SO, it’s all over. Kayode Fayemi, the donnish fellow with a guttural voice, will now return to the mound he vacated four years ago. Ayo Fayose, the governor as theatre, now retreats either to the shadow of oblivion or ignominy.
And it was a long way coming. Like the words of T.S. Eliot in his poem The Journey of the Magi, “a hard journey” he had of it. Fayemi crouched, sulked, fought over that 2014 poll. He said he was robbed. Some believed, many doubted. The courts acclaimed the winner. The erudite former governor seemed to have collapsed into a sort of ennui.
But still hovering over that dreary dawn were many questions: The electronic evidence of Jonathan’s soldiers in gladiatorial electronic heist. His political minions in a million lying tales. The birth of stomach infrastructure. Fayose as a feathery impresario and a sort of mythical tale of a returnee to power.
Fayemi consoled himself with a ministerial toga, but what consolation. He still felt an ache. Anytime I saw him, I saw the ache in a contrived display of self-confidence, and even defiance, the sense of someone deprived. I remember he explained to me over the phone, a few days after INEC released the results, while Fayose still huffed and puffed. He said he had to concede because he did not want any “killing fields.” The ache I think is still not over. He carries it still until he is done. A big meal was at the table, but he still worked himself over the one he did not finish. Now he has the chance again at the table.
So, while Fayose peacocked and derided him, he answered back, but his voice was somewhat muted. The narrative of stomach infrastructure rose over any rhetoric of his achievements. On my television show on TVC, just before the APC primaries which he gulped handily, I wanted him to go back to his time as governor, the charge of aloofness, of focusing an elite style over what many saw as Fayose’s “common touch.” He was not all that repentant. He had learned his lessons, but he would not sway from his task of obviating poverty.
He is not the type to stop by a market and help women fry garri, or buy bole at the roadside, or utter imprecations at an old, ailing president. He could not do that even if it meant losing an election.
But the ache egged him on for over four years, working the grassroots methodically and in silence, a stealth agenda to clobber the great foe of his political life. The same Fayemi who would stay away had been jolted by the necessity of victory into the humility of grassroots work. Franklyn Delano Roosevelt’s biographers have said that if polio did not paralyse him, he might not have been president. The former U.S. president, often called FDR, was too patrician to understand the common folk. Was that what happened to JKF? Was the earlier defeat an asset for his soul and political trajectory?
But he insists he never lost, and that question remains up till now. How do we agree that he lost all 16 local government areas? But Fayose lost all but four. Yet the difference in numbers were about 20 thousand. What is clear is that what Fayemi had was a victory, not a mandate. That is critical. A mandate is an overwhelming victory. It may not be a landslide, but the difference must be emphatic.
So, a more of the folksy heartbeat should remain with Fayemi as he remounts the throne. Few people have opportunities for redemption. But shall we say, that the great numbers that Fayemi’s opponent, Olusola Eleka, had was a vote for stomach infrastructure? That means, Fayemi must see a median between his lofty philosophy of governance and the quiet rumblings from society’s ether. Some eyewitness accounts of those who thought Eleka prematurely won chanted in Yoruba, “oju ti owo. Oju ti agbara.” Translation: “shame on money. Shame on power.”
Yet, we cannot blind our eyes to a common story from reporters. Both sides turned election into a sort of bazaar. Money sprayed on voters. Some are saying that the people voted for the highest bidder. In Ondo, they called it “di’bo ko se’be” – vote and cook a soup. In Ekiti, the refrain was “see and buy.” If it was a battle for the highest bidder, there was no innocent party. The guilty one was our brand of democracy.
In this age, democracy is still a bourgeois ideology. It lacks the innocence of its beginnings in Athens, a thing lamented by philosopher Hanna Arendt in her classic, The Human Condition. Political scientists say, money is the mother’s milk of politics. So, does it mean that Fayemi won because he outspent Fayose? That may be an oversimplification. But some analysts think, in an ambience of poverty, especially when civil servants had not been paid for many months, money was a great catcher. So, are we practising cash-o-cracy or buy-o-cracy? Maybe it is one tragedy our babyish democracy thrusts on us.
Lincoln, perhaps America’s best, often said his best triumph as president was the Emancipation Proclamation. But he could not get it through Congress without bribing. There was, in spite of Lincoln’s great morality, a Machiavellian impulse. We ought to learn from their beginning, not copy, or console ourselves that filth is permitted with the lucre at this stage of our democracy. If that is the way of politics now, it means the new rigging is not to bully the ballot but sully the mind. To rig, first rig the voter’s mind. That is the definition of rigging at source. No bloodletting. No roughnecks bearing guns.
So, is it possible for Fayemi to ignite the common touch now. The election shows the majority want it the Fayemi way, perhaps with the proviso that he is less lofty, his voice less granite, his eyes in softer hue.
Fayose’s desperation in announcing the result was an act of subversion, not permissible in a democracy. It was an admission that he had lost the argument. He has opened the doors wide for his foes to floor him without a fight. He has governed with the principle of the id as official ID.
Now, Fayemi has a chance to return. It will begin like Jesus’ return to Jerusalem in pomp. But in Shakespeare’s words, “all is well that ends well.” In four years, that is. Will the return of the native look like Thomas Hardy’s novel of that title where the novelist is not sure whether the native’s return ends in a romance or estrangement? Dr. John Kayode Fayemi has the opportunity to write that testament.
