Wikipedia describes Farooq Adamu Kperogi as “a Nigerian academic, media scholar, public speaker and newspaper columnist.” He is a well-respected Nigerian but that was until he was allegedly outed as a fraud a few days ago. Kperogi made the unenviable list of “Fact-checking social media influencers who shared fake news during Nigerian general elections” alongside raucous politician, Dino Melaye.
The fact-checking was done by the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), which found that Kperogi deployed weapon grade fake news – videos and pictures – during the recent general elections. He shared a video of a female electoral official thumb printing ballot papers and claimed the crime was being committed to favour the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2019 presidential election but it turned out that the video was from 2015 and it was for a parliamentary election while the party being thumb printed for was Accord.
For someone that claims to be an associate professor of journalism, one that insists on holding those in authority to account, Kperogi fell short of his own standards as he refused to answer questions from the ICIR reporters that did the fact-checking. Tragically, the report done by ICIR exposed only a fraction of the fraud that the so-called media scholar has pulled on his unsuspecting readers. He has a serial history of manipulating events to suit whatever interest(s) he is pandering to at the point when he is launching his mischief.
Naturally, the fact-checking is a major blow to whatever credibility Kperogi has. If he can lie with his posts on the scale he did during the elections, when emotions were highly volatile and the fake video could have triggered a nationwide inferno, one wonders if he has ever said the truth in any of his write-ups and posts when it did not seem much was at stake. A logical reaction is for Kperogi to attempt redeeming what he can of his image after literally being caught pants down by the fact-check.
It is thus not surprising that because he knew that he was about to be exposed he sought out what he knew would touch on raw nerves of right thinking Nigerians and of interest to those that are too mentally incapable to bother about knowing the difference. Less than 48 hours to the ICIR report being published, he picked on the war against Boko Haram in Borno (and neighbouring states) as his path of distraction to shoo attention away from the discovery of his lies. His approach, typical of the prescription in his writing is to add more falsehood to the falsehood he had been indicted for peddling.
In a piece he authored on June 22, Kperogi shamelessly picked on Borno state governor, Babagana Umaru Zulum, who he called several names for daring to suggest an alternative approach to dealing with Boko Haram. He went on to suggest that Boko Haram’s language of violence must be replied with violence and even threw some deranged inferences of ‘eye “plucker”’ with a feeble attempt at revisionism by claiming that ‘Gandhi’s oft-quoted aphorism that “an eye for an eye will only leave the whole world blind” is not entirely accurate.’ He must really think he is something special to attempt nullifying Ghandi’s wisdom.
To justify his perversion, he quoted Malcom X but forgot to quote his contemporary, Martin Luther King Jr., who met a fate no different from that of his contemporary anyway. Kperogi will do well to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote that “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.
“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Even as Kperogi attacked Zulum, he could not hide the object of his rage for long as he tried to diminish what President Muhammadu Buhari has achieved in the time he has been in office. Acknowledge that the Boko Haram crisis has crossed the timeline of one decade, which gave them time to have killed more people, but an equally murderous Niger Delta militants got the offer of rehabilitation and reintegration, which cannot be described as a total failure today. So at what point did it become a crime to attempt repeating a modified version of that approach with the insurgents? Plus, while it serves the liar’s interest to claim that President Buhari sided with Boko Haram in the Goodluck Jonathan years, it is disingenuous of him to not recall that the same Jonathan usually use the first person (plural) possessive pronoun “we” whenever he was referring the then murderous militants at a time he was vice president to the late Umaru Yar’Adua.
The Nigerian Army and its leadership are natural victims of Kperogi’s misdirected venom, bystanders caught in the hail of his stray bullets of hatred for President Buhari. It does not matter that the military operates under known constraints and the ones not known to the public. It does not matter that the fire of terrorism that the Nigerian Army is putting out is being fed with fuel from beyond the borders of Nigeria. The successes that have been recorded in containing the insurgency and terrorist activities count for nothing. All so long as Kperogi finds something to throw angry Nigerians off the scent of the deception that this charlatan fed them during the elections and the preceding days.
Lying may be a way of life for Kperogi but to make war face paint with the blood of those that have been unfortunately killed by terrorists is a new low, even for him. The concept of “soft targets” does not in any way designate those that are being attacked as expendable on account of their class but is rather suggestive of the terrorists launching attacks against places where they know they will meet the least resistant. A man that deludes himself about teaching others the correct usage of English language should have at least made the effort to understand something as simple as this instead of using his ignorance of the concept as a basis to incite people to begin a class war.
It is okay for Kperogi to sit in Atlanta, United States and be asking why there is no outrage. It shows that he is disconnected from reality to a point where he now believes his own lies. The people he is inciting to be outraged are aware that President Buhari and the military are making the right efforts, which the Zulum, as a new governor, has also come to appreciate and keyed into. It is Kperogi who must be reminded that he can only try in vain to attempt setting Nigeria on fire after being paid for such assignment by neocons, the same people that make arms and other logistics available to Boko Haram. He is the one that should be encouraged to be ashamed that he is now trying to incite people to violence by writing about Boko Haram when his promotion of fake news during the elections could not achieve the same result when the country was most vulnerable.
In all these, the people targeted by Kperogi – President Buhari, Zulum and the leadership of the Nigerian military – are not the ones to be pitied. Even the nuisance himself is past the stage where one feels pity for him. Neither should any thoughts be spared for his hapless social media followers, who consume the bile he vomits all over the place without question. The true victims of Kperogi are the students that are being made to study journalism under a confirmed purveyor of fake news, a man in need of redemption. But it is the redemption that Kperogi will never find unless he first learn to purge himself free of hatred. Only then will he realise that he has strayed from the true path and has continued to walk farther away from reality.
Okanga writes from Agila, Benue state.
