Abba Kyari’s Self-Serving Condemnation of Foreign Intervention

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Friday, February 15, 2019

Abba Kyari’s Self-Serving Condemnation of Foreign Intervention

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter:@farooqkperogi

Abba Kyari, President Muhammadu Buhari’s geriatric and morally stained Chief of Staff, wrote an impudent, awkwardly error-ridden, and mind-numbingly platitudinous screed titled “Tomorrow Never Dies.”  That’s an ironic title in light of the well-known fact that he and a junto of reactionary, avaricious pudden-heads misgoverning Nigeria on behalf of a senile, cognitively degenerate, and physically infirm Buhari are already murdering Nigeria’s tomorrow.

Kyari has an unflattering reputation for physical and intellectual laziness and for down-the-line duplicity, so his hackneyed, intellectually malnourished harangue didn’t surprise me. Nonetheless, the false, exaggerated, and opportunistic appeals to patriotism and the hypocritical denunciation of foreign intervention that constitute the core of his essay need a response and a reality check.

 Kyari griped about Bukola Saraki’s alleged hiring of an American lobbyist by the name of Riva Levinson.  “We are meant to believe that Ms Levinson, like the others who are paid by one of the contestants, wants only to promote a free and fair race,” Kyari wrote. “And that it is only a coincidence that this language for hire is identical to what we hear from accredited diplomats!”

I have no clue what thought Kyari wanted to express in that tortuous quote, especially the in the second sentence, but it’s apparent that he was taking issue with the hiring of an American to help the opposition with today’s presidential election. Well, I too resent it and have written several columns in the past to denounce what I have called Nigerians’ knee-jerk xenophilia, which I have defined as the tendency to uncritically celebrate and valorize the foreign. Nevertheless, Kyari’s APC isn’t immune from this disease of low self-esteem.

 From December 2013 to 2015, according to influential American online newspaper Politico, the APC paid for the services of AKPD Message and Media, a political consulting firm owned by former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod. “AKPD’s Nigerian work has already drawn media attention in the U.S. and Nigeria, including reports of leaked emails that discussed the firm’s recent work for Buhari’s party,” the paper wrote in its February 14, 2015 story titled “Democrats working both sides of Nigeria's presidential election.”

The same sorts of pronouncements from Trump administration officials that Kyari and his gang of philistines in the Presidential Villa characterize as evidence of foreign interference were also made by Obama administration officials against Jonathan in 2015. When President Goodluck Jonathan postponed the presidential election in 2015, for instance, then Secretary of State John Kerry said, “It is critical that the government not use security concerns as a pretext for impeding the democratic process.”

Several other influential American political players made statements that the Jonathan administration interpreted as covert endorsement of Buhari’s APC. For example, following Kerry, Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington think tank, said, “There is a great deal of anger about the postponement of the election and suspicion among opposition supporters that the delay is a deliberate ploy to subvert the democratic process.”

I can give more examples, but the point is that in 2015 when US, UK, and EU officials issued statements that benefited Buhari’s APC and censured Jonathan’s PDP, Abba Kyari and the band of farouche provincials he is speaking for now didn’t see any “foreign interference.” In fact, when Buhari visited the US in July 2015, according to the Associated Press of July 20, 2015, “he said Nigeria would be ‘ever grateful’ to the U.S. for its support of free elections in his country,” and added that “U.S. and European pressures to ensure the election was ‘fair and credible led us to where we are now.’” He repeated this sentiment on several other occasions. And Jonathan, on the other hand, has blamed his electoral loss on foreign, particularly American, interference.

Even after getting into power, the Buhari regime has been more obsessed with getting favorable public opinion in foreign lands, particularly in the West, than it has been with its perception in Nigeria. That is why Buhari gave all the consequential press interviews of his presidency to foreign media organizations—usually on foreign soil.

In addition, a September 20, 2018 Premium Times investigation found that Justice Minister Abubakar Malami “hired two American lobbying and public relations firms to plant opinion articles favourable to the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration in American newspapers.”

So, for Buhari and his no-good puppeteers like Abba Kyari and homicidal executive thugs like Nasir El-Rufai, foreign interference is good only when it favors them and condemnable when it calls out their incompetence and duplicity.

I won’t lie that when I read statements from foreign countries cautioning, warning, and threatening our leaders to be of good behavior or risk punishment, my national self-pride is often bruised. Sadly, it is only this sort of infantilization that can compel our leaders to be of good behavior.

I have pointed out in previous interventions that most Nigerians would seem to be held hostage by a debilitating and deep-seated inferiority complex. This complex consists in the internationalization of a mentality of low self-worth and an inordinate reverence of the foreign, especially if the “foreign” also happens to be white.

It is this xenophilic inferiority complex that allowed low-grade US diplomatic officers to extract treasure troves of sensitive national secrets almost effortlessly from well-placed Nigerian officials, according to revelations from WikiLeaks in 2011.

What I’ve found particularly instructive from the US diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks squealed in 2011 is that our perpetually lying politicians suddenly become truthful, honest, and straight-talking people when they talk to Americans. You would think they were standing before their Creator—or at least before a stern, omniscient, no-nonsense dad who severely punishes his kids for the minutest lie they tell.

For instance, Nuhu Ribadu, the wily airhead who had told the world that he thoroughly investigated former President Obasanjo and found him squeaky clean confessed to the Americans that Obasanjo was more corrupt than Abacha. The same Ribadu had lied that the EFCC he headed never investigated Mrs. Patience Jonathan over money-laundering allegations. However, leaked US diplomatic cables quoted him as telling US officials that he indeed investigated Patience Jonathan for money laundering.

Nasir el-Rufai, the thuggish, murder-loving governor of Kaduna, had also publicly denied any debt to Atiku Abubakar for his political rise, but he confessed to American embassy officials that Atiku indeed gave him his first public service job as head of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, according to WikiLeaks.

Many Nigerian leaders—and followers— seem to have an infantile thirst for a supranational paternal dictatorship. The United States is that all-knowing, all-sufficient father figure to whom they run when they have inter-elite troubles. We learned from the US embassy cables in 2011 that our Supreme Court judges, Central Bank governors, national leaders, and state governors routinely ran to the American embassy like terrified little kids when they had quarrels with each other. They only preach “patriotism” in the open when they are publicly chastised by their masters.

I can bet my bottom dollar that even Abba Kyari will squeal like a canary if he is “honored” with an invitation to any Western embassy. Don’t be deceived by his fraudulent pretense to patriotism.

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

[Okey Iheduru]

Thanks, Farooq for your write-up. The disease you described is called "extraversion", a term first used in 2000 by Jean-Francois Bayart to describe the hollowness of African political elite and/or "leaders." See the referenced articles and abstracts below.

Okey Iheduru

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=

“Extraversion, vulnerability to donors, and political liberalization in Africa”

Caryn Peiffer  Pierre Englebert

African Affairs, Volume 111, Issue 444, 1 July 2012, Pages 355–378, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/ads029

Published: 01 July 2012

Abstract

In seeking to maintain their power, many African regimes rely on strategies of extraversion, converting their dependent relations with the external world into domestic resources and authority. This article assesses the relationship between extraversion and political liberalization, a dimension of African democratization that has been somewhat underappreciated in recent empirical studies. African countries vary in their extraversion portfolios, or the dimensions of their relations to the outside world that they can instrumentalize, and these variations correspond both to different degrees of vulnerability to the demands of foreign donors and to different preferences from the donors themselves. We find four quantitative measures of extraversion vulnerability to be statistically associated with the initial transitions of the 1989–1995 period and with the ‘consolidations’ at different levels of democracy observable between 1995 and 2011. These findings shed new light on both democratic and hybrid regime trajectories in Africa.

 

African Affairs (2000), 99, 217-267

“AFRICA IN THE WORLD: A HISTORY OF EXTRAVERSION”*

JEAN-FRANÇOIS BAYART

AFRICA SOUTH OF THE SAHARA is often said to be the limbo of the international system, existing only at the outer limits of the planet which we inhabit. But, again according to a widespread opinion, it is unlikely that Africa is a limbo in the sense of Roman Catholic theology that is to say, a place where souls are prepared for redemption. 'Africa has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold, for ever pressing in upon itself, and the land of childhood, removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night', wrote Hegel.l The vast literature produced by journalists and academics which refers ad nauseam to the marginalization of the sub-continent, or to its 'disconnection', even if it is only 'by default',2 does no more than reproduce Hegel's idea that this part of the globe is an 'enclave', existing in 'isolation' on account of its deserts, its forests and its alleged primitiveness. For those who subscribe to this school of thought, the spread of war as a mode of political regulation over the last decade or so is a sign that the day of salvation is yet far off. Evidence is offered by those terrible messengers, the handless amputees produced by war in Sierra Leone, the Danteesque inferno of the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994, or the spread of the AIDS pandemic, a sinister companion of conflict, which decimates those populations which war has spared. Nevertheless, if we are to stay with the metaphor of limbo, it is above all in a limbo of the intellect that such a simplistic view of the relation of Africa with the rest of the world is conceived. For the sub-continent is neither more nor less than a part of the planet, and it is pointless to pretend that, to quote one French former colonial governor,3 it leads a 'traditional existence shielded from the outside world, as though it were another planet', which passively absorbs the shock of having been made dependent on other parts of the world.

 

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Okey C. Iheduru

e-mail: okeyi...@gmail.com

Just published “The African Corporation, ‘Africapitalism’ and Regional Integration in Africa” (September 2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785362538.

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Thanks for the reference.

Farooq

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

[segun ogungbemi]

But the truth of the matter is that the rest of the world depends on the continent for their industrial revolution to succeed.  The European and American histories are a narrative of barbaric behaviors of war mongers with million if lives lost. 

There shouldn't be any holier than thou between Europe and Africa histories. 

Segun Ogungbemi

[Salimonu Kadiri]

​Culturally and traditionally, it is permitted in Nigeria to argue and discuss with elders but it is an abomination to abuse and insult elders. Youths are not brought up to call their elders thieves or liars, most especially, if they cannot prove their allegations. Politically and ideologically, I am a pole apart from Abba Kyari, yet I am awed and injured by the abuses and insults hauled at him and President Muhammadu Buhari by Farooq A. Kperogi in his piece below. Read this excerpt : Abba Kyari, President Buhari's geriatric and morally stained Chief of Staff, wrote an impudent, awkwardly error-ridden, and mind-numbingly platitudinous screed titled, "Tomorrow Never Dies." That is an ironic title in light of well-known fact that he and a junto of reactionary, avaricious pudden-heads misgoverning Nigeria on behalf of a senile, cognitively degenerate, and physically infirm Buhari are already murdering Nigeria's tomorrow. It is noteworthy that Farooq Kperogi did not tell his readers what is wrong in Abba Kyari's essay, "Tomorrow Never Dies," and how he and Buhari are already murdering Nigeria's tomorrow. As if old-age is a crime, the excerpted paragraph above seems to give the impression that he, Farooq, is against old people and especially octogenarians like Abba Kyari. Culturally and traditionally, genuine Nigerians believe that a youth who wants to grow old should not seize walking stick from an elder and throw it away.

Farooq continued his diatribe on Kyari thus, "Kyari has an unflattering reputation for physical and intellectual laziness and for down-the-line duplicity, so his hackneyed, intellectually malnourished harangue didn't surprise me. Nonetheless, the false, exaggerated, and opportunistic appeals to patriotism and hypocritical denunciation of foreign intervention that constitute the core of the essay need a response and a reality check." What fuelled Farooq's anger against Kyari was the appeal of the octogenarian to Nigerians to be patriotic and resist foreign interference in Nigeria's internal affairs. Therefore, Farooq regards Abba Kyari's appeals for patriotism as false, exaggerated and opportunistic and his denunciation of foreign intervention in Nigeria's affairs as hypocritical. Yet, Farooq Kperogi reminded his readers of his own heroic patriotism thus, "... I have written several columns in the past to denounce what I have called Nigerians' knee-jerk xenophilia, which I have defined as tendency to uncritically celebrate and valorise the foreign." When Farooq Kperogi dressed himself in Frank Sinatra's suit with bow-tie on his neck and mounted the pedestal to preach anti-xenophilia to Nigerians, certainly, nobody would believe him because he did not lead with example. Now, Farooq's present outburst against Abba Kyari's is premised on the fact that the rascal intellectual sees patriotism as his fortteress which an octogenarian should not intrude into. Farooq ploughed through WikiLeaks disclosure of US diplomatic emails in 2011 to extract compromising information about APC members that have served as servants to foreigners. However, he forgot that not everything in WikiLeaks disclosure can be taken as true because the author of the contents of the email could have written anything to impress his employer. Believing in WikiLeaks email disclosure as true, Farooq fired, "So, for Buhari and his no-good puppeteers like Abba Kyari and homicidal executive thugs like Nasir El-Rufai, foreign interference is good only when it favours them and condemnable when it calls out their incompetence and duplicity." Farooq Kperogi is too intelligent not to know that there are  good and bad sides of foreign interference in another country. Abba Kyari, Muhammadu Buhari and Nasir El-Rufai are privileged by their official positions in Nigeria to know and determine which foreign interventions are good or bad for the country. If Buhari and other APC leaders tolerated the interference of the US, UK, and EU in Nigerian affairs, in 2015, because they were convinced it did not encroach on the sovereignty of Nigeria no one in his right thinking mind should blame them in 2019 for resisting their interference in the suspension of a criminally accused Chief Justice of Nigeria who has admitted to violating the Code of Conduct Bureau Act for public officers, not only for failing to declare his assets as required by law, but when belatedly he declared the assets, he concealed his naira bank accounts containing millions as well as his domiciliary bank accounts in dollars and euro currencies. Abba Kyari and Rufai El-Rufai, like many Nigerians, know that the crime the Chief Justice of Nigeria admitted that he has committed would not only have earned him immediate sack from office in the US or EU but also have kept him behind the bars throughout his trial. For Kyari and El-Rufai, to draw the attention of Nigerians to the Interference of US and EU in the suspension of criminally indicted CJN, Farooq Kperogi, a self-exiled Nigerian professor of English language in Georgia, USA, got deranged and poured invectives on them. According to the professor of English whose origin is Bariba part of Nigeria where 85% of the people are stark illiterates, Farooq Kperogi wrote : Abba Kyari is a morally stained geriatric;  Abba Kyari wrote an impudent, awkwardly error-ridden and mind-numbingly platitudinous screed titled, ''Tomorrow Never Dies''; Kyari and junto of reactionary, avaricious puddling-heads misgoverning Nigeria on behalf of a senile, cognitively degenerate, and physically infirm Buhari are already murdering Nigeria's tomorrow; Kyari has  an unflattering reputation for physical and intellectual laziness and down-the-line duplicity; Kyari hackneyed, intellectually malnourished harangue didn't surprise me; and Buhari and his no-good puppeteers like Abba Kyari and homicidal executive thugs like Nasir El-Rufai ….

​Professors are known to be extremely cautious and restrained in behaviour even when others do not. In his heart, Farooq Kperogi thinks he is a white American and in order to demonstrate his Americanisation, though not physically but mentally, he often resorts to excessive flaunt and deployment of bombastic English words in his writings to address, not  whites, but Nigerians. What Farooq has failed to understand is that the American whites he pretends to be imitating, vis à vis freedom of speech, never indulge in abusing, insulting, relegating and demeaning their elders in the name of freedom of expression. In his inflated self-perception Farooq Kperogi wants to be seen as a wise and knowledgeable professor of English language but very often he poops from the mouth only to end up as an intellectual hooligan with his verbosities. A writer must pursue and honour the truth and accuracy but Farooq Kperogi never does because his mind is dirty and his pen is not clean. Reading what Farooq Kperogi wrote about Abba Kyari, Muhammadu Buhari and Nasir El-Rufai, I recognise in him a Bariba bush professor who saunters into the metropol in loin-cloth because of his contempt for the urbanes. Farooq is dancing to the music of praise singers and if he does not stop in time, he may end up sustaining broken waist because as we say in Yoruba, A SÉJÙ KÒ DÃ, meaning too much of everything is bad.

S. Kadiri 

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