Fatoyinbo’s apology: the smell of spin, by Bamidele Johnson

I first read Biodun Fatoyinbo’s apology on social media and refused to believe he had issued one. Why? Divinities are infallible. Whether or not they are walking among us in human form, divinities are right, even when wrong. I also considered the possibility that someone had cooked up some shit without his knowledge and put it out in his name. Then I saw it published on The Punch website and sat down to read it again.

You will have to forgive me for reading the apology with one eyebrow raised high enough to brush the ceiling fan of an old-time church. Those old enough know the yawning distance between the KDK fan-bearing ceilings and the floor. The apology or clarification reads like a case study in the art of “I did not say what you think I said,” a widely spoken dialect among pulpit stuntmen.

In the statement, Fatoyinbo wraps himself in layers of reverence for Apostle Babalola, sprinkles in childhood memories of church life and finishes with a bow so deep his head must have almost touched the floor. But somewhere in that bouquet of flattery and “honour,” the faint whiff of backpedalling is unmistakable.

That the response from the CAC was sufficiently magnanimous to avoid scorching him with the kind of language that would feel like charcoal on his head seemed to delight him. He seized the olive branch, laminated it, framed it and hung it in his office. The problem is that the “I never said it like that” defence often sounds suspiciously like “I said it, but you took it seriously.”

This is the same man who once declared, on camera, that if God Himself told him seed-sowing did not work, he would politely disagree with the Almighty. In the end, it is a polished, well-perfumed, image-friendly bow to the CAC. But like most bows by the pathologically conceited, it feels less like contrition and more like a snow job. Apostle Babalola’s legacy will not be made damp and dog-eared by the little drizzle from the mouth of this plainclothes clown.

His own credibility, already shredded by scandal over bedding a parishioner and loading her with Krest Bitter Lemon, will continue to unravel except, of course, in the eyes of the Pavlovian dogs who treat him the way North Korean delegates treat the Supreme Leader. COZA is a religious North Korea, where parishioners spend their waking and sleeping hours praising the dapper chancer.