Nigeria is a cheap country; so cheap that the only thing to do to become a celebrity is to write an “Open Letter To The President”. Even those who are already famous or well-known would need it to further climb the stardom ladder. The letter does not have to be anything extra ordinary. The writer would merely have to rehash arguments that are already in public domain, even plagiarize and then go to the social media and shout “Open Letter To The President!”. It would not even matter to the writers whether or not their letters get to the intended recipient or, if they do, get acknowledged.
Former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who popularized this “Open Letter” syndrome in the country, himself expressed his frustrations when, in the preamble to one of his “open letters” to President Goodluck Jonathan in 2013, regretted that “… none of the four or more letters I have written to you in the past two years or so has elicited an acknowledgement or any response…” Chief Obasanjo had resorted to “open” letter writing ostensibly as a means of drawing the attention of those who came after him that they were not doing the right things. In the six years Dr. Goodluck Jonathan was president, Chief Obasanjo wrote him at least five (open) letters.
In the 2013 letter in particular, the language was so strong, even seen as repugnant, that his own daughter, Iyabo, had to personally rebuke her father via another “open letter”. A peep into Iyabo’s letter to her father would be quite revealing: “It brings me no joy to have to write this but since you started this trend of open letters… I have been reluctant to tell the truth about you as it seems you still delude yourself about the kind of person you are and I think for posterity sake, it is time to set the records straight … Like most Nigerians, I believe there are very enormous issues currently plaguing the country but I was sure surprised that you will be the one to publish such a treatise … I don’t blame you for the many atrocities you have been able to get away with, Nigerians were your enablers every step of the way… you and your cronies mentioned in your letter have left the country worse than you met it at your birth in the 1930s and 1940s. Nigeria is not the creation of any of you and although you feel you own it and are “Mr Nigeria”, deciding whether the country stays together or not and who rules it, you don’t …”, Mrs Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello wrote.
Such was the type of diatribe from a daughter to her illustrious father via an “Open Letter”. Thus, when in 2018 President Obasanjo did another open letter to Jonathan’s successor, Muhammadu Buhari, copies of Iyabo’s 2013 letter to her father suddenly surfaced in both the social media and in bound hard copies on the streets, apparently the handiwork of supporters of the Buhari administration. In the letter, Obasanjo accused the Buhari administration of incompetence, nepotism, corruption and advised the president not to seek re-election in 2019. Apparently, those who re-circulated Iyabo’s letter had wanted to demonstrate that Obasanjo no longer had the moral justification to pontificate over issues bordering on the competence or integrity of those who came after him, going by his daughter’s disclosures about him earlier in 2013.
But surprisingly, Iyabo came strong in defense of her father, urging President Buhari to heed his counsel. She escribed her father as “one of the most brilliant leaders to ever emerge in modern Africa”. She accused the government of re-circulating her scathing letter to her father and advised President Buhari to heed the call not to present himself for re-election in 2019.
At the end, however, Buhari not only presented himself for re-election in 2019 but also won the election and proceeded to serve another term of four years. The question then is, of what use did Obasanjo’s “open” letter that elicited such condescending comments from her own daughter serve both the writer and the country as a whole? Nothing. Just nothing. Even though President Jonathan was not as lucky – he didn’t make it at his re-election bid in 2015 – that couldn’t have been precisely as a result of Obasanjo’s negative prognosis via his letter. Pundits argued that Jonathan would have lost, anyway, for reasons that had nothing to do with Obasanjo’s letter. In other words, they argued that the reasons Jonathan lost at the 2015 presidential election were so open that there was no longer anything “open” about Obasanjo’s letter.
Conversely, Buhari won in 2019, despite Obasanjo’s counsel, via another “open letter”, that he should not run; thus, further making the latter’s penchant for “open letters” cheap and uncalled for. Despite this demystification of “open letters” to sitting presidents, a few ego-seeking Nigerians still resort to it. The latest “open letter…” writer is Chief Dele Momodu, a chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Recently, Momodu trended with his “OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TINUBU”. Momodu, a well-known columnist, publisher and politician, however introduced a new vista into the OPEN LETTER scourge by claiming that only him, Momodu, has the capability of telling the President Tinubu the “TRUTH” about what is happening in the country. Not done, Momodu asserted that “I am also hoping that some of your friends will read and INTERPRET to you…” Haba! Have things become that bad for our country?
Even though Momodu’s critics have chided him for delving into economic matters when he majored in Yoruba studies in his undergraduate programme and went ahead to pursue a vocation in publishing a “Miliki” magazine, my take is that it is not uncommon for people with such a background to develop flair for matters of economics and economy. What I find strange is that a fellow with such a trajectory would presume that an Ahmed Bola Tinubu, a professional Accountant who worked in multinational corporate organizations, would need an interpreter to understand a Dele Momodu’s drift on political economy.
My first encounter with Chief Momodu was in 2012 following an article he did on the then governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr Lamido Sanusi, who was encountering some difficulties in pushing down some of his reforms in the banking sector and had, in fact, fallen out of favour with his boss, President Goodluck Jonathan. In the article, entitled “THE BULLY CALLED SANUSI”, Momodu made a blanket condemnation of Sanusi’s reforms and even linked it to the latter’s rumoured presidential ambition. He even went beyond Sanusi and painted a very hopeless picture of Nigeria, employing hyperboles that depicted more of a fairy cast than verifiable facts. I did a rejoinder to that article and in which, among other things, I disagreed with him on his blanket condemnation of Sanusi’s reforms because as far as I was concerned, some of them were headed in the right direction.
Among other things, I wrote: “Momodu lived up to his bidding namely, to use his column to lambast one notable Nigerian or the other. And when he was not doing that, Momodu, a former presidential candidate, was boring Nigerians with his trite rehash of their collective history. In the article under reference, he combined what he knows best: to weave together hyperboles in painting a picture of an immitigable hopeless”.
Dele Momodu fired back via his THISDAY Column of October 6, 2012 under the title, “TEACHER, DON’T TEACH ME NONSENSE”. Incidentally, he also used the column to respond to our late senior colleague, Pini Jason, who had similarly done a rejoinder – even unknown to me – to Momodu’s earlier article on Sanusi. May the soul of Pini Jason Onyegbadue, one of the finest newspaper columnists Nigeria had ever produced, continue to rest in peace but let me recall some of the passages in Momodu’s counter rejoinder.
He wrote: “I will ignore other writers and concentrate on these two, Pini Jason and Ethelbert Okere, because when you carry an elephant on your head, you should worry less about ants on the floor…” Turning to me in particular, Momodu wrote: “I could not get his full bio-data but a peep into his writings led to the discovery that he is notorious for writing all manner of junk in newspapers … Ethelbert clearly used his articles to disparage people who are not in the same political boat with him. His last port of call was the Imo State Government House where he worked as a media aide to former Governor Ikedi Ohakim. He did well as an attack dog such that he wrote an acerbic piece and rubbished the Owerri tribe of Imo state…” He continued: “Ethelbert’s hatchet man’s role extends to other states where he is hired to help men of power…” Bla! Bla Bla.
On the very day the article was published, I was at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja traveling back to Owerri when a fellow said to me, “Somebody finished you in THISDAY newspaper today”. That’s by the way but as a matter of fact, it was after my rejoinder that I stumbled on another one wherein the author claimed that Momodu was quarreling with Sanusi because the latter’s reforms had led to the sacking of two of his friends from top jobs in the banking system over fraud that amounted to about N191 billion!
This write-up is not necessarily a rejoinder to Momodu’s “open letter” to President Tinubu. It is basically intended to generally look at the habit of Nigerians claiming to have written an “OPEN” letter to a sitting president which I believe has to do more with ego-chasing than a genuine conveyance of a message that would be of help to both a sitting president and the country as a whole. As I noted at the beginning, the contents of such open letters are more often than not a mere repetition of views earlier rendered by others. To be sure, several Nigerians have made very useful suggestions through ordinary opinion articles in newspapers or posts in the ubiquitous social media platforms without tagging them “Open Letter…”. Give it to him, Chief Momodu is a popular writer whose articles are easily graspable. So, what made him believe that the president or those working with him would not have noticed his advice in an ordinary newspaper column?
To lift views expressed earlier by others and tag it “OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TINUBU” is nothing but to seek attention. I hear that Momodu is among those who are complaining bitterly that they no longer have access to Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed with whom they had, as claimed, a bread and butter relationship before he became president. Instructively, Momodu laments in the preamble to his letter that “I am writing you today not because I expect you to act on my suggestions…” So, why write at all? As already disclosed, Dele Momodu’s counter rejoinder to mine to his 2012 article on Lamido Sanusi was entitled, “Teacher Don’t, Teach Me Nonsense”. Might I not, therefore, render an adaptation of it to similarly say to him “TEACHER, DON’T TEACH MY PRESIDENT NONSENSE”.