Political Spotlight: Bayo Onanuga's Controversial Defense on Hunger

The words “hunger” and “Onanuga,” nearly homophones, set the stage for a critical examination rooted in Yoruba epistemology, which advises comparing likes with likes. While the focus isn't merely comparison, the central concern here is the alleged decimation of the cries of the afflicted by powers that promised hope, epitomized by figures ensconced in the barn in Abuja. Presidential media adviser and prominent journalist, Bayo Onanuga, finds himself embroiled in controversy following his recent television appearance. His curt, off-the-cuff, and seemingly unfeeling remark—"I don’t see the level of hunger people are talking about"—has earned him the rough edges of Nigerian tongues. He didn’t end there, suggesting that the siege on the country by terrorists, bandits, and kidnappers is contrived by the media, stating, "The way they report insecurity is as if the entire country is consumed." To Onanuga, grave incidents like the abduction of 39 pupils and teachers or the brutal murder of Michael Oyedokun appear to be dismissed as mere mirages, perhaps just another of Shakespeare’s farcical plays.

Onanuga’s recent outing can be figuratively compared to two local vegetable variants: `tètè` and `dágunró`. By all standards, Onanuga is a Nigerian media icon; the history of the Nigerian press’s battle against military autocracy cannot be written without a sizeable chapter reserved for him and colleagues of similar persuasions, many of whom were martyred for the democracy enjoyed today. `Tètè` and `dágunró` are species of the same mother with a Siamese semblance, yet while `tètè` is an edible culinary recourse, `dágunró` is a harmful, punishing cuisine. Elders warn that attempting to cook them together in the same pot ends in disaster. This, to critics, is what happened to Onanuga. How could a man who fought valiantly with his pen on the side of the people during military regimes now irreverently smash both `dágunró` and `tètè` with his molars? By cavalierly dismissing the widespread hardship and insecurity that ordinary Nigerians suffer, Onanuga seems to have mistaken `dágunró`, the Nigerians of military rule, for `tètè`, Nigerians under Bola Tinubu’s suzerainty. To the Nigerian people, this felt like a friend plunging a dagger into their hearts, echoing the Ides of March when Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by his trusted ally, Brutus. The figurative question, "Et tu, Brute?" or "Kai sy, teknon?"—You too, child?—is exactly what the Nigerian common people asked Bayo Onanuga last week, as his interventionist trajectory on their side decades ago belies his current off-hand dismissal of their travails.

When the Yoruba are pained beyond measure, let down, and colossally betrayed, they become pensive, and from the stabs of their hearts emerge profound philosophical sayings. One such saying is, "eni a f’èyìn tì, bí ó ba yè, wíwí níí wí" (if the one restfully leaned on contemplates shifting from the comfort they offer, they at least should inform those who leaned on them, lest they fall face-flat on the floor). Did Onanuga give ample notice he had defected to the ranks of their suppressors? Another aphorism, expressing anguish, is a rhetorical question: "Òpáláńbá ń’wájú, kùmò l’éyìn orùn, sé b’òjú ti rí nìyí, t’áa fi ńje obì l’ójà Ede?" (Broken bottle on our forehead, bludgeon on the back; Is this how they play comradeship at the Ede market?).

Could Onanuga’s sin be more than mere betrayal? Beyond an inability to see naked insecurity and extreme poverty, could it be a failure to propitiate Èṣù, the god of the mouth, and the human mouth deity, which the Yoruba call Olúbọbọtiribọ? In Yoruba spiritual anatomy, the mouth is the "Baba Ebo"—the father of all sacrifices—occupying a delicate placement, balancing both ingress and egress forces of the body. The graveyard of political power in Nigeria is littered with bones of officeholders who run afoul of Olúbọbọtiribọ by failing to give the mouth its cross-functional due regards. Those who despise the god of the mouth are cast in the sewage of history. Onanuga’s past, however, tells a different story. On April 9, 1992, General Ibrahim Babangida proscribed the African Concord magazine over a highly critical cover story titled “Has Babangida Given Up?”—penned by Dapo Olorunyomi, marking Onanuga’s 30th month as editor. Babangida had earlier expressed admiration for ruthless figures like Chaka the Zulu and Hannibal. When publisher MKO Abiola demanded a personal apology from Onanuga to propitiate the "gap-toothed god," Onanuga penned a resignation letter instead, stating: "Journalism, especially the one to which I subscribe, is not meant to make the environment cosy for leaders of nations; it is meant to cause them sleepless nights… What shall I be apologising for?" When Onanuga and his friends went on to found TheNews, he declared their ideological underpinning: they were independent, but this "is no excuse for opportunism and spineless neutrality in the major issues that affect the well being of the Nigerian people. We shall be partisanly neutral on the side of truth, justice and good government." Thirty-four years later, sitting regally as a media adviser to a principal who is eighth in the line of succession to Babangida, the question arises why Onanuga would now "eat dágunró and tètè with the same teeth."

In that same television interview, Onanuga was further criticized for his "mealy-mouthed" comments. While denying the harrowing fate of Nigerians, he advised civil servants earning a 70,000 minimum wage: "If I work for government and I am earning 70k, except I am crazy or dumb lazy, I will go and do something at the side to add to my income." This advice appears to urge workers to run counter to Section 2(b) of the Fifth Schedule of the 1999 Constitution, which forbids "something at the side," and the 2021 Public Service Rules, which prohibit most public servants from engaging in other businesses. By stating, "We have been pigeon-holed into certain assumptions and conclusions" regarding hunger and suffering, he placed the people in a pigeonhole, rubbishing as non-existent the hunger and suffering of the very Nigerian poor he fought for and escaped military juntas’ death pills for. The pigeon, `eyelé`, is a Yoruba totem of fidelity and loyalty, known for not abandoning its landlord in travail. The use of this metaphor to seemingly torment ordinary Nigerians with their friend, the `eyelé`, is seen as contradictory. If he says the prevailing national agony is contrived, could one logically conclude that the tyranny he painted of the military era was equally contrived?

Indeed, the graveyard of political power is filled with victims of Olúbọbọtiribọ. On September 22, 2017, then-presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu was similarly struck when he announced that the Buhari presidency neither believed nor classified killer herdsmen as terrorists, but merely as "criminal gangs." This was later followed by reports in June 2021 claiming the government had reached a truce worth N100 billion with Miyetti Allah. Today, Nigerians perceive Buhari as complicit in the orgy of terrorist strikes, as much as his hirelings dressed in media visors. Take Alhaji Umaru Dikko as another instance. As the powerful Minister of Transport under Shehu Shagari, amid widespread cries of poverty, Dikko infamously stated that he could not believe Nigerians were hungry because they had not yet started eating from dustbins. Dikko alone holds the patent of the Onanuga statement. Olúbọbọtiribọ similarly struck then-Colonel David Mark. At the height of his majesty as Nigeria’s Minister for Communications in 1989, during an infrastructure inspection tour in Akure, Mark told debtors that “Telephone is not for the poor,” which was seen as the ultimate symbol of elitism and disdain for ordinary people. The deity was equally unsparing of Mohamed Sa’ad Abubakar, the Sultan of Sokoto. As reported by the BBC on July 29, 2011, while fuming against a military crackdown on Boko Haram insurgents, Abubakar told a gathering of religious leaders, “We cannot solve violence with violence.” This was at a time when gallant Nigerian forces had brutally suppressed the uprising and killed its leader, Mohammed Yusuf. The Sultan even demanded that the five policemen on trial for Yusuf’s killing must never be given bail.

More recently, First Lady Oluremi Tinubu became a victim of Olúbọbọtiribọ. Addressing the nation’s economic despair, she touted the "hope" of granting women money to start roasting corn or making `àkàrà` and `kúlí-kúlí`. In an address to State House Correspondents, she said: "We’re trying to give hope, and to start Akara business doesn’t take a lot of money. To start roasting corn, or somebody even said kúlí-kúlí doesn’t take much…" These remarks have since provoked nationwide outrage, especially given that just a few weeks prior, she had mandated APC state governors to gift party women befitting vehicles, likely SUVs worth multiple millions of Naira. This raises the question of whether Nigerian women voted for her husband only to be tied down to a "renewed hope" of frying `àkàrà`. Invoking the parallelism of literature, it can be said that for Nigerian women in the hands of the First Lady, they are in a ‘from frying pan to fire’ situation. It reminded citizens of the ancient Yoruba saying about governmental duplicity: the same dog that tenderly feeds her own baby with breast milk ferociously hunts down the offspring of the grasscutter. It is argued that Nigerian women did not vote her husband as president only to be tied down to a renewed hope of bakers of `kúlí-kúlí` and `àkàrà`.

In saner climes, an infraction against Olúbọbọtiribọ earns its victims banishment from representing the people. Here, they are garlanded, which some attribute to a "highly burnished Nigerian short memory." This recalls Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa. By 1964, the violent political crisis in the Western Region of Nigeria had escalated. Balewa, who projected the image of an "unworried" and "unconcerned" Prime Minister with his "ominous silence," was pummeled by the Western Region media. This is similar to how Bola Tinubu is harangued for worsening hunger and killings in Nigeria today. Balewa still advertised a façade of insulation from the worsening fate of the West and someone who didn’t read newspapers. On a tour of Benin in June 1964, still feigning ignorance of the crisis, Balewa was quoted as saying that he could not judge the intensity of lawlessness in the West on account of newspaper reports of the brigandage. Onanuga, last week, also took sizeable slices of this Balewa omelette that precipitated blood when he said media reportage of insecurity and hunger was contrived. Worse still, as Balewa departed Nigeria for Accra to attend an OAU meeting in October 1965, he was still quoted as having alleged that the violence in the region was contrived. While at the Ikeja Airport, he was asked by journalists what he was going to do about the fire raging in Western Nigeria. Successfully tucking his bother inside his flowing babanriga, Tafawa Balewa reportedly looked round and cynically declared, "Ikeja is part of the West and I cannot see any fire burning." That same fire consumed him on January 15, 1966. It was a case of a disease that would kill one which is always pampered and treated with kid gloves. While Dikko’s unguarded comment on the state of the Nigerian people riled the people, it survived three and a half decades before Bayo Onanuga picked it from its inglorious rafters. Dikko’s was widely remembered as a symbol of governmental disconnect from the reality of the people. Like Second Republic Nigeria where politicians mismanaged the economy amid dwindling oil revenues, which resulted in mass suffering and extreme scarcity of basic commodities, Nigerians are back to this inglorious era. With Onanuga’s claim and Remi Tinubu’s condescending take on the development of the Nigerian woman, we may have heard the defining summary of the Tinubu government about Nigerian citizens’ plight. As Dikko’s comment reflected the Shagari government’s tone-deafness to the people’s plight, Onanuga and Mrs. Tinubu’s have effectively summarized what the current administration thinks of its citizens. No wonder Dikko, who waited for Nigerians to feed from dustbins, was eventually given the dustbin treatment in December 1983—abducted in London, drugged, and crated like a bin commodity. Olúbọbọtiribọ, it seems, smilingly takes its pound of flesh.