In home movies you find clear depictions of prostitution. A tale of ladies who readily let their guards down for money. As ready soul providers, they scandalously solicit male interests. For them, it is all about the Benjamins – sex-for-money.
As it is with the home movies, so it is in politics, particularly when an election year becons. You find hordes of political prostitutes displaying their sycophancy shamelessly for altruistic reasons. With the 2015 election in the air, the airwaves, newspapers and online media have been annexed by these growing army of political harlots.
Like call girls who stand in the kerbs late in the night mindless of the risks and shame, these political harlots readily throw decency to the dogs to the point of cursing and swearing by their father’s names. All they seek is to be noticed!
In Rivers State, you find the supervising minister of state, Nyesom Nwike, dancing naked on the streets for the presidency so he can be imposed on the Rivers people as governor.
There is the police, surely, a new recruit, whose duty it is to provide security for all irrespective of party affiliations but have since found a veritable new vocation in politics. Now, a deepening shame of the nation, the police clearly relapse into coma until the ‘Oga at the top’ points them to where duty calls and like zombie, off they go, sheepishly.
Prostitutes abound in political parties, whatever name called. It is even worse when there is no culture of internal democracy in such parties. From the All Progressives Congress (APC) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and from the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) to the Labour Party (LP), you find giant posters of political prostitutes noisily living their lives. From strange political bedfellows allying for everything but the interests of the masses, to charlatans displaying their shame mindlessly on the pages of the newspapers as well as on television and radio programmes.
Only recently, former Minister of Transport and former Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly, Honourable Ibrahim Isah Bio, swelled the ranks of charlatans and political prostitutes dusting off their files to jostle for attention. In a widely syndicated interview, I could only but belch hard; going back many times to be sure that I read the lines properly. Like a broken tongue needing severe and firm stitching, the interview suitably qualifies as a gush of greed, unbridled ambition and sugar-coated lies by someone obviously suffering from a failed ambition.
For a young man, who rose from obscurity to becoming a favourite of Kwara political equity, threw up by the same leadership he now seeks to demonise, one would have expected a song of thanksgiving, first to God and second, to those who yielded themselves as human instruments to making him who he is today.
For those who do not know him, Bio’s political fortune changed after he was introduced to Elder Saraki by a member of the Saraki family in the House of Representatives.
I still vividly recall Bio’s turbulent days as Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly. Perhaps, leveraging and riding on the wave of support he enjoyed from former governor Bukola Saraki, who returned him as Speaker after his first term in office ended, Bio evidently turned the heat against his colleagues to the shock of many. Gradually, but steadily, the monster began to manifest in a young man in whose paths, it could be said, the cards fell in pleasant places with danger signs of arrogance and high-handedness following.
Yet Saraki curiously protected him throughout his tenure. It is still so fresh in the minds of political observers of Kwara politics, the humiliation his colleagues who dared and wanted him removed as Speaker suffered in his hands.
For, literarily speaking, the Sarakis gave Bio their shoulders to lean and carry on. It was a show of love that has defied all reasonable logics and yet unmatched till today. This explains why one can only but be amazed that Bio, who, whether in this life or in the next, should be grateful to the Sarakis, should speak ill of Dr Bukola Saraki, in the name of playing politics.
It is on this backdrop that one finds Bio’s comments quite disappointing, yet this is all in tandem with the way of political prostitutes – gross treachery and ingratitude. But whatever Bio wants, conscience and decency demand that no attempt is made to further deface and malign the truth just to score a cheap political point and possibly curry favour from those in whose hands his new fond illusionary ambition of becoming governor of Kwara State lie.
Again, a little background will help here. Bio had a shot at the governorship of Kwara State in 2011 but failed for the same reason that had worked in his favour in the time past. Saraki had explained to him that Kwara Central had had 12 years uninterrupted reign in the Kwara government house, succeeding Kwara North. Kwara South was barely three months at the government during the tenure of Cornelius A. Adebayo. Saraki, it was said, made it clear to Bio that it was the turn of Kwara South to produce the governor in the spirit of equity. So, would Bio want everyone to become enemies of the Sarakis simply because for once, he failed to get what he wanted?
Like he did about the Sarakis, he made an annoying allusion to how in his illusionary world, the Baraje-led faction of the Peoples Democratic Party (nPDP) would not survive. Like all modern day political prostitutes, he also forgot that if, a governor like Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, is such a huge challenge for the party, it would be a willful suicide attempt to dismiss a pack of seven serving governors with a wave of the hand. Indeed, Bio must be living in a dream world.
Come to think of it, Nigerians know what members of the Baraje-led faction of the Peoples Democratic Party (nPDP) want. More than what Bio would want people to believe after going through his interview, the Baraje group like most Nigerians, are opposed to the seemingly enshrined impunity going on in a party that prides itself as Africa’s largest political party.
Only a few days ago, the PDP leadership seemingly condemned to rascality, pooh-poohed an Appeal Court ruling, which returned Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, a former Osun State governor, as the authentic National Secretary of the party, further damaging its already battered image. And, to Bio, this backhand leadership style, which clearly demonstrates crave for the absurd and which the Baraje group seeks to correct, should be tolerated so he can fan and fuel his self-serving political ambition. Nigerians are watching and no matter how badly Bio and his co-travellers in ignominy want the truth twisted, it will surely prevail over falsehood. There is no gain repeating the fact that Tukur is supervising what could best be described as a final interment of internal democracy in the PDP by brooking no opposition and hunting down real and imagined enemies.
Ridiculously, Bio in his interview, laboriously attempted to deface what is common knowledge that the PDP thrives in rascality and has deliberately tried to squash contrary views tending to put it to scrutiny.Whether this is traceable to sycophancy is anybody’s guess, but it is clear that when a man gets what he craves for by living a false life, it will only be a matter of time for his real person to manifest.
This is why like many Baruten youths, one wonders how someone with such a warped understanding of things or who circumvents the truth would be entrusted with the destiny of the peace-loving Kwarans.
•Boro writes from Gurei, Baruten LGA, Kwara State.