WHILE presenting the 2017 Appropriation Bill to the Ekiti State House of Assembly last Tuesday, Governor Ayodele Fayose was as animated and bohemian as ever. Never for once enamoured of conformism, the governor took delight in indulging his unusual nature by appearing before the legislators in a black T-shirt, military camouflage pair of trousers and also camouflage face cap. Had he truly intended to ape the manner of a wartime leader, the similitude would have been grossly overdone. As it turned out, his intention was nothing more than a partial mimicry, perhaps intentional parody, to satisfy his yearning for imposing leadership. But in his own words, his dressing was appropriate to the wartime situation Nigeria had found itself. “We are at war in Nigeria,” he said with his customary magniloquence.
That was, however, not the only drama the legislature witnessed on Tuesday. As he presented the budget, he also declared delusively that the bill was as good as passed because the Speaker, Kola Oluwawole, might very well be his alter ego. “I’m the Speaker,” said the governor grandly, “he (Oluwawole) is on that seat on my behalf. He is the Acting Speaker, therefore, he cannot be wrong. If he is wrong, we will take it to the Government House and resolve it. Therefore, I will pass the budget myself.” Since Mr Fayose won the governorship some two years ago, he has deliberately and systematically suffocated dissent from all sectors of the society, from the legislature to the executive, and from the civil society to the judiciary. Even the unions have either been castrated or infiltrated and disembowelled.
All Mr Fayose needed to do more last Tuesday to look and feel like the wartime leader he so casually tried to ape was to have a red star embossed on his camouflage face cap to remind the nostalgic socialists among his audience of the inimitable Chairman Mao Zedong, the late iconic leader of modern China. But since the hood does not make the monk, Mr Fayose’s evocation of wartime imagery, such as suffused the world in the roaring epochs of the last century, appeared a little overdone, if not entirely surreal. Of course, the happy-go-lucky governor does not give a damn what anyone thinks. If he says Nigeria is in wartime, then so it is. Indeed, if there is no war in actual fact, if Nigerians do not think recession and hunger amount to war, why, he could easily furnish them one, if not in deed, then at least in word. And, boy, does Mr Fayose gibber.
In a way, Mr Fayose’s soldierly dressing last Tuesday was a predictable progression from the ‘war’ his fecund imagination had continually engendered since he first took office after flamboyantly defeating the then incumbent, Niyi Adebayo, in 2003. A little more than three years later, he was impeached. But shortly before the impeachment in October, 2006, Mr Fayose had entered into war mode. As he scurried from one rat hole to another pursued by the agents of state unleashed against him by the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, the beleaguered governor occasionally emerged on the stump to rally his bewildered supporters. The electorate honoured his summons and humoured him with rapt attention as he declaimed, eyes blazing and mouth frothing, upon difficult and unfamiliar democratic concepts. He managed in the process to ladle out boiling oil on Chief Obasanjo whom he accused of betrayal despite selling himself rather cheaply to the former president as errand boy. As he hurled abuses at his enemies, some of them imaginary, many observers thought the frightened and cornered Mr Fayose had taken leave of his senses, perhaps stimulated by something ghastly and unearthly.
Now, 10 years after that impeachment, and barely two years after his return to office through another election, Mr Fayose is once again feeling cornered and frightened. He had won an election on the back of one of the most controversial and induced governorship elections ever. But win he did, nevertheless. However, with nearly all his accomplices in the induced 2014 poll intercepted and questioned by the anti-graft agencies, and the secret service breathing threats against him and down his neck, Mr Fayose is filled with alarm as the dossier of his sins grows fat and the prospect of his date with nemesis looms larger than his imagination can contain. It was perhaps in anticipation of this doomsday scenario that he did his damnedest to avert the election of Muhammadu Buhari as president. His instincts were right, for President Buhari is uncompromising.
Before the last presidential election, Mr Fayose spoke loudest, abused most vitriolically, and warned frantically of the fate that awaited the country under a Buhari presidency. He was right in most parts. But no one paid heed, for it was clear he had neither the disposition of an ethical leader himself nor showed that his past struggles were carried out altruistically for the good of the people, having exploited them intensively and extendedly using dangerous artifices and emotions. He did not spare President Buhari before the 2015 presidential poll, just as he did not spare the opposition before and moments after his own election in 2014 when he orchestrated the most vicious assault on the justice system, particularly in Ekiti. In consequence, the Ekiti legislature became castrated, and the judiciary tamed. Reacting to the tyrannous environment, the opposition fled the state and sought shelter elsewhere, only finding its voice now when the political weather has seemed expansive and clement.
Mr Fayose’s military dressing last Tuesday before the Ekiti lawmakers is beginning to look like a re-enactment of his agonising last months in office in 2006. He says he is in war mode. It has little to do with the content of his 2017 budget, nor with the plentiful needs his state’s paltry resources can hardly accommodate. Before his very eyes, and in strict nonconformism with the laws of the land and the constitution, the Department of State Service (DSS) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) have become deadlier than they ever were, and eager to pounce on the president’s enemies. The instinctive Mr Fayose knows he tops the list of wanted men.
He has therefore contemplated bailing out of the ship of the deeply troubled Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) without indicating where he would berth. The All Progressives Congress (APC) port would not countenance his bill of lading, not to talk of allowing him in, his opponents suggest gleefully. If the mega party being contemplated by the Ahmed Makarfi faction of the PDP should materialise, he would gladly berth there. But more intriguingly, the boisterous Ekiti governor has decided to implement a two-part strategy to insure his own future and mitigate the almost certain fate he believed would befall him in 2018 when his second term ends. His first approach is to treat the Ekiti people much better than he had planned or desired. To this extent, Mr Fayose has suddenly become a much better politician than his jejune ‘stomach infrastructure’ politics predisposed him in the past. Second, and more crucially, he has begun a rapprochement with the Southwest power elite in whose hands he seems keener to put his fate and destiny.
Whether these tactics will avail him much or not remains to be seen. But he hinges his survival on the alienated Southwest power elite already giving subterranean battle to both President Buhari and a possibly chequered and weakened APC. This is a difficult gamble, for at the moment no one in the Southwest but Mr Fayose himself seems eager for an open warfare when tact and discreteness would suffice. So far, too, the APC has managed to sustain a tenuous truce in its internecine conflict, with many erstwhile enemies of the president within and outside the party being wooed by presidential tactical committees in brazen defiance and subsumption of the president’s ethical codes. It will grieve Mr Fayose to see that the president is having a head start in putting together alliances for 2019. But this is unavoidable.
War footing or not, Mr Fayose will leave office nearly a year before President Buhari. Except the president’s hands are debilitated by political and economic circumstances, a cruel and inescapable fate awaits the Ekiti governor the moment he vacates office. Mr Fayose has consistently played to the gallery and thrown caviar to the general with considerable aplomb, and has in turn become somewhat a darling of a gullible section of the Southwest electorate. He will likely intensify his famed gambit for needless and reckless excesses, and continue to troll the recesses of his dark mind for extra supply of caviar to nurture his warmongering and addictions. But there is nothing in his ideas or background, not to say his present and future, to make even his friends and potential allies let down their guards.
http://thenationonlineng.net/irascible-bohemian-fayose/
That was, however, not the only drama the legislature witnessed on Tuesday. As he presented the budget, he also declared delusively that the bill was as good as passed because the Speaker, Kola Oluwawole, might very well be his alter ego. “I’m the Speaker,” said the governor grandly, “he (Oluwawole) is on that seat on my behalf. He is the Acting Speaker, therefore, he cannot be wrong. If he is wrong, we will take it to the Government House and resolve it. Therefore, I will pass the budget myself.” Since Mr Fayose won the governorship some two years ago, he has deliberately and systematically suffocated dissent from all sectors of the society, from the legislature to the executive, and from the civil society to the judiciary. Even the unions have either been castrated or infiltrated and disembowelled.
All Mr Fayose needed to do more last Tuesday to look and feel like the wartime leader he so casually tried to ape was to have a red star embossed on his camouflage face cap to remind the nostalgic socialists among his audience of the inimitable Chairman Mao Zedong, the late iconic leader of modern China. But since the hood does not make the monk, Mr Fayose’s evocation of wartime imagery, such as suffused the world in the roaring epochs of the last century, appeared a little overdone, if not entirely surreal. Of course, the happy-go-lucky governor does not give a damn what anyone thinks. If he says Nigeria is in wartime, then so it is. Indeed, if there is no war in actual fact, if Nigerians do not think recession and hunger amount to war, why, he could easily furnish them one, if not in deed, then at least in word. And, boy, does Mr Fayose gibber.
In a way, Mr Fayose’s soldierly dressing last Tuesday was a predictable progression from the ‘war’ his fecund imagination had continually engendered since he first took office after flamboyantly defeating the then incumbent, Niyi Adebayo, in 2003. A little more than three years later, he was impeached. But shortly before the impeachment in October, 2006, Mr Fayose had entered into war mode. As he scurried from one rat hole to another pursued by the agents of state unleashed against him by the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, the beleaguered governor occasionally emerged on the stump to rally his bewildered supporters. The electorate honoured his summons and humoured him with rapt attention as he declaimed, eyes blazing and mouth frothing, upon difficult and unfamiliar democratic concepts. He managed in the process to ladle out boiling oil on Chief Obasanjo whom he accused of betrayal despite selling himself rather cheaply to the former president as errand boy. As he hurled abuses at his enemies, some of them imaginary, many observers thought the frightened and cornered Mr Fayose had taken leave of his senses, perhaps stimulated by something ghastly and unearthly.
Now, 10 years after that impeachment, and barely two years after his return to office through another election, Mr Fayose is once again feeling cornered and frightened. He had won an election on the back of one of the most controversial and induced governorship elections ever. But win he did, nevertheless. However, with nearly all his accomplices in the induced 2014 poll intercepted and questioned by the anti-graft agencies, and the secret service breathing threats against him and down his neck, Mr Fayose is filled with alarm as the dossier of his sins grows fat and the prospect of his date with nemesis looms larger than his imagination can contain. It was perhaps in anticipation of this doomsday scenario that he did his damnedest to avert the election of Muhammadu Buhari as president. His instincts were right, for President Buhari is uncompromising.
Before the last presidential election, Mr Fayose spoke loudest, abused most vitriolically, and warned frantically of the fate that awaited the country under a Buhari presidency. He was right in most parts. But no one paid heed, for it was clear he had neither the disposition of an ethical leader himself nor showed that his past struggles were carried out altruistically for the good of the people, having exploited them intensively and extendedly using dangerous artifices and emotions. He did not spare President Buhari before the 2015 presidential poll, just as he did not spare the opposition before and moments after his own election in 2014 when he orchestrated the most vicious assault on the justice system, particularly in Ekiti. In consequence, the Ekiti legislature became castrated, and the judiciary tamed. Reacting to the tyrannous environment, the opposition fled the state and sought shelter elsewhere, only finding its voice now when the political weather has seemed expansive and clement.
Mr Fayose’s military dressing last Tuesday before the Ekiti lawmakers is beginning to look like a re-enactment of his agonising last months in office in 2006. He says he is in war mode. It has little to do with the content of his 2017 budget, nor with the plentiful needs his state’s paltry resources can hardly accommodate. Before his very eyes, and in strict nonconformism with the laws of the land and the constitution, the Department of State Service (DSS) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) have become deadlier than they ever were, and eager to pounce on the president’s enemies. The instinctive Mr Fayose knows he tops the list of wanted men.
He has therefore contemplated bailing out of the ship of the deeply troubled Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) without indicating where he would berth. The All Progressives Congress (APC) port would not countenance his bill of lading, not to talk of allowing him in, his opponents suggest gleefully. If the mega party being contemplated by the Ahmed Makarfi faction of the PDP should materialise, he would gladly berth there. But more intriguingly, the boisterous Ekiti governor has decided to implement a two-part strategy to insure his own future and mitigate the almost certain fate he believed would befall him in 2018 when his second term ends. His first approach is to treat the Ekiti people much better than he had planned or desired. To this extent, Mr Fayose has suddenly become a much better politician than his jejune ‘stomach infrastructure’ politics predisposed him in the past. Second, and more crucially, he has begun a rapprochement with the Southwest power elite in whose hands he seems keener to put his fate and destiny.
Whether these tactics will avail him much or not remains to be seen. But he hinges his survival on the alienated Southwest power elite already giving subterranean battle to both President Buhari and a possibly chequered and weakened APC. This is a difficult gamble, for at the moment no one in the Southwest but Mr Fayose himself seems eager for an open warfare when tact and discreteness would suffice. So far, too, the APC has managed to sustain a tenuous truce in its internecine conflict, with many erstwhile enemies of the president within and outside the party being wooed by presidential tactical committees in brazen defiance and subsumption of the president’s ethical codes. It will grieve Mr Fayose to see that the president is having a head start in putting together alliances for 2019. But this is unavoidable.
War footing or not, Mr Fayose will leave office nearly a year before President Buhari. Except the president’s hands are debilitated by political and economic circumstances, a cruel and inescapable fate awaits the Ekiti governor the moment he vacates office. Mr Fayose has consistently played to the gallery and thrown caviar to the general with considerable aplomb, and has in turn become somewhat a darling of a gullible section of the Southwest electorate. He will likely intensify his famed gambit for needless and reckless excesses, and continue to troll the recesses of his dark mind for extra supply of caviar to nurture his warmongering and addictions. But there is nothing in his ideas or background, not to say his present and future, to make even his friends and potential allies let down their guards.
http://thenationonlineng.net/irascible-bohemian-fayose/
No comments:
Post a Comment