Give me a good piece, nicely crafted in fine language and you have made my day. This is why opinion and column pages of newspapers attract me more than any other part of a newspaper. There are columnists in Nigeria whose weekly columns I have not missed for many years. I buy newspapers because of columnists and my good friends in Thisday will forgive me if I confess that Dele Momodu is the reason I stopped buying Saturday editions of the paper since 2010. There are a number of Nigerian columnists I don't agree with, but that fact doesn't stop me from reading them, but not Momodu. And the reason is simple: I can't stand men that don't stand for anything and will easily fall for anything. The popularisation of the Social Media has given rise to a number of emergency activists in recent time. From Facebook to twitter, these pretenders are there, taking advantage of the public mood, pretending to be on the side of the masses. If Dino 'Mike Tyson' Melaye thought we had forgotten how he was captured on live TV shamelessly punching a woman co-member of the lower chamber just two years ago, then we can forgive Femi Fani-Kayode for suddenly finding his voice as a freelance activist. After all, it's been more than five years that he has lost his national relevance and eagerly needs attention again. Malam Nasir el-Rufai, even if ahead of these fellows in terms of performance while in office, also needs to watch his twitter activities as his needless attacks on the current administration is becoming boring and worn out, and even in unmoderated cyberspace, decency calls for moderation. But while the above mentioned emergency activists' activities are more on the social media, Momodu, in addition to his thoughtless twitter postings, also has a formal medium, his Saturday column in Thisday, to himself to lecture us on governance and people. Until recently, Momodu hardly wrote on politics. His turf is entertainment and I have no business with that ' that is his choice. Week in, week out, if Momodu is not praising Ghana, he is entertaining us with how he sat in the fourth row in Michael Jackson's burial service, how he spoke with Mike Adenuga the night before, how he visited MKO Abiola in London, how he visited Siberia or Djibouti, how he fought during the Liberia war, or how he owned a Limousine. But the few times Momodu's pendulum swings to politics and political economy, one wonders whether he would not have done better staying in his entertainment and photography turf. Among such days was Saturday, September 22, 2012. Someone had posted an article entitled 'The Bully called Sanusi' in an online discussion forum without referencing the author. My quick googling of the original article directed me to Thisday website and I saw the article as Momodu's. I had expected Momodu to do better this time round, given the fact that there is a very good case to disagree with CBN governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi in his current proposed but now suspended currency restructuring exercise ' an exercise I also hold is not well-advised. But rather than Momodu dealing with the substance of the matter this time round, he continued from where he stopped in 2009 when Sanusi sacked two of his celebrity friends in the banking industry. In an article he wrote in 2009, Momodu, while subtly admitting patronage from two of the sacked bank bosses for his magazine business, chided SLS for his kamikaze reforms. To Momodu, it is no crime to empty depositors' monies, inasmuch as such looters patronise his photography business. After all, he saw no wrong in promoting Babangida and Abacha's ill-acquired opulence in his magazine for the right prices. Thankfully, he did not find corruption in SLS's baggage ' the common denominator of all his (Momodu's) patrons in both the private and public sectors.Momodu wrote: 'He (Sanusi) needed to disguise his real intentions and motives by taking on an entire institution and sacking otherwise brilliant bankers in the process'. Even after one of Momodu's 'brilliant bankers' owed up to stealing the funds and judicially accepting to forfeit assets in addition to paying back N191 billion, to Momodu, the matter is still a case of witch-hunting and disguised motive. Whatever is Sanusi's motive, Momodu should be bold enough to admit his benefactors' thievery. That is when we can begin to take him seriously.The currency redenomination proposal, for all its benefits, doesn't sound convincing enough to me as well-advised, but Sanusi not getting it right this time doesn't diminish the good things he had done in the past, especially instilling sanity in our financial system. So the old music of 'hidden agenda', as sung by the likes of Momodu since 2009, is faded and if Dele's mission is to take advantage of the current public sentiments against Sanusi to revise history, he has failed woefully. Momodu also made a veiled attempt to set Sanusi against his boss, President Goodluck Jonathan. Even though this is not new, as a serving Senator even made a more direct remark in that regard recently, the analysis is an orchestrated mis-read of events. If anything, the hesitation exercised by the President before finally succumbing to socio-political pressure to suspend Sanusi's policy only shows the President still has confidence in the CBN leadership.Expectedly, Momodu did not fail to lend his voice to the pepper soup joint talk about Sanusi's presidential ambition. No serious media will take that seriously, because it doesn't take personal knowledge to know Sanusi fares better as a critic than as a politician and clearly not the type that will climb the podium to dish out those lies called electoral manifestoes as it is done in this part of the world. Above all, he has never hidden his ultimate ambition in life.In any case, even at the nadir of his popularity today, if Sanusi were to contest presidential election, he would surely poll more than one hundred times the miserable 26,000 Momodu returned countrywide in 2011! He who lives in glass house should not throw stone.Oyewale, a blogger and public commentator, lives in Lagos.
Click here to read full news..
