Battle of words: SLS, IBK, Kperogi and our collective suffering
By Bin Isah
it has been a long week of debates, discussions, rejoinders and exchanges between and among the fans of three important personalities from Northern Nigeria: Emir Muhammadu Sunusi (popularly known as SLS), Prof Farooq Kperogi and Prof Ibrahim Bello Kano (IBK).
The truth is that, the wordplay of the writers provokes the fancy of readers, and entices the sense of the intellectual minds. However, the real deal rests upon the substance of the game and the appeal of the persuasions. IBK has truly got it right in the wrong way, while Kperogi still holds the ball in his court.
In fact, Kperogi didn’t simply wake up to set a fire upon the super-luminous star of the nation, SLS. He was called to the pen. SLS made a reel of remarks that smelt of all personal proclivities to self-importance, interest and power. Kperogi read the remark in its pompous tones, which cumulatively ran down the bad road of nonchalance to national concern.
Kperogi was on fire because SLS seemed to have put the national concern lower than his personal interest. Not only that, the remark also showed that SLS had forgotten that the precarious dance of the national economy which he found uninteresting was the product of his biblical belief in neo-liberal economic theory that he has preached to the government for a while. Remove subsidies, privatize, and add more tax!
Actually, the battle of words would not make SLS safe from the wildfire, because the matter is beyond words and vocabularies and lexicons of English frenzy. It’s deeper to be reduced into a rejoinder that boils down to rhetorical bigotry, jokes and indifference to real issues. The matter reveals what SLS represents as a national treasure, a facade. This is man who considers himself to be a gift to Nigeria, who has a magic wand to solve its problems, yet a self-centred saint.
To be fair to Kperogi, he is not worse than SLS in deployment of abusive arsenals when engaging a person. SLS is expert at dropping bombs on the personality of his worthy critics, ripping them apart, with words so vile of his royal roots. But, this is what a pen power induced into a person with a sense of superior opinions. Remember his unprintable phrases on Sheikh Jafar Mahmud Adam in his “Engagement with Jafar Mahmud Adam”. In this line, Kperogi can even be holier than SLS.
The case that awaits SLS is that of his undiluted support for policies that proved difficult to yield any results to the nation. I don’t know to what school of economics theorists he belongs, but they are not the best. At least, when a solution is given, and the solution put people into the mud of another worse problem, you propose for another solution not to insist on the first solution which had failed to work.
Because, any economic solution that would lead to economic depression, losing jobs, closing of businesses, high cost of living, poor standard of life, and plunging millions of people into abject poverty, that solution has become a terrible problem. A problem which requires a revision, a change in thoughts, in ideas, and in actions. However, SLS as a lover of IMF recommendations and brutal capitalism, he sees no problem with that line of trial, and no any other solution can be given but an embrace of patience and hardship.
I’m not an economics expert but we have been taught that economics is for the creation and management of wealth and resources in a way that a nation and its people get better, do better and produce better. It’s about the betterment of people, not deprivation and exploitation for the benefit of the few. We know SLS is an economist, at the same time, a business man, and thus, a profiteering hustler around the national wealth. What do you expect?
A support to Tinubu’s economic policies over which the nation is weeping is a sin. It’s more of a moral abuse than an intellectual view. In fact, SLS as an intellectual, is a betrayal to public intellectualism. The basic work of a public intellectual is to help the poor people against the powerful, not the powerful against the poor. Only that we know SLS has been a friend to the people in power, which may actually be a reason why he cannot but help them to succeed in their poor management of the nation. A friend in need is a friend indeed.
It’s not a hidden fact that he has no regrets for his romance with Tinubu’s iconoclastic antics of economic problematics. That’s not a problem! The remorse of SLS is that after all the sweetest sugars he added to their policies the government is still not taking him as a friend, is not treating him like a political-economic superman with paranormal powers to make things happen in a hush of the blink. This is the economic problem that disturbs the soul of SLS, not the national one. The government has used and dumped him like a homeless prostitute. Of course, it’s not fair. But, who cares? It’s a dinner with the devil.
It’s not about Kperogi, IBK, or the fans that worship the wonderful words around their altars. It’s about SLS and his public show of unpatriotism to the nation after he placed his back for the government to implement its illest ideas that inspire a brazen, merciless management of the country. Now, that the people he had provided a theoretical justification to their economic malevolence have abandoned him in his battle over the throne, and he now wants to throw them away along with the entire nation into a deep blue sea. What made Tinubu and his government better than the nation?
The man is for himself.
Bin Isah is a blogger who writes from Kano State.
