ICONOCLASTS are fundamentalist jihadists, purists, conservative promoters of intolerance, invasive agents of pulverization who are dismissive and disdainful of the other in any identifiable permutation except their own parochial fanatical beliefs, convictions and theories. Having built, elevated and transformed pulverization into statecraft, daily drawing thousands into it like a whirlpool, iconoclasts are indeed the canoe for daily haulage of merchandise of calumny and pulverization.
Therefore, a celebratory caper would claim the earthly plane if a counter-pulverization force emerges from among intellectuals implacably opposed to all agenda of space-hegemonization in a secular world. This is why I write.
A pen journeys effortlessly when lubricated by knowledge, truth, depth, objectivity and inspiration. When a pen journeys stubbornly away from this rational channel, even supposedly inspiring words disappear in a flight of rebellious indignation.
Inspiration, the universally acknowledged POWER-HOUSE of writers, also flies leaving the writers to the mercy of ponderous words and non-functional theories that serve no purpose beyond lies-propagation. Theoretical PONDEROSITY is the latest passionate adventure of Sunny Ikhioya and Josef Omorotionmwan whose bank of essays must have suffered dangerous depletion to the point they now assume the clothes of drowning men who tenaciously hold unto anything within reach, undeterred by the potential danger that inheres there.
To awaken Ikhioya and Omorotionmwan to their misrepresentations and demeaning discourses is a cathartic mental engagement preferable to physical confrontation which some benighted people may be tempted to ponder on. This cathartic mental nudging or reawakening has the potential to purge the readers of any move towards indiscriminate consumption of the balderdash regurgitated by these two conspiratorial iconoclastic writers whose writing adventures are animated by TELEGUIDED theories of hate-cultivation and hate-production concerning certain personalities in Nigeria.
I dare hazard that the whole world must have been bamboozled, hypnotized to the extent of applauding Ikhioya when he published his article entitled ‘Ijaws and the rest of Niger Delta’ because in this interesting essay he was categorical that the crisis between the Ijaws and the Itsekiris in Warri South Local Government of Delta State originated from disagreement over the choice of the Local Government Headquarters between Ogidigben and Ogbe-Ijoh. The great writer he is,chosen by Mac Flecknoe over and above the exceptionally gifted Shadwell, he also contended that the Ijaws had claimed all the top government appointments and projects in addition to appropriating the Deputy-Governorship and the Delta South Senatorial District elective seats in Delta State.
President Jonathan was portrayed too as being biased in the handling of the EPZ project in Delta State. As a Professor of phonology, Ikhioya equally ridiculed the Ijaws for their inability to pronounce words like ‘John’ and ‘Johnson’ in their correct phonological order.
As an erudite scholar whose academic credentials are so intimidating as to drown any intellectual counter-move, Ikhioya passionately exploded in another article that the Ijaws had always paraded themselves as owners of the resources of Delta State, obsessively waging unnecessary wars against their neighbours while President Jonathan was did nothing to stop this. This explosion found expression in the article ‘Protecting 2015 Elections Cautiously’.
Considering the paragraph composition of the article ‘Protecting 2015 Elections Cautiously’, this passionate explosion is unnecessary because it is not related or connected to either the preceding paragraphs or the following paragraphs in content. It is an illogical, extraneous ideational SUPERIMPOSITION borne out of his ponderous serial theorization. Perhaps, Ikhioya would have been more intellectually exciting if he had merely embarked on a perambulatory voyage around his proverbial skeletal framework ‘if wishes were horses’, beggars will ride’. But merely stopping at this proverb-appropriation would still have been wrong because the correct words are not captured in quoting the proverb ‘if wishes were horses, beggars would/might ride’.
Water purifies. Water also cures ailments. Therefore, let a cascade of lustral water chasten the Ikhioyas of this world to the truth that there had never been any crisis in Warri South Council between the Ijaws and the Itsekiris in Delta State over the location of the Headquarters of Local Government and that the top appointments and projects of President Jonathan are not usurped by the Ijaws. Jonathan is also beyond reproach in the handling of the EPZ project in Delta State.
However, as an educated man, I do know that phonological problems are not the peculiarities of any particular nationality over which the Ijaws should be singled out for mockery because all the nationalities of Nigeria have their phonological encumbrances or problems. Would it not also be wise for our erudite scholar and flawless historian to know that Deputy- Governorship and Senatorial seats are democratically won through election, not ‘appropriated’, and so the Ijaws could not have appropriated these seats in Delta State. Besides, where are the so-called top appointments and projects expropriated by the Ijaws?
Because Ikhioya has developed a penchant for Warri issues, two prescriptions offer themselves to him: Relocate to Warri from Lagos or go for a major in Warri Studies as a discipline at the postgraduate level at the Delta State University, Abraka. This would give him the intellectual enablement to invent dependable theories to analyze happenings in Warri and write compellingly to the admiration of even our ancestors who are armed with the authentic account of Warri issues.
The commendable inspiration that drives Ikhioya is the same one that drives Josef Omorotionmwan: they are both gifted writers committed to distortion of even the universally known vibratory frequency of objects using their ponderous analyses.
In an article entitled ‘The Leadership we want’ Omorotionmwan shamelessly maintained that Tompolo had acquired arms and gunboats without being stopped by President Jonathan who was scared off the EPZ project commissioning . This shameless position was published even after the Nigerian Navy and the Director-General of NIMASA had defensively exonerated Tompolo from the accusation of arms acquisition. In another article entitled ‘Buhari and the qualification question’, he told the entire world that a man without certificate as President was preferable to a zoologist with PHD as president.
Muhammadu Buhari is unable to prove that he has the paper to authenticate his O’ level credentials as a Presidential aspirant. But to Omorotionmwan, demanding certificate from aspirants as the basis to verify their level of education is the cause of the under-development of Nigeria. He shamelessly defended the indefensible in demonization of President Jonathan by saying that ‘And our preference for those ‘Cardboards may be the very albatross of this nation’.
Is it not time to demand Omorotionmwan’s certificate as a confirmation of his level of education? For a writer who sees nothing good or commendable in the Federal Government’s N10 per litre reduction in petrol and rather proclaims that half loaf of bread is equivalent to zero, there is something absolutely wrong with his lens of analysis in his article ‘REDUCTION IN PUMP PRICE: Half a loaf is worse than no bread’, the drift of which is: ‘The reduction of N10 per litre, which is directed only at petrol, came too little, too late. This is benign tokenism! And this is where half a loaf is worse than no bread’.
Over the years some columnists and opinion writers have been so dangerously indoctrinated they grow uncannily silent over the deafening performance fireworks/knockouts of President Jonathan, and High Chief Government Ekpemuplo’s genuine moves and achievements and only thunder CACOPHONOUSLY to discredit the undeniable achievements of the President and Tompolo using ponderous theories, riveting for their polemic rather than their substance, that would dwindle on the path to praxis. Incontrovertibly, these are the intellectual Boko Haramites and jihadists intellectually programmed like Robots to bomb President Jonathan and Tompolo even where the detonated verbal bombs cannot penetrate their Egbesu-soaked skin, only ricochetting off to reveal the lethal mindset of the verbal suicide bombers. The belongingness of Ikhioya and Omorotionmwan to this class of intellectual Boko Haramites and Jihadists is beyond denunciation.
It is amazing how Ikhioya and Omorotionmwan came to develop and perfect the capacity to elevate and dignify nonsense to the admiration of readers from home and abroad. Could these persons have been already crowned by Mac Flecknoe in John Dryden’s poem ‘Mac Flecknoe’ with the inspiring exhortation: ‘my son, advance Still in new impudence, new ignorance’? Perhaps already crowned by Mac Flecknoe in a conclave to advance unfettered in nonsense, tautology, impudence, ignorance and ponderous analyses, Chinua Achebe would have dismissed Ikhioya and Omotionmwan as haulers of ‘deodorized shit’ in extreme disgust and indignation.
Science is always discovering. Because science is always discovering I have equally discovered that the inspiration and capacity of Ikhioya and Omorotionmwan to distort the normal vibratory frequency of objects and personalities, particularly President Jonathan and Tompolo, must have been derived from the colonialists. They have so perfected the art of distortion that only the colonial Masters could offer them such sophisticated apprenticeship in the vocation – the art of moulding and detonating verbal bombs to acquire regular spaces of believability.
Through intellectually controlled literary and sociological discourses powered by theories of national superiority, binary worldview of polarization, totalization and essentialization, the colonialists see the oriental world as backward, inferior, wild, irrational, emotional and uncivilized, and the occidental world as rational, superior, civilized, civil and progressive. In malevolently distorting the image of President Jonathan, Tompolo and the Ijaws, the theories of national superiority and binary world view of polarization invented by the colonialists to justify their negative discourses against the colonized people must have struck them as their comfortable authoritative source.
The 15th century marked the period of colonial expansion and penetration when Spanish and Portuguese discovered New lands in the West Indies and the Americas. This ended with the outbreak of the first world war though the colonial expansion and conquest continued for over 400 years. Within this period Great Britain, France, Germany Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Spain, with their commercialization inclinations, had conquered the whole of Africa and the areas today delineated as America, Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, the Middle East and parts of Asia.
Similarly, in the first half of the 20th century the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) aided by a vigorous expansionist agenda and post-world war II treaties, conquered the whole of Russia and numerous parts of Central Asia and Eastern Europe before the collapse of the USSR in 1991 – a time Soviet regions like the Balkans, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe began to experience border conflicts, human rights violations, uneven distribution of resources and ethnic rivalry.
In colonizing the far East and in the scramble for Africa (1870-1914) these colonial powers invented theories of national superiority designated as bringing the light of civilization to the dark parts of the world and many others. Through intellectually directed literary, sociological and anthropological discourses powered by theories of national superiority, denigration of the oriental world and the colonized people became a serious task just as the denigration of Jonathan, Tompolo and the Ijaws has been elevated to patriotic national assignment by writers in the grip of the iconoclastic virus of distortion and pulverization.
The oriental world would have preferred heterogeneity in describing them but the colonialists chose homogeneity in describing them. This homogenous descriptive categorization of the oriental world is an anathema to them because it subsumes, overshadows, beclouds and discards their essential cultural differences – cultural differences the word ‘heterogeneity’ would have appropriately captured. The aggressive devaluation, distortion and denigration which the oriental world and the colonized people once suffered in the hands of the colonialists is what has daily come upon Jonathan, Tompolo and the Ijaws in the hands of Ikhioya and Omorotionmwan.
No matter the degree of apprenticeship and immersion in colonial theories of denigration, President Jonathan and Tompolo should be engaged as individuals whose activities are open to healthy commentary. The successes or failures of individuals should not be linked to their ethnic nationalities because that would be tantamount to the use of ‘homogeneity’ to describe the oriental world – a phenomenon they have a strong aversion to. For writers like Ikhioya and Omorotionmwan who harbour a dangerous predisposition to denigrate all the Ijaws anytime they are attacking either Jonathan or Tompolo, should review their STEREOTYPICAL critical commentaries and infuse truth into them because only psychopathic, neurotic and schizophrenic iconoclasts behave this way. Ikhioya and Omorotionmwan should not turn Jonathan, Tompolo and the Ijaws into images upon which they have the right to desecrate, distort, pulverize and incinerate.
For iconoclasts like Ikhioya and Omorotionmwan already crowned by Mac Flecknoe as exceptional critics/writers, they are distinguished by fanatical destruction and pulverization of images valued by people. The virus of destruction/pulverization has possessed Ikhioya and Omorotionmwan to a perilous 800 DEGREE CELSIUS that they always denigrate Jonathan, Tompolo and the Ijaws sadistically through carefully crafted critical essays.
The time has come for the virus of iconoclasm to be tamed because a new season has come – a season needed to review old theories of denigration and pulverization once invented by Sunny Ikhioya and Josef Omorotionmwan against President Jonathan, Tompolo and the Ijaws. Even the so-called Eurocentric literary,sociological and anthropological discourses of denigration from which they derive their inspiration have been reviewed by the colonialists. This is why the iconoclasts need to review their ponderous theories of pulverization and be tamed for a cascade of lustral water upon their irredeemably MACFLECKNOISED souls.
But would John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe, their inseparable friend, free them from the royal dungeon to review their theories of denigration and pulverization against President Jonathan, Tompolo and the Ijaws in anticipation of the divine companionship of Chinua Achebe’s IDEMILI in Anthills of the Savannah which offers them the brightest prospect of transformation into illuminists empowered to develop navigable canal for this generation and beyond?Oh may Achebe’s IDEMILI descend on Ikhioya and Josef and chasten them to the right orbit!
Mr. Ekanpou Enewaridideke, a public affairs analyst, wrote from Akparemogbene, Delta State.
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