Ayo Fayose’s second coming as Governor of Ekiti State is the stuff of fairy tales.
His first coming, marked by ceaseless tumult and high scandal, ended in impeachment and disgrace half-way into a four-year term. It seemed then, for all practical purposes, that he was finished politically, his future behind him.
When he ran for Senate and was decisively rejected by the voters, nobody but Fayose himself could have wagered that, some three years down the line, he would secure the PDP’s ticket, despite an EFCC indictment for sleaze on a scale almost beyond belief, and two murder raps, on the way to a grand political resurrection that would take him back to the Governor’s Lodge in Ado-Ekiti.
Such instances of redemption are rare in public life. A new, improved Fayose was widely expected to embrace it as an opportunity to chart a new trajectory, and to make up for the huge deficits in character and achievement and elementary decency that had vitiated his first coming.
But Fayose, being Fayose, is throwing the opportunity away with both hands. Well before it was time for him to take charge, he had already started stirring things up. He sought at every opportunity to denigrate the person and office of the incumbent, Dr Kayode Fayemi, and his impressive portfolio of achievements with an incendiary brew of falsehoods, half-truths and innuendo.
He countermanded Dr Fayemi, urging the public to disobey a curfew that had been imposed in the interest of public safety. He led his band of supporters to abort hearings in a petition challenging his eligibility to run for governor. In the process, they beat up officers of the court and shredded a judge’s robes, as well as court documents.
His inaugural address has, if anything, confirmed the worst fears of those who set a great store by due process and decorum in public life.
The occasion called for reaching out to all the people of Ekiti, supporters and opponents — especially opponents, assuring them that the race was over and that it was time to come together. It was certainly the moment to deploy language and ceremony and symbol to summon the polity to common purpose.
Instead, Fayose launched into triumphalism of the coarsest kind, baiting and berating his political opponents and vowing to run them not just out of Ekiti but out of the entire Yoruba land. He reminded his audience that he was the first son of Ekiti to serve as state governor twice, and the first Nigerian to defeat two incumbents.
Remarkable feats, to be sure. But to what purpose?
Instead of asking the public he had so grievously wronged during his first coming to forgive him his transgressions, he said he had “forgiven” the public for his impeachment and disgrace. But was it not his blazing lawless conduct and lack of probity that led to his downfall?
Of what use, he said, were good roads to people who had no cars and no food? He was going to cater to the infrastructure of the stomach. To the vehement cheering of the crowd, he announced that he was already breeding their Christmas chicken, and that there would be plenty of rice to go with it.
His predecessor and his team could take their urbaneness and all that came with it to “their master” in Lagos. He would continue, as of old, to eat in the roadside and makeshift stalls that his favourite people patronise, and would continue to “put something down” at the end of his visits (translation: tips large enough to pay for the entire stuff on offer). And he would continue to partake of their medicinal concoctions.
Fayose had conveniently forgotten that, in his first coming, he had shunned motor cars even where there were passable roads and had chosen instead to criss-cross Ekiti’s compact land mass in a helicopter. He had forgotten also the “integrated poultry project” on which he wasted a colossal amount of public money without producing a single egg.
Why is he so obsessed with poultry anyway? Is that the limit of his imagination?
In the manner of a conjurer or a Pentecostal preacher with an eye on the bottom line, he decreed prosperity and peace and happiness and jobs and every good thing imaginable unto the state, as if governance were a matter of just willing things into existence.
The opposition APC, he said, bore full responsibility for the fracas in the precincts of the Ado-Ekiti High Court in the run-up to the inauguration. Desperate to block his taking office, it had bribed some judges to pervert the course of justice. The appropriate authorities were looking into the matter, and those judges who had compromised their oath of office — one of them was appropriately on hand to swear him in — would face appropriate sanctions.
In the meantime, he was going to build a judiciary in Ekiti that was second to none.
And, yes, he was going to see to it that a “military formation” was set up in Ekiti. It was not clear whether he was going to pursue the project on his own, or invite the federal government, the agent of the ruling PDP, to establish a garrison in Ekiti.
Not an industrial venture, not an undertaking that would pivot on the superior educational accomplishments of the residents, but a military formation.
Like a person possessed, he has been issuing diktats abolishing, dissolving, rescinding, or suspending one thing or another, all in a bid to drive it home that a new sheriff was in town.
As speeches go, in all my adult life, I have never heard anything more divisive even in Nigeria. About the only portion of Fayose’s peroration that almost sounded conciliatory and statesman-like was where he called for a moment of silence in remembrance of those killed in election violence. But before you could accuse him of high-mindedness, he made it clear that the gesture extended only to his supporters.
In practically every respect, he was serving notice that he had come, not to be governor for all of Ekiti but governor to his supporters and a scourge to his opponents, real or perceived. He seems not to realise that his opponents are also bona fide residents of Ekiti and citizens of Nigeria, and that the Constitution enjoins him to accord them equal treatment.
Where Fayose’s inaugural address was not divisive, it read like a passage from the diary of a megalomaniac.
All in all, it was a disastrous beginning. His first coming was decidedly a farce, riddled with sophomoric stunts, like renting hens to showcase an integrated poultry project that never got off the drawing board.
His second coming has already taken on the contours of a tragedy.
