The meaning of the phrase in the English language is clear and straightforward: “peeling the onion” idiomatically means achieving understanding of a person, an event or a dilemma by peeling the layer upon layer of matter or suggestion that covers her, him or it. Applied to the endlessly controversial, malefic and maverick Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti state, the phrase takes on an additional complication, as if the inherent challenge of the phrase was not enough. A case in point is the recent bizarre incident of Fayose’s weeping, openly and helplessly, consequent on an alleged severe beating that he had received from elements of the Nigerian Police. That the YouTube video and audio that captured the incident has gone widely viral has not helped one bit. But regardless of this fact, I suggest that as much as possible, we must try to get as full and as helpful an understanding of the incident as possible. As we shall see, this is easier said than done.
First of all, a quick summary of the incident would be helpful for our discussion of it, especially for readers that have neither heard of it nor seen its graphic YouTube presentation on the Internet. In one clip, we see Fayose falling to the ground at a political rally, with the helping hands of scores of his supporters preventing him from hitting the ground and also propping up his almost limp body. A barely audible sound track of somebody weeping is superimposed on the visual image; this is presumably Fayose himself in his hour of humiliation – how are the mighty fallen!
In another clip, the most dramatic of all the clips, Fayose has a brace holding up his head from the chin up to the crown of his head, as if without the brace, his broken, violated neck would collapse with the weight of his head on it. And it is this same clip in which Fayose looses it completely and breaks into tears, all the time whimpering that that he had been beaten by some policemen, that he no longer could hold up his head on his shoulders; that if he died, the Inspector General of the Nigerian Police Force should be held responsible and accountable for his death. The clip ends with Fayose turning his back to the cameras, the peals of weeping welling up as he is led away by his seemingly shell-shocked supporters. How, indeed, are the mighty fallen!
I admit that I have been deliberate in providing as detailed and as graphic a profile of this incident as possible. I even admit that the barely suppressed tone of sneering voyeurism in the profile is there because I wanted it to be there. I have my reason for these and that reason is the fact that the phenomenon of extremely brutal assaults by members of the security forces on both politicians and members of the electorate in general is, sadly, a very commonplace experience in our country. Some commentators, mostly composed of supporters of the APC, have stated that either Fayose was not beaten at all or, if he was beaten, it couldn’t have been as bad as he and his supporters have alleged it to be. I differ completely from such commentators. As a Yoruba saying puts it, there is no shortage of dead souls in the world of the hereafter: there is no scarcity of the phenomenon revealed by and in these recent Fayose’s day of physical bruising and humiliation at the hands of policemen and other members of our state security forces and agencies. This is one layer of the onion of this event: it is so common, so banal a phenomenon in our country, especially during electioneering campaigns, that it has become, sadly and even tragically, almost completely unremarkable.
But then, thereafter arises the fact that Ayodele Fayose has himself been the notorious, merciless and cynical perpetrator of this same phenomenon of the gross misuse and abuse of the personnel and instruments of coercion and violence of the state against political opponents. Those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword? Yes and no! Yes – because the party in power at the center, the politicians who achieve or wrest control of the federal government from their opponents gain the upper hand in this neo-feudal conception and practice of power and governance in our country. And to date, they have never, never been restrained or principled in their use of the “federal might” against their opponents. This is why they are completely correct, the commentators that have drawn our attention to the fact that when Fayose’s party, the PDP, controlled this “federal might”, no leader or chieftain of the party used it as openly and as wantonly as Ayodele Fayose. In this respect, who does not remember the mega-scandal of Ekitigate of 2014 that was indeed captured and preserved for posterity by the same technology of social that is currently showing the same Fayose weeping and complaining bitterly? To the shock created by that Ekitigate clips on YouTube, Fayose delivered an additional shock by admitting that it was he, Ayodele Fayose, the son of his father and mother, that was seen and heard in the clips!
But no, nobody, least of all the society and the nation at large, can afford to accept the moral and even practical implications of “live by the sword, die by the sword”. This particular layer of the onion that we are peeling in this essay may seem the most elusive or unrealistic, but only on the surface. Not far below the surface, there is the fact that when the security forces and personnel of any nation can be used – indeed are routinely and illegally used – against absolutely anyone that is deemed to be an “enemy” of the politicians in power, a cycle of illegal, gratuitous and neo-feudal destructiveness enters into the bloodstream of the nation. I am striving to put this idea into language and words that are lucid and uncomplicated. And I think of Ayodele Fayose in the year 2014, during the Ekitigate mega-scandal: he apparently believed then that his party’s control of the “federal might” would last for a long, long time, so long, in fact, that one day, he, Fayose, would be at the helm of the affairs of the nation. But the wheel, the cycle has turned full circle in the year 2018 – and Fayose gets a dose of the “medicine” that he had given to his opponents. But the wheels will keep turning and if it is not Fayose himself personally, who can say with absolute certainty that those who are giving the “medicine’ now will not themselves one day in the future be forced to drink the poison?
One more layer of the onion whose layers we are peeling in our discussion and we can bring this piece to a close. What does this layer reveal? Well, it reveals that the coercive, security forces and personnel of any nation, when they are turned into mere “militias” of those in power become so unprofessional, so compromised that they are of little or no effectiveness to the legal, legitimate and constructive uses of the state apparatus of power. Permit me to carefully outline this layer of our onion.
Speaking only for myself, I have little doubt that the beating and humiliation of Fayose this past week had a lot to do with Fayose’s widely known and much discussed attacks on Buhari and members of his party and administration for their total ineffectiveness in stopping or even curbing the mass killings of farmers and their communities by rampaging bands of herdsmen. Fayose has been completely unrestrained in these attacks, mixing genuine observations with unprintable insults and execrations directed personally at Buhari himself. And he has gone even further than verbal attacks to organizing and parading his own “security apparatus” in Ekiti State for dealing with the real and threatened menace of the killer herdsmen, this being the guild of traditional hunters with their “shakabula” (Dane guns), machetes and bows and arrows, together with charms and amulets. “Shakabula” against the AK-47 and AK-49 of the herdsmen? Charms and amulets against 21st century munitions? Yes, replied Fayose, just watch me! Well, I think Buhari, or someone acting for him, has now given his response to Fayose and his “security apparatus” of the valiant but hopelessly outgunned traditional hunters: let us see them protect you from us, Mr. Governor, protect you from our police, from the security and coercive forces of the nation under our control.
What gives me this idea, this feeling that Buhari and his administration deliberately wanted to physically and psychologically rubbish, humiliate and demoralize Fayose for his endless biting verbal attacks on the president is the probability that Fayose may have completely fallen for it! A man who had talked tough, a “Jagunlabi” who had proclaimed to Buhari and the killer herdsmen to come and try him at Ekiti if their fathers and their mothers were their true parents! It seems unbelievable that such a man could be reduced to the weeping and whimpering dotard that one can see in those YouTube clips that have gone viral on the Internet.
Some of Fayose’s supporters and apologists have suggested that the weeping, the whimpering and the gnashing of teeth of their hero are really a composite ploy to garner the sympathy of the Ekiti electorate just days to the governorship elections. This Fayose bandwagon is suggesting that the tears are crocodile tears and the crying a calculated charade. I disagree completely with this view, this proposition. Or, if it is correct, it is only partially correct, corresponding to that aspect of Fayose’s personality and public persona that is filled with bravura self-theatricalization. More to the point, in my view, is the probability that Fayose was completely unprepared for the public beating that was meted to him, was unprepared for the humiliation that Buhari’s Aso Rock badly wanted to mete out to him as an object lesson for him and others like him. By the time that this piece is published on Sunday, July 15, 2018, the results of the elections would have been proclaimed and we would have known, one way or another, whether in spite of his humiliation, Fayose’s bandwagon still has control of Ekiti State. Highly unlikely, but who knows, it may happen – though I hope not. In 2014, I wanted Dr. Fayemi to win. This time around, I say a pox on both of their houses, the APC and the PDP!
Our last words must go to Buhari and the APC. So what if you have given Fayose a payback for Ekitigate 2014? So what if you have let Fayose and the whole country know that “shakabula” and charms do not constitute a match for the arms and ammunition available to policemen, soldiers and security personnel controlled by you as the incumbent ruling power at the center? Where does that leave the security of life, limb and possessions of Nigerians in their tens of millions? Does the “object lesson” you have so soundly meted to Fayose absolve you, Mr. President, of the creeping fear and the corrosive demoralization that most Nigerians feel today about the incapacity of yourself and your administration to deal with spiraling cycles of killings in many parts of the country?
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu