By Tony Okoroji
I apologize that Saturday Breakfast is being served late today. Today’s meal was cooked in the belly of an aircraft and I am serving it from a different time zone. If it comes to you as brunch, please bear with me.
I used to be a great admirer of the young lawyer, Festus Keyamo. I like bold and courageous people. I verily believe that no great nation in human history has been built by cowards. Apart from his natural good looks, Festus Keyamo used to appear to me to be a young man of serious conviction who stood for truth, justice and fairness and was prepared to pay whatever price for the progress of the Nigerian people.
People like Festus Keyamo gave me hope that no matter how fierce the locusts and vampires may be, Nigeria ‘go’ survive. Festus was to some of us a scion of the inimitable Gani Fawehinmi, one of the greatest Nigerians that ever lived. I was sure that he was an inseparable friend of the Nigerian people and a true future leader of Nigeria.
I remember the Abacha days when the much younger Festus Keyamo would place his table under the Ojuelegba bridge in Lagos and collect signatures of Nigerians protesting the Abacha regime and its anti-people behavior. When Bola Ige was murdered in still curious circumstances, who was it that went to court after court to make sense out of the craziness? Festus Keyamo!
The first time I met Festus, it was at the High Court of Lagos State in Ikeja, during one of my many court battles. Before the judge came in, Keyamo addressed the lawyers and litigants in court on what to him was the insatiable appetite for money, of the disgraced former Inspector-General of Police, Tafa Balogun, who passed on recently. It was Keyamo’s openly expressed opinion that Tafa deserved whatever he got.
I have hosted the “who-is-who” of Nigeria in the different events I have organized: Gani Fawehinmi, Sani Abacha, Ibrahim Babangida, etc., etc. A few years ago, Festus Keyamo honoured me with his presence at one of my events at Eko Hotel, Lagos. I was very excited by his presence. That is how much I have admired the young man.
Recently, I was transfixed watching Festus Keyamo on television mount a frontal defence of the unmitigated disaster that is the Buhari administration. I honestly did not know whether to vomit or to cry. I asked myself: Is this the same Festus Keyamo or a clone? The Keyamo alteration has raised a thousand questions in my head. Right now, it is giving me a huge migraine. I must return to this matter on a later day.
See you next week.k
Tony Okoroji a Musician, Songwriter is Chairman, Copyright Society of Nigeria.