Of Farooq Kperogi on Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (I)

I don’t know how Vice President Yemi Osinbajo managed to cross onto the path of U.S-based Nigerian Professor of Journalism and Media Studies and one-time journalist himself, Farooq Kperogi. But crossed that path Osinbajo has and the outcome, so far, has been, in a manner of speaking, like being hit by a moving train. Kperogi, who […]

I don’t know how Vice President Yemi Osinbajo managed to cross onto the path of U.S-based Nigerian Professor of Journalism and Media Studies and one-time journalist himself, Farooq Kperogi. But crossed that path Osinbajo has and the outcome, so far, has been, in a manner of speaking, like being hit by a moving train. Kperogi, who should need no introduction for anyone following Nigerian politics keenly in the past decade or so, is like a hurricane: he scatters all in his path.

Perhaps the issue is not how Osinbajo got to cross Kperogi’s or any consequences of that for Osinbajo personally, but the significance of Kperogi’s commentary on Nigeria’s 2023 elections, since, Osinbajo is now officially an aspirant for President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in this election. Unlike my previous article on Osinbajo’s candidacy, written and published before he declared to run, which was about the godfather- godson relationship between Osinbajo and Tinubu in the same presidential contest in the same party, this one is about what Osinbajo’s candidacy means for the rest of us Nigerians, in a country so diverse as ours.

In other words, this is not so much about Kperogi and Osinbajo, but about Osinbajo, as a presidential candidate and the rest of Nigeria. I think, then, there are at least five ways to approach this issue: the core substance of Kperogi’s argument’s against Osinbajo’s candidacy; the facts he has presented to support these arguments; the reach and credibility of his arguments and the facts presented to support them and finally, the lessons we can learn from them, not just for this election alone, but for our future political engagements as a diverse country.

So far, since late last month, Kperogi has written a total of six full-length or mini-articles that argue the same simple point: that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is in fact a religious bigot who sees his elevation as an opportunity to promote not just one religion, but one religious sect above and to the detriment of all other religious groups in the country. In Kperogi’s opinion and I agree, such a person is unfit to be Nigeria’s president, given the sort of dangers the overt conflation of religion and politics has always entailed in this country.  

Making this point in one of the articles titled, “Two Major Lies in Osinbajo’s Declaration Speech”, Kperogi says that “as I have repeatedly pointed out in the past few weeks, Osinbajo is a compulsively narrow-minded, intolerant, Christian fanatic who nurses a noxious, deep-rooted loathing for Muslims (and, frankly, other Christian sects) and who sees his being in government as an opportunity to promote the supremacy of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), which I have characterised as his RCCGification project”. This is the core of Kperogi’s argument: that Osinbajo is out on a “theocratic capture” of the Nigerian state on behalf of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

The idea that the primary objective of Pentecostalism in Nigeria is to capture the Nigerian state itself is not new. It was first highlighted in scholarly form by Ruth Marshall, an Associate of Political Science at the University of Toronto, who did a PhD—and later a book—on the subject in Nigeria around the mid-2000s. Kperogi’s argument is, therefore, that Osinbajo’s attempt at the presidency is merely to realise this long-held political ambition of a particular religious group in the country. Moreover, Kperogi maintains, Osinbajo’s bigoted theocratic politics remains true, regardless of what the man himself says to the contrary and that Nigerians should beware of smooth-talking closet bigots.

This brings us to the facts of such a serious accusation. Kperogi has marshalled and presented two kinds of facts to support his case so far. The first is his direct quotations from previous speeches given by Osinbajo, including during the past seven years or so that he has been Vice-President. The statements that people make among closed groups of kith and kin tend to reflect their true feelings on many issues, regardless of what they say to the wider public. Kperogi has cited liberally from Osinbajo’s previous speeches about the man’s decidedly sectionist and bigoted politics, including in one instance in which a pastor was praying for Osinbajo to succeed to the presidential throne and to which Osinbajo repeatedly and intensely replied “Amen”; all at a time President Buhari was lying sick in a London hospital.

So, if today Osinbajo describes Buhari as a Nigerian “patriot”, no one should take the vice president seriously because it is no more than a ploy to stoop to conquer or flatter to deceive. More than that, however, Kperogi shows documentary evidence to the effect that Osinbajo walks his “true” talk by influencing or facilitating the appointments of only his Yoruba ethnic or Christian religious sectarian groups to any positions open to him as Nigeria’s vice president. As Kperogi put it, although “every political position” Osinbajo “has ever occupied in life has been facilitated by Yoruba Muslims (i.e., Prince Bola Ajibola and Bola Tinubu), every consequential position he has had an opportunity to facilitate was given to an RCCG member”.

Many of these appointments have been to the executive leadership of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) of the federal government, like, among others the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), the Bank of Industry (BOI), the Minister of Trade, Industry and Investment, the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), the Niger Delta Power Holding Company Limited (NDPHCL), National Social Investment Program (NSIP). When Osinbajo has had the opportunity to appoint heads of these agencies, and more, he has appointed only Yoruba or pastors and members of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). In addition, over 90 per cent of the 80 or so people who work directly in his office as vice-president (and manager of the economy) are also from these two closed groups to the overwhelming exclusion of other Nigerians.

The question is, therefore, not whether these details are not true or not. They are and easily verifiable. Moreover, no one has provided any controvertible evidence against them. Any attempt to contradict them has in fact made them even more apparent. The real question is why has Vice President Osinbajo escaped scrutiny and criticism for his virulent bigotry and blatant nepotism? Over the past seven years, the most stinging criticism of President Buhari, sometimes unfairly, has been that he has repeatedly made “unbalanced appointments” to federal offices in a diverse country. But why has the same criticism not been directed at Osinbajo, the second-highest-ranking official in the same government, for doing worse?

This question is the most important issue for me here and I will return to it shortly because all the evidence that Kperogi has presented has been in the public domain for a long time and all that he has done is to ferret it out and highlight it as a warning to Nigerians at a crucial moment. But this itself leads us to two other important issues for me in all of this. Why has Kperogi’s views and evidence about Osinbajo’s bigotry not made it to the mainstream media in Nigeria? And what lessons can we learn from it all? The answers, I suggest, lie buried deep in Nigerian media and political cultures. And to these three issues, I now turn.