THE UNREASONABLE RUFAI OSENI BY VALENTINE OBIENYEM

Mr Lere Olayinka has since joined the swelling chorus that has taken to branding Mr. Rufai Oseni as unreasonable. He is hardly alone. The guild already has some prominent members: Nyesom Wike, who appears to have misplaced even the elementary courtesy due to elders; Reno Omokri, the itinerant polemicist who seems never to encounter an administration he cannot, sooner or later, find reasons to defend; Daniel Bwala; Bayo Onanuga; and Kenneth Okonkwo, the supreme sycophants. 

Then there is Femi Fani-Kayode. I call him the “Agadiekwenka” of the group. Here is a man whose political metamorphoses have become almost a genre of their own.

Below these float the minor miscreants, digital hirelings, and assorted dregs whose contributions are generally too cheap and inconsequential to deserve mention. But, for the sake of completeness, let us mention a few: Pajimo, Adichie, Jonas Onwuasoanya, and Ejimofor.why is it that among hundreds of aides to the Prof., only Adichie and Ejimofor are found worthy for dinner jollity? 

Some, still mindful of tomorrow and uncertain of what tomorrow may bring, prefer to exhibit their follies under pseudonyms. Perhaps anonymity gives courage where conviction is lacking.

What unites this motley chorus is not necessarily a shared argument, but a shared discomfort with Rufai whenever he refuses to dance to the tune expected of him. To call a man unreasonable merely because he will not surrender his questions, his scepticism, or his microphone is to confuse obedience with reason.

Rufai represents that flickering, desperate hope of millions who still dare to believe that the Nigerian conscience has not been completely knocked down to the highest bidder. In every age of moral exhaustion, history produces figures of this sort, men who are branded impossible simply because they refuse to bow before power and potentates.

 Behind  Rufai’s gentle appearance burned a mind sharp, devoted, and intense, and a firm, indomitable will of a gadfly. A true gadfly does not seek to be comfortable, nor does he arrive to soothe; his sole virtue is his sting, forcing the sluggish beast of the commonwealth to awaken and move. Rufai provides that morning sting upon the calloused hide of a self-satisfied ruling caste.

He summarizes Diogenes in body and soul. The story of Rufai reminds us of Diogenes the Cynic, who, when Alexander the Great stood before him offering any imperial gift he desired, insolently replied: “Only stand a little out of my sun.” Diogenes was famously depicted carrying a lit lantern through the blinding noon of Athens, searching in vain for an honest man, much as Rufai searches for an honest politician across our television screens. Impolite courtiers called Diogenes a dog and a madman, yet his abrasive insolence was the only mirror left in which an empire could see its own decadence. Did some not call VeryDarkMan a madman for holding up that very same mirror before them?

Or consider Cato the Younger in the dying days of the Roman Republic. While Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus were buying magistrates and partitioning the commonwealth among themselves, Cato stood in the Senate, unbending and abrasive, shouting down official perjury until guards dragged him away. His contemporaries dismissed him as rigid, tactless, and utterly unreasonable. But when the state is being auctioned off in the forum, the only unreasonable man is the one who refuses to bid.

We live in a civilisation turned upside down, decaying not from the violence of its enemies, but from the apathy of its custodians. Those charged with moral leadership look conveniently away. The clergy, with only the rarest, heroic exceptions, have grown far too comfortable in the corridors of power to remember the prophetic fire of Amos or Isaiah. Some have become worse than blind; they are dumb by calculation. They gaze upon the parade of state impunity, shrug their shoulders, and pronounce a benediction upon the plunderers of the public till.

The judiciary, which ought to be the unyielding temple of our civic order, has suffered that quiet, fatal loss of public faith that precedes the fall of republics. The common citizen is driven to ask whether Lady Justice has dropped her blindfold entirely, having learned to recognise the titles, the wealth, and the menacing countenances of those who stand before her. Did he actually build a house for her?

Whenever I contemplate this judicial marketplace, my mind wanders back across twenty-five centuries to Cambyses II of Persia. Herodotus tells us that when the royal judge Sisamnes took a bribe and delivered a tainted verdict, the Persian monarch had him flayed alive and used his skin to upholster the judicial seat. The moral was brutally enduring: the judge must remember that the authority to sit in judgment today does not exempt him from being judged tomorrow. Where justice becomes merchandise, the state is already dead; it merely awaits an undertaker.

Nor is the marketplace innocent. Our captains of commerce engage in daily acts of fiscal “abracadabra” transforming scarcity into extortion and calling it enterprise.

Included in this parade of the vile are journalists. Their travails are best explained using the experience of Milton: he wrote the “Areopagitica”to defend liberty, yet ended up working as an official censor for the state. Today, we behold watchdogs who have slipped their leashes not to bark, but to curl up beneath the master's table, begging for scraps of patronage. When the sentry begins to dine with the thief, what becomes of the house?

Here lies Nigeria’s tragedy, and here too is why Rufai Oseni remains such a jarring irritation to the status quo. He possesses the fiery resolve of the Italian Renaissance and the rigorous intellect of the French Enlightenment. If he lacks the lighthearted wit and polished charm of court flatterers, it is because a dying republic leaves no room for frivolity. He disarms his opponents using only the weapon of relentless inquiry. He prowls through the political dogmas of our day, probing every assertion and demanding unambiguous, coherent answers. In the heat of cross-examination, his gaze turns so penetrating, so unsparingly fierce, that an instinct of dread seizes his beholders. His questions roll over the flimsy excuses of state officials like sudden thunder, permitting no retreat and brook no compromise.

He asks the forbidden question. He seeks empirical data and evidence. He dissects the official lie. We miss in him - though we have no right to expect - the technical details of Mr. Aniagor, yet we must remind ourselves again that the journalist, like the writer, is forever tempted to sacrifice the normal to the dramatic. But can anyone blame him? He refuses to applaud merely because the court jesters have decreed a standing ovation. The true office of the critic has never been to flatter our vanity, but to disturb our peace; when institutions rot, the polite tongue is treason, and only the sharp word can pierce the callous skin of entrenched power. In a land of manufactured consensus, such audacity is deemed unpardonable.

What, in the name of civilisation, do we demand of the press? Should the journalist soften his tone because the minister is sensitive or feels offended? Should he temper his inquiries because power has thin skin? Should he turn a blind eye because the culprit belongs to his social club?

The disease of our age is that we have systematically redefined cowardice as tact, and capitulation as wisdom. The principled man is dismissed as difficult; the unyielding critic is labelled stubborn; the inquiring mind is condemned as "unreasonable." Meanwhile, the moral chameleons and those agile acrobats who bend to every shifting breeze of state patronage or anticipated lubrication of palms are hailed as "smart" and "pragmatic."

One needs only to turn to Edward Gibbon’s monumental “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” to understand how great societies perish. Civilisations do not fall because their walls are breached; their walls are breached because their internal virtues have already turned to dust. The most dangerous enemy of a people is never an invading horde, but the domestic liar, the eloquent rhetoric that conceals starvation, the official optimism that masks decay, and the bought eloquence that bids the ruined celebrate. Rome did not collapse overnight. It died from the slow rot of civic cynicism, the corruption of its courts, the triumph of luxury over duty, and the cowardly acquiescence of its citizens, who learned to love their bread and circuses more than their liberty. The barbarian at the gates only finishes what moral decay has already achieved within the citadel.

This is the ancient road by which nations rot from within. Civilisation is never sacked from without until it has committed suicide within its own gates. It falls not in a single cataclysmic defeat, but through a thousand silent capitulations when men whisper when they should shout, defend what they ought to condemn, and measure morality solely by the badge of partisan loyalty. A nation that surrenders its right to interrogate its rulers has already chosen its chains; it ceases to be a republic of citizens and degenerates into a pasture of subjects. This is the tragic drift that Rufai stands against.

Therefore, if being "reasonable" requires silence in the presence of national decay, let Rufai remain unreasonable. If reasonableness demands that we sing hymns to sovereign incompetence, let him remain unreasonable. If it means bartering honour for bread, let him remain gloriously, stubbornly unreasonable.

Nigeria has suffered more than enough from "reasonable" men who watched the ship of state run aground and decided the most prudent course was to look away, keep quiet, or speak in tongues.

When the world around you loses its mind, the man who clings to reason will always look mad. And in that magnificent madness lies our only hope that the conscience of this country has not yet drawn its final breath.