Churchill Okonkwo
Fear pervades Nigerians’ lives and Nigerian politics. Fear has been in the air since President Muhammadu Buhari won reelection. Fear has been surging since he closed the borders and announced a visa-free entry to all African countries starting next year. Nigerians are more afraid today than they have been in a long time. TY Danjuma, a master of fear knows this and is invoking it in concrete and abstract ways for political gains.
Danjuma, a former Minister of Defense, delivered a speech at the launch of a book in Lagos. There, he warned that in Yorubaland, everyone seems to have lost their voice in terms of speaking against “governance collapse.” He added, “If I tell you what I know that is happening in Nigeria today, you will no longer sleep.”
“If you want details, I will give it to you privately.”
Privately? What is going on in Nigeria? Per TY Danjuma, you are free to make a wild guess and any terrible thing you assume is a possibility.
TY Danjuma is not new to making an outlandish attention-grabbing comment with little or no substance. But, as is so often the case in politics, there is a chasm between the messages of repackaged insinuations aimed at generating attention and heightening fear.
TY Danjuma is simply telling Nigerians; look, we ruined Nigeria; I corruptly enriched myself and was “dashed” oil blocks worth $2bn for a chicken $500m. Now, my family is financially settled and we will forever sleep peacefully. But if I tell you what’s going on in Nigeria, nobody will be able to sleep. TY Danjuma then goes home and sleeps peacefully with dozens of heavily armed guards watching over his life and that of his family.
Tribalism was at the heart of that speech delivered by Danjuma at the University of Ibadan. Tribalism is the biological loophole that many politicians have banked on for a long time: tapping into our fears and tribal instincts. If TY Danjuma and the wolves in Peoples Democratic Party still stands a chance to reclaim power in 2023, fear could be the key. Clearly TY Danjuma was banking tribalism by insinuating that the Yorubas are quiet, apparently because of the role of Bola Tinubu and Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, in Buhari’s administration.
The typical pattern in tribalism that was deployed by TY Danjuma in his speech was to give the Buhari’s administration and his ethnic group a different label than the rest of us in the Middle Belt and Southern Nigeria, and say they are going to harm us or our resources.
In building these tribal boundaries between “us” and “them,” TY Danjuma and some politicians have managed very well to create virtual groups of people, religions, and ethnicities that do not communicate to hate without even knowing each other: This is the human-animal in action!
When TY Danjuma said “May Almighty God continue to bless this country. But only we can save ourselves from ourselves”, he was leaving the option of acting in whatever form to the economically depressed, lonely and angry Nigerians. The ethnic discord that came out of the mouth of TY Danjuma has the effect of poison. His message of prejudice and conference is meant to pave the way for Nigerians to turn against one another.
It is has been established that the response to fear is the “fight or flight” response. That response has helped us survive the predators and other tribes that have wanted to kill us. By scaring us, the demagogues in the PDP and the opposition in Nigeria are attempting to turn our aggression toward “the others,” whether in the form of harassing them on the social media or taking political action.
Fear as a political force comes and goes, ebbing and flowing in Nigerian history. Politicians have always played to it just like TY Danjuma is doing. People need to displace and project their anxieties, their concerns about their own lives and the lives of people they care about.
Often they are susceptible to politicians who tell them that “the wrong kinds of people are responsible for threatening them or their loved ones. This is the kind of politic TY Danjuma is playing when he claims, without evidence that “If I tell you what I know that is happening in Nigeria today, you will no longer sleep.”
It is strange watching these political dinosaurs that liquidated Nigeria still positioning themselves as the alpha and omegas of our problems. When demagogues like TY Danjuma manage to get hold of our fear circuitry, we often regress to illogical, tribal and aggressive human animals, becoming weapons ourselves – weapons that politicians use for their own agenda.
Nigerians should, together, say no to these seductive whispers that are aimed at making us turn against one another.
May the politics of hope continue to triumph over the politics of fear in Nigeria.
Together, we can.
Churchill Okonkwo
On Twitter @Churchillnnobi
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