By Remi Oyeyemi
_“Take criticism seriously, but not personally. If there is truth or merit in the criticism, try to learn from it. Otherwise, let it roll right off you.”
- Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, and former Secretary of State of the United States.
Reno has been committing serious “crimes” in recent times. He has danced audaciously while committing them. He has titillated with temerity. He has flourished in effrontery. He arrayed in arrogance, and he bristled with brashness. His hostility hoisted with haughtiness harboring humility. He glided with grit. He percolated with impudence, while exuding self-exaltation in the self-assigned vocation, and crooned like a canary. He has become a sort of a sorcerer with pestilential sass.
He has not really given any damn about the consequences of his actions. He did not need to. He has been bold and challenging in the tasks. He has turned himself into a daredevil with the truth. A courageous harbinger of facts of History, ceaselessly watering the drylands of ignorance; enlarging the oasis of truth to subdue the aridity of the desert of falsehood.
He has been propelled by the fact that truths could be inconvenient, hurtful, irritating, annoying, and discomforting, but it ultimately heals on the long run. Like that Amala seller on the Mokola Hills in Ibadan, in the premises of the Cultural Center, with “ina-straight” as her cognomen, (I hope I got the spelling right), Reno Omokri has been dishing out historical facts that are verifiable, generously, and relentlessly.
Reno has been discomforting the cyber terrorists. Terrorists of fibbery. He has pulverized the propagandists of canards. He has inflicted pangs on peddlers of putridity. He has lacerated the hawkers of hogwash. He has debunked deceit, duplicity, and dishonesty. He has cramped the chicanery of the calcified. He torn to tatters the tall tales of tattlers, deploying intellectual bombs to blow blubberers into bits.
As he does these onerous tasks, he stuck to the truth. He remained loyal to verifiable facts. He was consistent and ruthlessly fair-minded. Revisionists, he took on, tutoring the untutored. He adamantly resisted the reverse psychology of dubious and diabolical angels of unjustified anger, gutting the gall germinating from a ghastly gusto, and bankrupting the braggadocio of the blatherskites.
The victim mentality, he exposed as a ruse. The “marginalization” cries, he underscored as distortions, disinformation and fabrication. Their pretense to being “intellectual,” he pooh-poohed, because the first point of departure for any serious intellectual, is the unconditional respect, regard and acceptance of facts. He hobbled the hagglers of hatred against the hoi polloi of Nigeria, especially those of Yoruba land.
He did not ridicule any claim of the disgruntled invaders of Yoruba land as being “better businessmen” than the rest, he just exposed the fallacy of their claims, and their lack of etiquettes, with evidence and comparative analysis of what others have achieved and done quietly for hundreds of years. He inflicted deserving pains on those who have no regard for facts of History by merely throwing into the ring of discourse, naked truths. Yes, bare naked truths!
He exposed the illogicality of how an uncivilized ethnic nationality, wandering the seamless forests of their homeland without clothing, or barely clad in leaves few decades ago, could claim that they “civilized” those who have historical and trajectorial evidence of organized milieu, traditional wears, political system, and have been living in city-states for about 1,500 years before the advent of kingdom/empire mentality!
He made sure to continuously expose the moral calcification of their elites who would support anyone from their ethnic nationality who committed any crime, regardless of the subsisting evidence. He showed evidence of their moral aridity and hypocrisy. He highlighted their propensity to a particular crime, in comparative analysis with other ethnic nationalities. He proved over and over how the education and exposure of their elites had no mitigation on their constant social and political charlatanism.
He exposed their congenital and pathological exudation of ingratitude. He digged out the sacrifices made on behalf of their ethnic nationality by Prof. Wole Soyinka, Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, Subomi Balogun and a host of other Yoruba elites. This excludes their accommodation by the generality of the Yoruba people. He, with subtlety, exposed their putrid jealousy, contaminated with a heavy dose of malice towards Yoruba land and civilization.
Reno Omokri is very much despised in their circles. He is seen as a formidable enemy about whom nothing could be done. They are frustrated about him. Everything they have thrown at him has not sticked. He remained as steady as Imo Hills (Hills of Widom) in Ilesa, in Osun State. He has been like an Iroko tree around which their arms could not be folded. Like a sea that could not be dried or redirected in its trajectory. The sympathizers of this ethnic nationality could not even fault his facts. All they have being doing is “hating” on the gentleman, levelling vacuous accusations against him. To discredit him, they labeled him a “job seeker” in the Bola Tinubu Government, as if that was a crime. But none of their inanities had any impact on him.
Rather than contend with the facts he has been churning out, they could not do that because he could not be faulted. Rather than contend with the evidence he has laid out on the ground because he continuously shakes their table of lies, and at times remove the legs of their table of falsehood, they whine and throw tantrums. With their red herring tottering horrendously, engendering further discombobulation in their rank and file, exposing the hollowlessness of their endless howling, Reno Omokri has now been turned into a boogeyman. In their contaminated imaginations, Reno now chases them around in their sleep, and disrupts their thoughts while they are awake.
But who is going to arrest him for all these “crimes” now?
Chief Remi Oyeyemi is a United States-based journalist, poet, writer, public analyst and social commentator. Opinion expressed here does not represent that of the news platform.