I WOULD have been too incapacitated to spot the Python in her cruel articles but for the strength garnered from His Royal Majesty Haile Selassie I, the Emperor of Ethiopia, who contends that: ‘Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known  better and the silence of the voice of justice when  it mattered most that has made it possible for evil to triumph.’

Jonathan, Tompolo and Asari do not deserve the acidic and abusive  language deployed by Tabia Princewill in her serially illogical articles. Prominent people in leadership positions always attract critical commentary from different people, though some purely borne out of envy. Having gained prominence in different fields, it is inevitable that they would be praised and minimised differently by people as Michigan I awakens readers to, captured in my own book

A Sail in the Dark: In every field of human endeavour, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. The reward is widespread recognition; the punishment. Fierce denial and detraction…’ True as this sounds, criticism should be based on issues, not on the personality as the Princewills of this world, hysterically excited by the approaching coronation, are wont to do without remorse and intellectual decorum.

The articles of Princewill betray acidic mindset in the deployment of language, intolerance and bigotry. She has a pen illogically conditioned to minimise Jonathan and Tompolo. When a writer becomes intolerant, vindictive and bigoted as pointers of his/her directional principle, issues are obfuscated. With deliberate obfuscation which appears priceless to Princewill, readers are WEANED ON HALF-TRUTHS, and half-truths are agents of dislocation and retrogression in society. I bare my mind this way because I am always nauseated by Princewill’s obsession with intolerance and bigotry in her analyses.

However much as I hate intolerance and bigotry in any guise, Soyinka is a better teacher to reawaken Princewill whose regression to a zealot is glaring. In his essay published in National Interest of 25 March 2000 entitled ‘Under the sign of an iconoclast’, Soyinka unequivocally declares thus: ‘I declare myself yet an implacable enemy of bigotry, intolerance and all agenda of mind-closure. A plague on the Taliban and  their kind, on zealots of every colour and creed’.

The man called Tompolo currently verbally assaulted by Princewill and others is the latest news in town. Tompolo’s company accounts were frozen by the Federal government and promptly he took EFCC to  court but no media hysteria greeted this. The media woke up when EFCC brought up a case of N13 billion against Tompolo in respect of the temporary site for the Nigeria Maritime University, Okerenkoko.

Again he wrote and deflated the claim of EFCC in an advertorial using verifiable evidence. No media drama attended Tompolo’s rejoinder. Then again EFCC brought up a N35 billion naira case of money-laundering against Tompolo and others in a Federal High Court, Lagos. On the appointed day of the summons he did not turn up in Court. Promptly, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. The media went wild and hysterical in the presentation of this order to arrest Tompolo. It became a dance of buzzing showy creatures buzzing to claim the honeycomb.

Top  on the buzzing creatures were Ayiri Emami and Michael Johnny who appeared captivated by their self-acclaimed patriotic assignment of newspaper persuasion and pressure on Tompolo to surrender, the two patriots carrying open minds unassailed by the words of Sir Francis Bacon that: ‘if a man begins with certainties, he will end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he will end in certainties’.

With the bench warrant and the destruction of piplelines in the Niger Delta, the buzzing creatures began to finger Tompolo as the mastermind. Tompolo was also prompt and clear in his denial of the pipeline vandalism, thus asserting himself once again as the agent of peace, not destruction, despite the conspiratorial drama to incriminate him in any possible way.

To the buzzing showy creatures, Tompolo is a fugitive, on the run from the law like biblical Jonah. Tompolo does not consider himself a fugitive but one who has just appropriated the age-long wisdom of tortoise who refused to visit Lion in his ill state because he (tortoise) could only trace the inward footprints of visitors to lion’s house without any visible outward footprints. The fugitive in Tompolo disappears when the outward footprints to the abode of Lion become visible and traceable.

For thousand years to come the memories of President Muhammadu Buhari’s last Presidential chat would live with Nigerians – a captivating Presidential chat resoundingly applauded by all patriots. In the Presidential chat the oracle of impunity was gaudily decorated and empowered to disobey valid Court orders as regards incarceration of personalities without bail.

And today as revealed by Hon. Rotimi Amaechi (Minister for Transport) with empowered pride and impunity, there are ploys to cancel the statutorily established Nigeria maritime University, Okerenkoko, without valid reasons beyond political vindictiveness. The Nigeria Maritime University, Okerenkoko, was established to address the educational backwardness of the Niger Delta but now the existence of this University is being threatened by the APC-led government of President  Muhammadu Buhari. Yet no buzzing showy  creatures are seen or heard.

At this time the coronation-seeking exceptional writer Prinewill, labouring for the only available Nobel prize for literature in the hands of the APC-led government, blessed with the rare gift of ‘verbal fluidity’ and compositional illogicality, would not journey to Okerenkoko and verbally chastise the Federal Government for that waiting meaningless move in a country where the bulk of the oil comes from the developmentally impoverished Niger Delta.

Not even  Emami Ayiri and Michael Johnny, the great patriots, activists  par excellence who laboriously prepared the Presidential seat for President Muhammadu Buhari in the 2015 general election and for which they have become the PINEAPPLES  of President  Buhari’s eye, would not flamboyantly hug the pages of national dailies and mouth their sincere concern  or developmental passion for the Niger Delta; or must we now Pencil them down as selective, showy profiteering occasional commentators on Niger Delta issues? That these  perpetually theatrical buzzing creatures keep hermetically sealed lips  on a matter  that affects the destiny of Niger Deltans, they are indeed patriots who should not be denied the waiting coronation. For Princewill specifically, hers would be the APC NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE for selective verbal fluidity and unimpeded compositional illogicality.

We now know that selective flamboyant hugging of pages of newspapers and mouthing expletive, incongruities and unalloyed support for President Muhammadu Buhari pays handsomely no matter the disguised profiteering undercurrents, whenever a bench warrant is showered on Tompolo and whenever pipelines are INCRIMINATINGLY vandalized. It also pays to be consistently engaged in programmed arid analytical verbal fluidity and uninhibited compositional illogicality – an ideal strangely pursued with bizarre flamboyance which has consumed the entire writing career of Princewill  Tabia.

Again, I feel obliged to add that because we love verbal illogicalities, because we passionately love verbal incongruities, because we love verbal hallucinations, let us address the buzzing creatures as patriots, activists and great writers so they would not be denied the waiting coronation they had laboured for over one thousand years. However, stuck in selective arid analytical verbal fluidity and compositional illogicality, it is intellectually debasing that Princewill serially leads a writing life untouched by  the directional words of Napoleon Bonaparte captured in my own book  The Road to Ken Saro-Wiwa that: ‘A journalist is a grumbler,  a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.’

No matter the devotedness allocated to the verbal minimisation and pulverization of Tompolo, Nigerians know him very well: he does not lie. His positions on any matter are not disguised; he fearlessly claims responsibility for anything he does and believes in. For Tompolo to say he was not involved in the recent pipeline vandalization in the Niger Delta means he is not actually involved. A believer of EGBESU does not lie. And those who tell false stories to incriminate and entrap him, know that the ultimate truth paddles near-by.

Every where is dark. The darkness is not cosmically decreed. For those who engage this darkness with pure thoughts and dark thoughts respectively, a recompense waits. Even for those turned bees overnight because  he is involved, the sting of bees has a duration. This is why the Princewills of this world should not daub and darken the darkness with intolerant, vindictive, bigoted articles dominated by illogical, famished and kwashiorkor-stricken sentences, all because of the prospect of the approaching coronation as the greatest writer ever born. As for Tompolo, one of the trophies  Princewill requires to qualify her for the APC NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE , is a man who will never be persuaded to walk on the revolutionary path however the  conspiracy; the Tompolo we know would rather seek out cosmically-decreed  direction in the fosilled lines of Ella Wheeler Wilcox in his poem, ‘The law:’.

‘Your path may be clouded, uncertain your goal;

Move on, for the orbit is fixed for your soul,

And though it may lead into darkness of night,

The torch of the Builder  shall give it new light.’

By: Ekanpou Enewaridideke. Writes From Akparemogbene, Delta State.