Letter To Journalist Festus Adedayo

By Remi Oyeyemi
Festus Adedayo
Festus Adedayo

My dear Festus,
Compliments to you. How is the family? I pray and hope that everyone is okay. My greetings and regards to all.

I have just read your last article, "Lie-gerian Army's 1,000 Unmarked Graves."

Reading from you serves three purposes for me. It tells me that you are still alive and healthy for which I give thanks and glory to God. It also tells me that the brutal hands of the Fulani herdmen killers have not touched you and I am also very grateful to God Almighty for this. Thirdly, it is a confirmation that the Mohammadu Buhari's Gulag anchors have not deemed you dangerous enough to be arrested and detained. May they never be able to do so. Amen.

I have found it necessary to commiserate with you on the loss of your brother, Bankole Folorunso Adedayo. The loss of a brother is a scar that never heals. It is a memory that is permanently hurtful for the duration of one's existence on the mother Earth. Having experienced the same fate towards the tail end of my days in Ibadan Gramnar School, I know how it feels to lose a dearly loved one. It is a tragedy that is better imagined than experienced. It is an experience that ought not be wished even one's detractors and enemies alike.

Yes, it is an experience that should not even be wished for cold hearted, hungry crumb eaters, the cannibals of our sense of value, decency, dignity and sanctity of human lives, of the types of Professor Demola Bakare and his minion on Newspotng platform identified as Tajudeen Suleiman as well as their soulless hailers, edging them on.

For to wish such misguided cold hearted elements, who see everything, including the death of their felliow human beings from the prism of politics, is to descend to their dimunition and decadence. It is to allow one's values to be vitiated and violated. It is to allow one's humanity to be hunkered and hindered. It is to become as heartless, unfeeling, wicked and cruel as they are. So, we would not wish them same experience. No we would not.

But we must pity them. We must sympathize with them. We must understand their motivation, driven by the basest kind of selfishness, they are over fed from the pot of poisoned porridge of partisanship and inebriated from homeopathic intake of warped wine of insensitivity.

They deserve our compassion as well as empathy. That is the best reaction that could be given to souls sired in sadomasochism; souls soaked in sadism, half smartedly cocooned in thoughtless political rebuttals. It is the best way to respond to unmitigated crassness, churlishness, loutishness and vulgarity of a crowd devoid of humaneness.

As I went through that thread, after your article was posted, I saw the alacrity with which they hasted in their hideous haughtiness to demonize you as "lie-journalist." To them, the loss and death of Bankole Adedayo is a "lie." To their luciferous souls, that was a fiction. It never happened. It was a make up story to malign an incompetent administration about which the populace have reached a conclusion.

Please, do not be deceived when they pout that Mohammadu Buhari has been re-elected by the Nigerian people. Everyone knows that is another lie. He did not win any re-election. They rigged themselves in and forced themselves on us. So, when they counter that the views of the populace are represented by his re-election, know that it is a fatuous claim. They are still in Aso Rock, maintained by paraphernalia of force controlled bybthe State.

A cursory look at idiocy would convey a repulsive, abhorrent, distasteful and objectionable aura. When you now take your time to look further, meticulously rummaging its length, breadth and depth, what you discover beomes more gory and sanguinary. What you find is more devilish, demonic and frightening. What you discover is ghastly, grisly, gruesome and grim.

Idiocy, which sounds simplistic as a word of rebuke or light derision, is actually an encapsulation of the worst traits in human nature. Such traits would include sadism, insensitivity, wickedness, lack of feeling, derivation of joy in the misery of others, egoism and egotism, crude selfishness, maniacal narrow mindedness and fumigated lunacy.

The beauty of idiocy is in its ugliness and emptiness. It radiates vacuity with gusto. It gallivants with ghoulish gangrene around the collective space. Shrouded in sizzling and searing stench, idiocy luxuriates in malodorous ignorance with pretentious intellect, laying claim to credibility and relevance. It communicates in seared sophistry, ludicrously ridiculing substance, trifflingly trivializing seriouness.

Unable to recognise the paucity in its psychological functionality, idiocy marinates in insensitivity, manacled in its ability to feel the sorrow and pain of others. It, unwittingly, locks itself up in a penitentiary of poverty of compunction that appears to him as a palace of pride in an exercise of vacuous superiority complex. In his constricted consciousness, his is the only world that is.

If you perceive these characteristics in sentries of tyranny and misgovernance, just be aware that they manifest the same qualities of the tyrants they defend on hourly basis. Even though they have eyes, they could not see. They have ears, they could not hear. They have noses and could not smell. They are human beings, or they pretend to be, but they could not feel.

It would be unhelpful if we fail to pity their lack of ability to be sensitive. We have not the luxury to be upset with them. We should not be angry with them. We should not be annoyed with them. We could not afford to be infuriated by them. We should not allow them to enrage us. We should not allow them to exasperate us. We should not allow them to incense or rankle us.

By allowing them to do any of those to us, we would have given them the opportunity to derail our humanity and the essence of our own beings. We should and must remain that contrast to their devilish orientation. We must remain the opposite of their sadistic instincts. We must represent the opposite of their poverty of kindness and compasdion for others. We must remain the bulwalk against their luciferous ululation.

My dear Festus, I am not afraid for you. I know the stuff of which you are made. I am aware of your trajectory as a KERUBIAN and as a distinguished journalist. I am more than confident that you are able to handle whatever they throw at you. They are encouraged to throw as many stones as possible because those stones are needed to cast the case for the castle of freedom and liberty, to build the mansion of compassion and love and erect the villa against villainy.

Needless to say, that your reputation goes before you. It remains as solid as Òkè Ìmò Rock at Ilésà. No amount of demonisation by detractors could ever dent it. March on. Soldier on. Trudge on. Lumber on. Ignore the irritants. Let them continue to marinate in their lack of feeling and compassion as we continue to show them understanding and pity.

Once again, I commiserate with you on the loss of a worthy brother, Bankole Folorunso Adedayo, who lost his soul in the service of a soulless country. May his soul continue to rest in peace. May Èdùmàrè, the God of our fathers give you and other family members the fortitude to continue to bear his painful loss. Amin.

Sincerely,
Remi Oyeyemi
Your brother, colleague and fellow Kerubian,
The Apamaku of Writersville.