The Nation Newspaper

Category: Femi Orebe

  • Politics Nigeriana: The lines are indeed falling in fine places

    Nobody could have put the state of politics in Nigeria better than when my adorable, and much respected  senior at Christ’s – School, Ado – Ekiti (UP SCHOOL!!!), Emeritus Professor Jide Osuntokun, writing on the topic: Political Fragmentation and Consolidation’ in his column in The Nation of Thursday, 2 August, 2018 averred, inter alia: “The changing of parties in the National Assembly in Abuja has created some kind of crisis and depending on who you are, Nigeria seems to be entering a long dark tunnel while optimists feel it is a good thing for birds of the same feather to flock together rather than political parties being an all-comers affair without any ideological or moral cement binding members together and separating each party from the other. There is, he wrote further, a need for the emergence of broad ideological parties that can either be identified as people oriented party as opposed to those who believe the people should eat from the crumbs falling from their tables. Even within parties it will not be strange to have left wing and right wings of the parties as one finds in the Labour and the Democratic parties in the United Kingdom and the USA respectively. The parties of the left usually agree on social democracy which most right thinking people would ordinarily subscribe to. Opposed to this tendency will be the Republican and Conservative parties of the United States and Great Britain respectively with their beliefs in cut throat capitalism and survival of the fittest even though this soulless political tendency is moderated by a sense of noblesse oblige in which rich and aristocratic people feel they have a responsibility to bring up the less fortunate people in the society. I am sure, he concluded, we can find these tendencies in Nigeria for people to coalesce around rather than around ambitious people who are just using the people to get power with which they loot the treasury and rob the people. We need to build political parties around ideas rather than the ambitions of money bags who made their monies by ripping off the system and appropriating what belongs to the people and putting it in individual pockets. If both the APC and the PDP can organise themselves around well-articulated visions and specific missions, then something positive may yet come out of the current political shenanigans going on in Abuja”.

    Professor Osuntokun should know. A scion of the indefatigable Osuntokun family of Okemesi-Ekiti amongst who is numbered my unforgettable boss, the distinguished, world reputed medical scholar, Professor Kayode Osuntokun of blessed memory, himself a distinguished Professor of History who capped his academic career as an Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to Germany and has, since on retirement, been giving readers of his column in The Nation of every Thursday, seminal lessons on issues of the moment in our beleaguered country. Reading him in the afore- mentioned topic this past week, my mind went straight to no other person than that giant of integrity, the 6 foot plus President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, besides whose exemplary moral leadership, especially his anti corruption war, nothing could have so herded together the political bandits of Nigeria, what Yorubas call jegudujeras, separated at least in large part, from those of our politicians who still spare a thought for the poor. The lines, as the Holy writ says, are truly falling in fine places!

    I saw them gathered in Abuja same past week, amidst ululation, dancing and backslapping, unknown that Nigerians were laughing at these agglomeration of these political reprobates just as my mind went to poor Kwarans when I saw the man most of them go on bended kneels to address, the outgoing Senate President, that is if he has any honour left in him, Bukola Saraki, being widely cheered back to the vomit he exited, exactly four years ago.

    It must say something for this man’s venality that not less than four members of The Nation’s commentariat, without any prior discussion, had to write about the danger this man constitutes to the good health of Nigeria in the past one week. What then could I have remembered reading about Sam Omatseye’s Eleyinmi, if not Dr Jide Oluwajuyitan’s: ‘Saraki’s Wars and Victories’, in his week article? Wrote my dear friend who I shall quote at some considerable length, and who by the way is, like Osuntokun and I, also of Ekiti extraction (says something of our moral upbringing in that hilly country): “Modern senates modelled after the original Roman senate whose essence, besides making laws, amending budget or repealing public policy and guarantee freedom and prevent tyranny, are meant to be chambers of “sober second thought” and are often made up of men of honour. Rather than strive towards these ideals, our senate since the birth of the fourth republic seems to approximate everything that is wrong with our nation – corruption, greed, treachery impunity and vileness. Saraki’s current 8th senate regarded by many Nigerians as the worst in our nation’s history, in addition boasts of not a few comedians and men without ambition. Bukola Saraki, inheritor of a fiefdom called Kwara State, is not and cannot be a democrat. It is therefore not a surprise that while swearing in the name of democracy, this veteran of civilian coup has done everything but promote the ideals of democracy in the last three years. Like Adolph Hitler, he is, however, not averse to using democrat’s tools such as parties and elections to fight democrats. His latest coup could therefore only have come as a surprise to some naïve leaders of APC who ought to have used the big stick when Saraki first demonstrated his lack of discipline to be a member of a political party which like a cult group has no room for traitors. His latest coup bore the hallmark of his style – some drama and some theatrics while assaulting the very basis of democracy. Since he started his political career fresh from a medical school in Britain as Obasanjo’s special assistant on budgeting, he decided his war for democracy must start with budget padding. The major actor in budget preparation is the executive since a government budget is the political tool with which government in power fulfils its electoral promises to the electorate.  The legislature debates, examines and authorises spending of public revenue while areas of joint cooperation between it and the executive include implementation, monitoring, evaluation and reporting. But Saraki who has never known failure has other ideas.

    Thus when the 2016 Budget submitted to the House in December 2015 was returned some five months later, Audu Ogbeh, the agriculture minister, was the first to claim he and his team discovered 386 “strange” projects worth N12.6billion inserted by the National Assembly after reducing the ministry’s budget proposals from N40, 918 billion to N31.618 billion to accommodate their own constituency projects. The Minister of Transport raised similar alarm about the cancellation of the Lagos – Calabar rail project to accommodate N3b National Assembly constituency projects such as provision of tricycles, town halls, classrooms, solar street lights, and pedestrian bridges. (His Health counterpart said his ministry’s budget was unrecognisable).

    The 2018 budget suffered the same fate. The National Assembly, according to President Buhari, had made cuts amounting to N347 billion in the allocations to 4,700 projects submitted to them for consideration and introduced 6,403 projects of their own amounting to N578 billion. While many of the projects cut, according to the president, “are critical and may be difficult, if not impossible, to implement with the reduced allocation”, some of the new projects inserted by the National Assembly have not been properly conceptualised, designed and cost and will, therefore, be difficult to execute.”  But for Saraki and his supporters, it was a triumph of democracy.

    Long before the collapse of his trial before the Code of Conduct Tribunal, ever confident Saraki had dismissed his trial as an assault on democracy. The weighty allegations by Michael Wetkas, a detective with EFCC, before a tribunal that Saraki as governor diverted Kwara State government funds to pay loans he took to buy properties through his aides, one of whom lodged between N600,000 and N900,000 in the former governor’s account 50 times on a particular day were attributed to enemies of democracy. So was his allegation that ‘Saraki collected salary as the governor of Kwara State for about four years after completing his second term in 2011’ . Even when it was confirmed by Secretary to the Kwara State Government, Isiaka Gold, that N578, 188.00 which increased to N1, 239,493.94 monthly from October, 2014 was paid to Saraki not as salary but as pension, his supporters only hailed their champion of democracy. (No thanks to River’s State based judicial consultants but Nigeria will survive). Last week after arrogantly directing his most strident supporters in the senate to defect to PDP and ordering his Kwara APC constituency to join PDP, he gave no indication he was about to honourably vacate the senate presidency seat he has for three and half years deployed not for serving the country but to wage personal wars with eyes on personal victories”.

    You will pity Nigeria, and  naturally feel like puking when you realise that Saraki was the king for whom the Abuja gathering was arranged, even though he was archetypical of all that gathered; old hands, and returnees to the most depraved political party on the face of the earth. But you’ve seen nothing yet  until that party of anything goes presents Saraki as its alternative to Mr Integrity, Muhammad Buhari, in the 2019 Presidential elections.

    And why not: do they consider Nigerians any better than MUMUs?

     

     

  • Defections and the Saraki conundrum

    Minutes before I sat down to write this article, I believed I had the opening paragraphs already cast in stone. That was until I saw the incredible piece from which I shall now proceed to quote at some length, as it uncannily captures a picture perfect image of the departing public reprobates now quitting the ruling party, and furiously returning to their likes in a party Nigerians overwhelmingly rejected only four years ago.

    Written by Dr Uche Diala. a Buharist, patriot and nationalist, it says inter alia in : After The Defection Tramadol: “I deliberately left this update till today to allow the noisy neighbours fully revel in their defection lala land before we bring them back to reality. Yesterday, in their characteristic mischief, they regaled their hypnotised followers with tales of how the Gestapo (not Nigeria Police) held their capons, Senators Bukola Saraki and Ike Ekeremadu captive whereas Saraki and co already had their plans all worked out. While Saraki was transmitting on the floor of the Senate, Ekweremadu was popping champagne at his home with Olisa Metuh, even as the loquacious PDP National Publicity Secretary, Ologbodiyan, was, in his usual drivel, declaring Ekweremadu missing.

    In their hate induced propaganda, they regaled their desperate hangers- on with stories of how Saraki had telephoned the U N and the U S and how American Marines were on their way to dethrone Buhari and free their ‘abducted’ lead actors. In their drunkenness, they thought they had won the 2019 elections already. They deluded themselves that because 14 nomadic senators and 32 HOR members (most of who were not going to get return tickets under the APC, anyway) left the APC, then Buhari and the party should lose sleep, forgetting that the APC still had control of majority states,  and majority in the House of Representatives even by their own calculation. Some smart by half ones among them will jump in here to say it was same thing that happened under the PDP in 2015 but in their myopia, they conveniently forgot that the key to APC’s success was the merger of three major, established and successful political parties: namely the ANPP, ACN and CPC with elements of APGA, all of which had control of states and Senate and HOR seats from across the federation.

    They also forgot that the singular galvanising force for that movement was a certain man of integrity – General Muhammadu Buhari as every movement needs a credible Point’s man. Who’s the Point’s man of this drunken PDP ensemble which, seven months to a general election, still can’t find a candidate but is looking for “a Northerner that can match Buhari’s integrity”?

    No quality. Just quantity. Hogwash!

    So when they liken their basket of defectors to that of  2015, I ask where’s their Rotimi Amaechi or their Tibubu or their Rochas Okorocha or their Adams Oshiomhole , that any reasonable political watcher should lose sleep over? This should not be an issue but they made it one”. They will wake up today to realise that they still .belong to the most corrupt and discredited political party that no decent Nigerian wants to touch even with a long pole, and that only dogs return to their vomit.

    They will wake up to realise that the Nigerian Airways, Ajaokuta Steel Plant and many other Industries and factories they killed off are back and tens of thousands of kilometres of abandoned roads, highways, bridges, power plants, unpaid salaries etc that they dumped on Nigerians after stealing the country blind, are already being fixed by PMB, and that external reserve, from their near zero, is now almost 50 billion dollars.”

    What a titillating spectre?

    Not a few Nigerians attributed the origins of the one fly in the Nigerian political ointment since June 2015, namely, the Saraki conundrum, to Buhari’s quip: I can work with anybody.

    But I say, in mitigation of the president’s obvious naivety, that nobody, especially not the straight like a rod Muhammadu Buhari, a man of incandescent integrity, could ever have thought there could be lurking somewhere in the Nigerian political firmament, any one so unconscionable, so selfish, and to quote Dr Diala again, any man so suffused in subterfuge, divide and rule, manipulation, and serial betrayal, even of his own biological father, like Bukola Saraki.

    Hell, how can anybody be so unreflecting  his name would appear in literally every odious breaking news: Panama papers, ‘death’ of banks,  and sundry allegations of illicit undertakings including one that is currently trending; that is, the one on the most audacious armed robbery escapade, ever in Nigeria?

    What manner of man is Bukola Saraki?

    Were the APC gifted with an Adams Oshiomhole, as chairman from the get go, Saraki should have long become history.  Numberless times on these pages, as my readers would recall,  I have suggested that  he had no place in a party of change like the APC and that he should be expelled on account of his mala fide (mesu jamba) by which he traded, not only the party, but the entire Buhari government, for the senate presidency. Had the weak APC leadership under an otherwise decent Chief Oyegun then heeded that call, especially long before Saraki  dazed  his purchasable colleagues with committee memberships  which he adroitly deployed, our man won’t, today, be the political cancer he has become to Nigeria.

    So dexterous is Saraki that even now that all his bed fellows and supine, emotional hangers – on in the red chamber have departed the party, he still stays spat in office, claiming he is of the APC.

    What is a man worth, without a sense of shame?

    What manner of Senate president would dodge police invitation for interrogation in a matter as grievous as having over 30 persons, including policemen, slaughtered by those who alleged, in written statements, that he is their patron and armourer?

    And  what do  his hailers say when  a man in his high position  lies  shamelessly regarding his alleged police barricade of his house at  the very time  that same police was expecting him to be in their office for questioning ? The police has since controverted this lie claiming that Saraki used some of the over 170 policemen allotted to the senate for this obvious subterfuge. Aren’t the chorus boys on social media ashamed they ever believed this hogwash?  Granted you can forgive these e-rats who are already so far gone in infamy, what of a man who is forever scheming to become the Nigerian president lying so shamelessly? If he ever succeeds, won’t Nigeria, one day become a mere item in another set of Panama Papers? Do Nigerians who hail Saraki, or those  Kwarans, who not only vote, but venerate him like a god, really think? Can they see the more polished, non feudal Yoruba become electoral slaves to the family of the much more venerated, and, in comparable avatar, Chief Obafemi Awolowo?

    What a people?

    From where do, at least the Yoruba portion, get the inner strength to bear these serial indignities and what did Pa Sunday Olawoyin not do to free his people from this mental slavery? I can even understand this under Bukola’s father, the suave, very kind and accommodating, Chief Olusola Saraki, but certainly not with this his son who knows only self, and for whom even your senators allegedly kneel down to talk to?

    Pray, what has he done for you to compare with the millions he takes monthly as senator and, on top of which he once also earned pension from the state? Was your water, at a given time, poisoned or you were, unknown to you, inoculated? I think the time has come for some of your highly educated ones, and they are legion – thanks to the inimitable man of his people, Sir Ahmadu Bello – to thoroughly interrogate this fiasco.

    What does it say of a senate president who is doing everything to politicise a criminal matter? You were indicted, based on the testimony of no less than five armed robbers,  and you’re saying your written response is enough when the  IG, says no, it isn’t? Are you saying you should be a judge in your own case or, rather, that you are above the laws of the land?

    Happily enough, APC has now come to the realisation that Saraki, with all his supercilious appendages, should be expelled from the party if they won’t leave honourably, of their own.  Bolaji Abdullahi could then replace the fumbling Ologbodiyan in their new abode.

    As Senator Abu Ibrahim and others said at a recent parley with the President, Saraki should now be shown the way out. He has done enough havoc, doubling as Buhari’s chief antagonist.

    However, to President Buhari must go a large part of the blame for the malfeasance I have chosen to call the Saraki conundrum. The award-winning journalist, Wale Adeoye, recently put this very perspicaciously on the Ekiti Panupo web portal when he wrote: “Now, the issue is not whether those fighting Buhari are “corrupt politicians”. Whether they are corrupt or not, it is mandatory for him to work with the National Assembly. His indecision and inability to make effective use of the radical wing of the judiciary remains his albatross. He is too slow to act. All he needed was to have galvanised the people at the beginning of his administration and deal decisively with corrupt politicians. We have seen examples in other countries with similar situation like that of Nigeria. He never did.  He simply failed to find a solution to a complex problem and that is a complete failure of leadership”.

    I am sure what Adeoye is saying here is that had President Buhari acted appropriately, and proactively, the national Assembly would have since been swept clean, rather than become a drain pipe on the country as well as what former President Olusegun Obasanjo called it.

    Or why have a broom as your party logo?

    In concluding, let us just say that Nigeria would be a much better place the day what ‘Saraki Conundrum’ represents in our politics has been fully, and completely, exorcised. Banning that, Nigerians will only continue to hope against hope.

     

  • Ekiti: Why we won and they lost

    Yes we, meaning the party, APC, its governorship candidate, Dr John Kayode Fayemi, and I.  There is a sense in which I can claim such inclusivity because, God bless him, I was privileged to be a member of that small,  select group of very trusted individuals  Dr Fayemi, the  governor -elect, gave the business of interrogating everything about  whether or not he should run in the 2018 governorship election having made up his mind not to be carried away by the deluge of  appeals urging him to run if only to show that he was coasting home to victory in the Ekiti governorship election of 2014 before then President Goodluck Jonathan told his Chief of Army Staff , his Ijaw compatriot, General  Kenneth Minimah, that he Jonathan,  rather than Dr Ayo Fayose, was the PDP candidate for the election and, therefore under strict orders, to have him declared the winner.

    The rest is history.

    Since then, whether in Abuja, Lagos or Isan-Ekiti, at  marathon, all night meetings, it became our business to clinically examine  every issue as if success depended solely on it, and never considering anything irrelevant, no matter how seemingly minuscule. For me, therefore, Dr Fayemi’s victory in the election of Saturday, 14 July, 2018, did not come as a surprise. However, no matter the amount of planning, we were in no doubt, whatever, that success depended solely on the grace of the Almighty God for it is not for nothing that the Holy Writ says in 1Corinthians 3: 6: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.”

    His grace was at play throughout the campaign. Given the mostly atavistic manner in which politics is played in Nigeria, and, in particular, Ekiti politicians, more often than not, fighting to the death over the flimsiest of issues, no prophet could have predicted the peace that descended on the party once a  candidate emerged. That not a single APC governorship aspirant defected to another party must be credited to the maturity of the aspirants, but more importantly, to the proactive mediator y role of the party’s Southwest leaders. Here our appreciation must go to the wise triumph rate of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Chief Bisi Akande and Otunba Niyi Adebayo.

    In contradistinction to the peace in the APC, a spirit of error entered Governor Ayo Fayose; a spirit fuelled by excessive arrogance which led him to treat other party leaders like trash, even asking those disgruntled over his choice of the dour Professor Eleka to quit. It was an egregious mistake which marked the final collapse of PDP in Ekiti as nearly everybody the party could rely on to win election in the state promptly left, leaving only the shrewd Senator Olujimi who is obviously waiting to inherit whatever remains of post-Fayose PDP in Ekiti.

    No politician, least of them a tactical one like Ayo Fayose, should ever have committed such unpardonable mistake, whatever his confidence level. The result was devastating as the defectors worked their hearts out to prove him wrong. And what a bounty they brought Fayemi. With his 5700+ votes in Ise-Orun local government, Prince Dayo Adeyeye made mince meat of Ikere -Ekiti where Eleka comes from and which Fayose has relied on for massive votes. The same thing went for the likes of Senators Rasaki in Ado-Ekiti and Arise in the Oye local government area. Ditto the other senior PDP chieftains who defected to the APC.  Prince  Dayo Adeyeye and  Cyril Fasuyi ensured that  the party’s candidate won in areas  that were traditionally PDP’s. And this was one area where Governor Fayose failed miserably in his policy choices. Of Ekiti’s 131 towns, and with an eye on the towns’ huge population, he had chosen to develop only two, namely, Ikere, and Ado -Ekiti. In Ikere- Ekiti, the spirit of error would lead him to take on the Olukere, who he saw to jail. With the huge portion of the town owing allegiance to the Olukere, the bottom was immediately knocked off his calculations and his professor candidate, despite the over 3000 non Ekiti indigenes he took to Aafin, Okeruku, Agbado Oyo and other  polling units,  still came a cropper. Hon Niyi Afuye had to confront him at the police station when he was begging that those arrested should not be made to write their statements. Fayose’s Ado-Ekiti calculations also floundered after Fayemi had tactically chosen the highly impactful Chief Bisi Egbeyemi as his deputy. This was, however, in addition to several other factors: the unpaid many months salaries of civil servants who reside mostly in the state capital and the additional insult of N3000 credited to their bank accounts to induce them to vote PDP and the huge votes of the Ebiras who had been wired for maximum performance by the ebullient Kogi State governor, who went from one Ebira settlement to another on his way from Kogi State. Thus collapsed Oshoko’s simple minded calculation erected on developing only two out of 131 Ekiti towns.

    However, by far the greatest contributory factor to Fayemi’s victory was his performance at his first coming, 2010 – 14, when the entire state became, literally, a construction site with his government leaving developmental impact on all Ekiti towns without exception. There was tremendous infrastructural development, school enrolment  was a whopping 98% but Ekiti has since regressed to the lowest in the Southwest – no thanks to school children being made to pay tax – while life expectancy during  his time was the highest in Nigeria; indeed, far above the national average. Teachers’ salaries was increased thrice,  just like he was the first in the entire Southwest to pay rural and core subjects allowances to teachers, each being 20%  of basic salary. And he owed not a single month’s salary except for October 2014 when the incoming Governor Fayose blighted his arrangement with the banks. His greatest impact was, however, in how he impacted all Ekiti communities. Everywhere we went on the recent campaign; it was always the first thing the Obas thanked the governor-elect for. “You built this palace”, they would begin but, end up, in every case, by adding that so and so uncompleted project when you left, remains exactly where you left it, asking him to come back quickly to complete it. Nothing could have been more gratifying than seeing the crowd, in every town jubilantly confirming what the Oba had said in private and turning it to panegyrics in honour of the candidate.

    As my readers must have noticed, I used these pages in the weeks immediately before the election to draw Ekiti peoples’ attention to all that Governor Fayemi did for our respective communities at his first coming and I cannot be more fulfilled than seeing them reward him with their votes. I can assure them that the man who, for the first time ever in Nigeria, initiated monthly stipends for the elderly, a programme which, as  director of policy in the Buhari 2015 campaign he took to the centre, and has since been adopted by the federal government, will be most unrelenting in further reducing poverty in Ekiti.

    I sat out the last one week with the candidate as he met different stakeholder groups. And you would not but pity Ekiti in the past three and a half years. From NULGE, to NUPENG whose representatives informed the candidate that of a total of 115 petrol stations in Ado -Ekiti only 50 now dispense fuel, to pensioners owed about ten months salaries, and from EKSU students who had been granted neither bursary nor scholarship in the past four years but must now cough out N107,000 as acceptance fee, to parents who now have to pay tax on infants in nursery/primary schools.

    This was how Governor Fayose accounted for no less than 25% of Fayemi’s victory through the insensitivity that characterised his administration and which saw companies like coca cola, GT bank and more, gave Ekiti a wide berth, as international best practices forbade the curious payments they were being asked to make. Another factor that killed off any hope of Eleka winning is the Ekiti debts. Governor Fayose’s narrative that Fayemi ran the state into debts would have remained sacrosanct with an increasingly unreflecting Ekiti society had the Debt Management Office (DMO), not fortuitously (?) released states’ debt profile which recorded Ekiti’s debt as N18B at Fayemi’s exit in 2014. That has since become a bulging N117B. Under Governor Fayose who claims he did not borrow a dime. “Let my opponents know that the elections are not won by propaganda,” he says. “If they are sure of what they are saying (that he borrowed N56B), let them tell us the bank that gave the loan and also produce the papers leading to the transactions.”

    So who is lying, the Debt Management Office or Governor Fayose?

     

  • What the coalition of united political parties (cupp) portends for nigeria

    HE woke up to a new development where PDP, outside power, has now managed to create another coalition. As facts continue to emerge, they listed 36 political parties. “Our analysis of that coalition reveals that a number of political parties were included in that coalition fraudulently. “Part of the 42 political parties they listed is Accord Party and the chairman of the party is here with us. If you are creating a coalition, you need to be honest about it as to who and who are members of the coalition. “As of today, the membership of that coalition is in doubt. Two members also listed at that coalition are here. We are not part of that coalition because we represent a type of politics, which is in total contradiction to what they are doing. “We do not believe that our country should be governed by people whose only objective is to capture power. Of what purpose is that coalition0? Is it for the purpose of taking Nigeria back to 1999 and 2015 or is it for the purpose of building a new Nigeria? “That purpose has not been stated, even in their memorandum. The only thing in their MoU is to agree to capture power in 2019. Their programme has not been made known to the Nigerian public. We will not be part of a coalition that does not have a programme for Nigeria,” – Alhaji Bashir Yusuf Ibrahim, Peoples Democratic Party Chairman.

    Just as well, as I almost called it a coalition of Nigerian rogue politicians. I almost did or  what do you call a group of people  that puts out their very first baby steps by fraudulently, claiming as many as 20 political parties, namely:

    Accord Party, Peoples Democratic Movement (PDM), United Progressive Party (UPP), Advanced People’s Democratic Alliance (APDA), Hope Democratic Party (HDP), Democratic Peoples Party (DPP), Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Freedom Justice Party (FJP), Fresh Party, (FP) New Nigeria’s Peoples Party (NNPP), Nigeria’s Peoples Congress (NPC), Nigeria Peoples Movement (NPM), Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN), National Action Congress (NAC), and NDLP as members when they know they are not?

    Aren’t they, in reality, playing true to what Nigerians already know of this coalition of politicians being driven almost solely by the ambition to be the Nigerian President?

    We can barely wait till their presidential primaries come August, 2018 when the Nigerian press will be obliged to clinically, and meticulously, x-ray these assortment of Panama kingpins and bank killers, this ensemble of wannabe Presidents among who, as President – God forbid – there are those who would attend a meeting of the United Nations only at the risk of being jailed by the Americans already in wait for them. I trust Nigerian investigative journalists to outperform the EFCC in conducting due diligent check to expose these people, many of who have already been hauled before the courts for sundry malfeasance, and who may actually be heading to gaol in the foreseeable future.

    It is the APC I congratulate the most, for having all these people, described by the inimitable Louis Odion as ‘ APC’s illegitimate kids’, in his last week column in this paper, exiting the party in one fell swoop. A better elixir the party would never have as the Buhari government can now perform without some in-house enemies posing as allies. By that Odion was referring to the Yoruba quip that a family comes asunder the moment its illegitimate child comes of age. Looking back, I feel certain APC would now wish they had been long gone so some serious issues of governance would have been put behind. What would the party not have given to see the nPDP people depart as long ago as when Senator Bukola Saraki singularly gifted the PDP the Senate Deputy Presidency in total disregard for both party, and well known democratic practice.  As I have severally suggested on these pages, that was when APC should have bade senator Saraki and all those who supported him bye. Seeing the party failing to seize that moment, the senate, which should have ensured a smooth running of the Buhari administration, even though not as an executive lackey, has since transmogrified to the Buhari government’s most truculent opponent, erecting barriers, all the way, on the President’s every move, especially, those intended to rein in corruption, and those aimed at enhancing the nation’s security. For a Senate President Saraki, always with an eye on the country’s Presidency, de-marketing, if not embarrassing President Buhari, simply became an article of faith. In this sacrilegious mission, he not only has a muscle man, an effant terrible colleague who doubles both as his mouthpiece, and executive whiplash, he has almost the entire membership of an unquestioning senate, in total concurrence with his every wish – thanks to the very lucrative senate committees’ membership which he adroitly constituted to make him much more than a mere primus inter pares. No wonder, they were always lining behind him on his many trips to the Code of Conduct Tribunal which has now, mercifully, been terminated by the Supreme Court. You would never know whether these senators knew they were being used as mere puns to pressure the courts in Saraki’s life and death tango with near political ruination.

    And so what is the cause of their belligerence this time around? What ailed the then nPDP, an assortment of political wayfarers who, I am sure, have not yet reached their destination as, sure as death, they will soon kill off the new coalition, the CUPP, the minute Senator Saraki does not get whatever it is he wants. That, however, will be at the next electoral cycle, since their types are never satisfied, but forever craving.

    Their angst have been in the public space for upwards of three months when  Baraje, another of his lackeys,  came out, claiming that “ the Buhari administration, and the APC leadership had neglected its members, despite their contributions to the party’s success in the 2015 elections”, even as they had the entire national assembly under their lockdown , with both the senate Presidency,  and the House Speakership as well as  chairmanship of several of the most lucrative committees in both chambers going to their members. Three things irked them the most: First, President Buhari paid them scant, if any attention, at all. Incidentally, that has always been the advice proffered by this column. Secondly, the Kaduna State governor, El Rufai , gave them not only a short shrift  but a large dose of his ever irreverent tongue,  and thirdly, Senate President  Saraki’s barely hidden presidential ambition which he knew  was absolutely unachievable in the APC.

    In reaction to their threat, El Rufai very disdainfully retorted:

    “What are they talking about? Who are these new PDP people that are threatening? This is Kwara, Kano, Sokoto, Adamawa, Rivers but Amaechi is not part of them”. “So let’s take these four states and go back to 2003.  Buhari, then under ANPP, won in all these four states. Go back to 2007, Buhari won in these four states. Even when Shakarau was running as a presidential candidate in 2011, Buhari defeated him in Kano. “And, I have no doubt in my mind that even if they leave, it will have absolutely no impact on the presidential election as the president will win Sokoto, Kwara and Adamawa easily. Kano is already in the bag. It has always been the president’s base”.

    That was the point at which desperation met desperados, and in comes the heavily blighted PDP which has been running from pillar to post, twice postponing the submission of the report of its  Lyel Imoke contact committee.

    Until birds of the same feather, the nPDP came over, not many politicians, at least not one with any  integrity, would touch the PDP, notwithstanding Mr Secondus’ apology to Nigerians regarding the party’s totally reprehensible thieving frenzy while in power.

    The party chairman, Secondus, had on Monday, 26 March, 2018 declared, half- heartedly, as follows without ever mentioning its unprecedented corruption by name Declared the party chairman:  As the National Chairman, I do admit that the PDP made a lot of mistakes; we are humans, not spirits and the ability to admit is key in moving forward. “We admit that we have made several mistakes; we have passed through all our challenges and have acquired the experience no other party can boast of. “We were sanctioned by Nigerians at the polls in 2015; let me use this opportunity to apologise for our past mistakes.”

     

    PDP so messed up Nigeria, stealing anything and, everything, and leading the country unerringly to recession that it confounds any sane mind that they could be thinking of regaining power in this decade, whatever the permutations of the likes of former President Obasanjo who, this past week, unashamedly returned to his vomit, when he reportedly stormed a PDP campaign rally in Ogun State.

    It is impossible to completely capture the ruination PDP visited on Nigeria during its 16-year stranglehold on the country. They not only masterminded crude oil thefts, they ensured that billions of dollars oil revenue were never paid to the federation account. They were so selfish, and unreflective, they looted billions of dollars meant for equipping the military in its ferocious war against Boko Haram and thought nothing of bribing INEC officials, and others, with billions of naira provided by their face of  corruption, intent on sexing up the results of the 2015 presidential election.

    Be not deceived: CUPP is nothing but a rebranding of an amalgam of nation wrecking politicians, and you need not take my word for it: simply ask Google!

    Search each and every one of these big politicians and forensically examine them to see if you will come to a conclusion different from mine.

    But they could still play a salutary role for our country.

    If both President Buhari and the APC know exactly what is good for them, and, ipso facto the country, then they should realise that power devolution can no longer be delayed, nor should they be that remiss, they would let the report of the party’s committee on Power Devolution die in the technical committee to which it has been sent for that purpose, as I was reliably informed.

    And why do I say so? As dangerous as CUPP is for our country, it can make life absolutely uncomfortable for the APC and could render President Buhari’s re election no longer so certain. No thanks to the activities of the murderous Fulani herdsmen who have turned life in Nigeria short, and brutish. This is going to have tremendous negative effect on APC especially in all the states in the North Central geo political zone as well as some states in the president’s own Northwest. To make up for the votes that will be lost in these states, therefore, I wish to recall that the report of the party’s Power Devolution committee was extremely well received in the Niger Delta area where both the Bayelsa state governor and the Ijaw Youth Congress hailed the recommendations, just as it was sweet music in the Southwest which it  should further solidify behind the president in its support, even though our Afenifere elders believe, not unexpectedly, that  they did not go deep enough to earn their full endorsement.

    For many like me, it is a solid beginning which can rapidly be further improved upon when stake holders, from all over the country, especially at extended public hearings in the National Assembly, meet to further discuss the recommendations. I do not think President Buhari and the APC, any longer, have an escape route from seeing these recommendations to fruition before the next presidential election.

     

     

  • Hurray! the Ekiti governorship election is a week away

    It is  exactly a week to the Ekiti governorship election and the worst offence  I believe  any freeborn  Ekiti , with the privilege of a forum like I have courtesy this column can commit, this last Sunday before the election, is to afghanistise, or write on topics far removed from that historic event.

    But first, let me crave my editor’s indulgence to kindly publish this article in its entirety though it is about twice my allowed space.

    I am much obliged.

    I am, therefore, as a concerned Ekiti citizen, and a member of the STRATEGY committee of the John Kayode Fayemi Campaign, even at the risk of repetition, devoting this column today, to reproducing a seminal article authored by Wole Olujobi, the hardworking JKF campaign Director of Media and Publicity, in which he interrogated, to the minutest detail, the four years of Governor Fayemi as governor of Ekiti, 2010 – 2014. The objective is to enable the Ekiti electorate draw a clear distinction between the two academic giants representing the two leading parties – APC and PDP – in the election scheduled for July 14, 2018, and thus be able to vote wisely, especially if he/she is interested in the state’s development.

    While I am doing this for Dr John Kayode Fayemi of the APC, it is my hope that somebody, on the other side, will be perspicacious enough to equally let the Ekiti electorate know what the PDP candidate, Professor Sola Kolapo Eleka, has done for the state in the course of his three and a half years service.

    So critical, in my view, is this exercise, which I have described elsewhere, as a sine qua non, that I have suggested to our candidate that we should have the article translated to a language all Ekiti citizens will understand as well as have it run severally before D-Day on radio, TV and the print media. This should be more urgent in the case of the PDP candidate who, besides having never functioned as a state chief executive, has the added incubus that he cannot be quoted on many key governance issues beyond talking about continuity. So monotonous has this ‘continuity’ overuse become it has led to people asking questions like: is it continuity as in a cannibalised Ikogosi Resort? Is it continuity as in school enrolment which under Fayemi was 98% but now has so plummeted Ekiti State ranks lowest among Southwest states? Or is it continuity as in the Ikogosi-based Gossy Water that is now history?

    I just hope Professor Eleka will appreciate, and commend my drawing his attention to this crucial inevitability.

    However, because we want to come to equity with clean hands, Professor Eleka is permitted to treat Governor Fayose’s achievements as his own. That way, we’ll have a level playing field and a better basis for comparison.

    So let’s go.

    Back then to the piece by Olujobi. Such is the quintessence with which it captured the four years of Governor Fayemi’s administration  that  I’d like to enjoin the reader, whether of  Ekiti extraction, or not, to read it with some solemnity in order to  appreciate, and internalise,  how much an individual with a conscience can, in public office,  positively impact society .

    Happy reading.

    FAYEMI’S ‘FIRSTS IN EKITI DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

    By Wole Olujobi.

    He wrote, mutatis mutandis:

    In the last three weeks, I have had the rare opportunity of traversing the length and breadth of Ekiti State to see, first-hand, the progress, if any, in the development  programmes of the Ayo Fayose-led government.  Worthy of note is that rather  than a leap in development  to add to the accomplishments of former Governor Kayode Fayemi, what I saw  was a reversal of  the state’s fortunes.

    Besides the over-priced 800-metre fly-over show that glitters in the night, all parts of the state are perfumed  in pitch darkness, and our people are daily  at the mercy of night marauders  who stalk residents without let.

    Infrastructural development has grinded to a halt just as economic development initiatives are zero. Health services are priced above the table, poverty is on all fours, while social services have taken  flight.

    Just like in make-shift props for quick-fix solutions to endemic problems, big  lies are now employed as soothing balms   to malignant problems for what has become an unquestioning Ekiti society.

    Everywhere across the state, the socio-economic development brakes that screeched to a thunderous halt on October 15, 2014, remain locked on the same spot.

    Curiously ,  all these negativities are dressed  up as heroic accomplishments,  never  before seen in the state that  the unwary. could  still believe in the make-believe story  that Ekiti State has become an El Dorado. As you read this, but for the Debt Management office, the state debts, like its  Internally Generated revenue, would still have been  shrouded in secrecy, even though it has since climbed to N115B from the N18B Fayemi left on his exit in October, 2014.

    In contradistinction , within a year of his assumption of office, which was a record achievement,  then Governor  Fayemi not only disclosed the state’s revenue profile, he  upped the state’s monthly IGR substantially from N109M to N600M. He achieved this,  not by imposing fresh taxes on the people like governor Fayose did. Nor did he increase the existing  taxes; rather, all he did was block leakages in the state’s finances.

    For the first time ever, Ekiti State in November 2011, adopted visits to  all Local  government Areas for budget planning purposes during which visit every town  presented their preferred three projects to be incorporated in the year’s  budget,  and subsequently, for those that could not be accommodated in the current  year.

    For the first time in the state, a total of 183 secondary schools, and 836 primary schools were renovated, and furnished.

    Forty eight thousand (48,000) laptops were distributed to students and teachers in Ekiti State schools while additional 25,000 pieces were ordered, making it the first time in the state that information and computer technology would receive such a boost. This  yielded dividends  far beyond imagination as manifested in the tremendous improvement in  the 2013 WAEC result in the state. This initiative was long  before JAMB changed  its examinations  to a computer-based system, thus giving Ekiti  students  a head start.

    For the first time in Ekiti State too , teachers received 25 per cent of their pay as  core subjects and rural posting allowances in addition to their monthly  salaries.

    Across the state, and also for the first time, five mini-water treatment plants were commissioned while new pipes were laid to replace the old ones, with 167 modern water fetching points,  nick named  Eyiyato Fetching Points,  constructed in various communities across the 16 LGAs to ease the  hardship of  water shortage while in September 2013,  governor Fayemi signed the Water and Sanitation Bill into Law, marking the first time for such initiative. The percentage of water supply in the state  rose to 52% as against the 25% in place on  his assumption of office in 2010. This  comprehensive approach to water supply crisis increased the state’s rating as one of the  two  best states in the water sector in the country.

    Also, for the first time ever, in the history of  the West African sub-region, 20,000 elderly people were paid a  N5,000 monthly stipend as social security,  while by October 2013, during  his Third Year Anniversary, another 5,000 senior citizens were added to the scheme while the wife of the governor, for the first time in the history of Ekiti State, made sure that no elderly person in the state went to bed hungry. She did that through her Food Bank Programme where the elders were served cooked food in special kitchens across the state.

    All general hospitals in the state were fully rehabilitated  and two new ones were built while 728.365 kilometres of both Federal and state roads were constructed in addition to the 81.2 kilometres constructed in all local governments under the 5 Kilometre Road-per-local-government scheme, the first time that local governments would undertake such initiative backed by the state government.  As much as 902.565 kilometres of Federal, State and Local Government roads were rehabilitated, re-constructed and constructed to last decades unlike in the past where new roads collapsed barely a year  after commissioning.

    Women were empowered through small business schemes while Affirmative Action took root in Ekiti State with many women appointed into senior government positions. The First Lady, Erelu Bisi Fayemi, a U N honour recipient for her role in women empowerment in Africa,  brought relief to mothers of triplets through her Multiple Birth Trust Fund where financial assistance and baby items were given to them while also strengthening women empowerment schemes through her gender empowerment programme.

    Fayemi’s administration enacted  a law banning discrimination against women and all forms of violence against women, as well as enacting a law banning abuses against children.

    For the first time too, many communities that had existed for over 200 years without electricity, such as Oke-Ako in Ikole Local Government, were connected to the national grid while many communities were opened up through construction of rural roads and culverts.

    Hundreds of Ekiti youths, which included a trained medical doctor – turned farmer,  were engaged in commercial agriculture under the Youth Commercial Agriculture Development Programme (YCAD) and 117,000 farmers were registered to benefit from the ADP programme.

    For the first time, Ekiti State had both the largest cassava productivity (yield/Ha) and cultivation.. Yield was above national average at 15T/Ha (national average was 12T/Ha).

    Ekiti also had the largest expansion in cultivation in the country in 2012 with the addition of over 1,150Ha by YCAD Programme alone.

    As at October 2013, YCAD critical objective had started to manifest, as Ekiti State had the highest yield in cassava in the country.

    In an amazing manner, Ekiti State started  producing water melon and carrot which were,  hitherto,  exclusive produce from the Northern states.

    750Ha of land was cultivated under the Rice Expansion Programme, where government supported farmers with 100% input for production. 2013 operation alone was aimed at achieving 3,000Ha capacity and government also flagged off N600 million irrigation project under which Ero and Itapaji dams  provided 1,700 hectares of irrigated land.

    For the first time, there was a joint constituency project in irrigation by the three Senators representing Ekiti State with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). The irrigated land was at Itapaji and served from Itapaji dam, which also served Iyemero and Gede farm settlements while  that of Ero dam was planned to serve Ikosun, Igogo and Ewu farm settlements.

    To restore cocoa to its prime position as the main cash crop as was the case in the First Republic, 150,000 cocoa seedlings were distributed to 15,000 farmers in 2013.

    For the first time, over 2000 school children and infants in Erijiyan – Ekiti were administered with 137,442 doses of Praziquantel pill to prevent Schisostomiasis, a water-borne disease prevalent in the area.

    In his health programme, no fewer than 400,000 Ekiti indigenes were treated under the free health mission programme during the seven editions across the state while the free health programme of Fayemi’s healthcare took care of the health needs of about 48% of children under five years, pregnant women, the disabled and elderly above 65 years.

    For the first time, another brand of free health mission called ‘Ilera Laafin’ was instituted, which took health missions to the palaces of the traditional rulers and their chiefs, even as more than N130 million was spent on the health care needs of indigent patients for various operations and provision of artificial limbs by the government.

    For the first time, a cancer care centre, the Funmi Adunni Olayinka Diagnostic and Wellness Centre, was established for early detection of cancer and cancer-related ailments to prevent avoidable death, even as the Ministry of Health conducted free medical screening for breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men.

    And for the first time, Fayemi’s giant strides in the health sector increased antenatal attendance from 15,254 in 2010 to 79,104 in 2012, reduction of infant mortality rate to 98 per 1000 (the lowest in the country where national average is 189 per 1000) while maternal mortality dropped to 250/100,000 (National average is 545 per 100,000), getting Ekiti and two other states certified as having met the 2015 MDGs health goals.

    From its decrepit state before he became the governor, Fayemi within three years developed Ikogosi Warm Spring Resort into one of the top seven of the natural hospitality destinations in Nigeria and for the first time, an elite Knowledge Zone was also established within the facility for advanced studies in various fields.

    As at 2014, there were 781 completed projects, 558 on-going projects and 134 community projects initiatives on ground. Altogether, there were 1,473 completed and on-going projects in the state from October 2010- October 2013. As revealed during the present campaign, all uncompleted community projects remain exactly where they were at governor Fayemi’s exit in 2014; not a single block has been added to at uncompleted building project since 2014.

    According to the Human Development Report (2012), Ekiti State, for the first time, was described as the most conducive environment to live, for long and healthy living with a life expectancy average of 55 years which was higher than the National Life expectancy average of 50 years.

    Ekiti also had the lowest infant and maternal mortality rate and the lowest HIV/AIDS infection rate in the country while the state had the highest pupils’ enrolment relative to Nigeria’s population and it had the least out-of-school children (less than 2%) in Nigeria.

    For his development and leadership style, Fayemi won ‘Governor of the Year 2012 Award’ for the first time by the Leadership Newspapers on September 18, 2012. He was also named the Governor of The Year 2013 by Champion Newspaper. All these were confirmed in September 2013 when the United Nations invited Fayemi to its session on the basis that his state had met many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), also for the first time in the history of Ekiti State.

    For the first time, SAMSUNG Corporation awarded ‘Best Governor in Africa’ honour to Fayemi for investing heavily in education, while the London Economist’s report on governance in Ekiti State said: “Better governance is creeping beyond the metropolis. When your correspondent e-mails the governor of Ekiti State in impoverished central Nigeria he gets a reply within minutes, with the entire cabinet copied in and being told to assist with a visit.

    “After a six-hour drive north, seven interviews across the capital, Ado Ekiti, are arranged in the space of a few hours. Cabinet members are mostly foreign-educated and highly motivated and have private-sector experience. A new employment agency sends out job advertisements by text message. All secondary-school pupils are getting free laptops with solar panels.”

    For the first time, the state’s official twitter of the Ekiti State Government-@ekitistategov had the highest number of visitors among the states that had accounts on the social media in Nigeria.

    It had 11,624 followers as at September 30, 2013 and it was a platform where the government kept its citizens aware of its programmes.

    Fayemi knew the importance of a knowledge-based economy and he embarked on a venture of making Ekiti the Silicon Valley of Nigeria through Information and Communications Technology with the laying of fibre optics around the state for high speed internet access to homes and offices at affordable price, including wi-fi hot spot around many business areas in the state.

    All these gains, which Fayemi hopes to strengthen if he is elected governor on July 14, 2018, have been reversed in the last three and half years by Fayose who is planning to sustain the tempo of that destruction through a continuity agenda by his proxy, Prof Olusola Eleka, the governorship candidate of PDP.

    Will Ekiti people support the agenda that will reverse their fortune and which holds no promise for their future?

    That is a question to be resolved by millions of eager  Ekiti people thirsting for a government that would no longer arrest the state’s overall development.(concluded)

    Let me now conclude by saying that I feel positive, and cocksure that, having now tasted both sides of the political divide, and seeing the differences between the two very clearly, peace and development loving Ekiti people will, enthusiastically, elect Dr John Kayode Folorunso Fayemi, on Saturday, 14 July, 2018, for development.

     

  • The main task before the new APC NEC

    So I feel like if we have a constitution in this country that allows each of the zones to develop at their own pace, to manage their own resources, to make adequate contributions to the centre so as to sustain the centre and strengthen the units and weaken the centre, without making it subservient to the federating units, we can live together as a nation where no man is suppressed. It is the issue of suppression, of marginalisation, that usually pushes people to want to go their own ways. But I think we are better off going it together than going it our separate ways.”

    Given the enormity of the major task I have for the newly elected Comrade Adams Oshiomhole-led APC National Executive Council (NEC), the seminal epigram above, which are  the views of one of the most consistent advocates of restructuring, the Archbishop L.S Ayo Ladigbolu, who recently turned 80, as quoted by Professor Segun Gbadegesin in The Nation of Friday 29, 2018 can eminently bear a repetition here as it captures, so succinctly, the very essence of restructuring,  about which the Yoruba has been insistent for decades, all for the sake of Nigeria. It is only the icing on the cake that many, hitherto lukewarm, or outrightly hostile parts of Nigeria, have now bought into it.

    In the article: ’That June 12 recognition may not be a hollow ritual’ (June 17, 2018), I wrote, inter alia: “Fortunately, President Buhari is not being called upon here to re-invent the wheel.  His party, the APC, has effectively done that for him by setting up the El Rufai Committee on Power Devolution, a subject to which the party devoted a considerable part of its manifesto,” when it said it will: “Initiate action to amend our Consti-tution with a view to devolv-ing powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal spirit.”

    Needless to say, that the new NEC already has its job well cut out for it, but we can take solace in the fact that its Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, comes to office with a long track record of being a consummate negotiator, having functioned as Nigeria’s labour leader no.1, in his position as president of the Nigerian Labour Congress; a no mean responsibility, requiring extreme perspicacity.

    But even that can only help, but certainly not mitigate, the task of clearing the literally unimaginable Augean stable he inherited. As you read this, many bodies, in the party, are ‘buried’ in very shallow graves, a consequence of the party’s torridly contentious recent conven-tion, especially at the lower levels.

    Fortunately, more out of respect for President Muhammadu Buhari, and the yeoman’s  efforts of many of the party’s leaders, good counsel prevailed, and to the chagrin of PDP,  and the promoters of some nebulous coalitions waiting in the shadows,  the party, rather than implode, emerged far stronger than it went into the convention. The severally postponed conclusion of the work of the PDP Contact Committee  has thus suffered a terminal death and members can now return, empty handed,  to their respective villages to await new slave assignments.

    However, the APC NEC must now move rapidly to extend the soothing balm to all members who came short of their respective expectations at the convention. The starting point should aim at seeing the party properly emerge as an organic whole now that the leadership of the nPDP has finally seen the futility of any sabre rattling, or any attempt at blackmailing the party. Everything should be done, short of trading the judicial process, to properly integrate every party member, while obliterating, permanently, any atomisation, again, into legacy parties. If the party could  escape all the booby traps put in the way of its  registration by the then all powerful Jonathan government, which included no less than nine court cases, then Oshiomhole and his NEC should require no  robotic science to succeed.. Achieving that should, ipso facto, redound to a cordial Executive – Legislative relations with a view to permanently put an end to PDP’s meddlesome and divisive politics which has negatively impacted the Buhari government; with one of the aims being the reversion of the deputy senate presidency position to the party long before the 2019 election if the country is not to lose all the achievements the Buhari government has recorded, especially  in both the anti corruption war and in infrastructure procurement. I sincerely hope that Chairman Oshiomhole would see this proper re-ordering in the National Assembly as both a minimum desideratum, as well as a sine qua non, in a bid to properly situate a party that has been severally ridiculed as merely being in office, but not in power.

    The greatest task before the new party executive, however, will be to uphold its integrity by ensuring that it accomplishes, before the 2019 elections, the power devolution which it promised Nigerians without the slightest coercion. That it went ahead to set up a committee on same, whose recommendations the party NEC adopted,  makes this absolutely mandatory if  the party is not to turn out exactly as the opposition has framed it – a party surviving solely on propaganda and deceit.

    God forbid.

    I will not delay us regurgitating the committee’ s recommendations which  are already in the public space, but suffice it to say that they were so well received that  Professor Segun Gbadegesin could write as follows in: ‘Tracking  a Report, The Nation, 17 February, 2018: “Compare such negative reaction to the enthusiastic reception of the report by some opposition leaders including former President Jonathan and Governor Dickson, leading to their call for the immediate implementation of its recommendations?  This is political maturity and it deserves commendation. We must join them in tracking the report and insisting on action by Mr. President and the National Assembly”.

    It is in view of the above background that one is close to tears observing the obvious shenanigans playing out at the highest levels of a party Nigerians entrusted with their all, when they enthusiastically voted candidate Muhammadu Buhari into office after three failed attempts. News from the grape vine, but in reality, from very top levels of the party, has it  that sustained attempts are being made to kill off the report at the level of a so-called technical committee which was put in place, primarily, to facilitate the recommendations’ implementation process.

    I heard, authoritatively from those who should know, that this effort is being led by a Northwest senator which should not be a surprise because the Northwest it is, that has profited the most, from the atrocious status quo, dating back to the  pre independence era .

    Nor is anybody suggesting that there shouldn’t be adequate consideration, emerging from all of us thoroughly interrogating the committee’s recommendations in such a way that we all can come to equity with clean hands.

    Wrote Gbadegesin, again,  in his referenced piece : “Given today’s composition of the national assembly, it will be difficult to have the North forgo all it’s unfair advantages such as a score of 10% getting admission to unity schools, 30% to universities as well as the number of Local Governments,  and the huge resources  that go to up north, monthly , in allocation to them, without  a quid pro quo”

    Oshiomhole must ensure that Nigeria does not miss this golden opportunity even as many still regard the recommendations as merely scratching the surface of a full blown restructuring, and even if of a truth, they amount to no more than baby steps as I am convinced that further negotiations, would, in a not distant future, achieve far higher heights in our goal of full restructuring, regionalism inclusive.

    It is heart warming, therefore, that Oshiomhole has promised that not even the party leader, President Muhammadu Buhari, would escape being charged with anti party activities, if he flouts approved party positions.

    I therefore conclude, as Gbadegesin did in his very commonsensical article that: “APC and the Buhari administration will do well for themselves, and for Nigeria, if they implement the El-Rufai Committee recommendations before 2019. Any delaying tactics or untoward action, he added, will be politically unwise”.

  • Again, this our 8th Assembly

    Yes, they showed their hands again this past week and Nigerians now know exactly why it took the National Assembly over six  months to complete work on a national budget upon which the Buhari government had hoped to leapfrog a post recession economy on the path of  growth and development. This meant nothing  to our  legislators who are least bothered by either,  as long as enough money could be made, whichever way, for the next election.

    For them, it is of  no moment, whatever, unlike the Socio- Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) which  observed that:   “cutting funding for essential public services such as health, education and security, constitutes a serious human rights violation which potentially rises to the level of crimes against humanity, against the Nigerian people,  which amply deserves to be taken to the Internal Criminal Court (ICC).”

    You can bet your last dime that  not even this scares the gluttons who will always argue, forgetting that their individual mandate represents only a microcosm of the president’s, that “the reason the constitution directs the bill to be submitted to the national assembly is that it expects it to vet it and make inputs before passing it in readiness for appropriation Act”,’ as if the letter and spirit of the constitution ever envisages that a time would ever come when those revered chambers would  be populated by a bunch of self seekers who would rather hijack appropriations to their farms and bore holes, rather than make them serve the needs of the poor masses of  Nigeria .

    But as our people would always say, it is every day for the thief but one day for the owner. Nigerians can gloat,  this time around, that the greed which has always united the national assembly leadership,  year in, year out, emboldening their padding propensity, has scattered them as I shall proceed to show below, quoting  some of their own members who I know Senator Bukola Saraki would now be eager to haul before their overly misused  Ethics committee.

    Hear the Southeast caucus in a senate where their man, Ike Ekweremadu, who in his own eyes is the waiting Igbo choice for 2023,  is number 2, after discovering that  a N2B allocation sustained  by the two  aviation committees of  the senate, and the House,  had been shredded to a mere  N500M wondering  that: “a region that hardly receives a fair share of the national patrimony, the little that came it’s way could be reduced as to make nonsense of the entire budget for the Enugu Airport Terminal.”

    Rather than own up to his role in this thoroughly ungamely act, but to cover it instead, a clever Ekweremadu is pleading that the measly N500M their lordships allowed should be “released immediately”, saying through one Uche Anichukwu: “I am happy that the presidency has indicated that he would send a Supplementary Appropriation Bill so by the time we are briefed by the relevant committees, we will work with our colleagues in other zones to ensure adequate provisions for the airport.”

    If only Ekweremadu knows he is about the least wise Igbo!

    It will be nice, if for once, Buhari – loathing, Igbo army of e-rats would now know exactly where to fix their gaze. For additional help, I plead they go read the inaugural speech of Chief John Nwodo, as Chairperson, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, concerning how Igbos are their own worst enemies, who share funds meant for infrastructural development in their region.

    For me, personally, the item that gladdens me the most is this, and not to be misunderstood, I shall quote newspaper reports directly.

    “Abaribe, who is the Chairman, Senate Committee on Power, Steel Development and Mettalurgy, said that a humongous N30B was smuggled into the Power budget “without his committee’s knowledge”. According to him, the N30B was listed for expansion and reinforcement of infrastructure in the distribution companies to reduce stranded firms. The amount, he said, “never passed through the Senate Committee on Power.” Now if a ranking senator of Abaribe’s ilk, and chairman of the Power Committee to boot, can be treated this shabbily, two things become obvious: both Minister Tunde Fashola SAN, and his former cabinet colleague, Dr Kayode Fayemi, could never have been a darling of the vicious small cabal manipulating and orchestrating the scientific padding of the national budget. How Fayemi fought back an attempt to use his then ministry’s budget to launder 500Million dollars even after they had earlier appropriated N2B in the 2017 budget for concessioning feasibility studies, readily comes to mind. And what spurious lies didn’t they tell against him?

    It is fascinating that, for once, critical segments of the Nigerian society are getting to know what manner of people they call honourables, and distinguished. It is great to know that the Nigerian Labour Congress, The Ijaw Youth Congress, the ever perspicacious Nigerian Manufacturers Association, would soon be joined by bodies like NANS and others to deprecate these heinous actions of people we, no doubt, wrongly dashed our mandate.

    But if anything fascinates me the most, it is the decision of President Muhammadu Buhari to come forward to make a full disclosure to Nigerians. What name has this man of integrity not been called by some myopic,  ethnicity and religion – clutching bigots, even if the latter worked in cahoots with a President Goodluck Jonathan during whose administration Nigeria was nearly stolen off the face of the earth.

    The president bared it all: how a small crowd of  less than 500, very selfish Nigerians, misused their office, cutting  off 4,700 people – impacting projects amounting to N347B from what he proposed,  to accommodate 6,403 of their own , at a cost of N578B which their constituents know they ALL come round to corner, where executed, at all.

    Among the president’s projects substituted for things like bore holes and sewing machines are: Lagos – Ibadan Expressway, the East-West road which PDP turned go a sink hole in its 16 years, the Enugu Airport, Itakpe – Ajaokuta road, Mass transit and major arterial road in the FCT where they all own eye popping mansions, as well as  funds for  the very sensitive and crucially important Maritime University in the Niger- Delta area where the funds they’ve turned to the object of their infatuation comes from.

    In conclusion, no less fascinating, indeed  more invigorating, is President Buhari’s decision not to engage in any discussions with the nPDP people whose members, incidentally, constitute the leadership of the National Assembly, and who, for a very long time, you could not distinguish from PDP members given their iron cast opposition to anything coming from the executive branch.

    You would most probably think the  president was reading this column in which, on Sunday, 13 May 2018, I wrote as follows: “it is, however, absolutely  nauseating, if not puke inducing, that it is the nPDP, which has constituted the greatest  enemy to Buhari’s government,  especially at the National Assembly, that would now come out, sabre rattling, and giving ultimatum. Were I President Buhari, I would,  even at the expense  of losing the forthcoming election, which God forbid,  tell them to just go do their very worst. Let them head back to their vomit, the  PDP, and let Nigerians decide as to whether they want their very lives stolen all over again.”

  • That June 12 recognition may not be a hollow ritual

    Beyond the wildest imagination of Nigerians, sans the microscopic few that might have been privy to it, President Muhammadu Buhari, a general of the Nigerian army who, though retired,  still falls within that narcissistic military that  guillotined the historic June 12,  1993 election, as well as a redoubtable, and leading member of the June 12 – loathing Fulani race,  on 6 June, 2018, rose far higher than his 6 foot plus frame, and proclaimed an executive order, recognising both the  election, and  the winner, Chief  MKO Abiola, who was conferred with the highest honour in the land, GCFR, in a bold attempt to put a closure to a very pernicious phase of our country’s history.

    Much has been written about June 12, but hardly would the relevance, and coverage of any national event, before or after that of 6 June, 2018, ever reach that crescendo.

    But lest we get lost in the euphoria of the moment, it is time to let the president understand, and appreciate that, truth be told, rather than June 12 being the closure, it is, indeed, the very beginning of telling truth to ourselves; the starting point of very sincerely, and vigorously, confronting the demons that have been tearing into our whole being. The first of these should be the realisation that the Nigeria of today is nowhere near a federation, and that when we so petulantly describe it, we are repeating a similar lie like the one the extant Nigerian constitution tells against itself when it arrogates its birth to a chimeric: ‘we the people”.

    The question then arises, what is a federation? To answer this million naira question, I will, very respectfully, press my two- time teacher, Professor (Senator) Banji Akintoye, into service.

    Writing, mutatis mutandis, on the topic: What is restructuring, in his column in The Nation of 6 January, 2018, the world reputed historian, and statesman, who we shall quote at great length, opined:

    “The basic idea of a federation is that the various distinct parts of a country (especially a country comprising different ethnic nations) should be made a federating unit (or state). Each state should have the constitutional power to manage its unique problems and concerns, to develop its own resources for its people, to manage its own security, and to make its own kind of contributions to the well-being of the whole country. The central entity (or federal government) should manage common matters like the defence of the country, the relationship of the country with the rest of the world (or international relations), the country’s currency, the relations between the states of the country, and general principles like defence of human rights. That, in his words, was essentially, the federal arrangement which Nigeria’s founding fathers agreed upon in the 1950s.”

    Continuing, he wrote:

    “But, since independence, our leading politicians, and our military leaders have gradually destroyed this structure and replaced it with a structure in which the federal government is the controller of virtually all power and all resources as well as the power to develop all resources, and in which the states have no control over their resources and must depend on federal allocations of funds to exist at all”.” The federal government is (therefore) over-burdened, controls too much money, has become egregiously inefficient and corrupt and, essentially, is destroying Nigeria because the states have become impotent, cannot develop their resources, cannot fight poverty in their domains, and cannot make their contributions to the progress and prosperity of Nigeria. The cumulative effect of all these, he concluded,  is that Nigeria and Nigerians have become horribly poor, most public facilities (roads, electricity, water installations, public administration, etc.) have degraded, and are not working with the result  that most of our  youths are unemployed and hopeless. Inter – ethnic relations has degenerated into enmity and hostility. Crimes have made life very unsafe all over Nigeria. So bad have things become that some sections are asking to secede”.

    Obviously, the patriot who saw the inescapable necessity of revisiting, and righting, the historic wrong of the annulment  of June 12, that is, President Buhari,  just like the Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, said of the obvious contradiction in the same person honouring Abiola and praising Abacha, can certainly not be found endorsing, or encouraging,  the continuation of a status quo that eventuated all the negative consequences of Nigeria not being a proper, well defined federation of equal parts.

    Fortunately, President Buhari is not being called upon here to do the impossible, or re-invent the wheel.  His party, the APC, has effectively done that for him by its setting up of the El Rufai Committee on Power Devolution, a subject to which the party devoted a considerable part of its manifesto. As captured by The Guardian of 26 January, 2018, the committee:”The committee recommended that states should have considerable control on solid and oil resources in their domains, subject to the approval of the National Assembly. It called for policing to be moved to the concurrent list, enabling the creation of state police alongside a federal force with specified areas of jurisdiction. It also proposed more revenue for states and reduction of federal share of revenue.

    More importantly, it recommends that: “All minerals, including oil and gas that are onshore, will be vested in the states of the federation. “Minerals, oil, anything in the land, belongs to those that own the land, which is the state governments, adding this clincher: “We think the time has come to make this bold step and move away from over-centralisation of mineral resources.

    “There would be certain constitutional amendments. The Petroleum Act needs to be amended, so that states can issue oil-mining licences. The Nigeria Minerals and Mining Act needs to be amended, to give states the power to do this. The Land Use Act will also need to be amended, to recognise the provisions in the Minerals and Mining Act. The Petroleum Profit Act 2007 will need to be amended. And we have drafted all the bills to give effect to these.”

    Ensuring that power devolution is achieved before the presidential elections scheduled for February, 2019, is therefore, the irreducible, the absolute minimum, President Buhari , and the APC,  must see through for the historic accomplishments of 6 June, 2018 not only  to earn their place in history,  but to launch Nigeria on the path of peace, and rapid social and economic development.

    It is the silver bullet for 4 MORE YEARS of Mr INTEGRITY in office as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria till 2023.

    May the good Lord guide President Buhari aright.

     

     

  • This dysfunctional National Assembly

    “Senate President Bukola Saraki has no sterner critic than this column, right from when he was Governor of Kwara State. It has remarked his overweening sense of entitlement, his predilection for cutting corners, his disdain for rules and process, and his serial disregard of the precept of noblesse oblige” – Emeritus Professor Olatunji Dare.

    And on the matter of the moment, Gbenga Komolafe writes: So people can’t see the direct causal link between Governor Sheriff arming Yusuff for political thuggery and the eventual emergence of Boko Haram, the arming of Asari Dokubo and co by Governor Odili and the eventual emergence of armed insurrection in the Niger Delta, the arming of thugs by the ‘Garrison commander’ in Ibadan and the proliferation of armed robbery in the same city? If it is true that Saraki armed the Offa robbers and used them for political thuggery, Saraki and co are vicariously liable for what those guys used the firearms given to them for. Saraki might not have sent them for armed robbery (that is too petty for a well heeled Abuja operator) but he certainly has a case to answer for creating a private army of criminals.”

    Dare, the celebrated journalism professor, has written far longer, and more profoundly than I on, or about, the medical doctor- turned politician, but God knows I have had more than a fair share of the huge interrogation Senate President Bukola Saraki has enjoyed, or endured, since he ventured into partisan politics. On 18 June, 2015,  after he just sold  off his party’s victory, gifting PDP what rightly belonged to the APC, I wrote: “… truth be told, my initial reaction to Bukola Saraki emerging the Senate President was: Yes, if a Tambuwal, why not a Saraki? Nor was that a flight of fancy because I believed, and still do, that he was as qualified as any member to be the Senate President considering his contribution to the emergence of the party.” My position would, however, change when one heard the details of his extreme disloyalty to his party and I am on record as later suggesting that he should have been promptly expelled before he bought off his senate colleagues with his tactical allocation of senate committee membership. The last of my articles about him, and the branch  of government  he has succeeded in  turning  to his personal estate the way senators pander to his every word, was as recent as 29 April, 2018  when I wrote as follows in an article I titled: “THIS  8th NATIONAL ASSEMBLY”:

    “So much has happened in the National Assembly these past two weeks that you are again  reminded that had President Buhari  not invested unbelievable faith in the integrity of  politicians, thereby believing he could work with just about anybody since ‘he was for everybody’ and believed, rather naively though, that everybody was for him, that had  Senator Bukola Saraki not crunched up for hours in the smallest of cars on the National Assembly premises all in a determined effort to  selfishly sell off his party’s victory to the opposition, and had the Oyegun –led NEC of APC  not played sissy, allowing a  man who should have been promptly expelled, to ride roughshod over the party,  the storm in a tea cup presently consuming the national Assembly could never  have happened.  The National Assembly has proved completely rudderless. When its members are not disrespecting the judiciary, ‘tearing to pieces’ the decision of a court of competent jurisdiction which said it has no powers to suspend a member, thereby denying his/her constituents representation in the national assembly  against the provisions of Nigerian constitution, they are sabre rattling, claiming they want to impeach the President”.

    If that was a few weeks ago, they are again back at it, shamelessly turning the very serious matter of impeachment into a veritable tool of blackmail. And what was the casus belli this time around? As has become the norm with Senate President Saraki, his name has come up again in totally odious circumstances with many of the ‘Offa serial murderer/bank robbers,’ giving salacious details of how, since his days as governor of Kwara State which he has also succeeded in turning to a captive state, he has allegedly provided them sophisticated weapons of ‘mass mauling’ and gifting them powerful automobiles to facilitate their nefarious activities.

    Let us capture vividly, how the police put it and all hell was let loose in our senate of unequal members: “the police have invited the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, over the Offa bank robberies of 5 April during which some police men were killed and millions of naira stolen. He was asked to report to the Force Intelligence Response Team Office at Guzape, Abuja, to answer to the allegations reportedly levelled against him by five alleged gang leaders involved in the robberies at First Bank, Guaranty Trust Bank, Ecobank, Zenith, Union Bank and Ibolo Micro-Finance Bank, all in Offa, Kwara State.  According to the police spokesman, the gang leaders namely, Ayoade Akinnibosun, Ibikunle Ogunleye, Adeola Abraham, Salawudeen Azeez, Niyi Ogundiran and some of the other 17 suspects arrested for direct involvement and active participation in the Offa bank robberies admitted, confessed and volunteered statements that they were political thugs of Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and the Governor of Kwara State, Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed, adding that the five gang leaders further confessed that they operate  under the name Youth Liberation Movement aka “Good Boys” and were being provided firearms, money and operational vehicles by the Senate President, Senator Bukola Saraki, as well as Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara State.

    More bewildering, however, was the discovery by the police that one of the lead gangster’s cars – incidentally a gift from the senate president – was allegedly, rapidly withdrawn  to the Kwara State house on the orders of the chief of staff to the state governor and its registration number changed,  to suggest that it was a government  vehicle.

    Ordinarily, one would have expected to see a rattled senate, completely scandalised, and eager to see its number one member, sooner than later, clear his name completely from these horrible allegations.

    But that will never be, the 8th Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria seems to enjoy luxuriating in serial scandals.

    Rather than that, we saw distinguished senators, amongst them many answering questions before anti graft agencies, waxing lyrical, in praise of their president, and, instead of being  sober, feverishly planning to confront  the president who they now claim they want to impeach as if Nigerians would be mere onlookers at such a gory attempt by a people who do nothing more than haul home no less than N14M monthly from the national purse, with hardly anything to show for their usurious life style at the expense of Nigerians, millions of who do not know where the next meal would come from.

    It has since gotten far worse. Like the Billy goat which will never learn, our distinguished national assembly members, this time of the House of Representatives, are already back, as usual, trying to criminalise two of the few, among them, who have the courage to point them in the way of rectitude in what has become a daily diet in their chambers – the threat to impeach President Muhammadu Buhari.

    As is their wont, Nigerians wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they have suspended the two members despite copious court decisions saying they lack the locus to deny Nigerian citizens of parliamentary representation.

    When these legislators look back – and  happily, we shall soon be rid of this 8th assembly – I am sure that not a few of them would come to regret how they completely misused a glorious opportunity to positively impact Nigeria, electing  instead, to be the play thing of an over ambitious member, surrounded by a colony of patronising, highly intimidated’ colleagues, who prefer to serve as armour bearers to Senate President Bukola Saraki, one of who was recently accused of always kneeling down to talk to the numero uno senator.

    Certainly, these times will soon pass.

    It was, however, heartwarming  seeing  the senate trying to rediscover itself as a serious law making branch of government, the way it reacted to President Buhari’s salvaging of the historic June 12 from the wicked embrace of very jealous and discomfited  former senior  state officials who, were they to have nine lives, can never approximate to the winner of that election.

     

  • Ekiti 2014: Of sophists and despots

    When Phil Aragbada, Governor Adekunle Ajasin’s Special Assistant in the ‘70s, a highly regarded journalist, newspaper editor and  retired Bank Executive, wrote the piece below, which was published  here  on  8 June, 2014, appealing to us  Ekitis  to vote Kayode Fayemi because of the innumerable  democracy dividends he  provided in each, and all, of the 131   and towns in the state, as well as the huge quantum of measurable  human development and safety net programmes he established for various segments of the  citizenry,  there was no way he could have known that the sitting President Goodluck Jonathan , who had chosen, most probably without knowing it, to outsource governance to a rash of thieving potentates, had also concluded arrangements to nullify the Ekiti electorate  and, in its  place, deploy his Chief of Army staff, his Ijaw compatriot, Lt Gen Kenneth Minimah , a feckless , weeping General Momoh, a peripatetic Igbo jobber as political contractor, and a coterie of political hangers on – among them two shameless, conniving  ministers of state, to steal the election for then candidate Ayo Fayose of his PDP. 

    However, far from Ekitigate being the reason for this article here today, I am using it as an aide – to  -memory, to remind my Ekiti compatriots of the great strides of governor Kayode Fayemi – as he then was – during his administration. 

    It is reproduced today with an eye to the forthcoming 14 July governorship election at which APC will be presenting two solid, highly experienced candidates, Dr Kayode Fayemi and Chief Bisi Egbeyemi,  as governorship and deputy governorship candidates respectively,  against two politically inexperienced candidates for the PDP.

    Phil,  wrote, as follows:

    A “loving fear”, writes Gunder Anders, is not fear of the dangers that lie immediately ahead but for generations yet unborn. This is what underlies the current political landscape in Ekiti; a panoramic view of the interrelated transactions going on between the different entities across the land of honour which would, ultimately determine the future of the state. The future is a sacred trust held by the present generation. Yet, it is not an abstract concept. Rather, it is determined by the consequences of the decisions a people take in their separate but inclusive inter-relations.

    This poignantly brings to the fore, the forthcoming governorship election in Ekiti which has attracted gladiators at both intra and inter-party levels, thus reflecting the latitude, and, indeed, the beauty of democracy. Democracy, in spite of its attraction and elegance, however, has a major drawback in its systemic sifting process which, if care is not taken, can end up foisting on the people, clowns, spoilers, sophists, urchins, even, an outright criminal.

    The consolation is that politics, like religion, in spite of its tolerance of pretenders and the ignoramus, has a moderating fiat: the Judgement Day. In Matt. 13:24-30, Jesus told his disciples the story of the weeds and the wheat and declared, “let the wheat and weeds grow together until harvest, and at harvest time, I will tell the reapers: gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” Surely, the harvest day for political contest is Election Day. There is no doubt Ekiti people already know the weeds and the wheat and on 21, June 2014, Dr. Kayode Fayemi will be the anointed wheat of the people which the Bible calls the son of the Kingdom.

    Without a doubt, the massive transformation which has manifested in Ekiti since his emergence cannot but palpitate those who have in the past hindered Ekiti development as the natural reaction of evil-minded persons to any form of change, as is currently happening in the state, is to obstruct the path of change. This should be expected as the beneficiaries of the old order and the propagandists of obscene deceit are bound to be scared out of their wits. But man must live with change and those, who throughout history, have wrought changes on their environment despite daunting challenges and excruciating sacrifices have always turned out to be men of destiny.

    There is no doubt that Fayemi is a man who has a date with history. His path in life is strewn with multiple achievements that can only be ignored by incurable pessimists and pernicious scoffers who are incapable of being impressed by any form of success arising from brilliance, courage, resilience, integrity and measurable hard work.  Try not convincing these people as they are already trapped in their closet of pathological ignorance.

    Governor Fayemi, conscious of the groaning pain of the aged due to poverty, commenced a welfare package for senior citizens who have attained the age of sixty-five years. He also introduced free medical care for this category of Ekiti citizens. Despite paucity of funds, Fayemi, critically aware of the place of education in socio-economic development, ensured the complete renovation of all primary and secondary schools in the state, made education free to secondary school level and supplied students with free laptops to enable them connect, that early in life, with technological modernity. The tertiary institutions in Ekiti State were leveraged in the areas of infrastructure and funding to make them meet global standards. The immediate dividend of government’s investments in education is the ground-breaking 2012/2013 Bar results of Ekiti State university students who shone like a thousand stars at the last Law School exams.

    Fayemi’s empathy for the grassroots is palpable. His proximity to the rural dwellers is evinced by his novel State Assisted Community Projects Initiative acronym-ed SACPI in contradistinction to one of his opponent’s ‘Boli and guguru’ –roasted plantain and groundnut eating shenanigans, which has resulted in sundry socio-economic developments all over the state. The beauty of this project lies in the ability of the governor to personally meet community dwellers, feel their pulse and pains and get the state to assist in providing their needs. This evolutionary strategy has resulted in the provision of 1,906 SACPI socio-economic projects in 131 towns and communities, each executed, directly by the beneficiaries.

    Relying on verifiable records the Fayemi administration has not restricted its road revolution to state roads alone. Rather, it took upon itself the burden of rehabilitating some federal roads as a way of minimising the transportation problems in the state. About 1000 kilometres of federal, state and local government roads have been constructed / rehabilitated at the last count.

    For a state that has long suffered from the pangs of industrial aridity, Fayemi’s revitalisation of ailing companies like the Iree Burnt Bricks and the Road Materials Company (ROMACO) which also provides jobs surely deserves accolades and a guaranteed cheque of continuity. Of course, the impetus injected into the tourism sector through massive investments in various tourist centres, especially the now world-class Ikogosi Tourist Resort has tremendously expanded the economic base of the state. The youth volunteer scheme has also provided a source of livelihood and hope for thousands of young men and women. This is besides the YCAD programme which has witnessed a trained Medical Doctor veer into commercial agriculture as one of thousands of young men and women enlisted in the programme.

    The performance of this human Trojan has not gone unnoticed by international bodies as epitomised by the following:

    • The Human Development Report (2012) rated Ekiti State as the most conducive environment to live for long and healthy living with a life expectancy average of 55 years (10 years above the national average).
    • The state has the lowest infant and maternal mortality rate in Nigeria.
    • It has the lowest HIV and AIDS prevalence in the country.
    • It has the lowest mother-to-child transmission of HIV and AIDs in the country just as it boasts
    • The least out-of-school children (2%) in the country.

    As the saying goes, you do not change a winning team; indeed, no sane people will dissolve a winning team. Ekiti can, therefore, not be enticed with juvenile braggadocio, illiterate pomposity, and some funny appeal to phony populism. Fayemi whose integrity has qualified him as the blue chip asset to our state needs another term. A people who once experienced a culture of economic haemorrhage and ‘janjaweed’ rule in the hands of a despot and kleptomaniac will not dare attempt a repeat.

    A shining star in the firmament, Fayemi remains a moral tone of his generation. A man of credible pedigree, he would always stand on the side of the truth even at a cost to his political popularity. A typical example was his plea to the teachers a few years ago to pay their 27.5% professional allowance as soon as the state finances improve. This, he has since done, thus bringing to a happy end, the festering acrimony between the state NUT and the government. This has again confirmed him as a promise keeper, thus re-affirming the people’s sobriquet for him: O WI BEE, SE BEE.

    Ekiti must stand up and be counted. A vote for the APC is a vote for continuity. A vote for an assured future for our children; even for generations yet unborn. A vote for tranquility. A vote for economic leverage and, a vote for everything that is good for humankind. Come Saturday, 21 June, 2014, the good people of Ekiti must troop out, refuse to be intimidated by the federal police and army lock down  (as eventually happened) and vote Kayode Fayemi overwhelmingly. Enemies of the people must be permanently shamed.