Omo Omoruyi: The Anatomy and Profile of an Inglorious Cheerleader

By

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh

ogbunwezeh@yahoo.com 

William Shakespeare; One of the Universal Masters of Western literature, in one burst of inspiration and literal intuitiveness, appropriated and summarized in a flash, what would eternally remain the fundamental postures of hypocrisy. He made the greatest literary hypocrite and traitor of all times; Macbeth tell the world the true colours of hypocrisy: “false face must hide what the false heart doth know”.(Macbeth, Act 1 Scene VII) Prior to that, the Hebrew Writers of the Sacred Writ, equally had traitorous and hypocritical sycophants in mind, when in one of the great Psalmodic moments, they essayed to extract from the Holy mouth of Yahweh Sabaoth, those sacred words of eternal relevance and validity, when the enemies of progress came to court: Not a word from their mouth can be trusted; their heart is filled with destruction. Their throat is an open grave; with their tongue they speak deceit (Psalm 5:8-10)

In the same work, in which he etched forever in ink, his stand, and summary of the evil of vaulting ambition, hyper galloping hypocrisy and unvarnished sycophancy; he inadvertently lamented the finitude and poverty of human perceptory faculties, which disables man from knowing, or grasping the preoccupations of other minds. Shakespeare wrote: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”. (Macbeth, Act 1 Scene IV) This stands true even today, despite the rampaging advances of technology and the bridging of this gap, which the lie detector equipment and test attempt. Since the morning of times, sycophancy has always remained a tool, deployed by selfishness to achieve its spurious aims and leprous ambitions. Sycophancy is a cocktail of lies laced with poisonous doses of praise, directed at the man of power or means, as a way to secure his attention, massage his broken or lonely ego, and hold him hostage to the manipulable promptings of the sycophants. Just like a wood borer, the sycophant gradually drills a hole in the inflated, deflated or out rightly neurotic ego of his victim. He then gives himself the contemptible contract of filling this void, with his songs and canticles of unmerited praise, which the self-delusions of the victim and his broken personality render him amenable. This was the case when Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels respectively held Hitler’s reasoning abilities captive with the fatal juices of their sycophancy. Hitler degenerated at their hands, from a megalomanic dictator to an enfleshment of evil, under their seductive promptings and collective madness.

Sycophancy as the metaphysics of diametrical falsehood embosoms a congenital allergy to truth, a platonic hatred of reality, an aversion for facts, and an avid propensity to celebrate and mismanage illusions in an incredibly subtle manner as to keep its victim in bondage and thraldom to the fractured fairy webs that it so incredibly spins, without a qualm of conscience. A sycophant is an ontological aberration and a perfect embodiment of all that is bad, false and ugly. He remains the lowest expression of all that base human nature as well as the dark grottos of human insincerity and wretchedness can ever brew or contrive. Sycophancy is hypocrisy with clothes on, and smiles on its face. The motives of a sycophant are always the satisfaction of his own unfulfilled needs or will to power. This betrays an unresolved or un-reconciled neotenic[1] fixation, which is primarily psycho-sexual a la Eriksson.

In the recent history of the destruction and rapacious plunder of Nigeria , one contemptible character has arisen as a summary and embodiment of all that is politically vile, inglorious, hypocritical and sycophantic. This man is a political prostitute entertains no moral inertia in his advanced willingness and propensity to desire and to sleep with whoever is raping Nigeria at any given moment. That man is Omo Omoruyi.

We are going to describe the truth about this man. We may end up being inelegant in that regard. But that is the price we have to pay for telling the truth. This was recognized by no other authority than Albert Einstein, who reminded all disciples of truth that: “if you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor” So Mr. Tailor, here is your elegance. We want to be left with the truth alone. And that is what we are going to dispense, for the sake of Nigeria and her posterity.

Omo Omoruyi has all the skills that constitute the trademark of spineless sycophants. His peddling and hawking of perverse cant and frivolous irrelevancies, in support of thievery and political tomfoolery is legendary. Yet the impious nonsense that ooze out uncontrollably from his mouth and pen, as a matter of course has really not attracted the kind of repugnance that it deserves. Omo Omoruyi as a name and identity, commenced his rise to notoriety with his candidature for the 1983 gubernatorial race in the Old Bendel State of Nigeria, where he was most woefully and roundly defeated to the glory of goodness and the salvation of the good people of the Old Bendel state, whom would have been the first guinea pigs of the social engineering fraudulence, he so very mischievously crafted and actively promoted under the Machiavellic shadows of IBB. This was the same chameleon, who as the Director for the Centre for Destructive (Democratic??) Studies, under one of the worst kleptocrat ever to rule Nigeria , namely Babangida, helped this kleptocrat to engineer Nigeria into poverty and bankruptcy. Since the kleptocrat left power and he could not sing way into Abacha heart, went into hibernation in America , were he mutated into a more dangerous reason-resistant strain. He has up to that effect, been inundating our auditory faculties with his inglorious drums of support for a re-installation or rather re-imposition of the IBB thieving conglomerate on Nigeria . History is conversant with inglorious names that would at the twinkling of an eye, metamorphose or instantly evolve into rabid dogs for the sake of inglorious pieces of rickety bones. Omo Omoruyi had really worked extra had to admit himself into this roll of dishonour. In fact the way manner our Omo has so far comported himself in the Nigerian socio-political concourse has marked him out as either a congenital sycophant or a man with a broken personality who must sing the songs of thieves for his daily bread and his search for cheap popularity and relevance. Be that as it may, the most nauseating dimension of the rambling incoherence of this man, who from all indications is battling with his many failures and long history of bootlicking, is the fact that he dresses his sycophancy in the robes of patriotism. Most recently, Thisday Newspapers reported Omoruyi as holding Babangida the EVIL genius, aloft as the best “option” for Nigeria . This stance is capable; though in wholesale inadvertence of portraying this man as possessing of a heart, coursing with the patriotic corpuscles of love for Nigeria . Though this pretence, for all it is worth is nothing but the kind of love existing between a lion and a hapless sheep that acquired the misfortune of being his most proximate supper.  To this stance, we would go no farther than Chinua Achebe to unmask the shallowness and deception etched in the core of this feigned patriotism, openly flaunted by this active participant in a regime that raped and nearly bludgeoned Nigeria to death. Achebe in 1983 tried to articulate the “Trouble With Nigeria ”. He did this beautifully with his characteristic excellence, clarity, sincerity and great patriotism. Of patriotism and the claims laid to it by sycophant, he quite social-prophetically, anticipated sycophants of the ilk of Omoruyi, when he wrote as follows:

Quite clearly patriotism is not going to be easy or comfortable in a country as badly run as Nigeria is. And this is not made any easier by the fact that no matter how badly a country may be run there will always be some people whose personal, selfish interest are, in the short term at least, well served by the mismanagement and the social inequities[2].

Achebe’s inspiration for this comes primarily from the rich and fertile ambience of his traditional climes and cosmology. Ndigbo, whose august stock and ancestry conceived and suckled Achebe’s brilliance and world view, had it in their Calabash of wisdom, that: “Na obodo adighi mma bu uru ndi Nze aruru ala”. This translates to exactly what Achebe succinctly rendered above in English, which in this context spells that “A bad situation in the polity conduces to the selfish gains and interests of some evil men around the centres of power”. A very bad and mismanaged Nigeria will always continue to feed the inglorious tastes and criminal extravagances of men like Omo Omoruyi, who truth be told, obtains in all tongues and tribes of humanity; though Omo’s is one of the worst instance of its impunity.

Continuing, Achebe noted that these sycophants;

Naturally they will be extremely loud in their adulation of the country and its system and will be anxious to pass themselves off as patriots and to vilify those who disagree with them as trouble makers or even traitors[3]

Rounding off his submissions on these leeches, Achebe foresaw the mire we are in today. He warned us. But we were too engrossed in our gastronomic affairs to pay heed. It all fell on deaf ears. And today, men like Omo Omoruyi stealthily slipped through our lethargic defences, and rose to define what patriotism is for us. We positioned ourselves on the highway to doom and perdition, the moment we in poltroonery and fear allowed dictators and their collaborators to hoist their reprehensible selves and their traitorous collaborators across our land. We would never finish paying for this lazy oversight. Achebe wrote:

But doomed is the nation which permits such people to define patriotism for it. Their definition would be about as objective as a Rent Act devised by a committee of avaricious landlords, or the encomiums that a colony of blood sucking ticks might be expected to shower upon the bull on whose backs they batten[4]

On another pedestal and in addition to that, Omoruyi flaunts himself as a democrat. His chameleonic vacillations in the corridors of military dictatorship cast a very fundamental aspersion on this hypocritical posture. What was a democrat doing or looking for, in the whorehouse or brothels of tyranny? What then is left of the reputation of our most democratic Omoruyi, when he consorted in matrimonial copulation with mean spirited tyranny yesterday, and hobnobs with its civilian mutant today?  Is this not akin to the Pope turning into a Jehovah Witness?. I thought that a democrat would be in the frontlines directing the attacks against tyranny and despotism, just like Gani Fawehimi courageously and uncompromisingly did, while our “Democratic” OmO was busy whispering “arrest and deal with him” into IBB’s ears? I thought that democrats take principled stands that bluntly refuse any compromise whatsoever, whenever the issue turns to the derailment of democracy. Not only that our Omo was a moral weathervane in this regard whose opinion and stances oscillate like the thermometer, programmed to rise and fall at the temperature of the weight of money; he slept hand in gloves with a plundering army of occupation, whose raison d’etre was the plunder of Nigeria and the destruction of democratic structures. Omoruyi by his garrulous verbal knavery and ethical poverty, has made Nigerians realise that he was the architect of that inglorious blueprint, with which IBB ravaged Nigeria for 8 years on end, destroying our middle class, debauching our institutions, mangling the people’s mandate, and taking Nigerians on a Machiavellic-Maradonic ride for 8 years. Honour should have compelled Omoruyi to shut up his garrulous mouth and stop broadcasting his sycophancy, against the backdrop of the horrendous roles he played in the IBB government. But honour seems to be a very scarce resource in his avaricious considerations.

Omoruyi’s activism for the return of roguery, executive thievery and grotesque incompetence, summarized in IBB to the Nigerian power epicentre is akin, as one writer so very beautiful put it, to the recalcitrance and the evolution to activism of an exposed pervert. The pervert, in the early stages of his addiction strives so very gallantly to hide his embarrassing encumbrance. This is the closet stages. The perversion may be successfully hidden from the public albeit temporary. The moment he is uncovered or confronted with irrefutable evidence of his burden, instead of recoiling and abandoning his perversion, he spoils for war; brazenly owns up to it and starts out as an activist, proselytising and trying to force civilization into acquiescing and accepting incivility as a norm or way of life. Omo Omoruyi is now on a similar journey nay evangelism to persuade Nigerians to accept a thief as a leader and to equally acquiesce and tolerate executive thievery as the norm of Nigerian politics. We should not be amazed that he is ready to go the extra mile that it takes, like breaking or rolling up his exile or refugee camp in the USA to come near the theatre of action, where his voice could be heard. After all, an artiste who sings for his bread should be near his market nay target audience, to be effective. Even if we are surprised by this, we should always console ourselves with the knowledge that it has always been the normal trajectory of perverts. Once they break the shells of shame to come out in the open, it is almost impossible for them to retreat or retract their inglorious stands. Omoruyi has had his fair share of exposure(s) at the hands of other people who have equally seen through his web of deceit and false pretensions. To this end, he, under the illusion of being a true friend of IBB, which most appropriately should read fiend, deludes himself into thinking that all Nigerians are as compromised as he is, and to that effect would always keep silent while the battered image of a thief is sold in our marketplace of ideas and politics.

Omoruyi sees Babangida as a Messiah. He has every right to that unholy opinion. Besides, Babangida was the financial Messiah that funded Omoruyi’s relevance and comfortable life in exile with his loot. If he did not imitate his master creaming off enough resources, I wonder how he could be drumming support for a man that ruined the nation. In addition to that: If IBB was a saviour, who did he save and from what? This question becomes imperative when one realises that the country he ruled for 8 years is now ranked among the poorest nations of the world. IBB single-handedly sent Nigeria back to primitivity. I will not fight Omoruyi on his opinion of IBB’s mission as messianic. But I am aware that the cries, tears and silent agonies of many young beautiful Nigerian maidens, majority of who come from Omoruyi’s backyard, whom Babangida’s and Abacha’s thievery gave no other option, but that of servicing the sexual insecurities and lewd preferences of old Italian perverts, in order to survive will always live to haunt this Rasputin till kingdom come. I am equally certain that the macabre dance he performs in the village squares of Nigerian politics, cannot be unconnected to the cosmic vengeance of the bottled frustrations and plight of many Nigerians, condemned to lives of comfortable slavery in Europe and America , all in a bid to survive. I think nemesis is really exacting her pound of flesh from our man.

In the Newspaper report already cited, Omoruyi stated that IBB should :

Neither be judged by the June 12 annulment nor his eight-year rule as a soldier in his new ambition to rule the country again rather he said, Nigerians should judge him now for what he has to offer because as he put it, “as a soldier he may have had a vision; his vision was that of the armed forces and will certainly be different now as a democratic candidate” so my advice is that we should allow the voters to judge him”

This is one of the crassest reasoning that I have ever encountered in my whole existence. I will cite two instances and then forge on. Omoruyi’s argument here is so beautiful that I will shed any toga of ethics and join him in selling it to our people only if he would hire with immediate effect a severally and multiplely convicted pedophille, rapist and murderer to babysit his new baby’s. Or if he would leave his disabled 44 year old son in the care of a well known cannibal whose gastronomic preferences favour men on wheel chair. This is what Omoruyi is asking Nigerians to accept; a man who raped our commonweal for 8 years and stole us blind in the process, is been peddle before us, with the wooden excuse that he is now a changed man who has been rebaptised in the waters of penance. Nigerians are not poor students of history. We know that Omoruyi’s type in another clime and age was a debauched moral ruin as a youth, and not even his false donning of the monastic hood could transform his evil inclined heart into that of a monk. We are talking about Gregor Efimovich Rasputin,the evil monk. As a young man, “Rasputin shocked his village by constant finding ways to get into trouble with the authorities. Drunkeness, stealing and womanizing were activities particularly enjoyed by the dissolute young man...it was at a certain time after meeting a renegade sect within the orthdox faith, the Skopsty, that the debauched, lecherous peasant adopted the robes of a monk, developed his own gratifying doctrines, traveled the country as a “Staretz”, a holy man and sinned to his heart’s content” . Babangida as a youth in the Nigerian public space was an accomplished coup plotter, and by the time he ended his rigmarole as sole administrator of Nigeria for 8 years, he has succeed in hewing his name on the marbles of idiocy and pervasive resentment as a thief par excellence. Just as Rasputin debauched the Royal House of the Romanovs before its disintegration at the patriotic and righteous anger of the oppressed Russians, Babangida debauched the sacred corridors of our national existence before handing it to his equally debauched accomplice Sanni Abacha, to finish off the job he started. 

Omoruyi’s crippled arguments and his above striving to turn logic and reason on its head is indicative of the fact that either this man’s intellectual and ethical hinterland needs development or that they are evidence of some depravity of character. Omoruyi urged us not to judge a thief by his character but by his non existent goodwill. Granted that Kant canonized goodwill as the only thing that is unqualifiedly good, that does not nullify the fact that a thief with a goodwill is a contradiction in terms and in fact. No good thief has ever been blessed with good will or a good conscience. If he had goodwill, he would never have been a thief in the first place. IBB is a good thief still clutching tenanciously to his loot, while Omoruyi, his inglorious cheerleader is at the other end; eyes trained, tongue wagging and hanging out like that of a Pavlovian dog salivating at the feeding bells of his master, and giving us a sermon, he does not believe in himself. Reason would weep at this crucifixion of common sense. The author of this senile mutilation of reason, should come forth and tell the world when words started speaking louder than actions, as for us to entertain the lazy and criminal luxury of glossing over IBB’s acts of treachery, and come to believe his balmy words that is in all likelihood hiding further deceits. Here Omoruyi as IBB’s defence counsel in the High courts of public opinion, after his client has been convicted on hard, incontrovertible evidence, in his allocutus pleaded the court to acquit and discharge his client on grounds that this thief has agreed to donate ¼ of his loot to feed the victims devastated and pushed into a poverty quadrangle by his robberies. Omoruyi has rebaptised a crime and asked Nigerians to look the other way while our country is once again been repositioned for the renew ravaging by IBB and his gang of rapists. This ungenerous dose of cant shamelessly represented above is indicative of a conscience that has been so hopelessly compromised beyond redemption, that the line between scandalous evil and good is senselessly blurred. What is this man teaching his children and grand children? That betraying public trust and stealing public money is a virtue?. This is what a vote for Babangida forcefully sires and emblazons on our collective psyche. If we are to swallow this, and condone the return of this monumental robber, have we then any right to send a man to prison for stealing a piece of yam, or to lynch a man who stole piece of bread to forestall some life-threatening, gastronomic emergency? Campaigning for IBB is an insult to all that is good, true and beautiful. It is an indictment of our national pooltroonery. This is a man that should be facing the tribunals of the people’s anger, to answer for his criminal mismanagement of Nigeria . Yet men like Omoruyi fete him and asks us to join him in bending our knees in subservient genuflection at the idols of corruption.

Omoruyi, by his chameleonic vacillations has evolved to embody the worst currents of sycophancy and untruth in the Nigerian socio-political scene of today. The tribunals of history can only summarize his cockeyed illogic infantile musings and criminal collaboration with the wreckers of our posterity for what it is; namely a debauched attempt at cheap popularity and sordid money. In fact the best that can be achieved in the language of studied restraint is that this man is a worthless blackguard stained with every kind of greed; a venerable ruin in the Nigerian hall of shame. Babangida the best for Nigeria is the gospel according to Omoruyi. Yet the country that Omoruyi’s best ran for 8 years remains a forlorn dysfunctional place riddled with poverty, corruption. That Omoruyi in order to fill his pockets, would treat the pain of Nigerians so lightly and tell brazen lies in our faces to that effect, is a conduct that cannot be condoned on the score of social hygiene and ethics. His cheerleading of the IBB’s “operation destroy Nigeria ” project remains a nauseating insult on the collective pain of the Nigerians. And in order to sell his damaged goods to us, we must knuckle sheepishly and keep mum, while his lies gains currency and also while everything that his ignorance, prejudice and rancour could contrive and suggest is poured forth in copious fury.

The depth of this man’s political harlotry is exemplified by his toasting of the Obasanjo’s massive rigging of 2003 elections. Today, he lectures the Arewa on why they are stupid and hell bent on destroying Nigeria . The next second he warns Obasanjo not to convoke a Sovereign National Conference. Tomorrow, he descends on Ndigbo and fires away his pathological hatred of his intellectual superiors at people like Ojukwu, who had the courage to dare history in the face, while men like Omoruyi where hiding in irrelevance. And next tomorrow, he tells us to give a thief a chance to steal more. He targets every tribe and every other person except himself. His fluid ability to project his ills on others and to bend history to his whims and caprices, made him blind to his gaping weaknesses. He never saw himself for what he really is; namely a part of the conglomerate that transcended tribe, which under IBB constituted itself into a faceless cabal, who sworn duty was to steal everything that could filched in Nigeria. During Abiola’s struggle to regain his mandate, this guy sang a sycophants songs and demonized Obasanjo and Diya at that occasion. Omoruyi himself wrote about OBJ thus:

I witnessed the Abuja incident of the ill-planned effort of Generals Obasanjo, Adebayo and Diya with some selected Traditional rulers in 1994 to get Abiola to apologise to General Abacha or to the country for the harm he, Chief did to Nigeria . To add to injury Chief Abiola was to renounce his mandate as a condition for his release [5]

But shortly after rigging himself back to power in 2003, Omoruyi took up the refrain of Obasanjo, the man he demonized a few years before. One only needs to read his letter to Obasanjo which he tilted “Congratulations, President Obasanjo” to realise the ethical emptiness and sycophancy of this man. He at that occasion started telling the world that OBJ’s hijack of the electoral process in 2003 was done in good faith. He justified it by saying that all the parties rigged elections, but Obj outrigged them all. This is the justification that our political science professor could submit in defence of an indefensible position. This is to state that one will not lose his bet if one beholds or hears omoruyi tomorrow canonizing Abacha whose hands were equally stuffed with loot as a saint. He could even have done this as Abacha lay perspiring on his way to expiration atop those imported prostitutes.

The most unfortunate thing about characters like this in our situation, is that these empty and unethical vessels are the kind of men that our press in Nigeria toast and fete. These are the models we set before our youth, yet we complain that Nigerian youths are involved in Advanced Fee Fraud. Why should that not be, when our leaders are the greatest fraudsters ever to walk the face of the earth. They promise to deliver heaven and earth. We give them our mandate or in many instances we choose to ignore their rape of the electoral process, hoping that they will lead us aright. In many cases equally, we advance our taxes. All they do, typical of Fraudsters is to run away to Switzerland with our money, without delivering on their promises. When a country is ruled by a gang of thieves, the citizenry are trained to become bandits. That is the situation in Nigeria . Achebe remains forever right. The problem with Nigeria is leadership, but the trouble with our leadership is that they are criminals cross sired with sycophants. Little wonder then that thievey, secret cultism, corruption and every other kind of vice and social ill finds a fertile ground in Nigeria . When thieves become chiefs and sycophants become the chief’s councillors, then the state is poised to be eaten up in a feast convoked by political cannibals and vultures of the ilk of IBB and his gang of vultures and other scavengers that includes our Democratic Saint Omo Omoruyi.     

Omo and his IBB would have surprise awaitng them come 2007. IBB and his team remains a Humpty Dumpty that had a great fall. And since all the king’ss horses or and all the king’smen could not put Humpty Dumpty together again; so also would all the apologies in the world, like that urged lately by Soyinka nor all the rented crowds in Nigeria, And not even all the Omoruyi’s could dare put his humpty Dumpty image together again.