Emmanuel Ugwu: Femi Fani-Kayode, the tsetse fly who flew to Cambridge

In times like this, you are compelled to ask yourself whether Femi Fani-Kayode’s avowed Fulani heritage has disappeared. In times like this, you are provoked to ask yourself whether he is still descended from a Fulani bloodline. In times like this, when he is choking on the rage of Fulani xenophobia, you cannot but ask yourself whether he is more Yoruba now than he once claimed to be.

Immediately the kidnap of Olu Falae happened, Fani-Kayode kidnapped the incident! He laser-focused on it, indicted the entire tribe of the alleged perpetrators and declaimed against the nomadic livelihood that sustains the Fulani race. Even weeks after Falae’s release, Fani-Kayode still holds the issue hostage; making merchandise out of that act of criminality: And crying that the Fulani be banned from venturing into Yoruba homeland.

As Fani-Kayode vents his nauseating hate speech, you try in vain to reconcile his present, relentless Fulani demonization messaging with his erstwhile revelation that he was a scion of Fulani. He had disclosed that: “My maternal great-grandmother was a pure Fulani woman from Sokoto. My grandfather, Sheikh Nurudeen Sa’ I’d was half Fulani and half Yoruba. My mother had one quarter Fulani blood in her and I have one eight Fulani blood in me. I have Ife, Ijesha, Egba, Isale Eko and Fulani blood running through my veins. I am very proud of each and every one of those bloodlines.”

So you ask where the Fulani blood in Fani-Kayode has gone. Has he, by some quirky technology, separated the Fulani fraction of his blood from the red sea of his bloodstream and drained away the accursed Fulani thing? Has he bled away that fluid Fulani part of him? Has he purged himself so clean he is now a retroactively purebred Yoruba?

Or you wonder whether he got the legend of his family tree wrong. Has he come to discover that there is zero drop of Fulani blood in him? Did the elders in his family tell him that he was an unalloyed Yoruba all along; that all the generations traceable to both parts of his parentage are completely Yoruba?

If Fani-Kayode has found out that he is all Yoruba, not remotely Fulani in any way, he shouldn’t have kept it secret. He should have announced his correct identity. He should have proclaimed the immaculate purity of his Yoruba blood as gladly as he had advertized he could reach into expired eternity to profile his forbears.

But if Fani-Kayode still believes in the Fulani component of his make-up, then he really needs to tell us how he manages to do it. He needs to tell us how he casually murders himself, buries himself, and reincarnates –insisting, like an Abiku, that the latest model of his reinvented self be taken as a serious member of our society.

In his latest railing, Fani-Kayode, the adult who had mined his own family history to prove that he was a Fulani kid, characterized the Fulanis with circumscribed, alienated otherness. Fani-Kayode reiterated that the Fulanis must be expelled from Yorubaland.

Kwakwanso, immediate past Governor of Kano State and a serving senator, had gone to a function in Ibadan where he reportedly voiced his disagreement with the demand made by certain Afenifere elders that Fulani herdsmen be banned from operating in the South West. To Fani-Kayode, the former attack dog who used to rain abuse on the silver-haired Wole Soyinka for an Obasanjo pay cheque, Kwakwanso had committed the crime of mustering the temerity to ‘’insult our revered Yoruba elders.’’

But that’s not all that irritated today’s ‘’elder-respecting’’ Fani-Kayode. He was also incensed that Kwakwanso ‘’went further by attempting to give us an unsolicited lecture about his Fulani heritage and pedigree and about the benefits of having a good education: imagine that coming from one of them.’’

Imagine an egotistical Fulani asking you to imagine the supposed oddity of his estranged blood brother!

The thought process of a flamboyant hypocrite defies analysis. And Fani-Kayode is a promiscuous fraud. He operates in a torturously confounding kaleidoscope of delusions.

As you would have noticed, Fani-Kayode feels insulted when some other person challenges his monopoly on pedigree recitation. Only Fani-Kayode may declare the roots of his ancestry for public consumption. Only his own Fulani descent is worthy of promotion. Only Fani-Kayode’s pedigree!

And Fani-Kayode is mad because Kwakwanso gave an ‘’an unsolicited lecture.’’ It’s a transgression to declare your ancestry at will. Only Fani-Kayode may freely report the right fraction of his lifeblood that flowed from the caliphate of Sokoto.

Again, the subtext of Fani-Kayode’s outrage tells you that declaring your Fulani ancestry is foisting a grave sort of obscenity on people. You should be ashamed of being Fulani. You should be so ashamed of being born Fulani that you should live your life constantly apologizing for inheriting an awkward prenatal misfortune. Hide it!

Fani-Kayode is ‘’proud’’ of every tributary of bloodline that has made him an organic melting pot. This, of course, includes the drops of Fulani blood in him. Looking at his anti-Fulani racist slur beside his own Fulani background, I conclude that, Fani-Kayode is as prejudiced as he is foolish.

Fani-Kayode would shame a man for being completely Fulani while he (Fani-Kayode) still harbors one eighth of Fulani blood!

Of course, Fani-Kayode is not announcing his fractional Fulaniness today. He isn’t making the full disclosure. That is a strategic blunder; because his Hate Fulani Campaign may have gained some traction if he had leveraged the Fulani fraction of his heredity in his war against the Fulani folks from hell. A segment of the gullible in our neighborhood may have bought into his ‘’legitimacy’’ as an unbiased truth warrior.

Fani-Kayode can’t confess he is a Fulani child these days. He is invested in damning the Fulanis. And he had to disqualify himself as Fulani, to be able to thrust himself into that flaming passion.

To be able to loathe the Fulanis, to able to cast torrents of abuse on the Fulani tribe, and to rally the rest of Nigeria behind his Fulani Hate Campaign, he had to expunge from his memory the fact that there is a Fulani contribution to his constitution. He has convinced himself that, for now, the Fulani part of him is nonexistent or, at best, infinitesimal and inconsequential.

At the moment, Fani-Kayode’s obsession is converting other tribes to Hate Fulani gospel. If other ethnic groups would embrace his hate activism, he would feel successful: and he would gain a modest feel of high to subsist on for a while… before he preys on the next virgin tribe.

Last year, he meted his xenophobia poison to the Igbos. This year, he is focused on the Fulani. Next year, he will be spitting at another tribe on his checklist.

Fani-Kayode is proficient in injecting himself into the subject of his immediate, pressing fixation. He withdraws himself, as if he was some tangible bills of money, from one worldview and lodges himself into another niche of existence. And he doesn’t transition from one identity to another. Neither does he notify you of his latest abdication.

He is persuaded that you are charitable enough to understand that he changes at the speed of a newsflash. That he gets bored, sticking with one character for too long.

So often, Fani-Kayode, through fever-pitch noisemaking that is amplified by an indulgent Nigerian media practically sworn to disseminating any filth he excretes, stages a contest of his former self with his newer persona. In his Fake Femi Fani-Kayode Show, what he had said of himself wrestles with what he is currently saying of himself –for the silverware of which untruth is most distant from the body of its presumed source.

Fani-Kayode’s biggest problem is his wild propensity to intrude, to privatize the trending point of social discourse and to crown himself the issue. The man is compulsorily primed to invade a debate, impose the anarchist authority of drugged thug and exercise a faux liberty to pronounce the terms of normalcy.

His method is appalling, utterly odious. He brims with eagerness to terrorize with his hysterics. He charges into the matter with a condescending haughtiness that judges you unworthy to be his interlocutor. He strives to intimidate with you with some Armageddon he can conjure. He intervenes to escalate chaos.

Fani-Kayode calls Fulani herdsmen ‘’tsetse flies’’. That’s Femi Fani-Kayode being Femi Fani-Kayode. He is a bigot, a misanthrope who feels most alive when he is denigrating other humans. But this time, the exported insult points at him.

Fani-Kayode’s mother is one quarter Fulani. Femi is one eight Fulani. Further down that genetic odyssey, hundreds of Fulani herdsmen abound. This means that our British-nursed boy turned psychopathic Yoruba chauvinist, our culture minister turned barbaric segregationist and our Christian theology school attendee turned Hate Fulani Herald is the son of tsetse flies.

Except that Femi is a curious, haughty mutation of the son of tsetse flies. He detests other tsetse flies –those that, unlike him, have never flown to Cambridge!

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Emmanuel Uchenna Ugwu engages the issues of the day with honest audacity. He writes with an intense passion that is tempered by prudence. He tweets via @emmaugwutheman

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