If Fayemi had decided that Fayose’s patently illegal usurpation of power must not go unchallenged, even if he is the only one left standing to be counted for the sake of posterity, in what has now proven to be a rape of the state and its people, all that the rest of us who are lily-liver can do is to wait with bated breaths and let the chips fall where they may.
The governor of Ekiti State, Mr. Ayodele Fayose may have seen his own government in an apparition which may have jolted him back to the land of the living when he cried out on the pages of the nation’s newspapers and on the airwaves that Dr. John Kayode Fayemi is the “bogeyman” who should be held responsible should there be a termination of his government – once again – before its four-year tenure. Fayose’s latest jitters came to the fore on account of Dr. Fayemi’s response to a question during an interview which was published on the Sunday, March 26th edition of This Day newspaper. The minister of Mines and Steel Development was asked if it was true that he was “itching to come back in next year’s election as governor” and he responded that he owes “it to the party and to Ekiti people to assist in getting to the root of what actually transpired” on the day of the election and that it is “a much more important exercise” for him, as it is “still unfinished business.”
It is important to stress that the kernel of the discourse here is not Fayose’s fear and apprehension that his tenure may once again come to an ignoble end as it did in his first coming, neither is it Fayemi’s emphatic declaration that the constantly barking dog may not be allowed to just lay down before nature terminates its existence. It is fundamentally the egregious revelations now haunting Fayose, which were what also violated Fayemi’s moral values and principles to their foundations, for him to have insisted that the first order of ‘business’ should be finished – first and foremost, that is being paid attention to here.
On Saturday, June 21, 2014, a governorship election was held in Ekiti State in which Dr. Fayemi was the incumbent seeking re-election. Mr. Fayose was his main challenger. What’s now known is that the election that brought Fayose to power violated all the principles, moral and legal codes known to man in conducting an election, that the outcome left the bookmakers scratching their heads and the pundits shame-faced, not because an incumbent could not lose an election in a democracy, but because the electoral exercise was deemed a no brainer on the strength of the incumbent’s sterling performance during his first term. What is more, the challenge to his re-election was also thought to be a non-starter because of the challenger’s chequered past which offended all human sensibilities in his first coming, leaving high crimes and misdemeanour, brutality and mayhem in its wake, from which the state is yet to recover. This is excluding an apparent impeachment that should have excluded him from running for office in the first place. But when the nation’s umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) blew the whistle, Fayose was declared the winner, having won all the 16 Local Government Areas in the state.
For the rest of the nation and Ekiti people, the election ‘victory’ was too good to be true. People became quite dazed and dumbfounded. They saw smoke everywhere but did not see any fire, let alone a smoking gun. Since there was no fire, the victor could not be accused of anything that would have made his victory nugatory then. Fayose simply waited for his inauguration, considering himself a victor. Fayemi too knew, intuitively, that he did not lose the election. But he had to accept the outcome since the umpire had made its announcement. More importantly, he believes that peace must reign supreme in any society at all times, which he alluded to in his concession speech. It was also because he knew that something was not quite right about an election that all indications had pointed in his favour that, also instinctively, he declared in the same speech that “a new sociology of the Ekiti people may have evolved”, which “will be that of scholars” to handle.
About a year after Fayemi left office and had moved on to become one of the most significant politicians in the country through his present portfolio as the minister of Mines and Steel Development, Nigerians in general and Ekiti people in particular – through sordid revelations – became witnesses to history that the election that brought Fayose to power had been brutally ‘murdered’ by the Jonathan administration. It was such a grisly ‘murder’ that its crudely decapitated body parts were found in unlikely places – from the inner recesses of the nation’s security forces to the closets of some highly placed public and private individuals in the polity. It was a patently illegal, morally reprehensible, ethically repugnant and crudely executed election in recent memory that its ‘ghost’ refused to go away to find eternal resting place.
The Nigerian people became aware of what transpired because the people who ‘murdered’ the Ekiti election that enabled Fayose’s second coming didn’t know what to do to exorcise the crying ‘ghost’ from the hills, valleys and streams of Ekiti landscape. So, it became a matter of time before they started to sing like canaries about the roles they played in that deplorable election anomaly. Although, details of how the Ekiti election was recklessly rigged are now in the public domain, it is important to recall Captain Sagir Koli’s account (with a tape recording evidence) of how the military (of all the security forces) was drafted, without any hesitation, with the then ministers of state for Defence and Police Affairs, Musiliu Obanikoro and Jelili Adesiyan respectively being in the presence of Brigadier General Momoh to perfect the rigging plan. Senator Iyiola Omisore (then Osun State’s PDP governorship candidate) was also a member of the inner caucus of the Ekiti rigging ‘cabinet.’ Even Chris Ubah from Anambra State led the militants that paraded themselves through the streets of Ekiti, as a detachment of the state security force from “the presidency”, handling AK47 guns.
APC chieftains and field officers were clamped into holding cells across the state until the polls closed. Other members in the party hierarchy, such as Rotimi Amaechi and Adams Oshiomhole were turned into persona non grata to the state on the day of the election, and were prevented from entering Ekiti. The siege on the state was complete and total. As if Nigerians have not heard enough from these principal officers who had admitted their participation in this very shameful act, the then PDP Secretary in the state and a member of Fayose’s inner caucus, Mr. Tope Aluko later insisted that the election was rigged in all its ramifications and provided incontrovertible evidence to support his claim, just as Captain Koli before him had done. The Supreme Court also had earlier weighed in by throwing out the case that emanated from the election for what it called the “lack of merit.”
In a saner clime, all the state security outfits that were involved in this sordid affair that has since become known as “Ekitigate” would have been so thoroughly embarrassed that it would have warranted a major sanitisation of the security forces, coupled with the prosecution of those involved. It should be noted here, however, that only the military actually saw the need to salvage its sullied image by probing what happened in Ekiti. It set up a military panel headed by Major General Oyebade, the GOC of the 1st Division in Kaduna, which indicted many military officers and ordered the immediate retirement of Brigadier General Momoh, whilst the rest of the indicted officers and men were cashiered and demoted. The Supreme Court would have felt that it had also been deliberately embarrassed, misled and deceived that it would have called – in its own volition – for a retrial of the “Ekitigate” conspirators. What is more, the people themselves would have felt so aggrieved that their suffrage had been irredeemably violated that the actions they would have taken (by way of sustained protests and several class action litigations) would have long collapsed Fayose’s government by now. But he continues to ride roughshod on them with reckless impunity.
It’s also important to point to Fayose’s election saga as a classic illustration that the Nigerian polity will remain hobbled in its developmental trajectory so long as impunity continues to be the new normal to be tolerated. That Fayemi said in his interview that he owes “it to the party and to Ekiti people to assist in getting to the root of what actually transpired” on that day may be another way of saying that a society that cannot identify its core values, let alone act in unison whenever these values are egregiously violated by anyone of its members, can never aspire to any modicum of greatness. The state’s socio-economic and political castration already playing out before the people’s eyes by Fayose, because they continue to tolerate his impunity, should be a cause for worry by all the right thinking people of Ekiti. After all, a people that take pride in having the highest knowledge per capita, which has rightly earned their state the moniker as the “Fountain of Knowledge” in the Nigerian society presupposes that it should also harbour the finest moral values and ethical standards that others should be falling over themselves to emulate. It is befuddling that some people are still trying to make a case for a governor – again of a state with the highest educated elites per capita – whose understanding of human development indices is summed up in what he calls “stomach infrastructure.” His claim of his love for his people was not based on the power of his ideas to transform them to the next level of prosperity and growth, but rather his frequent forays into the streets of Ekiti to scavenge for foods and unwholesome drinks at decrepit places as a demonstration of his love.
Fayemi represents all that is noble in politics. His insistence that Fayose remains an “unfinished business” may well be a clarion call to his people that they have no reason to remain perpetually lethargic to those socio-political and economic conditions that affects their existence and wellbeing with this “Oh! Well” attitude which is diametrically opposed to those values that have defined them for ages.
One can draw the attention of readers to the US presidential election won by Republican Donald Trump despite the fact that virtually the whole world and majority of the American electorate was simply waiting for Hillary Clinton’s inauguration after the November 2016 election, not because Trump was unqualified, but because Americans and the world saw him as representing everything bad in humanity. But win Trump did in accordance with the US constitution. But his administration is already on the ropes from both congressional Republicans and Democrats, not to talk of the American people because of the allegation that his election victory may have been orchestrated by the Russian government.
The discontent that this allegation has generated among the American people, irrespective of their political persuasions, illustrates the fact that Trump and/or his campaign team may have violated a significant moral value that binds the American people together in which he must pay a price that may include the termination of his presidency if the allegation can be proven to be true after all the on-going investigations. Fayemi may be saying in that interview that a people can only advance into modernity if the people are courageous enough to confront their demons which Fayose represents. If Fayemi had decided that Fayose’s patently illegal usurpation of power must not go unchallenged, even if he is the only one left standing to be counted for the sake of posterity, in what has now proven to be a rape of the state and its people, all that the rest of us who are lily-liver can do is to wait with bated breaths and let the chips fall where they may.
Femi Odere, a media practitioner, can be reached at femiodere@gmail.com.
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