Tag: Fayose

FOR in both. The Director of Media and Information Technology of the Buhari Support Organisation, Dr Chidia Maduekwe, has described Governor Fayose of Ekiti State as suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder for stalking the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari. He may be right. However, most of us know that the Ekiti governor is definitely not acting normal in his obsession with Gen Buhari. He was elected to govern Ekiti, but he has forsaken that responsibility and taken on a more aggressive role in the President Goodluck Jonathan reelection campaign suitable to his conflicting personality and pugnacious background. While his paranoia is obvious to everyone, he however thinks he is engaged in a patriotic albeit quixotic duty to save Nigeria from the imminent election of someone he sees as old, unsuitable and infirm.

Last week, he took out costly newspaper front page advertisements in some newspapers to denounce the general and his handlers for misleading the public in respect of the setting of a supposedly foreign interview. In addition, he travelled to Abuja where he believed the interview was done, took a suite in the offending hotel, Transcorp Hilton, and declaimed to reporters upon what he thought was the worst campaign forgery of the decade perpetrated by the Buhari Campaign Organisation. I have read the captions of the interview photographs, and it is clear the impression was created that the interview was held abroad. The Buhari team has yet to explain where the interview was conducted, or whether the caption was a mix-up, or perhaps, as many think, it is unnecessary to offer any explanation.

But what is even more germane is Mr Fayose himself, who increasingly and frenziedly behaves quite like someone impelled by forces beyond his control. The Ekiti governor has taken liberty with everything, and will yet behave more irresponsibly in the weeks to come, but who paid for his trip to Abuja to debunk the Buhari interview location? Who paid for the Hilton suite he took to engage his melodramatic refutations? And even more ominously, who is paying for his multi-million naira newspaper front page advertisements, all of which have whooped crazily against Gen Buhari’s candidature or against former president Olusegun Obasanjo?

Mr Fayose is a frantic man, and he obviously has all the time in the world to engage his natural tomfooleries. But his obsession with Gen Buhari, particularly the APC candidate’s health status, is now evidently madness. If his new crusading pastimes tell a lot about his disconnected personality, which has not changed for the better as he tried to portray during his own governorship campaign, what do his antics tell of the judgement of his compatriots who supposedly elected him into office, or of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, President Jonathan, on whose behalf he has elaborated his sickening chicaneries?

Last week, Mr Fayose tried to impress a section of Nigeria’s superstitious electorate with his self-proclaimed clairvoyant gifts by suggesting that he knew who would win the presidential poll. “Mark my words,” he said in his usual bizarre and irreverent manner, “Buhari will not win the poll.” Even if he was not spiritually inspired, it is not expected that he would predict President Jonathan’s defeat. Having sacked his state legislature, concocted a new lawmaking apparatus, inoculated the state judiciary, and browbeaten political parties in the state, Mr Fayose doubtless sees himself in the megalomaniacal mould of a Middle Age potentate.

As long as President Jonathan remains in office, there will be no one to moderate the temper of Mr Fayose, or fumigate his insane eruptions. Indeed, we would get for the price of one, two monarchs with the fanatical instincts of destroyers. Like the president who has subordinated state institutions to his party’s whims, Mr Fayose will be his own police, army, judiciary and legislature. He is young and irreverent, but he will do everything in his power to pollute the little positive uses youth and irreverence sometimes lead a person to put his personal endowments. And given his energy and boisterousness, the Ekiti governor will either end in jail or rot in a sanatorium. His unique displays and endowments make any other outcome impossible.

Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose has said he has nothing personal against the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Gen Muhammadu Buhari.

The governor, who spoke yesterday through a statement by his Chief Press Secretary, Idowu Adelusi, said he does not wish Buhari dead as widely believed in many quarters but maintained that the APC candidate is too old to govern Nigeria.

He said his experience as chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Ad Hoc Committee, which shopped for a presidential candidate in the run-up to the 2007 presidential election, informed his opposition to Buhari’s candidature.

Fayose said his committee did not recommend the late President Umaru Yar’ Adua, whom he said initially, rejected the offer before he (Yar’Adua) was allegedly imposed by former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

The governor said he owed no one any apology and accused APC leaders of placing personal interests above national interests.

Going down memory lane on how the late Yar’Adua was preferred by Obasanjo, Fayose said he did not want the events that culminated in the PDP presidential primary in December 2006 to be re-enacted in 2015.

His words: “I remember then as the ad hoc committee chairman, a crop of suitable, brilliant, healthy and competent northern politicians in the PDP were shortlisted by me for Obasanjo to pick from, but he overruled the list and asked me to contact the late Umaru Musa Yar’ Adua because he preferred him.

“In fairness to the late president, he objected on health ground, but Obasanjo insisted that he must be the president.

“I am not against the North, rather if Obasanjo had picked from the list of names submitted by my committee to him, certainly, a northerner, replacing Obasanjo would have ruled this country till 2015. As an insider who saw everything and who again has noticed the repeat of the episode of 2006, I must talk.

“There is nothing bad in allowing President Goodluck Jonathan from the South to complete the two terms he is allowed constitutionally and in 2019, a real candidate from the North, not the one manipulated by the Southwest APC, will emerge to take over.

“That 2006 scenario is again being re-enacted with Obasanjo and APC leaders branding General Buhari to be the president.

“I do not wish Gen Buhari dead, but the fact remains that he is too old to govern a complex country like Nigeria and we don’t want a president who will govern by proxy.”

Accusing the APC of hypocrisy, Fayose wondered why Buhari could not appear at the APC organised rally in London if indeed he was not hospitalised.

He said the much-talked about Chatham House lecture was a face-saving device to cover the true position of Buhari’s health.