi Fani-Kayode is no pugilist and Obi is not a hooligan either but I think that Femi Fani-Kayode would easily whip either of them ( Obi or Atiku) in the ring
I had a short telephone chat with Baba Kadiri this afternoon and we agreed that the main thrust of that ongoing discussion was not about democracy per say and that there’s the tendency that when talking about democracy in practice, it’s enough to merely hold regular elections - however,as Jibrin Ibrahim and Musa Auwal Rafsanjani have been adumbrating ad nauseum there’s the crying need to build and strengthen democratic institutions in the country.