Tinubu’s Supporters Say They Are MAD – Farooq Kperogi

By Farooq A. Kperogi

A friend shared with me a graphic in which Tinubu supporters describe themselves as MAD. Because social media has become a putrid cesspool of disinformation, I was initially disinclined to believe that it emanated from the president’s true supporters.

But an AI-aided fact-check showed that the graphic is genuine and was actually shared by presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga on October 18. Apparently, it was an attempt at what we call paradiastole in classical rhetoric. Paradiastole is the intentional conversion of a perceived vice into a virtue by redescribing it in a favorable moral light. In everyday language, it’s a form of semantic reclamation.

ADC vice presidential candidate Rotimi Amaechi said at a town hall meeting in Benin City that only mad people would vote for Tinubu in 2027. In an attempt to rhetorically reappropriate this negative portrayal of Tinubu supporters, the president’s media team apparently thought it wise to invert Amaechi’s negative rhetorical energy through a backronym. (A backronym is an existing word reinterpreted as an acronym by inventing words that correspond to its letters. A famous Nigerian folk backronym is Jos, which some people claim stands for “Jesus Our Savior.”)

Onanuga’s post on X inaugurating the official description of Tinubu supporters as MAD people says it all. “Rotimi Amaechi: Yes, we, the followers and supporters of President Tinubu, are truly MAD. Read why we are,” he wrote. MAD was then paradiastolically reframed as “Motivated, Assured and Determined.”

But that’s self-impressed nonsense. I am sure it made mad sense to the people who came up with it. It’s just that outside the presidential media filter bubble where it was invented, it’s a spectacular, confoundedly ill-advised rhetorical self-own. Here’s why.

Let’s start with the substance before going to the rhetorical realm. Tinubu is supervising the worst existential crisis in Nigeria’s modern history with his “reforms,” which have democratized hunger, hollowed out the middle class, pauperized the already poor and enriched the already rich.

Amid the unexampled torment that an increasing swath of the population is forced to live with, suffering people are being insulted for their condition. Tinubu’s campaign director-general, Senator Abdulaziz Yari, an overfed, barely educated wag, declared that anyone who was not lazy would have food on his table. This is the kind of contempt that masquerades as economic wisdom in the corridors of power.

And every opportunity the president has, he doubles down on his ruinous policies that continue to immiserate millions of families and incinerate their sources of income. It’s like inflicting pain on ordinary people is Tinubu’s inviolable article of faith. Any suggestion that fuel subsidies might be restored at some point in Nigeria gets him really riled up. Just this week, he insisted that the subsidy would never return.

In any normal country, any government that has driven people into as much poverty, pain and deprivation as the Tinubu government has would prepare itself for an epochal electoral shellacking. So, saying only mad people will vote for a government that has pauperized them isn’t necessarily the flippant partisan jab it appears to be because it was uttered by a political opponent. We have just seen a version of that electoral reckoning in the United States.

Republicans who appeared indifferent to voters’ Trump-induced economic pain found themselves fighting for political survival, even in ruby-red states and districts that had seemed safely Republican.

In last week’s column, I mentioned the case of Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who disdainfully dismissed concerns about the high cost of beef as a result of Trump’s boneheaded policies. Asked about rising beef prices, she said, “You have so many proteins to choose from.”

Her Democratic opponent, Scott Colom, turned the remark into an ad in which a voter said he would rather choose another senator. Voters did just that. Colom beat her and became Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction and its first Black senator elected by popular vote.

North Carolina Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, who had always won her seat by wide margins, was trailing Democrat Chuck Hubbard and appears certain to lose to him. In a June congressional hearing, she spoke disrespectfully about the poverty of her constituents.

And, of course, Trump himself spoke of “short-term pain” for “long-term gain” while defending his war against Iran, which helped drive up energy costs. He also boasted about how much money his administration was bringing in. That is almost exactly like President Tinubu.

Trump asked his supporters to pretend he was on the ballot in the midterms. In a sense, voters obliged, though not in the way he intended. Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in an electoral repudiation of the ruling party.

So, it’s entirely legitimate and defensible to wonder if people who vote for an administration that pauperizes them, that insults them on top of their suffering and that routinely doubles down on the policies that cause them grief are normal.

Of course, Amaechi is the least qualified to say this. He was part of a government that set the stage for what the current government is doing. The Buhari government was corrupt, profligate, insensitive and contemptuous of the people. It helped normalize the affliction of misery on ordinary people as an art and a strategy of governance. Its own fuel-pricing policies prepared the ground for what Tinubu would do more comprehensively. Yet Amaechi campaigned for Buhari’s reelection against the same Atiku Abubakar with whom he now shares a ticket.

I am scrupulously nonpartisan when it comes to Nigerian electoral politics. I don’t say that to claim any moral or intellectual high ground. I say it only to point out that I have no confidence in the poetry of campaign promises and in suave, deceitful politicians who pretend to care for people when they are out of power but who become indistinguishable from, and in many cases worse than, the people they once criticized.

So, this is not a defense of Amaechi, whom I described in an April 11, 2022, article as a “featherbrained, leaky-mouthed buffoon.” I haven’t changed my opinion about him.

Now, let’s look at the attempt at semantic reclamation of “mad” from a rhetorical perspective. Until I saw that graphic of Tinubu’s supporters and followers describing themselves as “MAD,” I didn’t know that Amaechi had called them “mad.” I imagine that this is the case for most people.

Calling themselves MAD and hoping that people understand the context of their puzzling but supposedly reclamatory self-description is an inadvertent self-indictment. Research on rhetorical reappropriation by Katherine Du, Lingrui Zhou and Keisha Cutright titled “Bunch of Jerks: How Brands Can Benefit by Reappropriating Insults” shows that semantic reclamation works best when the insult being reclaimed is perceived as unfair and ultimately harmless.

For example, Abdul El-Sayed, America’s first Muslim senator-elect, was demonized by Republican opponents, including Trump and JD Vance, during the campaign because of his Muslim faith and his progressive politics. Others tried to portray him as “dangerous” by stripping his words of their context. Instead of denying that he was dangerous, he accepted the label but changed its moral referent.

He said he was indeed dangerous to injustice, exploitative billionaires, predatory insurance companies and foreign lobbyists.

“If you’re AIPAC, I’m pretty damn dangerous. If you’re Big Pharma, I’m dangerous,” he said. “If you’re Big Tech and want to put a data center in your backyard, I’m dangerous. If you’re a big bank that wants to collude against us, I am dangerous. If you’re a monopolist who wants to raise our prices, I’m dangerous. If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous. And I think it’s about damn time we had Democrats who are willing to be dangerous for all the people rigging our policies against us.”

El-Sayed’s semantic reclamation worked well because the characterization was unfair and out of sync with the facts in the first place. Plus, he was a political underdog and a religious minority whom the president, the vice president and the Republican political machinery were attacking with undiluted viciousness. It was top dogs invidiously trampling on an underdog.

That’s not the same with Tinubu’s supporters. Tinubu is the top dog. He has enormous symbolic weight. He is the incumbent. And his policies, which he defends every opportunity he gets, smolder people piecemeal. Instead of banking on his achievements, he still inhabits the future tense and makes promises like a first-time office seeker.

It’s almost impossible for someone like that to semantically reappropriate a negative label, especially one that many people consider fitting and logically defensible. Attempting to do so produces what we call the rhetorical boomerang effect.

That happens when the effort to reclaim a negative word backfires and ends up reinforcing it and giving it even more visibility and legitimacy. Now they have given people permission to call them mad, werey, craze people, maukaci and so on without guilt and without anyone thinking of “Motivated, Assured and Determined.” That’s such a spectacular self-own.

You cannot make hunger disappear by inventing flattering words for the people who defend it. A backronym is no substitute for good governance.