He obviously loves the lime light and has managed to stay in it, not by any special achievements or feats but by an unrepentant penchant for courting controversy. A Nigerian baby (because he was born in October, 1960) Femi Fani-Kayode is the quintessential Mr Controversial. He is one man who has always fascinated me in many ways. A man of many parts, FFK as he is popularly called has become the new attack dog of the president having only recently been appointed the Director of Media and Publicity for the President Goodluck Jonathan Campaign team. The politician, essayist, poet and lawyer is sure taking his job seriously…a little too seriously. Chief Fani-Kayode is currently giving the likes of Doyin Okupe, Reno Omokri and Reuben Abati a run for their money when it comes to staunchly defending the president as well as fiercely attacking his perceived adversaries or enemies.

The person of Femi Fani-Kayode interests me because for one, he is a good orator and I am one person who appreciates oratory prowess. Secondly, FFK is an intelligent man (even though many may not agree with me), it takes an intelligent man to be able to take on the many colours of a Chameleon thereby remaining relevant through successive governments. It takes some level of intelligence and shrewdness to be able to lie with ease from both sides of ones mouth without so much as flinching. You have to give it to him, FFK is the Mac daddy of Nigerian politics. A political prostitute who pitches his tent where the money is. For someone who comes from a prominent political and legal family and had all his education abroad one would have thought that he would at least have a bit of shame and decency. It is rather sad that for all his enviable family background and impeccable Ivy league schooling, a man who should be the epitome of integrity and class has turned out to be one who may be likened to a mad man that feels no shame dancing naked in the market square.

The former Special Assistant on Public Affairs to ex-president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who while he was a chieftain of the APC described President Jonathan’s government as a dismal failure and the worst in Nigeria’s history, branding him a weak and uninspiring Commander-In-Chief, now sees absolutely nothing wrong with defecting back to the party he once described as “a stinking carcass which has been rejected by God and whose leaders are suffering God’s judgement for their unjust, gluttonous, wicked, foul and evil ways” but also gladly and boldly accepted the job of being the president’s campaign director. He now sings the praises of the man he once demeaned! What an irony! Contentious FFK in perhaps one of his most disgraceful gaffes almost stoked the embers of another civil war when he drew the ire of the entire Igbo population of the country by labeling them as “collectively unlettered, uncouth, uncultured, unrestrained and crude in all their ways,” following the controversial deportation of some destitute Igbos to Anambra state by the Lagos state government.

A one time Minister of Culture and Tourism and Minister of Aviation who has been investigated and arrested at different times by the EFCC in connection with the misappropriation of a N19.5bn Aviation Intervention Fund and money laundering charges, Fani-Kayode refuses to see the log in his own eye and would rather attempt to remove the speck in another’s. From his flippant remark about his “long standing intimate relationship” with Bianca Ojukwu the widow of Odumegwu Ojukwu the late Biafran warlord and current Nigerian ambassador to Spain as well as some other notable women, to his castigation of former president Umar Musa Yar’Adua whom he called a “sickly tyrant” to his current unnecessary obsession with attempting to pull down the APC presidential candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari and more recently his swipe at the former CBN governor Charles Soludo for daring to criticize the management of the economy by the Jonathan administration, there is no limit to how far this man to go to remain in the consciousness of the public.

Femi Fani-Kayode appears to be the greatest nuisance in the Nigerian polity today, arguably second only to Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti state, for what manner of man consistently derives pleasure in being pugnacious all the time? What manner of man over 50 years of age boasts about his sexual conquests? What manner of man throws decorum to the wind for a few morsels of food? For all his many gaffes and supercilious display of vulgarity, one wonders to what end this son of Ife does what he does, and is compelled to ask what manner of man FFK is.