In Osun West, the hurly burly is done. The battle is lost and won.
So, you can understand the taunts, from the victorious camp, heckling Governor Rauf Aregbesola to fall on his sword.
Why, even the comatose Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is taking its chances at some political resurrection!
Still, why this emphatic defeat?
For starters, it’s all about pork. Aregbesola paid a hefty price for pressing a pork-starved army into battle. The rebellious, brimming with outrage, simply joined forces with the enemy. The loyal, but demotivated, just rolled over to be slaughtered. No marks for guessing right: it was a rout.
Then, the explosive question of salaries. A piqued body of civil servants roared its anger over “half-salary”.
The PDP opposition, like the tribunes in Shakespeare’s tragic play Coriolanus, goaded them against the Aregbesola order. “Half-salary, half-vote!” mocked the victorious shriek.
But has Osun West taken a wiser decision than the old Roman rabble of Coriolanus? That is doubtful.
After the malevolent tribunes baited them to shoo off Coriolanus, the plebs condemned themselves to rolling in the dust before the same Coriolanus, now leading the invading Volscians, in an even more passionate plea to save their city. Pathetic!
Indeed, there are haunting parallels from the past, following the 2003 electoral ouster of Governor Bisi Akande.
Governor Akande (1999-2003) was a victim of irrational voting. Teachers, growling over salary matters and job losses — hardly illegitimate demands — poisoned the Osun electorate, en route to an electoral slaughter.
But the bigger and sharper knife lay waiting for the voters, merrily vengeful. For the next eight years or so, the state became a stagnant pool, breeding only king-size mosquitoes and parasites, consuming all! Again, hardly an illegitimate result, from vengeful voting!
Also, empty sound bites, crafted to whip up emotion and deaden reason, have re-surfaced.
In 2005, as the Oranmiyan movement raced against time to reclaim Osun’s soul, it was Tekobo (Lagos arriviste).
Now, it is Ajele (viceroy), to the Osun emotive rabble; by those bent on sending Osun the wide and merry way. That led to perdition in the past. It may yet do so again.
Yet, between Tekobo and Ajele, Osun had benefited from rare developmental governance these past seven years, unmatched in its history, even with the brutal economic downturn.
Contrast that to those who beggared Osun in times of boom, and you’d probably see why the Osun opposition preen and strut, as grandmasters of deceit!
Still, even if 2003 was so far away, what of the Ekiti experience of 2014?
Three years ago, Ayo Fayose won an improbable victory, over Governor Kayode Fayemi. Yes, Fayemi’s politics was soulless; and part of his problems too was a pork-starved army. But there was no question about his policies — a developmental paradigm to rouse Ekiti from the death of Fayose’s first coming.
Well, Fayose won and crowed. But what has he done with his win, aside from yakking inanities, as undisputed though unfazed gubernatorial nuisance, to the chagrin of his electors? Now, Ekiti is enduring its choice, perhaps as living example of crass electoral ingratitude to a government that wished it nothing but the very developmental best.
Back to the Osun debacle — and it is a debacle on many fronts.
The Adeleke victory signposts terrible omens for a new Osun Aregbesola is trying to reconstruct, from the post-Bisi Akande ruins. (See “Osun: threat to a new order,” 27 June 2017).
Behold: the crowing victors are the old nemesis that, like locusts, gobbled up the land!
Iyiola Omisore was there from the very beginning. As deputy to Governor Akande, he was the progressives-contradiction-in-the-house. After the Akande debacle, he was there, strutting, all through the Osun PDP years of the locusts.
Take a good look at Omisore’s political persona, and what do you see? A mirage of vanishing nothingness! He is, indeed, fitting metaphor for the Osun lobby, committed to the democratic right to stake nothingness. Unfortunately for Osun, they triumphed on July 8.
Ademola Adeleke, the new senator, inherited a solid family name, for Senator Ayoola Adeleke, the paterfamilias, was a solid Awoist. But Ademola’s sudden political emergence signposts a not-so-sudden corroding of the Adeleke progressive DNA.
Isiaka, the late Serubawon, inherited his father’s progressive goodwill. But not the Awo developmental élan. For all his street verve, it is doubtful if he ever became governor again, as he had planned, he would have mustered the rigour needed to nurse Osun back to full developmental health, after the Aregbesola years.
Ademola, the new senator, would appear even more neither-nor, given the optics he has beamed so far. To hurtle from APC aspirant to PDP candidate portrays nothing but crass opportunism.
And the soukous victory dance! Not unlike excited King David gyrating before the Ark of the Covenant, earning the rebuke of his ill-fated wife, Michal. But Senator-elect Adeleke appeared dancing before the mammon of treacherous politics, showing how an excellent private hobby could terribly go wrong in the public space.
Then, the metamorphosis: from Jackson to election-time Nurudeen, then after, back to senior apostle!
These are perfectly explainable complexities of the senator’s birth. But in an Osun milieu that often ripples with empty symbolism, designed to confuse and confound, he freely defined himself among the unfazed orchestra of empty din. He would swim or sink with that identity.
Should Osun go the Ekiti way, the grand losers: public school children enjoying free school meals; the caterers and food vendors for whom the exercise is daily economic reflation; the crop and poultry farmers enjoying a near-captive market for their produce. Indeed, the vulnerable –the proverbial “everyday people” of Osun.
Of course, the futuristic infrastructure: schools, roads and bridges, crucial poles to vault Osun from a dreary civil service state and broaden internally generated revenue, would progressively crumble. With Ekiti, Osun would make its peace with a future Stone Age!
Still, any lesson from history? Yes, legacy.
How many remember the great Obafemi Awolowo lost the first election, after embarking on his epochal free primary education programme, no thanks the NCNC’s scalding demonization, built on high tax and vanishing farm hands? Now, in Osun, it is half-salary!
But today, history and legacy have shut up the Awo electoral traducers.
Like Awo, legacy and history may yet silence Aregbe’s traducers.
But these Osun “everyday people” had better snap out of their reverie before, like Ekiti, embracing a second avoidable death, in a spade of 15 years.
