Now that Aiyedatiwa has the knife, can he face the smoke, pull out his chestnut from the fire and govern Ondo State? It will be a calamity if Ondo State perceives that it has an accidental governor. While you need small luck to become a governor, plenty brain is needed to administer it
Festus Adedayo
Ondo State was in the news for the bad reason last week. A gale of killings, kidnapping and demand for ransom swept through the Akure North and South local governments of the state. Armed assailants were said to have stormed Aba Alajido, Aba Sunday, Aba Pastor, and Ademekun communites of the Akure North Local Government Area. By the time the flakes had settled, deaths, caked blood and destruction dotted the landscape, with weeping, wailing and gnashing of the teeth as the victims and their families’ companions. From 20 villagers allegedly killed, fourteen bodies were said to have been recovered.
This bad news had hardly subsided when on Tuesday, same last week, nine surveyors were also said to have been kidnapped. Reports said they had been working at a site in my village in Ilu-Abo, Akure North Local Government Area of the state. After the abduction of the surveyors, their abductors were said to have made a demand of the sum of N100m to secure their release. This led to protests by individuals, market women and organizations which called on the governor, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, to face the business of protecting the people which is central to the mandate given him by the people. Earlier, on January 31, along the Benin-Owo-Akure road at the Ifon area of Ose Local Government Area of the state, seven travelers from Akwa Ibom State were abducted by bandits in a commercial bus.
In Nigeria of today, the sad reality is that. no state is totally immune from violence, banditry and insecurity. In virtually all components of Nigeria, countrymen sleep with one eye closed, making the security situation a national affliction that cannot be tackled with rhetoric. With these in mind, no one can totally harangue Ondo State and its authorities for the deluge of violence that aims at the state’s jugular. However, there is a lot to be bothered about when government’s response or lack thereof is tame and perceived to be a reflection of incompetence.
God bless the soul of Governor Rotimi Akeredolu. He led the establishment of the Amotekun security network in the southwest and ensured that his state reflected the frown of Yorubaland against invaders of whatever extraction
Yes, I am aware that governments in the Third World, try to de-numericize figures of casualties. So, if 20 people, for instance, suffer casualty in a disaster, governments keep the figure down to a tolerable numeral. The mind behind this, especially in Nigeria, is that actual figures could attract national bile towards the government. But, I have hardly seen where governments look at the face of their people and tell brazen lies.
The first indication of tame leadership response to the Ondo State insecurity came from government’s response. Just like Goodluck Jonathan did when the news of the kidnap of the Chibok girls got to him, responding with unbelief that it ever happened, the Ondo State government lived in denial of the calamity for almost 48 hours. Feelers from within it said government believed that the killing took place outside of Ondo State and its political enemies were merely weaponizing the killings by claiming it happened in the state. Their conviction was that this was done for the purpose of embarrassing the state government. Jonathan, I am sure, is yet to recover from the effect of this. When a Chief Security Officer of a state shows this level of absence, it is obvious the state is done for.
Thus, while addressing women protesters on behalf of the governor, the Special Adviser on Union Matters and Special Duties, Mr Bola Taiwo, gave the indication that mental rigour was lacking in the Alagbaka Government House. Taiwo’s response to the kidnapping of the surveyors was to blame them for getting themselves kidnapped. Their specific sin, the adviser said, was that they went to the site without security protection.
“We shall speak with your leaders if they have reported the incident to the police. If they have not, they should go there and report, that’s when the government would act. Nowadays, surveyors going to the site should go with police escorts. If they do, no gunmen would abduct them. No one can kidnap anyone without internal collaborators,” Taiwo said. He also told the women to return to Ilu-Abo and pursue their demand for the release of the surveyors. “You shall now go back to Ilu-Abo and cry out that those who abducted the surveyors should release them. No Hausa or Fulani man can come to Ilu-Abo and kidnap without the connivance of one of the natives. It is your people that kidnapped the nine surveyors. We will meet with your leaders and discuss with them,” he said magisterially.The same adviser was on a radio station to continue this doggerel verses which incensed the people of the state.
In saner clime, after that statement, Taiwo should be history in government. When a government hires an adviser who speaks this vacuously and leashlessly, then you need not look further as to why there is paucity of rigour and vision in the activities of the government. The appointive authority should be blamed.
However, the good news is that Governor Aiyedatiwa has sworn to do the needful. At a press conference thereafter, he talked about procuring drones to fight the bandits who seem to have convoked on the state. God bless the soul of Governor Rotimi Akeredolu. He led the establishment of the Amotekun security network in the southwest and ensured that his state reflected the frown of Yorubaland against invaders of whatever extraction. Now that Aiyedatiwa has the knife, can he face the smoke, pull out his chestnut from the fire and govern Ondo State? It will be a calamity if Ondo State perceives that it has an accidental governor. While you need small luck to become a governor, plenty brain is needed to administer it.
Nasir El-Rufai And The Philosophy Of Nothing
Former governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai caused a mild stir last week. Though the resignation of his membership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and gravitation towards the Social Democratic Party (PDP) did not come as a shock, the ruckus that attended them have been instructive. Torrents of negative comments have been heaped up as reactions to his decamping. And they are expected. Brilliant politician, intelligent and renowned for his organizational ability, El-Rufai is one politician you would love to hate. Since 1999, he has been a factor, either for ill or good, in Nigerian politics. Many have glibly equated him with the proverbial species of rat Yoruba call the Eda. This rat is perceived, just like El-Rufai, to always be the central focus of mostly bad issues. Playing on the alliteration in this rat species’ name of “Eda” and cause, “da” as mutual causative factors, my people say the harbinger of every issue is always the Eda rat which often brings about the caused element (iyi). So, they say, the Eda is the rat that causes this (Eku t’o da’yi le ni je eda). With his eventual pitching of tent with the SDP and the resurgence of opposition activities in Nigeria in the last one week, what came to my mind is a philosophical concept called the beauty of nothing.
In the perceived nothingness of El-Rufai’s politics, Nigeria may benefit something in the opposition that El-Rufai’s SDP may bring to Nigerian politics. If you know the characters in today’s government and the APC very well, we might just enter the 2027 elections as a totalitarian state, with all the opposition parties mere scarecrows decorated by the APC government to pass off as opposition forces
The “philosophy of nothing” is bothered about the nothingness in human existence. In articulating it, this philosophy tries to find out the role of nothingness in human existence, meaning, and the nature of reality. When you explore nothingness, you will be compelled to examine how “nothing” and “everything” intersect; how, from everything, you can get nothing and ultimately discovering that nothing is a fundamental aspect of something.
Asked why he left the APC for the SDP, El-Rufai blamed a system he alleged had gone to the sewers. He cited irreconcilable differences with the leadership of the APC and disappointment with the ruling party, as, in his words, in the last two years, APC had strayed from its progressive principles (as if the party ever had any). On what he would do in the SDP, he said, “I will focus on engaging with and persuading other opposition leaders and parties to join us and congregate under a unified democratic platform to challenge the APC in all elections and by-elections.”
With all the deluge of comments that have attended El-Rufai’s decamping into the SDP, the clear implication, as said by the party he is leaving and the government he has since been exposing its rump, is that the ex-Kaduna governor will be bringing nothing and is indeed an emissary of nothingness. The Nigerian presidency and the ruling APC had dismissed El-Rufai’s capability to galvanize opposition to unseat President Bola Tinubu in 2027. In their words, he is driven by what they called “an inordinate ambition that is destined to fail”. My immediate take is that, when the president began his political peregrination in 2022 or so, many of us said similar thing about his journey. Today, we are wrong and he is right, sitting comfortably in Aso Rock and picking his teeth like his predecessor. So, which of them is God enough to assume that El-Rufai’s political journey is a potential disaster?
Martin Heidegger, a renowned German philosopher with legendary contributions to the philosophy of existentialism, may want us to see the El-Rufai decamping from another prism; from the concept of nothingness and “nothing” being a fundamental aspect of being. Heidegger argued that “nothing” is the condition that allows for “being” to exist. There is however beauty of nothingness. It implies that even though nothingness brings about a state of emptiness or void, paradoxically, in it can be found immense potentials which may give a deeper appreciation of existence. In this regard, nothingness offers opportunity for creativity, peace among chaos, and renewed perspective into a logjam.
Let us now relate this philosophy of nothingness with our Nigerian reality. Other than the occasional flash-in-the-pan of individual critique and criticisms of the APC-led Nigerian government, no one can doubt the fact that Nigeria drifts towards a totalitarian state. Either real or imagined, there are facts which tend to support the allegation that the instability in the two leading opposition parties in Nigeria were cooked by the present government. According to Adeseye Ogunlewe in a television interview last week, Tinubu is the Master of Nigerian politics. Of a truth, only a fool would take his power of assembling and dissembling in politics with a pinch of salt. Being an old warhorse of Nigerian street politics, with octopodal tenterhooks to the nooks and crannies of the streets and institutions, causing institutional rifts in opposition political parties may just be a prologue in the handy playbook of the Master. While the PDP and Labour Party are engaged in a destructive angling for individual selves’ jugulars, with a Babelian voice that points at total irreconcilability, some hidden hands are said to have unhinged the screw of peace and amity in those political parties.
The above portends grave danger to Nigeria and her polity. Not minding whatever damage El-Rufai’s kind of politics might have done to political party politics in Nigeria in the past, we should look at his decamping from the above stated Heideggerian perspective. In the perceived nothingness of El-Rufai’s politics, Nigeria may benefit something in the opposition that El-Rufai’s SDP may bring to Nigerian politics. If you know the characters in today’s government and the APC very well, we might just enter the 2027 elections as a totalitarian state, with all the opposition parties mere scarecrows decorated by the APC government to pass off as opposition forces. As Heidegger argued, the El-Rufai “nothing” may just be the condition that will allow for our national “being” to exist.
While politicians may not agree with the above thesis as they benefit from the chaos of the polity, one thing it affords the people is a multiplicity of choice. In El-Rufai’s SDP, another choice is being handed over to Nigerians which must be adequately interrogated at every point.
My excitement at the potentials of SDP as a viable opposition suffered a momentary halt almost immediately that same last week. Adewole Adebayo, 2023 presidential candidate of the SDP had come on an interview session on a national television. I had heard of his trumped up brilliance from journalists who earlier interviewed him. At that interview session, gradually, Adebayo defrosted all those superlatives with which he was robed. By the time the interview session ended, in place of a huge turkey with huge feathers I expected to encounter, I was left with a species of hen Yoruba call “Adiye opipi”. This type of hen is known by a unique characteristic of featherless wings. Adebayo came across as this and much more. I saw a man who delights in a horse ride that takes place on the back of a cockroach. When you see such politicians, your mind races to a spent canister.
•Opinions, positions or thoughts expressed here are personal and strictly of the writer/author and not The Daily Crucible.
