What Has Tampered With Yinka Odumakin’s Brain?
by Segun Dipe
Yinka Odumakin.
Dementia is a chronic or persistent disorder of the mental processes caused by brain disease or injury and marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning.
I am beginning to get worried that this disease may have affected the brain of my friend and colleague, Yinka Odumakin.
I used to know Yinka in our media hey days. We would discuss all topics passionately, emotionally and sincerely, ranging from the sublime to the mundane. Hardly would he veer off course and deliberately denigrate anyone, as he often does these days.
Taking umbrage at unpleasant remarks is not an offence. But when it has become your character to diss anyone that is resisting your “political merchandising” and doing so with deliberate mischief and vehemence, yet your criticism is off-key, then observers may be right to assume that dementia has caught up with you.
Yinka is fast arrogating to himself a knowledge that he doesn’t have. He is mischievously casting himself as a lead actor in every Yoruba drama. You will almost think he is the quintessential Afenifere and that he has been there since the beginning of this world, with the dexterity with which he doctors facts.
However, if we have to accept Odumakin as a political entrepreneur and a hagiographer, then we will understand what he is trying to sell.
What could be amiss in Gov. John Kayode Fayemi calling on the South West leaders to review their method of pursuing their quest for restructuring of the country by being more tactical in liaising with other zones on how to actualize their plan?
But Odumakin sees Gov. Fayemi’s suggestion as a mischievous one, not because it was off-key, but because it tallies with that of the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. And which the latter had made long before Fayemi was born.
In his attempt to correct Fayemi, Odumakin observed that Chief Obafemi Awolowo actually criss-crossed the length and breadth of Nigeria, preaching the same gospel, long before the Governor was born.
Odumakin didn’t stop there. He also observed that Awolowo’s “disciples have neglected the path of reaching out to all sections of the country at every point in time to build a national concensus” since the exit of the sage.
Rightly or wrongly, so, where has Gov. Fayemi got it wrong in suggesting that the proponents of the restructuring in the South West should revisit the Awo’s tactics?
Is Fayemi’s offence that he was not born when Awo was using the tactics suggested by him or that he is now thinking exactly like the sage, Awolowo?
How has Fayemi insulted those who Odumakin regarded as leaders from the region? The same Odumakin is accusing them of jettisoning the Awo tactics, yet tagging Fayemi’s call to revisit the tactics as mischievous. See?
Surely Odumakin is guilty of one or all of these: One, that he is the mischievous one, two, that his brain has been tampered with so much that he could not understand the points raised by Fayemi and thus needs a reset, and three, that as a political merchant, he wants to be patronized by Fayemi.
However, in any case Yinka Odumakin could not comprehend what Fayemi was saying, albeit innocently, then he should understand that all the governor was saying was that those pushing for restructuring on behalf of the South West should drop the “we-versus-them tactics, which is guaranteed to fail and deliver nothing other than the usual conflict since there are those who entertain fears on the restructuring. He is also urging them to liaise with other zones on how to actualise their plan.
If Odumakin sees this as revisiting what Awolowo had done in the past but was jettisoned by the latter day proponents, so be it. And if Fayemi, who according to Odumakin, was not born by the time, Awo was adopting the tactics, is now freshly raising it, so also be it.
But if Odumakin is trying to launch a claim to the proposal, through his unappreciated role in the concocted National Conference, hurriedly put together by the former President Goodluck Jonathan, I am afraid that he has misfired, and he is the mischievous one, and he should please stop arrogating to himself the intelligence that he doesn’t have.
