Tag: Melaye

DEPENDING on which part of the divide the hypothetical voter stands, there were many upsets in the last National Assembly poll held simultaneously with the presidential election on Saturday.

Oyo State governor Abiola Ajimobi fell to defeat probably by dint of his political longevity and his controversial Ibadan politics. He lost the senatorial contest to represent Oyo South. Senate President Bukola Saraki got entangled in his own unending political rigmarole, his impatience wreaking havoc on his political obsessions and fantasies. He lost his Kwara Central senatorial seat by an embarrassingly wide margin. Former Akwa Ibom governor Godswill Akpabio also came to grief in his ultimately doomed quest to return to the Senate from his Akwa Ibom North-West constituency. The only politician the South-South has produced who can talk a waterfall virtually, it seemed, talked himself to political death. But Imo State governor Rochas Okorocha, by dint of his levity, won a gruesome and tentative victory to represent Imo West in the Senate, with the returning officer in that poll alleging that he announced the governor’s controversial victory under duress.
However, far from the madding political crowd in the South, the pompous and witless Dino Melaye won his re-election to the Senate as his Kogi West constituency conflated the election with the state governor’s oppressive and unintelligent approach to governance and politics. It was hardly because of anything the senator did; his constituency simply established an inverse relationship between the comical senator’s victory and Governor Yahaya Bello’s grief. To them, the only way to torment Mr Bello was to ensure he secured no political victory of any kind despite deploying strong-arm tactics against his opponents, as indeed he did in the other two senatorial districts of the state during the same election. Kogi West was eager to be his undertaker, and they wanted to do it with considerable glee.
Before the February 23 polls, most Nigerians were unlikely to understand the incestuous dalliance between Kogi West and the infamous Sen. Melaye. They saw him as pompous, egocentric, greedy, servile and theatrical. There was no iota of seriousness in him, they concluded, and they saw nothing of the nobility they associate with a lawmaker, especially their lawmaker. If any lawmaker was deserving of defeat, why, no one, in their estimation, fit the bill quite like Sen. Melaye. Contradistinctively, however, they only vaguely conceived of the Kogi governor as incompetent or oppressive. But he was at any rate distant in their summation of his person and office. What is more, they did not strangely see Mr Bello as a disgrace to the hallowed office of governor. It was, in essence, more urgent to them to dispense with the senator than to humiliate the governor, for Mr Bello had very expertly hidden his incompetence and lethargy far from the public view in a way Sen. Melaye could not disguise his triviality.
But Kogi West was not taken in by the political laissez-faire that clouded the eyes and occluded the judgements of the rest of Nigeria. Having felt more acutely where the shoe pinched them, and having been shackled and emasculated by the governor’s misrule, Kogi West feared no worse fall than he who is down, even if that fall was inspired by a comical politician, and no worse indignity than to be represented by and associated with a clown, even if Sen. Melaye were to be described as the world’s most ardent comedian. When the time finally came to choose their senator last Saturday, it was not surprising that Kogi West voters were not indecisive at all. Were they wrong to establish a quid pro quo between Sen Melaye and Mr Bello? As a matter of fact, that connection was already unnaturally made when fate brought the clown and the inept together under the same metaphysical auspices, and bonded them in the same time and space.
At this point, or at least by last Saturday, Kogi West emerged, through the Sen. Melaye crucible, as the most discriminating and scrupulous of the three senatorial districts in Kogi State. Of the seven local government areas in the district, six reposed their grudging confidence in the cantankerous senator, showing to the world how adept they were at drawing the line between exemplary public conduct and the tangled issues that bind the bitter governor to the defiant senator. Of course they have never found his buffoonery to be entertaining, considering that as their representative he was exposing them to global ridicule, but their animosity towards Mr Bello was of such severity that they were perfectly willing to renounce their respect and admiration for the senator’s opponent, Smart Adeyemi, himself a former senator. Sen. Adeyemi is a far better person and politician than Sen. Melaye, and his tenure in the Senate was devoid of the scandal and controversies that have dogged the politics of the re-elected senator. But his mere association with Mr Bello was such a burden that Kogi West found it therapeutic to vote against him.
Sen. Melaye is a far worse politician than Sen Adeyemi. While the latter twice genuinely won his seat in the Senate, this is the first time Sen. Melaye would be winning both the primary that made him a standard-bearer and the main election itself. He had previously muscled himself into taking the primaries and the tickets, whether for the House of Representatives seat (2007-2011), where he enjoyed brawling with his colleagues, or the Senate seat where he played the zany to the outgoing Senate President, Dr Saraki. It is an irony that it had to take a hostile political environment and the sledgehammer of both the state government and the law enforcement agencies to enable Sen. Melaye claim his first genuine electoral victory.
Those Nigerians ashamed to contemplate Sen. Melaye’s re-election must console themselves that at least he is not their representative in the Senate. They are left aghast that such an unfit character bestrides the legislature, but his harmless skits and parodies demean the reputation of his constituents in inverse relationship to the wreckage Mr Bello’s quietly turbulent misrule imposes on the indigenes of the state.
Given the chance a second time, and a third, and a fourth, Kogi West would vote Sen. Melaye into the Senate over and over again under a similar political environment, except Mr Bello can find the chutzpah to back him against Sen. Adeyemi. For now, the governor will be spared that act of self-immolation. And the country, especially the Melaye haters, will also be left to chew the cud on the travesty of crowning a clown and letting him loose on the legislature.