Femi Fani-Kayode: 'God's' Gift to Nigerian Women?

 In a curious way, I find Femi Fani-Kayode fascinating. Intriguing might be a better word, really. If I were to write Stracheyan portraits of certain Nigerian personalities, Femi would be factored in as the surprising and divisive choice for an Eminent Nigerian. My interest in Nigerian politics and politicos reached the nadir of utter uninterest a few years ago. To me, someone like Fani-Kayode is as representative of the thieving run-of-the-mill Nigerian political class as James Ibori or Bode George. I think it is a waste of time and brain cells writing or talking about the pack of them.  

However, I must confess that I have been buttonholed by Femi Fani-Kayode a few times – and not so much by his politics as by his sociology. He seems like the sort of man you would like to meet in a pub or ‘beer parlour’ and have a long, beery and blokey chat with – that is, if he were T-shirt casual. But then something also suggests itself to you when you read Femi’s works or see him speak – particularly when he is suited, you get a glimpse of someone who furtively anoints himself with the ointment of cant and artifice, reminiscent of a pentecostal pastor.  

I occasionally read his essays, and while I find some of his views slightly off-the-beaten-path and idiosyncratic, I think he makes as much sense as any rational being. He is opinionative, all right, but who among us is not... to varying degrees?  Even his overt-covert Yoruba nationalism should not just be dismissed out of hand. It is no more than an idiosyncratic and useful ventilation of the Nigerian question. But then that is politics, Nigerian politics, which I refuse to have any truck with for now.

And what is Femi’s sociology? As it happens, two instances of Femi’s sociologising have had something or the other to do with women. A couple of months ago, I happened on a thread on Facebook wherein a tattle of tireless Facebook denizens were wrangling over the propriety of Femi’s seemingly paltry aside that he’d had the honour to ‘date’ three Igbo women. One of these women was Bianca Onoh, later Bianca Ojukwu. So far as some of the commenters were concerned, Fani-Kayode had committed not just a castration-worthy offence but hanging treason: he dared boast that he was once romantically involved with the widow of the Nkemba, the Dim, the Generalissimo of the Republic of Biafra: Bianca, the sculpturesque grand dame who had become the Nigerian Ambassador to Spain at the time picayunish Fani-Kayode blurted out his long-doused ardour for the former Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria.

I was amused by some of the responses to Fani-Kayode’s retrospective and needless kiss-and-tell. And it was clear that tendrils of ethnic atavism had begun to weave themselves around the Facebook thread. You could pick up the raging, if suppressed, static: a jumped-up Yorubaman dared insult the widow of Nkemba! This was when I thought I should not comment and leave well alone. Because however much balance I tried to bring into the flame war, there was the possibility that I would be seen as taking the side of someone from the part of the country where I, incidentally, also came from.

But then, while it was rather foolish for Fani-Kayode to introduce his bygone boyfriendhood of three Igbo women into an argument about ethnocentricism, the indignation some people showed over his particular mention of Bianca Ojukwu was comical. Now, I am coming from an ultrahumanist, albeit commonsensical, position where I see every human as biologically equal. Before Bianca began to bear the imperial spousal cachet of noli me tangere as Ojukwu’s Wife, she was a young, beautiful woman – and free, free to date anyone she liked.

No, I might have been challenged, I thought. It wasn’t about who Bianca dated or not dated; it was the pointlessness of Fani-Kayode’s resurrection of the phantoms of these late relationships. A counterargument which would have held some water. But I would have posited: what if Fani-Kayode is a cad (pardon the archaism, it is the mot juste), an amoral, cavalier kiss-and-teller? After all, what he did was less obtuse than the tomfoolery of a comedian telling jokes about 90-year-old grandmothers begging to be raped by a group of young armed robbers. Perhaps Fani-Kayode only wanted to aggrandise himself as a kind of semi-retired cosmopolitan Casanova who could count three Igbo women among his conquests! I remember Fani-Kayode bringing up the image of another modern cad to my mind – silver-tongued James Hewitt, who only stopped short of describing in graphic detail how he shagged Princess Diana.

A few days ago, an old friend sent me a Facebook round-robin, an upended confession written by Femi Fani-Kayode. It is called ‘A True Story.’ The ‘true story’ is about how he fought off the seductive wiles of a friend's wife, who was detained at the pleasure of Obasanjo’s government. Fani-Kayode begins the essay with a reference to his poem, ' Power of Women’ – a title which recalls Chinweizu’s farcically misogynist treatise, Anatomy of Female Power.

Fani-Kayode tells the ‘true story’ of how he went to visit the wife of the jailed friend and how the woman had tried all she could, including stripping off, to seduce him. But Femi, an upstanding and devout man that he believes he is, had resisted like a kind of 21st-century Joseph fighting off Potiphar’s wife; he had pleaded and reasoned with the woman and had (of course) prayed! When all of these availed nothing, he had fallen back on his security detail, who was at the ready outside and, like the Praetorian Guard, the men had stormed the woman’s house to save Mr Fani-Kayode. Now, rather than coming across as a cad, Fani-Kayode would like to be seen as a man of honour, loyal to his friend, and strong enough to vicariously mortify the flesh of his poor friend's wife. That is what comes across from the tenor of the essay.

Fani-Kayode makes the point in the essay that what shocked him about the nonevent was the loathing and disgust the woman expressed towards her husband and how she confessed that she was only sticking by him because he was rich. Although Femi does not express this, I suspect this is a critique of not only the woman but women in general, particularly Nigerian women, with whom Fani-Kayode has more contact these days. But would I, for instance, have been surprised by the woman’s behaviour? No. She is human, and humans do curious and unexpected things, including trying to seduce their spouse’s best friend or expressing detestation and disgust towards their husband or wife. As a matter of fact, one of the most depredating cankerworms that eat into the fabric of marriages is Disgust – it is the antithesis of Love. 

Even then, Fani-Kayode’s shock is understandable, although it is hard to suppress the hunch that the essay is also a tad self-serving. Because while the man has the right to write anything he likes, the question may still be asked: What is the point of it? To let people know that women are not to be trusted? A cautionary tale about women’s capability to deceive, lie and dissemble? Of course, the essay is slyly phallocentric. Having offered a prayer up to his God to ‘help us all, particularly we men,’ Fani-Kayode couldn’t have been sending out his quasi-biblical message to women, or could he? After all, within the Judeo-Christian tradition in which Fani-Kayode proudly belongs, both men and women are supposed to read the story of how Eve inveigled Adam into eating the ‘fruit of knowledge’ and marvel at its profundity. But what I really find funny about the whole piece is how Fani-Kayode avows and re-avows the discretion he has displayed so far about what happened between him and the woman. Really? I mean, this guy describes where the woman’s husband was when she tried to snare him; he let it be known that the nearly cuckolded man is a politician, an influential politician.

And what did he tell his bodyguards after they’d saved him from the Nigerian avatar of Jezebel? Probably something – on the off chance, I’d add. Would Fani-Kayode have let go of the opportunity to further enigmatise himself before his henchmen: a keen lover of women who had suddenly rejected a member of ‘the fairer sex’? And did he really scruple at writing ‘A True Story’? Did he have any Hamlet-like introspection: To write or not to write? Probably not. I think Fani-Kayode knew exactly what he was doing; he knew that in spite of his feeble attempt at making the woman nameless, it wouldn’t take a supersleuth or a summa-cum-laude graduate of Sherlock Holmes Studies to work out who the woman was or at the least, who her husband was. But here is the dramatic irony in ‘The True Story.’ Chances are that Fani-Kayode’s friend, the husband of the femme fatale, will read the story, and he must be a prize bonehead not to deduce that the Parable of a Good Friend is, in the obverse about him and his beloved wife. So Fani-Kayode writing that he has kept the secret close to his heart is absolute bull, Irish bull - or even pure bullshit because he must have been well aware of what he was doing; he knew he was about to carry out an elaborate stage whisper.

Which is why I find Fani-Kayode intriguing. While I wouldn’t go as far as describing the politician as a consummate bullshitter, to a degree, he has the flair and facility of one. You only need to read a few of the articles on his website to pick this out. But then again, why would I not find a Nigerian politician who writes poems and prose-poems interesting? I am, after all, a litterateur. As an essayist, Femi Fani-Kayode is prolific and promiscuous in his interests. His prosaic poems, taken together, read like a cross between The Psalms and Songs of Solomon. There is one entitled ‘An Ode to Jezebel.’ Okay, this is an ironic piece of free verse. Still, it represents, more than all, the author’s moral attitude to women, a monologic psychopoetry, a pious jeremiad against a certain woman.

I have also gleaned from Fani-Kayode’s website that he is a very ambitious, politically ambitious man. Uncommonly enough, he dabbles in culture. In other words, he is sidling towards positioning himself on the plinth of Plato’s philosopher/king. Well, his feet of clay might not give him a solid foothold on the plinth. He also writes poems, I mean those slobbering ditties, so he may not even be allowed in the Republic.