No one can sensibly challenge the right and freedom of Ekiti people to vote into office whomsoever they like. Two Saturdays ago, they exercised that right effectively, admirably and remorselessly to enthrone their 2006 reject, Ayodele Fayose. The balloting – not the processes – was done freely, and it largely reflected the will of the people. Many nations and peoples have similarly and lawfully exercised the same right. Germany voted in Hitler in 1933, France first denounced and later embraced De Gaulle; and even more appositely, in 1945, Britain rejected their heroic war leader, Winston Churchill, who had just led them to victory in World War II. Moreover, more than 2000 years ago, Jews also rejected Jesus Christ and preferred that their Roman overlords release the criminal, Barabbas.
In the June 21 poll, Ekiti took a good look at itself in the mirror and didn’t like what it saw. It saw in Kayode Fayemi, the incumbent governor, a reflection of themselves as aloof, inconsiderate, egotistical, elitist, cruel and sanctimonious. Promptly, Ekiti cut its nose to spite its face. I am persuaded they will rue the choice they have so cavalierly made, for they have shown neither the learning nor the strategic reasoning Ekiti needs to engage and project the finer values and virtues of the Southwest, values and virtues they were for a long time the palladium of. It turns out Ekiti is human after all.
After its candidate in the just concluded Ekiti governorship poll gracefully and heroically conceded defeat, and was praised for the unusual gesture, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has unexpectedly announced its readiness to challenge the constitutional breaches that attended the election process. The party identified at least seven of those breaches. Nothing will of course come out of the court case. The petition will neither affect the poll result itself nor make a dent on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) whose adrenaline in the Southwest is surging to a crescendo. Nor, it seems to me, can a court in the land be found to make any philosophical or nuanced constitutional pronouncements on the noticeable breaches. Rather than serve any useful purpose, therefore, the court case may prove futile, even dampen the value of the statesmanlike action of Governor Kayode Fayemi in conceding defeat, and distract from the more cogent discussions of Ekiti’s post-election future and the unsuitability of the PDP candidate in that election, Mr Fayose.
There have been many analyses of what went wrong for the APC in the poll, most of them, save one or two, put squarely at the doorstep of Dr Fayemi. He probably accepts blame with the same aplomb with which he concedes defeat. Idiosyncratically aloof, too cerebral, inflexible, and insufferably apolitical are among the many faults attributed to him. In consequence, his transformation agenda for civil servants, teachers, local governments, and educational sector were said to have cost him thousands of votes and the election. When he conceded defeat and read his statement on television, he appeared shaken, as anyone who has just lost an election would be. But whether he regrets his policies, most of which have borne and are still bearing fruits, is hard to say. We couldn’t tell from his television address or from his melancholic look. He however claimed credit for redefining governance and setting a solid foundation for the state. He hopes posterity will judge him fairly and probably well.
The APC will regard this defeat as a setback both for its political agenda in the Southwest and its national ambition to form the next government at the centre. Indeed, they may fear that the loss of Ekiti could trigger the loss of other APC states in the Southwest. Conversely, the PDP has begun to express the boundless enthusiasm that the winning of Ekiti may lead to the gaining of more states for the PDP in the region. They speak expressly of the vulnerability of Oyo, Osun, Ogun and even Lagos. Indeed, Information minister, Labaran Maku, PDP chieftain Buruji Kashamu, Governor-elect Mr Fayose, President Goodluck Jonathan himself, and other top PDP leaders indicated a few days after the election that the regaining of the Southwest was imminent. How they can hinge such gargantuan ambition on one election is difficult to tell, and especially without a concise programme, manifesto, ideology or even philosophical direction for the present and the future.
Mr Fayose himself, it will be recalled, won the Ekiti election without articulating any programme. He had enough time to do so. That he chose not to present a programme is perhaps a function of his general paralysis and disinterestedness in intellectual exercises, and the plain fact that he is an impulsive and spontaneous politician who lacks both the discipline and the sagacity to form and conform to a systematic body of thoughts. He ran on the basis of appealing to the emotions of frustrated voters, voters long overrated by analysts and politicians alike. He deftly exploited their anger against Dr Fayemi who was accused of a disconnect between himself and the Ekiti people. If Dr Fayemi was accused of hiking school fees, then Mr Fayose, in his sophomoric dualism, would promise to slash them. If Dr Fayemi was accused of eating, then Mr Fayose would starve. If Dr Fayemi acquired knowledge, then Mr Fayose would acquire ignorance, literally and metaphorically. Dr Fayemi’s policy of industrialisation, said Mr Fayose incredulously to cheering Ekiti electorate, was a trap and a fallacy.
Well, from October and for the next four years, Ekiti will be ruled by a man besotted to hunches, plebeian tastes and boyish and proletarian fantasies. After Mr Fayose was announced winner, there was some jubilation. But on the whole, Ekiti seemed transfixed and sobered by their fateful choice, for they know full well that having ordered the crucifixion of Dr Fayemi and asked for the release of Barabbas, the mortification that follows the betrayal of the irrefutable legacies of Ekiti’s proud and learned past is inevitable. The election of Mr Fayose twice in 11 years is already prompting hard discourses about the constituents of Ekiti persona and tradition. Even if they were angered and mystified by things too deep for them to comprehend, which things were enunciated by Dr Fayemi, was it a sufficient reason to embrace the proven tomfooleries of Mr Fayose? If, as Dr Jonathan said of the Ekiti, they had more professors per capita than any other state, could that professorial gravitas have failed to permeate the entire Ekiti society? These and other questions will be answered in the near future, for the state Mr Fayose so spectacularly misgoverned barely eight years ago has morphed so comprehensively under Dr Fayemi that the difference between the two gentlemen could become tragically stark.
Overall, however, the value of the Ekiti election will be felt more by the chastened and chafing APC than even the exultant PDP. The PDP of course hopes that Ekiti will open the door dynamically rather than ideologically to the Southwest. Iyiola Omisore is loosely perambulating in Osun, naturally without a concise programme or vision. And seeing how Mr Fayose returned to office, the PDP is priming Adebayo Alao-Akala for a return to Oyo. He will rely on federal might and the conspiratorial actions of the Minister of State for Defence, Musiliu Obanikoro, and the Minister of Police Affairs, Jelili Adesiyan. It is the future replay of this conspiracy that the APC hopes to prevent by challenging the Ekiti election processes in court. In their first coming, the PDP had no programme or vision for the Southwest. They hope to enact a second coming on the same aversion to programmes, ideas and vision.
The APC on the other hand needed the Ekiti defeat in order to prevent electoral disaster in 2015. Had they won, they would probably have smugly and blithely walked into a trap, if not total disaster, in 2015. Now, I think the party will be better able to gauge the quality and worth of the voters it hopes to convince to abandon their superstitions, prejudices, ignorance and sham reasoning. APC leaders must now look inwards to find the inner strength, resilience and intellectual subtlety needed to face what is certain to become a steamrolling, ungainly and coarse PDP. They must pay closer attention to how the states under their control are governed, find a balance between their vision and mission, and engineer a delicate equilibrium between leading and kowtowing to the electorate. Importantly too, they now more than ever need to reassess their programmes in order to convince themselves that the integrity of those programmes is worth defending, even at the risk of losing an election.
There are moments when I hope that what transpired in Ekiti is that Dr Fayemi knowingly and stoically stuck to the integrity of his programmes even when he knew the pitfalls. But at other times, I fear that he was in fact politically naïve, a feeling underscored by his reported desperation to woo the electorate in the closing weeks of the campaign, when the signal of defeat had broken through his characteristic imperturbability. If, however, he was appalled by the political behaviour of the Ekiti electorate; if he mocked and defied the offensive vacuity of his opponent; if he superiorly refused to engage in the demeaning ritual of seducing voters with the same kind of sorcery Fayose used, then he can in the truest Kiplingian sense say his costly defeat sneers at the cheap victory of his opponent, and that he had become a man in a sea of political and ideational dwarfs.
It is also argued that Dr Fayemi lost as a result of the obtruding politics of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. This position was advanced on television and in newspapers a few days after APC’s Ekiti debacle. But the fact is that Dr Fayemi, knowing the people he governed, and sensing negative campaigns in Ondo and elsewhere, actually distanced himself from Asiwaju Tinubu. But neither his efforts nor that of Bourdillon – mythically so-called – has mitigated the campaigns. The truth is that there is nothing anyone in APC can say, and there is nothing Bourdillon can do, to erase the impression that Asiwaju Tinubu meddles in Southwest states. On the contrary, what APC leaders need to do is fine-tune their programmes, push the Southwest legislative houses closer to civic culture where Houses of Assembly stand up to their governors and offer the checks and balances the region has been famous for even before the signing of the English Magna Carta, and courageously and with equanimous firmness enact such developmental feats that those who now call for paradigm shifts will know that paradigms indeed shifted many years back.
I have always indicated in this place my sympathies for the APC because I shudder to think what four more years of mediocrity and inaction by Dr Jonathan’s government could cause Nigeria. I would therefore advise APC leaders to approach the loss in Ekiti with the same fortitude great leaders faced setbacks. Let them convince themselves and their consciences that their programmes, their humanistic politics, and their vision for the country are impeccable. If they waver, their programmes could become diluted and diffused, and they would be unable to enjoy in the long run the approbation which only iconoclastic posterity can give.
Dr Fayemi himself, notwithstanding his “insufficient politics”, has a great political future ahead. Mr Fayose, who is already thundering boyish vituperations and inflating himself with the vaulting ambition to eradicate APC from the Southwest, can be trusted to make Ekiti sorry to let Dr Fayemi go. And if some opinion leaders in the Southwest, many of them Dr Jonathan’s lapdogs, still see the rapprochement between Southwest politicians and Northern politicians as an unsustainable and unsuitable alliance because of the prejudices and bigotries of the past few decades, then they deserve our pity. If the APC stays the course and holds firm; and if they produce the right candidates for the defining elections of 2015, then notwithstanding the Ekiti setback, a new Nigeria could still emerge, perhaps against the run of play.
