TD This morning I woke to a message on my page. I will quote it exactly as it was written, because nothing I could compose would indict its author, or the political culture that produced him, more completely than his own words.
“I’m sure you are Igbo. Remember Nigeria is a sovereign state. Stop posting nonsense. Enjoy your food life and leave us in peace. All these gibberish just to support Peter Obi? Have you heard him talk? You want us to know you are living a good life, now we know. So get the fck off. Nyanmirin will always be nyanmirin.”
Read it again. Slowly.
The first act of this man is not to answer an argument. It is to assign me a tribe. Not to ask what I said, or whether it was true, but to decide what I am, so that whatever I said can be dismissed without thought. And he gets it wrong.
I am Kalabari, of the Ijaw people of the Niger Delta, of the Amachree dynasty of Buguma. And my mother was Yoruba. His attack collapses in its first sentence.
But notice something: it should not matter whether he got it right.
The point is that in the Nigeria Tinubu has built, tribe is the first question, the only question, and the answer to every question.
The word he uses, nyanmirin, is an ethnic slur against the Igbo. He deploys it casually, publicly, under his own name, at seven in the morning, confident there will be no consequence.
That confidence is the story. That confidence was manufactured. It did not fall from the sky.
Out of curiosity, I looked at the page of the man who wrote this. I will not name him.
He does not matter as an individual, and that is precisely the point. What matters is what I found.
His profile is crowned with a portrait of Bola Tinubu and his wife, displayed the way a devotee displays an icon.
Not a photograph of his own family. Not his village, his children, his achievements. The president’s face, mounted like an altar piece over everything he shows the world.
This is not political support. Political support debates, persuades, defends a record.
This is worship. And worshippers do not argue with critics of their god. They curse them, slur them, and command them to be silent.
For four years this administration has governed by division because it cannot govern by results.
When the naira collapsed, they gave us tribe.
When fuel subsidy removal impoverished millions without a single credible palliative reaching the people, they gave us tribe.
When insecurity spread from the North West to the doorsteps of the South, they gave us tribe.
A government with achievements defends its record. A government without achievements defends its ethnicity, and teaches its followers to do the same.
And so a section of supporters has been converted into congregants.
Tinubu is no longer a politician to them. He is an object of veneration, beyond question, beyond audit, beyond the reach of ordinary accountability.
Any Nigerian who challenges him must be an enemy tribesman, because the faithful cannot imagine that criticism could come from love of country.
I have spent years documenting no-bid contracts, offshore structures, and questions of fitness for office that remain unanswered in any court or chamber.
The response is never evidence. It is never rebuttal. It is a slur and an instruction to shut up.
Here is what I say to my correspondent, and to every Nigerian who thinks as he does.
I do not write from Stockholm because I am living “a good life” and mocking you.
I write because I watched my father, Chief Godfrey Amachree QC, served a Nigeria in which merit mattered and tribe was an inheritance, not a weapon.
I write because that Nigeria was deliberately dismantled, and the man whose portrait hangs over your page has made ethnic suspicion the operating system of the state.
You are not defending Yoruba honour when you spit slurs at strangers online.
My Yoruba mother would not recognise you. You are defending one man’s grip on power, and he has made you smaller to do it.
This is why Tinubu must go. And not merely go.
He must leave office and face a court of law, to answer for four years of economic destruction, for the questions about his past that no Nigerian president should be permitted to leave unanswered, and for the poison of tribal hatred that has been cultivated, fertilised and harvested on his watch.
The hatred in that comment is a seed he planted. It has taken root in ordinary men who now guard his image like a shrine.
It must be torn out of the body called Nigeria, root and branch, before it strangles what remains.
Nigeria is not Yoruba. Nigeria is not Igbo. Nigeria is not Ijaw, Hausa, Kalabari, Fulani, Efik or Kanuri.
Nigeria is all of us, or Nigeria is nothing. Four more years of this and it will be nothing.
The reckoning is coming. Not tribal reckoning. Legal reckoning. And no slur ever stopped a subpoena.
Kio Amachree writes from Stockholm, Sweden. Worldview International.
