Reno Omokri: The ramblings of a mad man

By Ifedayo Peters

It is human nature to crave attention, we all want to feel seen, our presence noticed and appreciated, but it borders on virulent mental disorder to do just about anything to get attention.

This I find the case of an Arise TV interview with Reno Omokri, former spokesperson to President Jonathan, and whose appointment was prematurely terminated due to gross misconducts.

To begin with, Reno’s gimmicks are not new to me, nor do they seem too much of an aberration to behold at this point. If he could exploit an unsuspecting movement for the release of Leah Sharibu, one of the Chibok girls abducted during his boss’s tenure in office, ultimately hijacking and making it entirely about himself and book sales, there is virtually nothing I’d put beneath him as long as it makes him the focal point.

This includes possibly paying the Arise Tv Corporation to grant him time on the Morning Show so as to further amplify his meaningless Twitter rants since the Vice President Yemi Osinbajo declared to run in 2023 for the office of the President, a stunt many would agree did not go in his favour.

“Ignorance is like cholera,” Sir Muir Gray writes. “It cannot be controlled by the individual alone: it requires the organised efforts of society.”

This instructive quote got a visual representation during the interview when the seasoned Arise TV crew — Reuben, Tundun and Rufai — quizzed Mr. Omokri over his grouse with the VP’s declaration speech. What’s perhaps worse than pleading to come on a show, is coming without the required purview to address the subject of discussion.

• El-Rufai sues Reno Omokri, Chidi Odinkalu and others for N1.5bn

Mr. Omokri’s own substantial argument, was that Osinbajo was disloyal to his political godfather Bola Ahmed Tinubu, oblivious to the many constitutional provisions empowering the former to exercise his rights to do so.

A line he densely regurgitated in response to nearly every question posed to him throughout the course of the torturous interview, including the one asking about his party’s preparation and his most preferred candidate in the upcoming PDP primaries.

It is terrible enough that Mr. Omokri, who had himself served for many years in the corridors of political power, could barely differentiate between a declaration speech and a manifesto — which Rufai gracefully pointed out — what’s worse is his pathological dependence on hearsays and lighthearted tweets to argue serious matters. It was easy to tell he had not read the speech he so vehemently knocked on social media.

His apparently sponsored hatred for the Vice President entirely clouded his reasoning when he spinelessly argued that Osinbajo was unfit to lead a nation simply because the man had never run a business. Reminded by one of the anchors that the VP once owned a law firm with hundreds of staff, he maintained that a law firm was not a business even after the definition of a business was spelt out to him on live TV. What then is “business-enough” in Omokri’s books?

Clearly mortified and once again looking to Osinbajo’s “disloyalty” as a means of escape, Reuben Abati saved us all the agony, calmly informing him about the Ikokus; statesman Late Alvan Ikoku and his son, Samuel Goomsu Ikoku, were political rivals. Samuel won against his father at the Eastern Regional Assembly elections in March 1957. There was simply no hiding place for Omokri at this point.

Mr Omokri who was exposed and later fired for wrongly indicting CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, in a publication penned under a pseudonym which got him in another pot of soup bordering on identity theft, one would think ‘Pastor’ Omokri should be doing less speaking; rather enjoying the bloodstained proceeds from his “Fugazi” Leah Sharibu campaign, or at least attending to his lovechild.

If his representation of loyalty is cheating on his first legitimate wife and beating another to a pulp while making a public scorn of her, then we can deem it safe to without reserve, applaud Osinbajo’s disloyalty.