1. When a writer or an author produces a text, whether fiction or non-fiction, he or she has used a grammatical or syntactical structure, and a writing system, over which he or she has no absolute control but has only to use it up to a point.
2. Grammatologists, literary philosophers, hermeneuticists, and psychologists (I don’t want to roll out the great names here) have collectively argued the following:
A). One may not know in advance the implications of his/her (the) writing over many years, and which would eventually be read by people across cultures, political stances, cultural philosophies, or the complicated interpretive grids available to the trained reader in a particular time, context, and reading formation.
B). Nietzsche, in particular, has persuasively argued (in his “Beyond Good and Evil”) that people write, authors write, people speak, or compose ideas, based on their personal confessions, namely that their texts are no more than their involuntary and unconscious memoir. To put it in yet another way: an author’s psychology, his or her drives and interests, are, at base, the hidden mechanisms of his linguistic-textual production (the writing itself).
Of course, cultural influences and inherited “genresial” tradition may add to that in a complex sense 3. This raises the question as to whether, for example, what Kperogi says about just anyone he critiques, is true, or the truth, or is transcendentally accurate.
Kperogi does make a lot of virtuous noise in his texts. He seems to suggest that he has discovered some, or a, veritable truth about the person he attacks or disparages (indeed his writing is overwhelmingly disparaging or denigrating towards his subject or object of criticism. He never has a positive view of anyone or anything).
In all his essays or texts, Kperogi does seem to pose as a transcendental subject of truth, morality, virtue, or the discoverer of a cold, pure, and deductive logic, even though it is evident to any critical reader, or the skeptical critic, that Kperogi’s perspective is based on the following:
a) Assumption (he lacks a wholistic understanding of his subject, say, Emir Muhammad Sanusi II– for Kperogi doesn’t know a thing about the Emir’s actual biography, his bank account, his family life, his charitable works, his formidable erudition in Islamic Law, or his secular writings, not even the Emir’s personal battles, his health condition, his close relationship with other people, or even his wardrobe!).
b). A hunch (Kperogi is not a Kano citizen, he is of the Batonu ethnic group, mostly found in Borgu and the Republic of Benin, he has never spent a day with Emir MSII, has never spent a moment with his close family circles, and has just no idea of or about the intensely private thoughts of the Emir).
c). A desire of the heart (Kperogi unconsciously sees Emir MSII as a worthy target because the Emir, being a charismatic, highly educated, admirable, well-dressed, handsome, glamorously attractive man is higher in cultural, political, psychological, and ethnic value than Kperogi.The Emir has better and more educated control of the English Language than Kperogi).
So, dear reader, if you total up my arguments above, we can reach the following inescapable conclusion, namely that:
i). Kperogi’s attacks on his subjects, in this case the Emir of Kano, MSII, are based on ENVY in the psychic sense of that word. Being a Narcissist, Kperogi cannot stand anyone that is superior to him in many ways and on any possible scale of measurement. For example, Kperogi is physically much shorter, than Emir MSII.
ii). Kperogi never attacks “ordinary people”, but people in the position of power, influence, wealth, charisma, or national or great cultural standing, even clearly better educated people, his former teachers, and previous benefactors.
iii). Narcissists cannot tolerate brilliance of any kind in other people than themselves. Therefore, Kperogi must dim, trivialise, whittle down, attack, disparage, denigrate, and turn to dust such brilliance, hence his attacks, more than once or twice, on Emir MSII.
iv). Kperogi supposedly attacks with reasons, his reasons, but only “after the fact”: he is a crude, emotionally insensitive and psychically unstable advocate whose raging waters of insecurity and Narcissistic wound cannot be disquieted, calmed down, or healed by a rational self-reflection. He is, thus, a wily yet very bad and tormented spokesman for his rarefied prejudices. Narcissism is a mental and psychic disorder. But it’s that very disorder that drives Kperogi’s malicious views of Emir MSII— nothing more credible than that.
However, Kperogi has a band of supporters and fellow travellers in our communities, even here in Kano, who, out of malice and poor edification, poor self-reflection, or out of political malice, or out of poor understanding of the links between critique and self interestedness, or out of a lack of a critical grasp of the deeper reasons for Kperogi’s vituperations, or out of a lack of proper cultural education, still find his writing either poignant or interesting.
To speak personally for a moment, I may not like Buhari or Tinubu as persons or as political leaders or official heads of government, but I don’t need Kperogi to either know that or understand why I am critical of them.
But I admire one of the shining examples of native Kano citizens, one of the most educated, one of the most accomplished citizens of Kano, one of the symbols of our identity, and one of the great symbols of our Kano cultural and historical fellowship— Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II.
Finally: Kperogi cannot hold a candle to Buhari’s or Tinubu’s personal achievements (good or bad). In the same vein, Kperogi cannot hold a long-lived lamp to Emir Sanusi II’s elegance, kinship, history, education, cultural and political prestige, and pure physical presence. Cheers. IBK.
* Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano (IBK) is a senior lecturer at Bayero University, Kano
