Dele Farotimi’s sin

“I don’t go around fire, expecting not to sweat.” The music rapper Lil Wayne is responsible for that lyric of the basic natural chain of events when a person decides to trigger a combustion of any kind. He titled the song ‘No love’.

Dele Farotimi did not just play with fire, he soaked the matches in gasoline. In my last artice titled “Misunderstanding the Judiciary as a confraternity,” I wrote about the skin and the skeleton of that noble arm of government. I picked the bones, x-rayed the fractures and tried to carry out the very difficult task of describing the judiciary’s anatomy as presently constituted in a misconceived way.

Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right, but as commonly found on the tongue of some Nigerians today, freedom after speech; there lies the question, and the answer to it is actually at large. In a country where hunger is the barometer of the masses, the people’s sensitivity to the kind of statements in Dele Farotimi’s book is awoken and welcomed with open hands.

Nigerians are angry. They are suffering. When an activist such as Dele Farotimi who is in fact a learned fellow due to the privilege of being a lawyer in the temple of justice, writes a book and cast specific aspersions to major personalities and to the sacred arm of government that exercises a godly finality when it speaks, the people are happy to be spoken out for and he then amasses an army of sympathizers and supporters. Like leeches to blood the citizenry cling to it.

They turn it to firewood for which they stoke the embers of their hatred for those in power. Already they have unlettered heroes like Verydarkman who consistently bashes the government while he does the good work of fighting for the oppressed. And he achieves results. How much more a learned fellow like Dele Farotimi.

Yet man must always employ some tact and wisdom in the doing of any act. The Bible itself tells that there is time for everything. In Ecclesiastes 3:1 – 11 is found the admonition that “There is time for everything and a season for every activity under the Sun.”

The key input of all that the pen says here is just to ask the question about the timing of Dele Farotimi’s book and the moral correctness of it in the first place. Small meaning is not a couple of pages in any book that can sit on a shelf for years when it talks about a personality that history must pledge fealty to; that is to say there is no chance of evading the character’s life and times as a person and as a legal practitioner in the space of Nigeria’s giants.

Once in his many days of kind mentoring, the critically acclaimed writer Bolaji Abdullah who himself has a place in Nigeria’s space of giants showed me a manuscript of a book he intended to publish but said at the time that he would not do so at that moment, because it was not politically correct at the time. The suspense that was wrought from the expectation that it would be published one day still drags on.

It can be assumed that he just doesn’t want to discolour the rainbows of the personalities in that book and so has not found it easy to just close his eyes and publish same. This would be because of his high moral fitness which he has not allowed to suffer some form of betrayal even when it would make him very popular.

Defamation is the one thing that actually defies physics. It is where action and reaction can be disastrously unequal. All men are without fault, including the Dele Farotimi whose book has caused disastrous vibrations to the personality of the Great Aare Afe Babalola SAN. Reputation is what renowned people of the earth who want to be remembered tomorrow in a favorable light, guard with their life.

It is in-fact amongst the forty nine (49) laws of power. A person whose character has been hit by damaging stories cannot be told how to react to same. That is where the reaction to the action cannot be expected to be equal.

It grieves this writer who is himself a freedom fighter bound by the oath of equal right and social justice that Dele Farotimi who sings the kind of music that Nigerians love to dance to, will now suffer the travails of prison cells and charges that lead to his docking. He threw caution to the wind and decided to cast aspersions on a legal icon, the supreme court and the very nation in itself.

What goes around comes around and no matter how radical, other aspiring freedom fighters will find some discouraging in the plight of Dele Farotimi, meanwhile the country is indeed in need of many Farotimis. In all the criticisms wherefore, it is then central to be wise by remembering Icarus who flew too close to the sun and dug for himself therewith an early grave.

Yet whatever grief that is generated because of the suffering of Dele Farotimi because of his book can easily be assuaged by the telling of the fact that when he lit the fire, he knew that the burning would without a doubt scald his own space as well. Perhaps the great Aare Afe Babalola will forgive the sins against him eventually and perhaps not. It is left to be seen.