A Nigerian writer called Obatunde, based in Ibadan, Oyo state has released an open letter directed to a Nigerian Author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for daring to send an open letter to the Joe Biden, President of United States of America over the recent General Election in Nigeria.
Obatunde, in his letter berates Ms Adichie for being biased and bigotry in her views and her lack of proper understanding of political architecture of her nation. Read the full letter below:
Dear Chimamanda,
Let me first tell you that I thought over the use of the word “Dear” to address you because I was somehow uncomfortable with the thought of you as a person that I should consider as dear to me. But based on your prowess in the field of literature, I still regard you as a dear person. It may also interest you that I once bought two of your books as gifts for my daughter.
However, by the time you released your book “Half of a Yellow Sun” I began to perceive the tragedy of the dichotomy between your rich literary mind and your obvious ignominious Igbotic indoctrination borne out of the inability of most of our Southeast leaders of thought, political class and ethnic leaders to take their people on that much needed journey of self healing required to overcome the self inflicted wounds of the needless and wasteful civil war of 1967 to 1970 which signified the darkest moments of our national history.
When you rejected the national award from President Buhari, you further revealed the ethnic chauvinism with which you must have been fed during your growing years, most likely by your parents. Would you have rejected the award if it was offered to you during the President Goodluck Jonathan era? But because you couldn’t bear the ‘torture’ of a Fulani man hanging a ribbon on your neck and giving you a handshake to boot, you vaingloriously rejected an award from your SUPPOSED COUNTRY! You threw away the baby with the bathwater due to your bigotry!
Ngozi, your childish and inappropriate open letter to the President of United States of America, Joe Biden, attempting a disdainful emotional blackmail on him for doing what was expected in diplomatic circles worldwide and that any sensible person with the slightest modicum of decorum and who has not dumped his or her brain into a dung hill should understand, is taking a deep plunge into outlandish indecency and obnoxious effrontery! For God’s sake, who the heck do you think you are, Ngozi? Because you won a couple of awards for your literary works, you now deem it fit to ascribe to yourself the temerity and audacity of a self conceited judge of how the President of any country, not to talk about the United States of America, should conduct their diplomatic affairs and agenda?
Do you, in your childish, tribally befuddled and bigoted mind, think Presidents just whimsically pick their pens and write letters the way you sit behind your desk and write poems? Are you that unintelligent about issues outside literature?
Now that you have written to Biden, what do you expect him to do? Come to you profusely apologizing and genuflecting while ordering President Buhari to order INEC Chairman to withdraw the Certificate of Return and hand them over to your little rat voiced, babbling and incoherent, Yes Daddy, Naanu, cry baby lying machine who takes his ‘hardvice’ from the maad man of Upp Iweka? Are you this unwise? I guess your parents never made you to understand the difference between being intelligent and being wise.
Apart from the audacity of your distasteful letter and its wild contents, do you honestly believe that Peter Gregory Obi could have won that election in any way, not to talk about him actually winning the election? Are you so uninformed and disillusioned by the realities of the country just because you so much detest her? Are you so oblivious of the socio-politico-ethno-religious characteristics of Nigeria? Come on!
If you were not foolishly carried away by the hoopla of the rowdy, rude and uncouth Obingos and IPOBingos mobs, you would have known that the comedic online polls that you referred to in your inglorious letter to Joe Biden were mere inconsequential loud clanging cymbals which have no relationship with the realities of the expected voting patterns of Nigeria. Did it occur to you that social media platforms are often bedeviled by make believe opposites of reality? Don’t you know that Facebook is more of a Fakebook ; Instagram is an Instascam and Twitter is infested by Twitrats? Come on, wake up, girl!
If you followed PitObi’s with your brain and not with a tainted heart, you should have noticed that most of his crowd are made up of the loud and lousy EndSARS anarchists, sorosoke arrogant ignoramuses, Christian-claiming religious extremists, Igbotic ethnic jingoists and yahoo yahoo cum attention seeking yeyebrities.
If you were smart enough, you would have observed that the Paul Eneches, APORNstu Johnson Suleimans, the Yes Daddy Gate of Hell custodian at Ota, Vote Waster Sarah Omakwus and that screaming sweating Pastor in Jos were actually taking the object of your ethically induced worship to POLITICAL GOLGOTHA!
Are you really surprised that PitObi won the election mainly in his ethnic base and in other Christian dominated areas? It’s obvious that you have very little knowledge about Nigeria, or else how did you expect PitObi, with his “Church take back your country!” campaign not to lose heavily in core Muslim dominated Northern States like Borno, Bauchi, Gombe, Yobe, Adamawa, Kwara, Kogi, Niger, Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Kebbi, Zamfara, Sokoto and Jigawa that make up a total of FIFTEEN STATES. When you add that to the FIVE Southwest States of Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ondo and Ekiti thereby making a total of TWENTY STATES where he couldn’t muster up to 25% how then do you expect him to have won an election where he is expected to score at least 25% of votes cast in at least 25 states? Do you also know that he is also expected, according to the Electoral Act 2022, to score the highest number of votes cast nationwide? For God’s sake, where did you and the mob expect him to get those votes from? Heaven?
At over 40 years of age, you’re not expected to exhibit the folly of a teenager and ought to have clearly seen that a large horde of PitObi’s followers are supporting him due to tribal bigotry as many of his nouveau supporters were his hitherto ardent critics when he was Governor of Anambra State. Now, they echo his empty “go and verify” chant whenever we highlight his lackluster performance in Anambra State.
Chimamanda, even if you were mumuscious enough to have been carried away by all that cacophony of noises on social media platforms, did you try to verify the phantom claim of the illusory mandate that is being bandied by PitObi and his goons? You and I know that PitObi is a man that has an uncanny addiction for figures and data even if most of those figures have been proven to be spurious, incorrect and irrelevant on several occasions. Have you, for once, stopped to ask yourself why your Okwute has not been quoting figures in respect of the election that he claimed to win? The PitObi that you and I know should have been reeling out figures of how many votes he scored in each of the States, how many votes his opponents had in the States, the percentages of the votes he and his opponents scored in each state, the number of States where he scored not less than 25% of votes cast in so so so and so number of states, echeteram echeteram!
If you have the slightest idea of how the election was held and the results were collated, you should have known that PitObi and his Ellu Pee have the hard copies of the results from every polling unit in their possession. You ought to have also known that PitObi and his team must have compared the hard copies of the results with the results uploaded on iRev via BVAS. Did he or any of his unruly gang come out to declare substantial disparity between the hard copies and those uploaded on iRev? Are you aware that the Obingos-led alternative collation website set up for a supposed independent collation of the results was abandoned the moment is started showing that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu won the election?
You also emphasized about the uploading of the results to iRev in real-time via BVAS as being pivotal to the transparency of the election. While I agree with you on the desirability of the results being uploaded immediately after the voting ended and votes were counted, the delay in the uploading does not in anyway undermine the integrity of the election results. If you read the Electoral Act 2022 and the INEC 2023 Election Guidelines well enough (which I seriously doubt), you would have known that the BVAS and iRev were not set up for COLLATION of results but for VERIFICATION of the results and that INEC had informed the nation as far back as August last year that the results would COLLATED MANUALLY while the TRANSMISSION of results would be carried out ELECTRONICALLY. I hope you’re not too election naive to understand my explanations.
So, my dear Chimamanda, it is a fact that Peter Gregory Obi (who I fondly refer to as PitObi), the candidate of Labour Party (that I fondly refer to as Ellu Pee) are fully aware that they clearly lost the 2023 Presidential election and that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the winner by the total number of votes cast and having scored at least 25% in a WHOPPING THIRTY STATES! He is not much different from your tribal brother Nnamdi Kanu who keeps on leading your people by their noses despite knowing full well that his IPOBic antics can never achieve Biafra. Kanu knows that there’s no constitutional provision for what he is asking for because it has been thrown away long time ago by your tribal elder Aguiyi-Ironsi and that it’s only a constitutional amendment that that bring such a discussion into reality. But Nnamdi Kanu would not target National Assembly members who are the ones saddled with the responsibility of constitutional amendments before concurrence by State Legislatures and the Presidency. He keeps pursuing an agenda of hate filled propaganda and violence induced fear to hold his people captive while fleecing them. So, it’s amazing that Igbo elders never cautioned or questioned just like they never do with PitObi.
Above all, this boils down to the inability of our Southeast people to heal themselves from the wounds of the Biafra war in order for them to be truly politically reintegrated into the country. Without the realization of the reality that nobody would offer them the apology they are unrealistically and stubbornly waiting for, and that they need to take the bull by the horns and heal their land in order for them to move on with lighter hearts, the Southeast will continue to alienate itself in the Nigerian political milieu. The Southeast must divorce itself from divisive and toxic characters like Nnamdi Kanu and Peter Gregory Obi because they are not good for its interests. This is why I would not totally blame you for your obnoxious letter. You’re just a grown up 45 years plus little girl that needs to be sat down and told the honest truth about her life as an Igbo in Nigeria.
I am Obatunde Oladapo, an almost 60 year old Yorùbá rascal village boy writing from Ìbàdàn, Nigeria