It was Reuben Abati who in a press statement of May 28, 2013, described, Rotimi Fashakin, the National Publicity Secretary of an inconsequential, regional and eventually defunct political party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), as “a medieval-era ignoramus and brainless individual”. Abati did not stop there, irked by the propensity of attraction Fashakin has for peddling falsehood and vending calumny against decent individuals who are by far above him in all ramifications, he further described him as “a silly, hideous and second rate character whose family should be ashamed of”.
It was on this ground that respectable individuals around heaved a huge sigh of relief when since that apt description of Fashakin by Abati, he (fashakin) was most probably withdrawn by his family for a mental check and was assumed to have been remanded in a mental home on the advice of his family’s psychiatrists after it was discovered his case would need all of the combination of orthodox, herbal and spiritual interventions for him to return to normalcy. Since then society has been better without his unguarded vituperations and outright spewing of hate like a man possessed and in need of urgent deliverance.
However, just recently, and surprisingly, too, he resurfaced and went straight into the same tirade that presumably forced his family to take him into custody in a mental home all this while for his own good and to protect the little respect that is left of their name from being further tarnished by this unstable individual. With his latest naked dance in the market place, it is obvious, Rotimi Fashakin, either was discharged from the mental home where he was receiving treatment and was being rehabilitated prematurely, or he overpowered those who have the unenviable task of ensuring he did not escape back into the public spher. Either way, there is an urgent need now more than ever for his family, that is if they are not yet tired of his troubles, to quickly re-arrest him, tie him up and take him back to a more effective mental home where more potent medicines can be given him to prevent his case from getting totally out of hand.
His recent tirade against Chief Femi Fani-Kayode in an attempt to vitiate the former Minister of Aviation’s well publicised Open Letter to President Buhari further gives credence to Abati’s description of him (Fashakin). While accusing Fani-Kayode of seeking presidential attention in his ill-informed essay, it is obvious that it is Fashakin who is actually in need of a presidential attention as he has been out of job since CPC was merged and metamorphosed into the then newly formed All Progressives Congress (APC) and he was rejected from participating prominently in the new set up owing to the unbearable negative aura that goes with him. It is also not a surprise that he was not considered fit enough to be one of President Buhari’s spokespersons despite his avowed closeness to the president. Who would want to make “a medieval-era ignoramus and brainless individual” his spokesman? Not even a Buhari!
In his infantile, insipid and infamous write-up, Fashakin tried to discredit Fani-Kayode’s point that President Jonathan actually purchased weapons for our military with which they chased Boko Haram away from all the territories they were holding shortly before the elections. In doing so, Fashakin, whom Abati also described as a man who fails “to do minimal research that any right-thinking person would
attempt”, quoted Alex Badeh, former Chief of Defence Staff as implying that no arms were bought for the military during Jonathan’s era. However, recent events have proved Fani-Kayode was right after all. The very fact that President Buhari admitted before a visiting British Minister of Defence that former President Jonathan bought arms with raw cash is enough to give credit to Fani-Kayode for being fearlessly truthful. While giving some information on the investigations by the EFCC into the purported arms deal, The nation newspaper reported on January 3, 2016, that “investigators have already obtained the list of military equipment which were bought and the inventory by the Armed Forces”. The source also said “Some of the companies which supplied these equipment have been contacted too.” All these imply that Fani-Kayode was right on the purchase of arms.
However, Fashakin in his usual manner of trivialising serious national issues, one of the reasons he would never have been found fitting enough to be a presidential spokesman, described Buhari’s admission of the fact that arms were actually bought by Jonathan as “sarcasm”. This is how lowly, Fashakin brings state matters. Little wonder then, Abati further described him (Fashakin) as a “disruptive character with a mental indolence that has left him with a deep character flaw”.
In an attempt to justify Buhari’s silence over the brazen raid of a Nigerian territory by Cameroonian soldiers who “violated our territorial integrity and savagely murdered 70 innocent Nigerians in their village before burning it down”, Fashakin ignorantly referred to the Lake Chad multinational force cooperation between countries in the area. He is not brilliant enough to understand Fani-Kayode’s standpoint that such agreements should not be a basis for foreign military to invade our villages under the guise of a multinational force and murder innocent Nigerians without provocation. Fani-Kayode’s take is for Buhari to investigate that raid and ensure it was within the scope of the agreement and cooperation between participating nations or else, Cameroonian soldiers would get to Abuja, raid the city with impunity and leave back for Cameroon without let or hinderance while hiding under the same Lake Chad multinational force cooperation.
For lack of an ingenuous way to satisfy his paymaster and still convince his family members that he is out of his “brainlessness”, Fashakin in that essay brought in a lot of extraneous and unrelated matters including a second-party bail issue for an inconsequential matter in a Customary Court as far back as 2003 involving Fani-Kayode’s wife in an environmental sanitation matter! This is how abysmally irredeemable Fashakin’s mental case is! One now understands why Abati once described this man as an arm-chair critic per excellence and that in his attempt to pull people “down at all costs, lies have become standard stuff, mischief a major commodity, and indecency a character flaw”. Just like he once cast aspersions on Jonathan while making reference to inebriation, he attempts to do same to Fani-Kayode by alluding to drug abuse, a narrative that has since expired and abandoned by its manufacturers after discovering the pointlessness of treading that path of lies and calumny against one of the nation’s finest minds in Chief Femi Fani-Kayode. One would not blame Fashakin; a man who is reported to be in custody for mental disorder and just escaped from a mental home after close to three years of forced hibernation would not know that his masters have since abandoned this narrative
because they found out it is jejune, puerile and facile to continue to progress on the path of error but which Fashakin still jumped on having lost touch with reality.
Let me end this essay by quoting what one commenter writing under the name “American Abroad” on Fashakin’s essay in SaharaReporters said: “I have never supported Mr Fani-Kayode…However, for any meaningful resolution of our many political woes, opposing views should be heard, but must strive to be civil, fact-based and relevant. This needless – and I might add – unproven digression into alleged drug use, second-party bail bonding, and all manner of editorial mischief, is uncalled for and counter-productive. Generally speaking, ad hominem attacks are an evolutionary dead-end in public argumentation.”
That is an award winning admonition to a delirious, easily excitable and unstable character like Rotimi Fashakin. One hopes he finds his way back to the mental home very soon before he does more damage to himself and the little honour left of his family name.
– [email protected]; Twitter: @stjudendukwe
