First published: https://citizensquare.substack.com/p/transfer-season-may-the-highest-bidder

Eyo Charles of Daily Trust may have asked the most important question in Nigerian politics. A question so powerful that can see a public servant descend to put up an infantile show of shame. That question, paraphrased, is oga, who is bankrolling you?

Eyo would not believe his ears when he posed this question to Femi Fani-Kayode (FFK), Nigeria’s former aviation minister. FFK needs no introduction as a fierce and virulent critic of this administration. On many occasions, he has made bold declarations that he would rather die than join forces with the All-Progressives Congress which he termed as a “filthy, rat-infested sinking ship”.

Today, FFK joins the long list of high-profile political reshuffling between the leading political parties, the All-Progressive Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). FFK claims his change of heart came as a result of a supernatural conviction from God. Towing the same religious reference, Reuben Abati likens FFK to Saul — a persecutor of Christians who received a supernatural encounter from God in Damascus leading to his conversion. He became a key figure in the Church and wrote almost two-thirds of the New Testament. We expect that the mouth that has so vilified Buhari and the “rat-infested” APC would begin to declare “their good news” to the ends of the earth.

Nigerians are not strangers to induced Damascus moments among the political class. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo once offered a glowing recommendation to the political job market: “Femi Fani-Kayode is my boy. Provide him food, he will eat and then sing for you. He’s a smart boy”. FFK would assent to this sentiment as he chorused that proximity to power mattered more than principles in an interview

There you go, FFK is a lousy portrait of Nigeria’s political scene. Nigerian politics is void of ideology and mainly guided by personal interests. The belly (personal interests), not the brain (ideological persuasions), is the trafficator of their political actions. It decides what song they sing per time – as Obasanjo illustrated. Recent political moves have also uncovered a political truth that the name of the incumbent party is a strong tower, looters run into it, and they become saints.

Nigerians are swayed by sweet-sounding empty rhetoric like “change”, “transformation”, “progress”, “federalism” that holds nothing for the citizenry but privately benefits these political messengers. Thank you Eyo Charles for suggesting via that “deeply insulting question” that no one is above bankrolling in Nigerian politics.

If Charles Newton could make an observation on Nigerian politics, his first law of motion would come in handy “a body at rest stays at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an external force.” For every unusual motion or lack of motion by Nigerian politicians, Eyo Charles teaches us to probe what external forces are at play. Fixing this messy scene would require that Nigerians replace the blind adulations of “Twale baba oo” offered to political entrepreneurs to “Sòrò sókè, who is bankrolling you?”