By Mobolaji Sanusi
“Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.”——Buddha
Political communication is inexorably becoming a tool of blackmail in our clime. It has made a celebrity out of several deceptive lickspittle pretending to be the public’s moral bastion. Most practitioners of this trade, hide under the tree of democratic freedom to inflict verbal venoms on notable figures or public office holders occupying exalted positions in our public life. Shamelessly too, once they discover there’s something to gain from victims of their verbal venom, with alacrity, they immediately take 360 degrees U-turn, swallow their vomit and begin their bootlicking game of hypocrisy.
Thence, these loquacious creatures who have taken the infliction of verbal diarrhea on victims as their means of livelihood, notwithstanding the character dents they spew out or the socio-principle implications of such bunkum, seek pretentious atonement, hoping to be forgiven as if nothing happened.
Below interview is a classical example of one of such expository scenarios of a bootlicker whose past has come to haunt his present.
Question: You told me in an interview that if offered (a job by President Tinubu), you will never take anything from this government.
Answer: No, that wasn’t what I said. I said (stuttering) that if Tinubu asks me to work with him, I said that I will not and the word that I used was that it’s not in my DNA. Right? That’s what I said.
Question: Has your DNA changed?
Answer: No. My DNA has not changed.
Question: But you’re eating your words right now.
Answer: No, I’m not eating my words. When I met, when I met with the administration officials and then…Look I can’t say everything that we said. I explained to them that this is what I’ve said, “I cannot take certain positions because I’d said that I cannot work for this (stuttering) because of certain things particularly because of things that I have said. However, I never said that I cannot work for Nigeria—-as an ambassador, I am working for Nigeria. I am going to be an ambassador of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Question: So, this appointment is an exception to your philosophy?
Answer: Exactly! Very clearly.
Question: So, if you had been given a ministerial appointment you wouldn’t have taken it? Or a special adviser?
Answer: Let me ask you a question. Do you even know?….I cannot say everything. I’ve said it here, when I had discussions i said look, I cannot do this, I cannot do that because of what I’d said and because of the positions I have held. However, I can do this because then I will be working for Nigeria but even at that, my position on President Bola Tinubu has changed. I believe he is the best for Nigeria.
Above interview dialogue on the reputable privately owned Channels Television station recently chronicles the question-and-answer session between that station’s efficient, effective and cerebral politics affairs programme host, Seun Okinbaloye, and Reno Omokri, the turn-coat erstwhile antagonist of President Bola Tinubu, GCFR.
Reno Omokri is one of the Nigerians who threw caution to the winds in their thoughtlessly careless attacks on Tinubu’s aspirations between Y2022/23. Alongside Daniel Bwala, we saw everything unprintable and indecorous jibes being thrown to futilely kill Tinubu’s presidential aspiration. Because they adopted verbal character assassination as a means of livelihood in the Tinubu opposition camps, their mostly phantom assertions against Tinubu, before their very eyes, fell like a pack of badly arranged cards.
Reno and his ilk like Daniel Bwala who is also shamelessly serving as one of Tinubu’s current Special Advisers, had malicious intentions against Tinubu in the runup to the 2023 elections. Despite their self serving vitriolic attacks, Tinubu still got elected as president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. When Reno was asked in Y2033/24 whether he’d work for Tinubu if called upon, he vehemently rejected the idea, claiming that it’s not in his DNA to work for someone like Tinubu.
Suddenly, he became an overnight Tinubu-turn-coat and started praising, to high heavens, our president and his policies and actions which he once openly derided without caution. What has changed? Reno claimed to have seen the ‘light.’ Hmmm.
Reno Omokri is currently an ambassador-designate of the country, courtesy of the benevolence and tolerance of a man he once derided in the most unpleasant phrases and who he claimed he can never work for because it is not in his DNA to work for someone like the current president. Reno’s hustling antecedent has now caught up with him and thank God that the internet never forgets his numerous interviews most especially his most recent on the incisive and evocative political programme of Seun Okinbaloye.
Nigerians can at least now take note that most of the vociferous political communicators antagonizing Tinubu are not doing so for altruistic purposes but for personal economic survival. For most of them, if they are not doing so to satisfy hidden sponsors, they’re doing so to rake in grants from foreign donor agencies, just for being dubious advocates of good governance in Nigeria. Unfurling facts are now revealing them to be nothing but profiteers taking advantage of our political failings to fill their pockets and corner important positions for themselves. Reno Omokri’s recantation is a clear validation of this.
The truth is that any reasonable person can now see that Reno sees praise singing or badmouthing of anyone or policy from the prisms of whether or not there’s benefits inherent therein for him. People like him mask their avaricious pursuits as being meant for the promotion of common good. They should not be taken serious.
His recent recantation and attempt to dismiss his shameful, malicious allegations against Tinubu as a mere misjudgment based on dubious information are not, in themselves, the reason for this intervention. Rather, it is his crafty maneuvering, to create an undeserving fallback position—-one that would allow him to conveniently distance himself from, or even recant, his relationship with the Tinubu or his government in the future – that has prompted this response.
Reno Omokri thinks himself to be smart but his deceitful deployment of his crooked intelligence has inflicted public opprobrium on him in the eyes of right-thinking people in this country. He claimed, on public television and without decorum, sense or tact, to have ‘graciously’ accepted to serve the country and not President Tinubu. Yet, any elementary students of government as a secondary school subject, will tell that the power to appoint anybody as an ambassador resides with the president of that country, and in this regard, by same Tinubu that he claimed his DNA will not allow him to work for. Yours sincerely gets surprised by Reno’s warped reasoning that further exposed his shallowness in his pursuits of personal economic survival and relevance, at all costs.
Perhaps, Reno Omokri is unaware that an ambassador is regarded as the personal representative of his country’s Head of State to the Head of State of the host nation. For that reason, ambassadors are accorded the diplomatic courtesy of being addressed as “Your Excellency” in official settings. They are formally received with a guard of honour (accorded heads of state or government), when presenting their letters of credence to the host Head of State. In the light of this, Reno Omokri, with his mischievous intelligence, cannot claim that he is not working for President Tinubu when it was President Tinubu who graciously appointed him: And as an ambassador, he would serve as the official representative of the President and his administration in the host nation. So, how can Reno Omokri garrulously state on national television that he is not working for President Tinubu?
President Tinubu deserves commendation for demonstrating the statesmanly tolerance of considering cantankerous Reno Omokri for such a significant role within his government. Nevertheless, vigilance remains essential because Omokri, as a fall back position in future, may have subtly advanced in that interview, an opportunistic invocation of a treacherous corridor to facilitate a shift of allegiance to future occupant of the nation’s topmost office once President Tinubu has completed his constitutionally permitted two terms.
One must conclusively admonish that the president of our dear country must be intuitively vigilant against ‘quistling’ like Reno, Bwala and others who have smuggled themselves into his government but nocturnally condemned him while profusely celebrating him and his policies in daytime.
- Sanusi, former MD/CEO of Lagos State Signage & Advertisement Agency, is currently managing partner at AMS RELIABLE SOLICITORS. (sms/whatsapp-07011117777
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