6 years ago, in my previous iteration as an anonymous Nairaland poster, I wrote a satirical story about Muhammadu Buhari. The story, titled “Buhari: The Man. The Myth. The Legend” was intended to serve as biting satirical commentary on the hopelessly fawning coverage and hysterical hero-worship that candidate Buhari was getting in the Nigerian media space.
Instead of even the most cursory critical examination of Candidate Buhari or any attempt to ask him any kind of difficult question about his coup-plotting history or his lack of intellectual depth or policy direction, coverage was restricted to the “Why are you so wonderful and benevolent, sir?” style of questioning. I thought my satirical hagiography of Buhari would put a dent in this wall of manufactured genuflection. It read as follows:
“Buhari: The Man. The Myth. The Legend
Never mind an Igbo son-in-law, Muhammadu Buhari has an Igbo mother and his full name is actually Muhammadu Odimegwu Uwadiegwu Fregene Chukwuma Festus Adekunle Rotimi Wilfred Callistus Douye Buharimma. He spent his formative years in Ugwashi Ukwu in Delta state where he met his Urhobo wife, Comfort David.
He was raised as a God-fearing Anglican Christian and he went through school consistently at the top of his class. Being a heart-achingly humble man, he chose to enter the Nigerian Army as a lowly infantryman despite his education. In time, being the inimitably brilliant fellow that he was, he rose to become a Lieutenant at the age of just 25. But he wasn’t done there. Being so irrepressibly brilliant, he was borrowed from the Nigerian Army by the Nigerian Airforce in 1964 and became a wing commander before even completing his basic flight training.
When the civil war broke out, he heroically saved more than 500,000 children on his own using his Flying Fulani Cow turboprop aircraft which he invented and constructed on his own. He flew more than 6,000 daring rescue sorties into Biafran territory while dodging anti-aircraft nuclear missiles from Nigerian Army formations on the ground. On one of these missions, his Flying Fulani Cow was shot down over Onitsha, but he managed to deploy his inbuilt Babanriga parachute. He floated down dressed in his regal white Babariga like an angel coming down to bless the cheering Biafrans.
Upon hitting the ground, Odimegwu Ojukwu immediately surrendered to him and agreed to end all hostile activities as long as he could convince the Nigerian military to do the same. Being a merciful and honourable man at heart, Buharimma walked for 30 days and 30 nights through the Southeastern hinterland bush without food or water until he got to the Nigerian line where the awestruck Nigerian soldiers formed a guard of honour for him and led him to their commanding officer. Within just five minutes, he convinced him to cease all hostilities, and that was how the Nigerian civil war ended.
Muhammadu Odimegwu Uwadiegwu Chukwuma Festus Adekunle Rotimi Wilfred Callistus Douye Buharimma. What a man! In my next installment, I will bring you the story of how a well respected German historian Gerhart Furmeister credited Muhammadu Festus Buharimma with single-handedly ending World War II and killing Adolf Hitler.”
Femi Adesina is Why Satire Fails in Nigeria
On Friday last week, presidential spokesperson Femi Adesina published an article that encapsulates why my 2015 attempt at satirical commentary failed to catch on as I expected it to. It also explains why a few years later when I took up satire as a full-time profession as a writer on ‘The Other News’ on Channels Television, the show just did not become as big as we thought it deserved to be. Sure, we had up to 2 million weekly viewers, but it never quite became a cultural fixture in the manner of The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight. The reason? Nothing is too absurd to genuinely work as satire in Nigeria.
In Adesina’s unhinged, fawning article, he took it upon himself to exhort Nigerians to stop allegedly “rejoicing over insecurity” and to instead put their faith into the God-King that is Major-General Buhari. For good measure, he even added a reference to a Michael Jackson song, exhorting us all to “Look at the man in the mirror and change our ways.” In Adesina’s mind, General Buhari is not the poor simulacrum of a president that we can all see he is, oh no no-no. General Buhari is a divine entity; a king appointed by God; a prophet sent to save us Nigerians from our sinful ways.
Femi Adesina and his likes are why The Other News never made it past 5 seasons. They are why satire fails to work in Nigeria. They are why critical questioning and reasoning are not really a fixture within Nigerian culture. It is impossible for a society to assume a truly intellectual outlook when it has so many Femi Adesina’s dotting its elite landscape. These people are so divorced from reality, and so committed to their delusions that they do not mind creating an entire falsity from scratch and living in such a way as to validate their own falsity. The concept of fact or truth is completely optional for the Femi Adesinas of this world.
This leaves us with an interesting dilemma – do we continue hanging on desperately to concepts like facts, empirical evidence, documented data, and objective truth, or do we give up and join Femi Adesina in his imaginary country ruled by his imaginary God-King?
Each one of us will eventually have to answer this question to ourselves personally.
