From the first pair of milk teeth to attempting the initial baby steps, the next skill a baby soon develops to communicate is getting cranky and throwing tantrums, obviously to get the mother’s attention whenever desired.
But give the baby a pacifier and it quickly gets quiet and contented, sucking away at the toy. It is perhaps the earliest form of “settlement” between a mother and the child.
While biology can easily explain such evolutionary pattern away in paediatrics, no such is supposed to occur in geriatrics. You don’t expect someone close to 70-year-old to still be acting as though a baby in need of a pacifier.
The reason many are increasingly amused by the antics of Femi Ojudu, the recently politically displaced in Ekiti, now permanently stalking our civic space, soliciting attention.
Perhaps, a context is apposite here for better understanding of the unfolding comedy. No doubt, Ojudu has been forced by circumstances today to watch his political stock plummet to zero after a disastrous outing with the Buhari administration. At a time his erstwhile comrades like Bayo Onanuga keep rising in the sun in Abuja and his political rival and our leader, distinguished Senator Opeyemi Bamidele, is equally shinning at the senate chamber. Such a situation must be quite traumatising indeed for a narcissistic person like Ojudu.
Senator Bamidele, who succeeded Ojudu at the senate in 2015, has undoubtedly done a better job. Unlike Ojudu, he is not arrogant and is very accessible and respectful of his constituents in Ekiti central senatorial district, exhibiting true Omoluabi ethos.
No wonder, Senator Bamidele’s good manners have earned him the coveted role of the Majority Leader at the senate. And by popular demand at home, the pride of Ekiti has won the endorsement of his people for a fourth term and the entire Ekitiland is better for it.
So, we must realise that this is actually the source of Ojudu’s seething bitterness, beneath his angry sophistry and misplaced grandstanding on the social media. As they say, “Ilara ko gb’ogun” (jealousy has no cure).
From initially offering unsolicited advice to now engaging in orgy of political hypocrisy, this “alagbe” (itinerant pen-for-hire) has undoubtedly turned a full circle. The common assumption is that social media platforms like Instagram, Tok Tok and Facebook are the playground of Gen Z and the millennials. It is therefore considered somewhat an oddity for a grandpa like Ojudu to turn Facebook to an office.
Of course, the resourceful young ones explore the social media to make money. But in his own case, Ojudu lays ambush there seeking to settle scores with perceived political opponents.
The puzzle is: why is Ojudu not going back to the platform, TheNews/PM News, that had given him ladder to climb to political lime-lights? Is he ashamed or feeling too big to identify with his humble beginning? Of course, those in the know will attest that he no longer feels at ease in the presence of his old comrades like the very principled Kunle Ajibade. Like the biblical Prodigal Child who forgot the son of whom he was, Ojudu started distancing himself from the likes of Ajibade once he got elected as senator in 2011 on the back of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Today, given the frequency and the nuisance of his fulminations (and sometimes photographic ostentation) on the social media, many are left wondering whether Ojudu had not formed a new queer habit of carrying a typewriter and English dictionary around. For, so prolific is he nowadays that his professional colleagues and age-mates recall they never saw such energy in his active days in journalism.
Take, for instance, his latest ranting on the composition of the National Presidential Campaign for Tinubu/Shetima 2027. When this failed politician sermonises against the inclusion of sitting ministers in the campaign council, you would think Ojudu did not serve in the Buhari administration that similarly included serving ministers in the Buhari/Osinbajo reelection campaign council in 2019. At least, it is on record that Rotimi Amaechi, then Transport Minister, was the Director General of the campaign council then. Babatunde Fashola, SAN, who combined three key ministerial portfolios simultaneously, was also included in the campaign council.
If one may then ask, why didn’t Ojudu advise President Buhari against such a set up then? Of course, this “Alatenuje” could not have mustered the confidence or conscience to publicly say that then, because he was accommodated in Osinbajo’s office.
Again, when Ojudu pontificates magisterially about the nuances of good governance and democratic principles on Facebook today, one wonders whether he offered same to President Buhari or Osinbajo. If he has any modicum of shame, he should not be talking, let alone raising his voice anywhere today, given the economic calamity that the Buhari government, in which he served, visited on Nigeria for eight years.
The financial mess Ojudu’s masters left is what President Tinubu has been clearing since 2023.
If Ojudu talks about responsibility and accountability, one wonders how he could also explain or justify the primitive looting by the likes of CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele while his immediate boss, Osinbajo, was busy on lecture circuits?
What makes this particularly striking is that here is a man who in 2022 had threatened to retire to his cassava farm in Ado Ekiti “in the unlikely event that Tinubu won the APC primaries and become the president.” Who will ever forget that infamous podcast interview where Ojudu, intoxicated by transient power as a Special Adviser to President Buhari, boasted that Tinubu was “politically finished” ahead of the June 2022 APC primaries.
But the political butterfly posing as a bird miscalculated terribly. His candidate in the race, then Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, performed woefully, coming a distant third in the primaries. It is a reflection of Ojudu’s accustomed poor judgment. As Senator representing Ekiti between 2011 and 2015, he similarly failed spectacularly, often talking down on his poor constituents who asked questions.
Yet, today, he postures as Mr Know All and the “conscience of APC”. As Asari Dokubo says in his viral skit online, “No be juju be dat?”
Politics is said to be local and charity, they say, begins at home. If he must interrupt conversations in APC at all, logic would demand that Ojudu starts from his native Ekiti. But for a man who is now more or less a political leper at home, he dares not. For, not too long ago, Governor Abiodun Oyebanji decided to take pity on him by rehabilitating him with an appointment into an advisory committee, which he embraced with gusto. So, he dares not direct any of his “critical interventions” at Ekiti government.
Rather, Ojudu’s unsolicited advisories are craftily targeted at national APC and the Tinubu government. Of course, these tantrums are calculated. The idle “Alatenuje” (freeloader) is hustling for a pacifier, like a baby.
As we say in Yoruba, only the shameless will continue to propose a song for the communal choir after being ostracised by the community. Rather than obsessing over APC and the Tinubu administration, one would expect Ojudu, as a self-proclaimed “principled man”, banish himself to his cassava farm in Ekiti as he boasted in 2022.
He should please spare us his unsolicited rantings and instead focus on his cassava farm.
*Mr. Fasuru, a retired civil servant, writes from Ado Ekiti.
