Tag: tragedy

The sickening confession by Dr. Tope Aluko that in effecting what he described as a coup against the people of Ekiti, they “went into the election with 1,040 recognised soldiers and another batch of 400 ‘unrecognised soldiers’ brought from Enugu by a serving senator from the South-East;  raised 44 special strike teams brought in (with) Toyota Hilux buses from Abuja and Onitsha and made special stickers for the vehicles that conveyed members of the strike team with  each of them given a black band for identification” was but a confirmation  of the hijacking of our nation by PDP brigands. For 16 years, PDP and its leaders operated with impunity, engaging in war of attrition and assassination of their members over the sharing of offices and our resources.

Fayose said we should look at the messenger and not the message. But there are compelling reasons to believe Aluko is a witness of truth. First Aluko confessed he and Fayose have been friends for 40 years. The closer we therefore look at these two friends, the more the possibility of agreeing with the saying by our people that ‘‘it’s only a thief who can accurately identify the foot print of another thief on a stone”.  For lying under oath at the tribunal claiming ‘the election was free, fair and credible’, Fayose wants Aluko committed to prison for three years for perjury. That Fayose’s Freudian slip, in itself, is all that is needed to confirm Aluko’s claim that the election was sham. But Fayose himself is no less guilty of perjury according to his political detractors who reminded us he claimed in his nomination form that he had never been indicted by any panel of inquiry. If the Supreme Court ruled he was not properly impeached, that came eight years after the event and long after filling the nomination form.

There are other compelling reasons why we cannot doubt Aluko’s claim that Fayose, after purchasing his victory in the primary with Jonathan misapplied $2m state funds, went back to tell the president that there was no way he was going to win the election without the use of the military.  Here was an impeached former governor, chased from pillar to post by EFCC for alleged financial and murder charges and who in his own words, “flee (sic) with all (his) property left in the Government House, and taken to court about 59 times aside the 45 days (he) spent in detention”, pitched without an agenda against a performing incumbent few months after losing a senatorial contest. Little wonder, Fayose was to describe his victory “a rare miracle” and his “return to government as not common in history”.

But Obasanjo is the source of Ekiti people’s nightmare. Precisely because of his contempt for them and their pursuit of academic excellence to advance in the social ladder, Obasanjo who self-conceitedly claimed he achieved on a platter of gold what Awo could not achieve through a life-long struggle, probably saw imposition of Fayose, considered half-literate by his people, a way to humble the Ekitis. In total disrespect of the feelings of the people, Obasanjo also sent Brigadier Olurin his kinsman to supervise the rigging of the 2007 election. The task was made easy with the exploitation of the intra-party feud in ACN by Obasanjo and PDP. Dissident ACN members, misled to believe they were out to prevent Tinubu from cornering the resources of the state  were armed with large sums of money, vehicles, communication and logistics to aid the rigging of the 2007 election later nullified by the courts. By the time Fayemi retrieved his stolen mandate, nearly all the legacies of Awo and his successors had been erased. The state College of Medicine which professors Oyebode and Oyebola tried to nurture had been traded for Fayose’s fraudulent poultry project. Christ School, one of the earliest and best secondary schools in Nigeria secured less than 30%success in WAEC examination. Other public schools suffered worst fate. This is the genesis of the present generation of Fayose’s area boys, ‘okada’ riders and political thugs. After four years of valiant effort by Dr Fayemi to prevent a repeat of the tragedy that befell a whole generation of our children, Dr. Aluko has now confirmed how he along with Fayose and some other Ekiti people colluded with outsiders to sabotage that effort.

But Obasanjo and not Jonathan, a master of political subterfuge who merely used Fayose to settle scores with his estranged godfather, should be held responsible for the coup staged against our people. He set the precedent during his 2007 ‘do or die’ Ekiti battle and its rerun supervised by another spineless Egba woman. Jonathan alleged commitment of $37m to his own variant of ‘do or die’ 2014 pacification of Ekiti by all means was only an improvement on the unspecified massive deployment of funds through ACN dissidents in 2007. If  Jonathan and PDP subdued Ekiti with 1,040 recognised soldiers and another batch of 400 ‘unrecognised soldiers’ brought from Enugu in addition to  44 special strike teams brought in (with) Toyota Hilux buses from Abuja and Onitsha in 2014, Obasanjo and PDP in 2007 provided ‘security, logistics and communication’ to break the will of Ekiti people.

Aluko was only confirming what we all heard and saw on national television when he said ‘we used the military to block all routes in the local governments and prevented APC chieftains, including former Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi from coming into Ekiti. So we ensured that no APC chieftain was in sight on Election Day. We provided polling agents for the APC in most of the polling units so we had no problem getting them to sign election results in the units’. It was a known fact that Fayose, Obanikoro, Adesiyan and Chris Uba reduced Ekiti to a conquered territory on Election Day in 2014.

But as said on these pages two years ago, weep not for Ekiti but for the nation.  Bode Thomas in the fifties canvassed for regionalism in order to save the Yoruba country from the rule of a one-eyed king. The tragedy is that the whole country has been afflicted by a spectre of one-eyed king, a euphemism for incompetent leaders since independence. While the west burned in 1966, Balewa waited patiently for Ahmadu Bello who returned too late from his pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. The bungling after the failed 1966 coup by ill-equipped Ironsi led to the civil war. The destruction of the bureaucracy and the university, the two major institutions that sustain the survival of society by Murtala Mohammed and Obasanjo who were ill-equipped to manage society is responsible for today’s corruption in the civil service and the collapse of our university system which once ranked with the best in the world. In 1979, Obasanjo who claimed the best didn’t have to win the election supported Shehu Shagari whose only ambition was to become a senator. Shagari smoked away while the economy of the nation was wrecked by his NPN led by Akinloye. We have had an Ibrahim Babangida whose regime Obasanjo dismissed as a government ‘deficit in honour’. Babangida destroyed all our values and institutionalised corruption.   We have had Abacha, a common thief whose obsession seemed to crudely ferry raw cash with boxes from the central bank. We have had Obasanjo, widely regarded and rejected as a one-eyed king by the Yoruba but wildly celebrated by the rest of the country as messiah. His legacy in the last 16 years is the seizure of our country by PDP brigands headed until recently by Goodluck Jonathan, his godson.

The way forward is restructuring of our multi ethnic and multicultural society so that each group can decide who manages its affairs. Ekiti must be allowed to decide if it wants to be ruled by Fayose, his thugs and ‘okada’ riders just as Delta should be allowed to choose if they want to be ruled by militants led by Government ‘Tompolo’ Ekpemipolo. The beauty of federalism is that it liberates groups and individuals from the tyranny of the state.