Letter To Ayo Ojeniyi

Dear. Mr. Ojeniyi,
Compliments of the season to you.
Just recently, I have had the opportunity to come across your timeline. I have been paying keen attention to your postings. I have been reading your comments. I have been examining your analyses. And I have been wondering.

As I did all these, you have recommended yourself to me as a mature human being with authentic intellect. You respect facts and evidences. In your presentations, you follow where the facts and evidences lead. No beating about the bush. No meandering around the miasma.

In the course of all these, you have also exuded uncanny candour. You have manifested courage. You have edified your own personality as a man of character. Though, I didn't always agree with all of your views, but I am enamoured by your refusal to be impervious to extant facts and subsisting realities of the Nigerian State under the jackboot of President Mohammadu Buhari and his disoriented clique.

What further recommended you to my attention, for whatever it is worth, is that you are a partisan. You are an APC loyalist. You don't hide this. In fact and indeed, you have no reason to. There is nothing wrong in believing in a party. There is nothing wrong in investing your hope and aspirations in the candidate of your party. It is a duty expected of all responsible citizens in a given polity.

What is wrong is blind loyalty. Zombie like followership. Constant exudation of unfecund mentality, a genre of docility that even the sheep would be ashamed to be associated with. Defending the indefensibles. It is embarrassing to see some of your APC members display, with gusto, vacuous thinking process, suggesting they could not evaluate simple existential threats and rally to get their President to tackle them.

Rather, you find them giving excuses for corruption. You find them explaining away nepotism. You find them rationalizing incompetence. You find them edifying State and official criminality. You find them justifying the murder, maiming and raping of innocent women, children and the oldies. You find them condoning arson against their fellow citizens. All of this, because they felt the need to support a misadventure in power by a deceitful and luciferous retired General bedecked in borrowed camisole.

But you refused to be blinded by party loyalty. You refused to keep supporting continuously, an ignominy of a government. A travesty. I could imagine how you must have been constantly harangued, vilified and reviled by those abbetors of anguish, those sentries of sorrow, sadness and squalor. Those defenders of destitution. Advocates of anguish and agony, gallivanting all over the social space, flagrantly and impudently.

You have separated yourself from these your party members imbued with herd mentality, arid of critical thinking and deprived of the functional social consciencelessness. Those that have been incapacitated from using their God-given common sense. They are unable to realise that we are all in jeopardy. That our mutual existential survival is at stake and at risk. They have forgotten that you could only play partisan politics if you're alive. They are amazing miserable numbskulls.

So, finding someone like you in the gobbling gamut of discombobulated Buharists and Buharideens, ferociously rapacious against independent minds like yours, is like a modern day miracle. Thus, I felt compelled to reach out to you, to let you know that there are some of us, who are grateful that your genre is not totally extinct. That you have the temerity to take a ride against the tide. That you are appreciated for having the effrontery to confront the cyclonically ravenous Buharideens and Buharists.

This brief letter, is to give you moral support and further encourage you to stand for what is right, defend the truth as embedded in extant facts and evidences and to inspire you to maintain the independence of your mind. Remain steadfast to your party, APC, but refuse to entertain blind loyalty. It is the best way to continue to edify your own character.

I wish you good luck.
My best regards.
Rèmí Oyèyemi.