Bayo Onanuga: Spewing Ethnic Hatred As Weapon Against Mass Hunger

 

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

These are very dangerous days in Nigeria. 

“These are times that try men’s souls,” as the founding father of American independence, Thomas Paine, wrote in The American Crisis. 

In very recent history, people did not speak out in time until the Hutu/Tutsi mayhem overwhelmed Rwanda. 

It is incumbent on me to now call out Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy, on his recent pathetic ethnic baiting that can only end up pitching one ethnic group in Nigeria against the other in an orgy of flagitious violence. 

Lessons From Julius Nwalimu Nyerere

By Banji Ojewale 

Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, Nigeria’s most captivating  columnist of the 1970s who rewrote history as editor of Sunday Times of that era, once returned from Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania and thrilled his compatriots with an account of the stoic exploits of this illustrious African leader. Just like his staid gait, Ogunsanwo said, Nyerere had no airs about him to suggest he was the president of Tanzania.

*Nyerere

This picture of an abstemious statesman sharply contradicted the Nigerian paradigm. Here, our leaders, even at the local government scene, would loot the public till to build personal empires, to  satisfy their palatial palate. The predilection of our leaders for financial rape has always been there and Ogunsanwo was among a small circle of ethical journalists who railed against this evil.

So the Tanzania experience had to excite this colourful columnist. Through his celebrated style of writing that nettled bad leaders and won applause from the public, Ogunsanwo said that if he placed the lifestyle of Nyerere side-by-side with what we had in Nigeria, the weight of the East African leader wouldn’t surpass the wealth of a level 9 officer in the Nigerian Civil Service. A shocked Ogunsanwo said something to the effect that the home of Nyerere had uninspiring furniture compared to what a middle level civil servant in Nigeria might offer. Nyerere’s was a study in Spartan decor.

Years later in 1999 when the beloved Tanzania leader died at 77, the New York Times correspondent, Michael Kaufman, wrote what has gone into the books as a most charitable essay by a Western reporter on an African president who mercilessly chided capitalism as a curse on humanity, thus confirming Ogunsanwo’s point. He admitted Nyerere’s “habits of modesty and ethics.”