Why now would President Jonathan treat the Southwest differently when he would never ever come back seeking our votes?
As it is now well known, PDP both as party and government, is like a con artist. More intriguing, though, is the fact that its Southwest leaders are by far worse. After six years of the president being in the saddle, appointing them to nothing higher than miserable preferments like board chairmanship of polytechnics in as far away as Damaturu while allotting to tiny Bayelsa powerful agencies like NIMASSA, he has suddenly woken up to how his government has thus far treated the Yoruba like Christmas chicken. But truth be told, we can hardly blame him because, after many years of interaction with his Southwest party men, he must have come to know that they think only of self. But if President Jonathan claims he still pities the Yoruba for the loss of the House Speakership, we should ask what in his opinion constitutes the gains of the Southwest from the tenures of Patricia Etteh and Dimeji Bankole? Or what one single thing can the Yoruba point to as benefits of those better forgotten days other than the fact that both ex-speakers significantly helped themselves? Therefore, if PDP politicians could not, I expect our respected Obas, who were present in numbers at the Ife summit, to easily see the vacuity of the president’s jeremiad. Or how, in four whole years, has this very sympathetic president attempted to assuage that loss or mitigate its supposed effects? How many Yoruba has he appointed to key positions outside of constitutional prescriptions? Which of our many highly educated Yoruba compatriots has he appointed to the headship of key agencies or departments? How convenient for him now, two months to his next election, to come sympathise with us even though the Mulika -not Southwest – loss, was at the very beginning of this administration? The president, I think, should be told that we know crocodile tears when we see one. The Yoruba nation has come a long way, with a history dating back thousands of years even if some nouveau rich misrepresent us as a hungry people.
And, it is not as if we had ever benefitted in any significant way from a PDP government. During the Obasanjo era, the Agbajo Yoruba Agbaiye, a budding Pan-Yoruba cultural organisation under the sterling leadership of Lt. General Alani Akinrinade, was so peeved and scandalised, it had to set up a rapid response team to react to the total neglect of the Southwest when, after every Federal Executive Council meeting, huge water/irrigation projects were being announced as approved for the north and some other parts of the country when Muktar Shagari was minister of Water Resources but with hardly any ever going to the Southwest. The team had as members, Prof Jide Osuntokun, Dr Dele Shobowale, Mrs Tola Adenle and yours truly.
The situation actually got worse as the entire Southwest road infrastructure collapsed as exemplified by the Ibadan -Benin Road which broke in two at Igbara-Oke. So if we were treated that nonchalantly under a president we called our own, what right do we have now to expect any better under the current administration which, in any case, the South – South has succeeded in annexing? This 11th hour presidential romance should naturally collapse, even before it gets under way.
These are some of the reasons Yoruba should easily see through this joke. Candidate Jonathan was hugely voted for in the West in 2011 – thanks largely to that penitent kneeling by the candidate, in front of a highly regarded Man of God who happens to be of Yoruba extraction – but to what good? Besides two of our young, gifted professionals sitting in pretty offices in the presidency throwing darts and barbs at just about anybody- the last being the Nobel Laureate – what in truth can we point to as dividends accruing from that massive Yoruba vote? Not even any of those oil pipeline security contracts which were generously awarded to the president’s kinsmen, and yet subsisting, even as oil thefts peak. Why now would President Jonathan treat the Southwest differently when he would never ever come back seeking our votes?
The Ife summit is nothing but a trap, dredged up by the Southwest crowd of the PDP and executed by the president who used the respect for his office to coral our royalties into attendance. Luckily, our people have shown conclusively in Osun on 9 August, 2014, that never again shall the Yoruba be rail-roaded against their best interests or be sold on the cheap. Of course, we would be nothing better than fools if we fail to correctly interpret the complete military lock-down the world saw in both Ekiti and Osun during the governorship elections. If we were not clear-eyed enough to see where President Jonathan was going when he appointed our compatriots as junior ministers of Defence and Police Affairs, we can now appreciate that we were being set up for self immolation. And how mightily they succeeded in my dear Ekiti! But it is the same Yoruba who say you can only defile a woman once using deceit. We now know the president like the back of our palms.
For instance, whereas our infrastructure collapsed under Obasanjo and his PDP Southwest governors, even the blind would now see what development is afoot in each of the states of the Southwest being governed by the APC. Whereas, not once did the PDP governors of that era mention anything about regional economic cooperation, it is now the driving force of economic development in the Southwest with the Ibadan-based DAWN COMMISSION under the lead of Dipo Famakinwa, a brilliant management consultant. Of course, should the PDP make any further in-road in the Southwest, the Commission will certainly be one of its very first casualties because it is beyond their ken to know its essence or relevance.
And talking about PDP making no further inroad in the Southwest, we need to be reminded that we are dealing with an opponent for whom nothing is off limits as we saw in Ekiti on 21 June, 2014 when a seemingly extra-ordinarily peaceful election -no ballot box snatching, no illegal thumb printing etc -was albeit, scientifically rigged. If we, Ekiti, could plead guilty to a failure of intelligence on that occasion, Nigerians no longer have that luxury. Our point of departure, as a people who want our votes to count, should therefore be vigilance. We must all be very vigilant. The APC, as the main opposing political party, however, has a much bigger responsibility on its hands. It must, as urgently as it can, get the courts to compel INEC to use ONLY the constitutionally prescribed INDELLIBLE ink as opposed to the VANISHING ink which it deployed to help in the scientific rigging we saw in Ekiti, at all the elections.
A single event will illustrate this. Where she voted, a highly regarded spouse of an equally respected retired banker, thumb printed her allotted ballot paper thrice but without the slightest mark showing. More annoyed than disappointed, she called on one of the NYSC members present who after listening to her complaint poured water on the ink pad. With this, she was able to get an almost unrecognisable mark left in front of her preferred party. But that is all the rogue scientists, purveyors of this immoral technology, need as that infinitesimal mark would subsequently migrate to impregnate a pre-programmed spot which is, of course, the PDP’s. At the end of voting, that little ink now presents in very bold relief -in one colour, though blue and black inks were used by INEC – and all in one size. That is the mystery Professor Soyinka referred to in the Ekiti election but thanks to what happened in 2013 at the Zimbabwean presidential election, which has been handsomely reported on the internet, the world has come to unlock that mystery. Of course, PDP will most probably come with other variants of that.
APC should now appreciate what a herculean task it has on its hands because courts which can rule that there is no division in the PDP even when the entire world saw members of the New PDP walk out of its Abuja convention, can conveniently rule that INEC is not obliged to follow in toto, the provisions of the electoral law as long as that will accord with the wishes of the PDP.
In concluding this piece, let me humbly say that if we are truly our fathers’ children, a thousand Ife Summits by President Jonathan should not succeed in deceiving the Yoruba again.
