Category: Sam Omatseye

Shall we say, we had a miracle, we have love, we have a free and fair election, and we have reached the land of peace and promise? We cannot say so even if the All Progressives Congress (APC) rejoices over its victory and the virtue of the Osun masses exult in vindication.

I warned last week that the election was neither about Otunba Iyiola Omisore nor Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, neither was it about the APC nor the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). It was a Nigerian vote and I warned the president and his party to beware of turning a ritual of democracy into a rite of blood. The president though deserves praise for not pushing the tension over the brink. Also the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for bowing to an inevitable mass will. We peered the precipice, but peace prevailed.

Some lessons were not learned. Prior to the election, we saw a repeat of the Ekiti impunity. Some party apparatchiks of the APC were hounded into detention. Exit town crier Lai Mohammed. Exit Sunday Dare, etc. One prominent lawmaker hid in the bush. The charges? Still unclear. Ambiguity. Impunity. Fear. In Ife, gunshots tore through the dust motes of the ancient city. Hooded men, sometimes identified as hoodlums, sometimes as government troops, sent terror by their sartorial ill grace. Hoods, doubtful uniforms, guns. Democracy as enchanted battlefield.

The virtue of the people spoke. They defied the gun and the minatory ferocity of their presences. On some occasions, reports had it that while shots rang to the heavens, denizens of the state hailed them in irony. The weapons of the weak: satire. The guns lost their bullets of fatality in the mockery of the folks.

But victory came, not because of the innocence of INEC, or because of the willful integrity of the party at the centre. It came because of the vigilance and tenacity of the people. As playwright Maxim Gorky said, the only people who deserve freedom are those ready to fight for it everyday.

The masses are not always innocent. Stalin once derided Lenin for putting too much trust in the proletariat, and it failed him. That was why he retraced his steps from Marxian dictatorship of the proletariat to what became an elite-driven New Economic Policy.

After the Ekiti poll, I noted that the masses vote according to the template and issues presented by the elite. The competing elite battle for the mind of the common man. Who wins won the argument. It does not mean the winner had the truth. The masses have many times had remorse when they voted for a particular idea and got another thing later. The French and British had voter remorse when they voted back Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill. That is the omen that may await the Ekiti electorate if Ayodele Fayose turns out to have turned a folksy image to con votes out of a suspecting electorate. Are the Nigerian masses an excellent sheep, obedient even unto death? Time shall tell.

But in the case of Osun, Ogbeni had from the beginning held the issues in his palm. Whether it was his tablet of knowledge, school feeding programme, jobs and uniforms, or the issue of whether his priestly beard should anchor his being or cause rancour in his detractors.

Most importantly, his signature project was education. His reclassification agenda, for all its beauty and promise, became a matter his detractors wanted to take from him. They turned it away from an educational agenda, to make schools accessible and cheap and raise standards. They turned it into a fight between the two heavens, that of Jesus and Mohammed. It became the defining controversy of his first term.

Even prior to the election, in spite of the soothing voices of notable Christian clerics about his good intentions, speculations still danced about the Osun horizon. Some said a sort of block votes from some Christian bodies would tilt the scale against him. Some people were gazing skywards even though the rain had stopped falling. Their heads dry, they did not know their feet were wet. The matter was not in heaven but here on earth. It was politics as religious vanity, as pious manipulation.

The Ogbeni did not have any qualms fighting back, reconciling here and there, and pushing the integrity of the message. The result shows he did not quilt and he won the virtue of the people to his side. He will have to continue this message, with fervour and with deliberate interaction with that part of the society.

But this election has proved that programmes are important. Those who hail the hailstorms of stomach infrastructure did not get this from Ogbeni. But politics is not always about programmes. It is about connection, and if you want to see that, go to any rally where Aregbesola is a speaker. By my account, in my life time, I have never seen anybody who can beat him in working a crowd. His is at once the ultimate impresario as folk and folk as impresario. He walks on the stage like a teenager, the broom twirling like a thousand strands of light. With his beard as lead, his feet stamping in rhythm, his waist wiggling in a half-erotic dance, his tiny body waxes like an apparition hiding a larger frame. That tiny speck of a body explodes into a voice that seems to come from a big, muscular cousin. His diction, his dances, his songs work the crowd out of a political reverie. It could have been a religious fiesta, a new year party or a festival. The crowd loses itself in the ecstasy of the man. Some have said he is not gubernatorial when he is on stage. I disagree. He is never less gubernatorial. He bows in order to soar. He is folksy for the vote.

That is Aregbesola’s virtue. That is Osun virtue, and that is why he earned their votes last weekend.

It is also an APC victory, but it is no time to gloat. The PDP was not crushed. With over 292,000 votes, Omisore showed a strong foothold on the state. It shows that the PDP is not yet a pushover in the Southwest. With Ekiti to PDP, and Osun to APC, it is in sports language, 1-1. A draw. It is time to go back to the drawing board. Last week’s victory is more an Ogbeni victory than an APC swagger. The Southwest folks want to be convinced. They have said, they are not for the taking. That is why the battle for the APC in Oyo and Ogun states must not be taken with the same sense of accomplishment as the one in Osun. There is a lot of work to be done.

We can do road, we can do schools, we can do hospitals, but we should do the heart. Loyalty to a cause often transcends the loyalty to material gains. Money is good. Stomachs will rumble. But the grumble of the humble come more from a sense of understanding, a belief that you feel my pain and you are not here to con me.

If the APC wants to build on this momentum, it has to follow the Ogbeni style. Not all of it. But his sense of folksy virtue, his animal enthusiasm for work. The other governor that shows an open animal joy for work is a PDP man, the Akwa Ibom governor, Godswill Akpabio, who speaks about his work as though an amorous affair. But he has evidence to prove his doings, in massive infrastructure, especially.

When he became governor, Ogbeni promised an unusual reign. He delivered in the way he performed and in the way he won last week. It should not be different in the next four years.

Sometimes it pays to compare politics with children at play. Yet when children play, their innocence can tease them into the province of danger. Hence a child can fall from a roof, stab his best friend, swallow poison, burn down a house and kill all that he or she holds dear, including the parents. If the child survives, he or she might utter the first cry, in his innocence, for the help of daddy or mummy. But the parents are now smouldering, without recall, in the oblivion of death.

The difference between child’s play and political fray, especially Nigerian style, is that one understands his absence of innocence and the other knows nothing but the sweet naivety of action, what playwright Tennessee Williams calls the sweet bird of youth. The sweet naivety of kids with its portent for calamity is well documented in the Nobel-prize winning novel, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), under the leadership of President Goodluck Jonathan, is providing material for fiction writers, especially in these parts, for a script on the adult version. We saw the play in Adamawa a few weeks ago. Now, the theatre has moved with a new ensemble to Lafiagi, in Nassarawa State. We have seen that the lawmakers do not pretend to be nice guys. They are not hiding behind any moral niceties. They are not laying any claim to the principles of democratic grandeur. They want Governor Tanko Al-Makura’s head. This is Isi-ewu as politics.

The people rose in the streets, in a Kaboom of rage, against what they saw as the low ebb of politics in the cabal to overthrow an apparently popular chief executive. But this is politics as theatre. The lawmakers said they wanted the governor out. The governor said he did no wrong. They started a process in the legislature and that seemed quite in order, and the House of Assembly mustered the numbers to call for the Chief Judge to set up an impeachment panel. That itself reflected a fidelity to law and order.

The Chief Judge, Suleiman Dikko, unveiled the panel and suddenly, the lawmakers do not like him. They said he should reconstitute the panel. Now, is that not foul play? It becomes a farce. They seemed to like the rule of law when it suited their devious designs. When they felt the process would not produce their grand design, they cried foul. It is like the youth in a soccer game who hacks a player down, but falls down himself and cries foul so the referee would not mark him down for infringement. It is the dangerous irony of our politics today. The lawmakers do not believe in the law, if it is not the law of the jungle. That is what is at play in Nassarawa state.

This is the nature of comedy. And comedy is sometimes more dreary than tragedy. As film director and screenwriter Mel Brooks says, “tragedy is when I cut my finger…comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die.” The Nassarawa lawmakers want to throw democracy into the sewer, so it can die.

When the impeachment panel was set up in Adamawa State, because they had the judge where they had him, the PDP power vortex deployed the security forces to protect the judge. In the way the politics goes, the PDP high command violates everything it touches. If it is the law, they turn into an instrument of revenge. If it is the soldiers, they do not protect the law but advance impunity. If it’s the due process, they make it a procession for doom. What is impeached is not a person, not an officer of the law, but the law itself, and the institutions set in place to ennoble it.

As I stated last week, the Jonathan presidency must realise that it owes this country the obligation not to turn it into a theatre of the blood in the name of ambition. Ambition is made of sterner stuff, said Shakespeare. But let the corporate dreams of Nigeria dwarf the puny egotism of one man’s or one group’s design.

But what is going on in Nassarawa State is the witch-hunt of the lawmaker. When Al-Makura became governor, he was on the platform of the Congress for Progressives Change (CPC). From the outset, he was set off against a group of lawmakers from the PDP on the revenge. They were angry they did not have one of their own on the throne.

But a certain uneasy calm had predominated until the Ides of 2015 reared itself. Now, the party at the centre in Abuja had begun what it sees as the impeachment cyclone as a weapon to oust “troublesome” governors. Its eyes are also on Rivers and Edo states. So far they have stumbled. Just as in Nassarawa State, their first goal is to impeach. If they cannot unseat the governor as in Adamawa State, they intend to keep the state on the partisan boil ahead of the next election so as to prime the polity for a giddy electoral process. They can then cash in and install whom they want in the state and make it ripe to secure the numbers of votes the president would need to win the presidency in 2015.

This is ordinarily funny, if it is not heavy with implications for our democratic survival. Now, it is Nassarawa State, and the option is whether to do good or evil. Russian poet Derzhavin said: “I am tormented by the desire to do honour/ I hear the sound of glory calling.” Do the Nassarawa lawmakers recognise a glory call when they hear it? Not yet.

Rather they have chosen the path of folly. They have the people to answer to, if they defy law, decency and due process.

Ayo Fayose seems a happy man these days. After a short spell of humility when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced him as the governor-elect, he has cruised into a summer of blusters. He is not the sort of man that would heed the exhortation of former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who said, among other things, “in victory, magnanimity.”

He is not only posting himself as the new king of Ekiti State, he is posing as the generalissimo of the Southwest and has put his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on notice.

Any party wheel horse, who basked on the rooftops before fate unveiled his new rise, should understand that he can pull them down. Inside his exultant soul, he is swooning with the quote of the buoyant actor, Al Pacino, that “vanity is my favourite sin.”

He has not even spared the Owu chief, Olusegun Obasanjo, his barb. And I know the second coming of Fayose is part revenge, part Oedipal vindication.  Hear him: “This is the last time I would sound this note of warning to those people who want to disparage the party to stop. If you want to disparage the party, whether you are a former president, senator, irrespective of your position, we will sack you. When I fought with the party, I left the party, I did not stay in the party. You are free to go to any party you want, but don’t stay in the party and disparage it.”

Not even when the military gave us parties did we hear such peremptory orders. As Americans would say, come over IBB. Stay humble in the grave, Abacha. Fayose acted not like a politician but an emperor. He has not even become a governor yet. He is a governor-elect, yet all over him he is preening with the feathers of an impresario. The alawada potential of his governorship era of the second coming promises us some excitement, to say the least.

For me, it is the parable of the godfather and godson in a skein never before written in the Nigerian politics of prebendal deviance.

When he was a governor in his first advent, he was the son as loyalist to Obasanjo. Fayose was the crony as point man, sometimes his Rottweiler. He had stood as the party stalwart. He did his biddings, as a humble servant. But this was the son in whom Obj was well pleased.

But the story went sour. Fayose became the prodigal son, but in this case, the son wanted to return home to a big and lavish party. The father, now unhappy with the son with a vindictive fury, did not want the son under his eaves. Rather he heaved him out in the throes of impeachment. He was accused of thieving felony and that he was cat among the Ekiti chickens.

The florid son turned philosophical as the unflinching father set the machinery of the state House of Assembly in motion. In one interview that must pinch anyone’s tender parts, he referred to a Yoruba proverb: anyone who sleeps in a mattress should have a mat around him, because he may need it someday. He left the soft, dream-suffused majesty of the mattress and was on the mat in the past half decade. Now, he is approaching the saddle, while his godfather is in his party’s wilderness.

Power has changed hands. He now must wait to daze and to dream in the mattress of power. Hence he shouted to the rafters to an Obasanjo, whom he was referring to as former president.

Obasanjo in his era had the power to give Fayose power, keep him there, and order him out in a fleeting hurry. Obj exercised that power then not to a few sons of his party. Former Bayelsa State Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha was one of them. He organised his exit. The thickset man who oiled over with dollar pride cascaded down the power trolley before the eyes of all. The Ijaw chief is undergoing a sort of renaissance of pride as the beneficiary of his political son who jumped from obscurity to presidency. He, at least, has the humility to abandon his fatherhood the way Esau did to Jacob. As Tolstoy noted in War and Peace, “it is better to bow too low than not low enough.”

What is the meaning of Fayose’s boast? Is he going to trek out of his Ekiti precinct to preen even in the vaporous vipers of Owu waters? It is common knowledge that Fayose has openly defied the man who gave him bread in the morning and vinegar at night. Now, he has woken the next morning with the power of dew and due for battle.

What is going on in Baba’s mind, and is he saying to himself, “I should have thought differently when I supported that boy to be governor and kept him there long enough to insult his father’s age mate.”

Or is he telling himself, “what do I expect when you put someone in office? He grows into his own, and I should have left him there. I should not have impeached him. Now, it seems he is the winner and I the loser.”

Could Baba have that sort of soul-searching candour, a brutal introspection of self- accusation?

When he played godfather, he wallowed in the illusion that he would be father forever. A mistake indeed. Even natural fathers are not fathers forever. Sometimes, the sons become fathers, an idea that Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev played with when he examined the concept of nihilism in his classic, Fathers and Sons. But poet William Wordsworth’s immortal lines, the “child is the father of the man,” is the sort that a bloating Fayose would really love now, especially since he is the one issuing the orders. He is not interested in giving a bash even if the father- now-turned-son returns in his septuagenarian penitence. Knowing the Owu chief, penitence is not in the cards. So Fayose can keep his forgiveness.

Obj may also have thought that a day like this could never come. He never knew about the transience of power. Few who are there think of the transience of power. After all he once sought a third term. No one ruminated on the transience of power more than the Nobel laureate, Garcia Marquez, in his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. In one of the passages, an old man who held sway over a community declared in a moment of hallucinated lucidity: “I have found immortality.” When he died by drowning, his main follower says he is not dead, but preserves his body as it decays in pestilential odours for long. The era is gone; the denial, however, has morbid consequences.

Few leaders in history are like Charles de Gaulle, who did not want pomp or ceremony when he died, and visits from other leaders. Just him quiescent in his casket. He knew the time was up when he went down.

That is the nature of power. Fayose also does not appreciate this, and that is why rather than release a blueprint to raise Ekiti lifestyle that no one heard in his campaign, he is flush with self-promotion, strutting like a peacock.