Fresh palm-wine is sweet. When the foaming and frothing stuff is cooled by Harmattan, nothing can be more appealing to the drinking palate. But stale palm-wine is more potent and potentially far more destabilising. Nature converts the sugar into more alcohol which heads straight for the seat of reason. The Yoruba have a proverb which captures the mystery. Pounded yam, even when it is twenty years old, can also burn with severity.
Ekiti, the land of rolling hills, rugged mountains, wonderful topography and equally wonderful people is also the land of palm-wine and pounded yam. It is the forest of a thousand professors where brave hunters (Ogboju Ode) prevail and predominate. The place had been in the news of late, but for the wrong kind of reason. How one had wished that it is for the academic exploits of its children, or the famed industriousness of its native people that Ekiti has been in the news.
The state gubernatorial election has now come again. But not so the controversies that erupted shortly before and immediately after the election. The sight of a weeping governor, floored by fistic adversity and drooling like a baby, is a new low in the demystification of democracy in Nigeria. Each day brings new revelations. Where one had expected a clear victory for progressive forces, however badly disunited, it has been an electoral cliff hanger. Where one had expected a departure from old electoral norms, it has been a consecration of impunity and electoral infamy. Old pounded yam can be very scalding indeed.
Let us now cut quickly to the chase. This is a matter of utmost importance to the Ekiti people, the Yoruba nationality and the Nigerian nation. It is a matter beyond the contending gladiators of the moment. How this matter shapes up will determine the democratic destiny of the nation and the relevance and suitability of our current democratic model to the extant historical consciousness of our people.
It will now be hypocritical and dishonourable to aver otherwise. Kayode Fayemi was not the automatic candidate of this columnist as far as the APC flag bearer in the last Ekiti State election was concerned. It was not that one had any candidate of choice in the matter. But one felt that it would have been better and healthier for the party, and in the greater interest of the people and the nation if the slate had been wiped clean and the board cleared of the mutually antagonistic debris both within and outside of the party.
That way it would have been easier to forge a new beginning based on elite consensus in the state and the commonality of poverty among the people. At a point, it seemed as if the party local leadership was groping and intuiting its way towards the idea of a consensus candidate before federal force majeure took over the proceedings.
It is not easy to have a sense of equanimity over being electorally humbled and humiliated in one’s domain as a sitting governor. This is more so when it was then discovered that the electoral advantage was procured through substantial fraud and chicanery. Right from the beginning, the Fayemi campaign was projected as a grudge match with the governor-elect himself famously being quoted as saying that Fayose would be caged on Election Day. Looming in the background was an unforgiving presidency very much embarrassed not to say embittered by Fayose’s endless taunts and often ill-bred tirades.
The grudge match has now produced a grudge mandate with the whole state badly polarized and bitterly divided. Never in the history of Nigeria has a homogeneous sub-national people been this fractured and factionalised. Fayemi and the Ekiti elite have their work cut out for them. Ranged against the enlightened educated class and the outraged salariate that made Fayemi’s return possible are a grumpy section of the elite fired by reverse nationalism, casual riffraff on the fringe of society and the vast homophobic underclass spawned by unemployment and the de-industrialization of the state.
Whether one likes him or not, Fayose has shown himself to be a man of extraordinary political dexterity; a consummate conman and ham actor given to boisterous theatrics and relentless rabblerousing. A robber baron himself without any qualms or scruples, the Afao-Ekiti born politician has managed to reinvent himself as a champion of the masses even as he contributed to their plight and pervasive poverty.
It is this combination of gifted charlatan and social shaman which makes Fayose a particularly dangerous customer. He has also managed to tap into a deep well of elite resentment and frustration with the unfortunate anti-restructuring stance and seeming sectionalist bias of the federal authorities.
The old ACN had perfected a strategy of containing him by trying to keep him inside while pissing outside rather than leaving him outside to piss inside. But this strategy was bungled by the politically short-sighted in the wake of the ACN fusing into APC. Eventually the bad boy returned to give his tormentors a good run for their money.
Those who care should also note that within the larger restructionist lobby of the South West, Fayose, whatever his antecedents, remains a Yoruba notable. Indeed if he were to surface at an Afenifere gathering with his electoral conqueror, it is obvious that it is the rogue populist who will be wildly lionized ahead of the triumphant victor.
What this suggests is that the Yoruba Question, like the National Question, is too deep and fundamental to be resolved by mere elections. Desperate political competition for desperately scarce resources is not amenable to electoral resolutions. No matter what happens to the current arrow head in the next three months, the Fayose tendency will continue to rear its head in Ekiti politics for a long time to come until the root cause is tackled, and comprehensively too.
Geography also matters in this business. Landlocked and hemmed in by a rugged mountainous terrain, Ekiti had for long endured and enjoyed the bucolic bliss of an isolated agrarian community surviving a on subsistence farming, its principal assets being a passion for western education and the celebrated pristine integrity of its denizens passed on from generation to generation and buoyed by the stirring tradition of heroic resistance to tyranny.
But for industries to thrive and survive, there must be fiscal empowerment of the populace and massive infrastructural development which remain the remit of a visionary state and patriotic political class. Without this, the only industry that can thrive is the industry of degraded and degrading politics in which pauperized voters are offered money to surrender their electoral suzerainty. The peonization of democracy requires extreme poverty to flourish.
It should be obvious that what Ekiti people require to spring the trap of electoral peonage is nothing short of a New Deal; a comprehensive blueprint for economic emancipation and the emasculation of pervasive poverty. Compare this forlorn fate with the geographical luck of their aristocratic neighbours to the south, the Ondo people, whose centuries-old access to the sea and its riches has allowed them to invest their wealth in the economic emancipation of their people.
It has now become economically imperative that Ekiti nation must break loose from its geographical isolation . A massive drive to open it to the outside world must be the priority of its elite in cooperation with the government. For starters, there ought to be a railway loop that connects the state with the Lagos-Port-Harcourt line or the Lagos-Abuja track. The Omuo-Kabba ; Ado-Ikare; Ado-Aramoko; Ado-Omu-aran via Ifaki and Ado-Akure via Ikerre gateways ought to receive immediate attention either through eventual dualization or fastidious rehabilitation.
There is opportunity in every crisis. The sweetness of the APC victory in Ekiti state lies in the fact that for the first time since the First Republic all the core states of the old West have now come under one political umbrella. This is a unique opportunity to drive regional economic integration and a comprehensive economic blueprint which is specific to the needs and aspirations of the region.
In the Second Republic under the leadership of Obafemi Awolowo and the surviving stalwarts of progressive governance there was an umbrella union of LOOBO states which drove regional cooperation and integration despite the unitary constitution bequeathed by the departed military administration.
But with all energies currently concentrated on the deadly power struggle at the centre, it is hard to see how this can become a reality. Indeed with the current anti-restructuring and counter-devolution mantra of the federal authorities, such ideologies of regionalism are likely to be viewed as politically suspect and surplus to electoral requirements. This is more so since the APC victory is federally inspired and driven by an obsession with unitarist centralization and conformity with statist principles.
The west may well be in more political trouble than it has ever bargained for. Rather than coming together to pursue the agenda of regional integration, what we are likely to witness is a relentless subversion and deliberate undermining of regional authority by state viceroys who are more beholden to central authority than to any regional leader. They may choose to humour them from time to time, but that is as far as it will go unless the regional leadership chooses to press its luck.
If this lack of synergy were to be the case, the ensuing regional discontent coupled with the fallout of the herdsmen imbroglio may just be enough to tip unitary federalism into terminal crisis in Nigeria. As usual with their earlier history, it is always at the point when the Yoruba people think they have achieved the greatest feat of integration that the sparks of disintegration begin to fly. Ancient pounded yam can burn the palms indeed. But let that not debar the good people of Ekiti from enjoying their pounded yam and palm wine this fine morning.
