Femi Fani-Kayode - Poems and Essays

Poems and Essays

In November 2009, before Yar'Adua fell ill, Fani-Kayode wrote a poem titled "I Stand and I Fight". In this poem, he described Yar'Adua as a "sickly tyrant with an amalekite foundation" and he predicted that "his end would soon come". Fani-Kayode wrote other poems over the last few years.

In January 2010 and approximately two months after Yar'Adua left Nigeria and was flown to Saudi Arabia on medical grounds (during which time no Nigerian other than his wife and his chief security officer saw him or saw any pictures of him), there were strong speculations in the country that the president was dead, was in a deep coma or was simply so sick that he could not even speak or get up from his sick bed in his Saudi Arabian hospital. This resulted in a power vacuum in Nigeria as a consequence of which a constitutional crisis began to unfold. The President's supporters and cabinet ministers, led by his wife Turai Yar'Adua, resisted the suggestion that the Vice President should take over power whilst the President was incapacitated even though this was what the Nigerian constitution prescribed, Fani-Kayode added his voice to that of President Obasanjo, President Shehu Shagari, General Yakubu Gowon, Ernest Shonekan and other former heads of government, former cabinet ministers, former legislators, leading opposition figures and leading members of the ruling PDP party by publicly calling for the resignation of President Yaradua and for the transference of power to Vice President Goodluck Jonathan at that critical time. In order to convey his view Fani-Kayode wrote a satire in Next Newspaper and titled it "Corpsology: Umaru's Gift To The Modern World". In the article Fani-Kayode suggested that by insisting on ruling Nigeria from his sick bed in Saudi Arabia and through his acolytes and wife, the President and his supporters were not just breaching the Nigerian constitution but that they were also surreptitiously introducing an entirely new and alien system of government into Nigeria, destroying democracy and attempting to perpetuate themselves in power through that new system indefinitely. He argued that this was being done by the authorities even where it was clear that the President was already "half dead". Fani-Kayode defined his concept of corpsology (or "corpsocracy" as he sometimes calls it) as "the rulership of the living by the dead" and the thrust and intent of his satire was to clearly convey the message that the attempt to introduce this hitherto unknown system of government into Nigeria by Yaradua, his wife and his kitchen cabinet was unacceptable and must not be allowed to stand.

On August 7, 2010 Fani-Kayode wrote another article titled "Charles Taylor: A Man Betrayed" in which he described the events and circumstances leading up to the extradition of the infamous former President of Liberia Charles Taylor from Nigeria, where he had been given refuge and asylum after a bitter war and crisis in his nation Liberia. Fani-Kayode explained how Taylor ended up being handed back to Liberia and how he was then sent to the International Criminal Court at the Hague in the Netherlands to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Fani-Kayode had been the spokesman of President Obasanjo at that time, and in his essay he gave an account of how Taylor was betrayed by a number of parties and nations and detailed what he described as the "treacherous and ignoble" roles that US President George W. Bush and President Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia played in the saga. He accused both America and Liberia of reneging on their word and on an earlier agreement on the Taylor issue and he alleged that they "betrayed the confidence" that the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Heads of Government, Nigeria and President Obasanjo had placed in them. Finally he called for the trial of former President George W. Bush and Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair at the same International Criminal Court at the Hague for what he described as "similar crimes against humanity" as the ones that Taylor was being accused of. He alleged that they had committed these crimes during the illegal invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Baghdad in which he claimed that "hundreds of thousands of defenceless and innocent Iraqi women and children" were killed. The article was published the day after the sensational appearance of super-model Naomi Campbell at the famous "blood diamonds" trial of Charles Taylor at the Hague.

Fani-Kayode was also involved in a debate about the mysterious circumstances under which Nigeria's first Prime Minister, Sir Tafawa Balewa, lost his life. In two essays titled "Femi Fani-Kayode: Who Killed Sir Tafawa Balewa?" and "The Death of Tafawa Balewa: the Segun Osoba angle", he opposed the view that Balewa had died of natural causes which had been suggested by Chief M.T. Mbu, Nigeria's former Foreign Minister and Chief Segun Osoba, a former state governor, and he proffered the view that the Prime Minister had actually been murdered. Fani-Kayode wrote other essays over the years. In 2011 he called for the "crushing" of the Islamic fundamentalist sect called Boko Haram which claimed responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Nigerians in a campaign of terror and bombing in their quest to ban western education and set up an Islamic fundamentalist caliphate in the whole of northern Nigeria".