THE USEFULNESS OF GOVERNOR AYO FAYOSE

By Pius Adesanmi

First, let’s enter some basic details about the situation of our interesting friend in Ekiti.

To the extent that there was Ekitigate, I expect the wheel of justice and due process to grind slowly, methodically, and fairly in the direction of the dramatis personae involved in that sordid spectacle.

If found guilty, I expect Musiliu Obanikoro to pay for his crimes in Ekiti. Some day.

If found guilty, I expect Peter Ayodele Fayose to pay for his crimes in Ekiti. Some day.

Before that day of reckoning, and, hopefully, before Ayo Fayose and all riggers in every political party begin to pay for the crime of rigging elections in Nigeria, there are two pending issues that must detain us with regard to the Ekiti Governor and his modes of self-inscription into national consciousness:

1) the nature and manner of his service in Ekiti;

2) the modalities of his relationship with the government at the centre.

This will be a long read for I intend to deal extensively with both issues. Bear with me.

THE NATURE AND MANNER OF HIS SERVICE IN EKITI
On the first point, Ayo Fayose is probably the most mocked, most ridiculed Governor in Nigeria today. Precisely because he has reduced governance to a daily production of ribaldry and awada kerikeri (comedy), with ponmo, abodi, shaki, atarodo, and ajinomoto as the operating metaphors of his pact with the people of Ekiti; precisely because his idea of demystifying power and staying close to the people is dressing like an American gangsta rap artist (disappointingly, he is yet show Nigerians his butt crack by sagging his pants!), people have turned him to Nigeria’s number one joke.

National reaction to the people of Ekiti ranges from pity to contempt on account of their Governor. Nigerians treat Ekiti people much like many Americans and the rest of the world treat the supporters of Donald Trump. Nobody seems to be able to understand the appeal of these two politicians to their followers respectively in America and Nigeria. In the case of Ekiti, Fayose is burlesque and grotesque rolled into one but his people in Ekiti like him just like that, their logic being monkey e no fine but im mommy like am.

I think we need a paradigm shift in our apprehension of Fayose’s hold on the people of Ekiti. Mockery and laughter should yield to deeper questions and sober reflection. How did Fayose happen? Why did Fayose happen? In answering these questions, we must be mindful of one thing: Fayose was stupid. He was stupid enough not to realize that he really didn’t need Ekitigate. He would still have won handsomely without rigging and colluding with Musiliu Obanikoro to misuse the military and flood Ekiti with President Jonathan’s and Dasuki’s Boko Haram dollars.

He would have won because of the failure of the elite paradigm in Ekiti. He was deft enough to identify this failure and replace it with something so crude and primitive that it caught the elite completely pants down. The failure of the elite paradigm is much more complex than Fayemi. It spans the history of Ekiti as a state. There were questions the elite paradigm failed to answer, explanations it couldn’t make to the people. The highpoint of the elite paradigm is an identity which Ekiti acquired in national consciousness as a national factory of professors.

In a state as rural and as underdeveloped as Ekiti, what Fayose was able to do was to problematize that identity for the people around the following questions:

• Since this state was created on October 1, 1996, people have been calling you the elite state of professors, abi? Okay o
• How precisely has this national identification as a state of elite professors helped with your hunger, rural poverty, and underdevelopment?
• Has that identity helped you in any way?
• Has it ever paid the school fees of your children?
• Before you acquired that identity as a state of Professors, you were at least able to eat pounded yam three times a day, accompanied by grasscutter meat and palmwine, why is it that on the watch of those who gave you that elite identity, you can now afford to eat pounded yam only once a week?

To all these questions, Fayose provided an answer: here are pounded yam, egusi soup, ponmo, atarodo, and crayfish. Come back tomorrow for La Casera and Zobo to wash it down.

We know from experience that, unlike the permanently-deferred promises of the elite paradigm, Fayose never fails to deliver on the primitive immediacy of stomach infrastructure. To the Yoruba philosophical poser – who offered you pounded yam and assured you that soup was easy to come by? – Fayose’s answer was: “I did. I am the Governor who offers pounded yam with the assurance of easy soup”.

So long as poverty, hunger, and rural backwardness are prevailing factors in Ekiti, the hand that offers the immediate gratification of pounded yam, grass cutter and palm wine will always win the argument over sophisticated and visionary leadership. What the elite paradigm has been unable to do in Ekiti and, indeed, in Nigeria is to multitask by finding ways to alleviate the immediate hardships of the people while working on the establishment of 21st-century institutions, infrastructure, and governance.

Until the elite paradigm finds a way to dualize its purpose and mission, the primitive and crude paradigms of the Fayoses of Nigeria will always win the argument. This is why we should do more than mock the people of Ekiti for responding to a man who has found a way to cash in on their stomachs for political gain. Our task is to convince the rural Ekiti farmer that his chances in life are better with the man who has a vision to develop the agricultural base of Ekiti and empower rural farmers through a combination of science, innovation, and 21st-century governance than a man who steals from the state’s allocation to give him a plate of amala and gbegiri just for today.

THE MODALITIES OF HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE GOVERNMENT AT THE CENTRE

Ayo Fayose’s relationship with the Federal government has been understandably problematic. There is no love lost between him and President Buhari. There is no love lost between him and Aso Rock Villa. Basically, a day in the life of Peter Ayodele Fayose boils down to going to the market to buy iru (locust beans) with the full accompaniment of television cameras, dressing up like a gangster to “inspect projects” before returning to government house to throw juvenile tantrums in the direction of President Buhari.

It must be admitted that Fayose’s tantrums against Buhari are a tad saner than Femi Fani-Kayode’s drug-induced incoherent jeremiads against the President. Much of Fayose’s animus is also fed by disappointment and fear. He is disappointed that Buhari has so far not died in office in accordance with his prediction. He is afraid that he will one day have to pay for his role in Ekitigate. He is screaming to foreclose the possibility of claims of fairness when the law eventually rolls to his doorstep. He wants to be able to say: “you see? I told you they’d come for me! I am being persecuted!”

There is, however, grave danger in reducing his opposition to the Buhari presidency to these issues as is the wont of a fanatical core of President Buhari’s supporters. As juvenile and uncouth as Fayose’s tantrums are; as ill-bred as his language make him out to be, there is something in his defiance of President Buhari that I fully embrace and endorse because it is great for Nigerian democracy. We should rise above petty sentiments and recognize that matter. Whenever a state Governor somehow finds it within himself to defy the Nigerian Presidency, such a governor gains my attention in the context of the urgent task of growing Nigeria’s democracy by reducing the omnipotence of Nigeria’s behemoth Presidency.

I have been writing about the aberration that is the Nigerian Presidency for a very long time. I have been writing about the irrationality that is Aso Rock for a very long time. I screamed about the irrational powers of the Nigerian presidency through the tenures of Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, and Jonathan. Such irrational powers increase with each occupant of the Villa instead of diminishing.

The Nigerian Presidency is the most powerful presidency in the world and that makes her the most irrational Presidency in the world. One snap of a First Lady’s finger can have all state Governors and their wives, all Ministers and their wives, all Senators and their wives, rushing gragra to the Villa to answer “mummy”. If a Presidential spouse unrecognized by the Constitution has so much illegal powers over the actors and institutions of the Nigerian state, how much more her elected husband?

We say we are operating the American Presidential system. President Obama has no power to order any American governor to the White House. In his nearly eight years in office, there are Republican Governors who have never been to the White House. They have no business with Obama. Institutions are there to regulate the modalities of their contact with the American presidency and each faces his own business in his own domain. In Nigeria, every time somebody sneezes in the Villa, all state governors run girigiri to the Villa. It doesn’t make sense. This is not democracy.

Such are the immense powers of Aso Rock Villa that mere presidential aides even come to acquire illegal powers over institutions, actors, and resources of state. You see Presidential aides issuing yeye directives all over the place – ordering Governors and Ministers and Senators around because they have the power to determine access to an omnipotent President.

That is why the Nigerian state literally moved to the late Oronto Douglas’ hometown when he buried his father. We lost a Governor and a former National Security Adviser to that brazen personalization of the state by a presidential aide. That is why the Nigerian state literally moved to Abeokuta when Reuben Abati buried his mother. Let Femi Adesina wake up tomorrow and decide to “turn the side” of his late great grandfather, you will see state Governors, Ministers, and Senators suspend the work of the Nigerian people and troop to the home town of the presidential aide.

In the context of such irrational powers accorded a Presidency in a so-called democracy, it was a good thing for Bola Tinubu to have defied the Obasanjo presidency; it was a good thing for Rotimi Amaechi to have defied the joint Presidencies of Goodluck and Patience Jonathan.

I salute Ayo Fayose for his defiance of the Buhari Presidency.

We need more state Governors to acquire Fayose’s balls. It is good for our democracy. We cannot continue to have a Presidency that can just wake up and kick other branches of our democracy around.

Happy new year to the people of Ekiti. I hope they kept my own rice and shawa fish in the freezer.

This article was sourced from Pius Adesanmi’s page on Facebook on January 06, 2016.