By John Fanimokun
In April this year, ahead of the May 29 inauguration of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, a US-based Nigerian fiction writer, Chimamanda Adichie wrote an open letter to the United States President, Joe Biden basically complaining to him or if you like, chastising him for allowing the US State Department to congratulate then President-elect Bola Tinubu and accusing the US of being compromised!
Chimamanda alleged that the elections were flawed and that President Bola Tinubu was not the actual winner of the February 25 presidential election. Her reason? INEC ‘reneged’ on their pledge to upload copies of polling unit results into their result viewing portal in real time citing technical glitches. INEC according to her then ‘hurriedly’ announced Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC as winner on March 1st (more than three days after close of voting) despite calls by opposition parties for INEC to stop collation since all results have not been uploaded into the IREV portal.
Chimamanda essentially told Biden that Mr. Peter Obi whom she supported and many ‘young people in the country’ voted for won the election and his mandate was stolen. I am sure she probably wanted the US to declare that Peter Obi who came a distant third should be sworn in on May 29th or the US will send three aircraft carriers to Nigeria with hundreds of F35 fighter jets to stop the inauguration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
May 29th, 2023 came and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was sworn in as President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in a colourful ceremony that had in attendance a powerful US delegation as well as other world leaders. This meant that the US President, Joe Biden took Chimamanda’s letter as one her fictional work of art with basis in reality.
At the presidential election petition tribunal, one would have expected Chimamanda’s hero, Mr. Peter Obi to present evidence to suggest he won the election or that the non-upload of scanned copies of polling unit result sheets into the IREV portal in real time affected the result of the election or at least tell the world what his real vote tally should be. However Obi did none of that and it dawned on many of his supporters that he lost the election.
Chimamanda Adichie in her letter, just like most Obidients, showed a complete lack of understanding of the electoral process by equating the IREV portal to a collation center much like the way Mr. Peter Obi made the IREV portal the central pillar of his watery election petition. She mocked the Washington Post as having ‘imaginative poverty so characteristic of international coverage of African issues’, simply because they struck a measured tone in their editorial post about the election and even tried to highlight the positives that came out from the elections despite the IREV portal glitches.
Ironically, it is Chimamanda that displays a brazen imaginative poverty and who misreads the country’s mood. Having not voted before in her life in Nigeria nor participated in any Nigerian election or campaign, she misinterpreted the noise on the social media dominated by Southern youths and in churches to mean that her candidate had the majority of young people and Nigerians behind him. It was therefore difficult for her to understand how Obi was not declared the winner.
Chimamanda perhaps expected INEC to take the mood on twitter and Facebook as the mood of the nation and declare Mr. Peter Obi on that basis. That to me, is intellectual laziness on her part, which is not surprising since her career and probably life is centered around fiction and imagination. Chimamanda Adichie probably feels Nigeria starts and ends only within the states in the South East and part of the South South where Obi had a commanding support base and interpreted the mood in Obi’s stronghold to mean the mood of the nation!
In an Africa World lecture series at Princeton University recently, Chimamanda Adichie showed that she is yet to wake up to the reality when like classic Trump election deniers in the US, she introduced Mr. Peter Obi as ‘the man who, according to POPULAR OPINION, won the presidential election. She tried to convince her audience that Obi won the election and according to her, ‘there is evidence to prove that’.
It beggars the question how a Chimamanda in the US who does not even have a Nigerian voter’s card and who was certainly nowhere close to Nigeria on election day would have evidence that Obi won the presidential election and yet fail to furnish Obi with the evidence so that he could plead in his election petition. Even after the Supreme Court had dismissed Obi’s appeal in less than 120 seconds, Chimamanda still talks about unseen evidences.
I feel Chimamanda Adichie is finding it difficult to accept that she backed a losing horse and laboured in vain to get her brother elected as President and to further aggravate her misery, the ignorance-laden open letter she wrote to Joe Biden could not stop the inauguration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Now, she is romancing with treason by attempting to declare the Agulu man as the Nigeria’s President whom she recognises.
The fact that Chimamanda describes Mr. Peter Obi as a beacon of hope for Nigeria and Africa shows how far removed from reality she is. If there is anything the 2023 presidential election has done, it is to help unravel Mr. Peter Obi as a very intellectually challenged and below average politician who is desperate and willing to cross any red line just to become President. He has equally become a rallying point for dullards and a mass of gullible fellows who live in alternate reality. Sadly, Chimamanda Adichie, Nigeria’s new Letterwriter-in-Chief is among them.