An Osun, it is a birth pang of sorts. An old order is dying — and frankly, no sane mind would mourn its passage.
But a new order is struggling to be born. Again, until it is delivered, safe, healthy and strong, no sane mind can afford to be sanguine.
It’s a dramatic juncture of two extreme possibilities: either to consolidate the emerging era of conscious safety nets, by a compassionate state, to shield the most vulnerable; or take a tragic roll-back into the prebendal past, where state resources were captive to the few fat cats in government — and their cronies.
All that is playing out in the make-good senatorial election, billed for July 8. It is to replace the late Senator Isiaka Adeleke, aka Serubawon, the first elected governor of Osun and two-time senator of the Federal Republic.
Interestingly, in the rumpus to fill that void — and elections here are always a rumpus, simply because barren folks often hide behind empty bluff and bluster — is an Adeleke brood, Ademola Adeleke, literarily sworn to, willy-nilly, succeeding his elder brother.
To face him is Mudashir Hussain, a Tekobo (Lagos arriviste) by defensive but bitter local political gossip, but a legislative veteran in his own right.
Hussain represented Oshodi-Isolo, Lagos, as Alliance for Democracy (AD) member in the House of Representatives (1999-2007), before he joined the Aregbesola-led long trek to salvage Osun, back in 2007.
After losing to the elder Adeleke in the controversial election of 2007 — an election not a few insist could be the worst in Nigerian history, in which Rauf Aregbesola himself got his governorship mandate stolen —he defeated the same Adeleke, as sitting senator, to became an All Progressives Congress (APC) Osun West senator in 2011.
But Senator Hussain would yield his place to the same Serubawon, an election-eve trade-off to the defector from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), after Serubawon’s sinister confrontation with the Omisore group.
By Serubawon’s own words, the Omisore group threatened to kill him, with Jelili Adesiyan, then President Goodluck Jonathan’s minister of Police Affairs, allegedly raining stiff blows on Adeleke, at the PDP state secretariat at Osogbo, to underscore that threat. That sent hurtling the mighty Serubawon. For once, the fearsome one that sent folks scuttling, himself dived for cover!
It’s an irony of the no-holds-barred clawing for power, in these climes, that the younger Adeleke is back in bed with the same noxious forces that nearly politically gassed his brother.
In “The politics of death and the triumph of truth”, Niyi Akinnoso, The Punch columnist, did full justice to the soulless manoeuvres of the younger Adeleke: the dirty politics of poison over a sudden family tragedy, the media amplification of that theory, the attempt to sully the waters over the coroner’s probe, the politics of intra-APC disqualification and re-qualification, and the eventual Ademola Adeleke scurry to the Osun PDP, the same party and people his late brother fled from for dear life.
In that piece, Prof. Akinnaso did a clinical, if furious, putdown of Otunba Adeleke, for his desperate tactics. To be sure, that was well earned, with all facts available.
But lo! Politics is often a utility business, with morality as the least consideration. Remember the Machiavellian quip about the end justifying the means? The only catch though, is that a politician would forever live with how he defines himself.
Take Iyiola Omisore, furiously remaking his image and rebranding his political essence on Facebook, and other social media channels. Not bad — after all, Saul, the ultimate anti-Christ turned Paul, the Christian neophyte-without-equal!
But would that, open sesame, wipe off Omisore’s past, any more than all the waters of the Atlantic would blot out the blood in the hands of the evil Lady Macbeth, in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth?
With his first steps in politics, the younger Adeleke has defined himself. It is a democratic right he would float or sink with.
That, however, is not the problem. The problem is what Adeleke and his new company epitomize: the right to pushing emptiness, as a democratic alternative to substance.
That is almost beyond pardon, especially in a state experiencing seven straight years of developmental governance, after nearly eight years of ruin and stagnation.
But because an old order is dying and a new one is not fully born, these poster boys of democratic barrenness jerk awake at each electoral cycle, to rattle-dazzle the gullible, with a rich lather of empty emotions.
In the past seven years, despite a deliberate orchestration of the contrary by the Osun opposition and their media confederates, the news coming from Osun has been decidedly developmental.
Only from June 15 to 17, UNICEF midwifed a study tour by 16 states, to understudy Osun’s social safety nets, for possible implementation in these other states. The states: Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Benue, Katsina, Delta, Lagos, Ondo, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Enugu, Adamawa, Kano, Bauchi and Rivers.
Lagos is to Nigeria what California, the “Golden State”, is to the United States — the biggest economy around. Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta, Rivers and Ondo are oil royals, far more endowed than Osun. Kano is the northern commercial nerve.
Yet, all these states went, under UNICEF’s proud banners, to take a tutorial on what mighty developmental strides puny Osun had attained, with its meager resources, to protect its most vulnerable!
Apart from safety net programmes like OMEAL (the school feeding programme, which the Federal Government is adopting), OYES (youth volunteer and retraining programme, to tackle unemployment) and O-REHAB (focused on care for the destitute and the mental health-challenged), the whole state is a huge work-in-progress, in solid roads and futuristic schools, on a scale never witnessed before.
That is the new Osun, struggling to consolidate.
The old Osun? A daily plague of ruin: run-down schools; cratered roads; dysfunctional polity, where thugs were lords of the manor; a relay of contrived crimes to trap political opponents; and, of course, unfazed haven of institutionalized ignorance, and cavalier global capital of destructive rumours!
Indeed, the grim modern equivalent of Hobbes’s state of nature: an Osun where life was nasty, brutish and short.
So, the July 8 election is between Hussain and Adeleke, for the Osun West senatorial seat? Only on the surface.
The real battle is progressive and reactionary forces gunning for the soul of Osun, as prelude to the 2018 gubernatorial elections: either to further deepen the developmental strides of the past seven years (which would be wise); or slip back into the ruin of the past (which would be tragic).
Talk of the delicate tendrils of a new order, of hope and promise; tangling with the dry stubs of a dying order, of ruin and stagnation.
That, then, is the stark choice before Osun West voters — and one false step, it just might be back to the past of ruin, from the emerging future of hope.
