I am not an expert on treason or toxicity, but I am in love with the ObiDients. They are an inconveniencing lot because they refuse to accept the excuses and arrogant nonsense of the so called elites. Many ObiDients are more intelligent, patriotic and sensible than those who either claim Emilokan or other feudal or class prerogatives.
How democratic are these lots who are putting down the ObiDients if their idea of democracy is to make false statements and never get pushed back? If that is their conception of democracy or public reason, then they have not understood democracy.
By the way I have not heard about the ObiDients heckling anyone or refusing people the right to speak. You speak. They speak. They may speak more irreverently or more forcefully. That is not a problem. Many who now put them down made their marks while shouting down authorities in more fiery and indecorous language than the ObiDients now deploy. Soyinka is a famous bully. People freeze before him even when he is dead wrong because he is Nigeria’s only Nobel, and an exceptionally brilliant man and globally respected intellectual. He remains irreverent and often hawkish and bruising in his critique. Who can ever forget his indecent and undignified attack against Patience Goodluck, a mother and First Lady of the nation?
We all cower before Soyinka in spite of his less than brilliant political discourses and navigations. But here are irreverent people who don’t care about precedents or antecedents but will subject every statement to their own idiomatic or syntactic critique. What is wrong about that? That is democratic. The credo of the ObiDients seem to be “In God we trust, every other person must receive a retort”.
That is democracy. That is not a cult. If it is a cult, then it is a counter-cult to the prevailing cult of self-serving elitism.
Sam Amadi is Director of Abuja School of Social and Political Theory.
