It is well known that Yoruba have a way with words and axioms. If proverbs were the palm oil with which Igbo eat roasted yam; words would be akin to efo-riro with which Yoruba demolish pounded yam. Eforiro being that special vegetable soup that is dense as a thicket for the sheer assortment of rare condiments it is garnished with.
But before your throat begins to suffer from salivation, Hardball is not about to introduce you to a new eateries to surpass all eateries, no. The issue at hand is about inanities in some levels of governance which have reached such a crescendo that they are now at cross purpose with mundanities.
And it brings to mind Yoruba description of such actions and their purveyors. Some of such words deployed to describe such acts of foolishness include: kati-kati, rede-rede, woro-woro, kobo-kobo, boto-boto, and so on. And the purveyors of such actions are described as oni woro-woro, or oni kati-kati, for instance.
Now that we have found our locus, so to speak, Hardball is worried about the recent announcement coming out from Ekiti State, Governor Ayo Fayose country. It is the Governor himself, notorious for his stomach infrastructure folly, who has struck again; impinging on our collective psyche.
This time he has devised a grand plan to dress up about 10,000 young children this Christmas. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine trailers- load of cheap, mass produced China ersatz cotton dresses or ankara and cheap crayon apparels. The rejects and giveaways from flea markets of the West would soon be shipped in (if they are not in already).
Now you may be wondering: haven’t we lived with discarded, refugee apparels on these shores over the ages; what’s the fuzz now? But when such dirty and despicable preoccupation becomes state government’s multi-billion project, then there is cause for worry.
Worse still, when these cheap giveaways sourced from the garbage sites of well-off countries are passed off as costing government huge sums in foreign exchange, then there is trouble. When the governor goes on air to announce this tokenistic folly as some kind of official charity, then we can firmly say inanity has collided with mundanity.
And this is exactly what has happened. The ruling party has described critics of this brain wave as “anti-people, myopic and unfriendly.” The governor’s party describes it “as a mark of showing Ekiti children love to partake in the sharing of the state’s wealth.”
The PDP states further that it’s the governor’s gesture of love which is unprecedented in the history of the state. This is one of the ways to prove that he is the man of the people…”
As PDP celebrates this emptiness of an infantile kind, it would be considered official homicide each old pensioner who dies of hunger or frustration in Ekiti State as a result of non-payment of entitlements.