ILIYASU GADU
Fani-Kayode, (more popularly known as FFK by the initials of his name) the designer wearing son of Chief Remilekun Fani-Kayode, (Fanny power) Deputy Premier of the Western region in the first republic is the perfect example of a pig still being a pig even with a lipstick on.
Yes, he is on record to have attended the high-brow English public school Harrow and followed that up with a law degree from the prestigious University of London and a masters from the world famous Cambridge University.
But if the idea was to mould him in character and training in the best traditions of an English gentleman having attended these institutions of British upper crust society, it has proven to be a waste of expensive English public school education.
His bohemian lifestyle while in the United Kingdom included an addiction to drugs for which he had to seek spiritual and physical rehabilitation in Ghana. But till today he has not been totally cured of that habit which leads him to fits of boorishness, irascibility and thuggish behaviour unbecoming of the status he occupies in Nigerian public life.
Though he likes all too often to take pride in and show off his English public education as a badge of honour, unfortunately FFK does not live up to the genteel and hallowed requirement of an Oxbridger in all he does. In the public space which he courts and hugs for recognition and relevance he is always expected to exhibit his base, yobbish, uncouth manners of an alley cat at persons who are his betters in all parameters of life.
Last week, FFK was at his yobbish worst during a press briefing in Calabar where in response to a question from a Daily Trust reporter Eyo Charles as to who was financing the trips he (FFK) had been embarking on round the country, he let rip at the poor reporter. Suddenly FFK who takes it as licence to hurl volleys of invectives at just about anyone in Nigerian public life had his thin skin exposed. Like a boxer with a glassy jaw, which the gentlest of jabs was all that was needed to shatter his thinly covered veneer of respectability was ruthlessly exposed.
In those few minutes of foul mouthed rant at the reporter for asking the question, FFK sunk lower than the lowliest he had ever been in the public estimation of him. He never had any reputation of worth anyways. But it exposed him as a brittle minded fellow who can give but cannot take and confirmed that he is just a windbag and a wanker, worse than the people he all too often vilifies mostly without rhyme or reason.
With his latest oafish behaviour, it is about time FFK met his comeuppance. His verbal assault at the reporter should be seen as an attack at the very profession that provides him with the necessary oxygen and limelight to remain relevant in the Nigerian public space. If he did to a lawyer in the legal profession he belongs what he did to the journalist in Calabar he would have faced immediate sanctions. (Ask Governor El Rufai)
Suffice it to say he is not even reckoned with in the legal profession. Even the so-called “charge and bail’’ lawyers one sees often hanging around courtrooms are likely to have better records of achievement in the profession than him.
He is also not a political figure of note in his native Ile-Ife or Osun State even though he tries to present himself as one. He certainly will not win any political contest there. And in the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) of which he is a member, he is avoided like the plague for his impulsive, self-opinionated, gaffe-prone statements which often put the party in bad light, and which necessitate painstaking damage control measures to mend.
The lout has neither a sense of shame nor gratitude. In 1966 General Yakubu Gowon then as Army Chief saved his father from imminent death by mutinous soldiers when he ordered then Lt Paul Tarfa of the Guards Brigade to rescue and keep him under protective custody of loyal troops. Had General Gowon not intervened the senior Kayode would have almost certainly been dispatched to meet his maker on that occasion by the mutineers. FFK was a toddler then, and only God knows what would have become of him in later life. Yet even General Gowon had not been spared of this loony’s ingrained bad manners. He once issued a scathing, abusive retort to a statement the former military head of state made on the civil war.
That FFK has been indulged in the public space despite all the known and documented instances of his indecorous behaviours is attributable to two factors; he is the scion of an illustrious public figure in Nigeria who literarily was born and fed with a silver spoon, and also because of the fawning, uncritical indulgence of our media which tends to accord undue relevance to persons who went to the type of schools FFK attended abroad.
FFK is fannying around in his family’s shadow and in the inferiority complex of our media who believe that Nigerians who attended Ivy League institutions in America and Oxbridge in the United Kingdom possess uncommon wisdom. It is what makes otherwise vacuous and spastic individuals of his ilk to bask in the public space with a dubious sense of entitlement, advertising their self-importance in the full knowledge that the Nigerian media will indulge them uncritically.
In the aftermath of his intemperate and disgraceful outburst in Calabar, having temporarily returned to his senses and realised that he had gone beyond even the unduly generous allowance the media has given him, he attempted to climb down from his high horse. But it was done in a derisory manner which further reinforces the utter contempt FFK holds journalists and the journalism profession which ironically is the only profession that provides him with a platform to be relevant in Nigeria.
If the journalism profession in Nigeria has any modicum of honour at all it must put this designer wearing, drug addled thug in his place as an example to all who dare to treat it with levity.
