Ekiti: And the winner is…

Treadingnews.com

Jul 12, 2018 11:43 PM

By the time you will be reading this column next week, a winner must have emerged in this Saturday’s Ekiti governorship election. The race is generally perceived to be between the PDP candidate, Prof. Kolapo Olubunmi Olusola Eleka, and the APC candidate, Dr. John Kayode Fayemi.

The other thirty-something candidates are pretenders. PDP will win the election if it is not rigged. The major factors working against APC are also, in contrast, those working in favour of the PDP. One is national while the other is local. At the national level, APC has lost a lot of the verve and panache that saw it rolling over PDP in 2015, uprooting incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan at the centre and many PDP governors in the states. To start with, President Muhammadu Buhari, who was seen as saint and messiah, is today seen as the devil itself. Many of those who shouted “Hosanna” in 2015 are crying “Crucify him” today. Buhari is no longer the highly revered personality that he was in 2015.

He has lost – wasted – the credibility and integrity he once commanded and many Nigerians cannot wait to see his back as they chase him out of the Presidential Villa with their votes in 2015. The huge goodwill of 2015 is gone with the wind! It is like the presidential election should be held today so the people can sing “good riddance to bad rubbish”. It is that bad for Buhari.

Truth be told, Buhari has not governed well. His performance rating has been below the mediocre level. The economy that was once one of the fastest-growing in the whole world has come to ruins under him. Rather than create the millions of jobs his party promised, millions of jobs have been lost instead. Rather than the parity in the Naira exchange rate to the dollar that he promised, we have seen the worst performance of the Naira against the dollar ever. Power supply has been at its most epileptic level. The national grid has collapsed more times under Buhari than under any previous leader.

Local industries cannot compete with foreign goods as a result of high production cost caused majorly by their running on diesel and black oil; factories are closing or voting with their feet and their buildings are becoming events and worship centres. The so-called anti-graft war of the Buhari administration is generally seen for what it is: Victimization and oppression of political opponents with a view to silencing them and foisting a one-party state and dictatorship on the people. Corrupt elements within APC are treated as saints by Buhari. Corrupt elements outside who run into the party have their “sins” instantly forgiven and can then continue to sin even more, assured that the anti-graft agencies will look the other way.

Only opposition figures are the target of Buhari’s war against corruption. But by far the greatest undoing of Buhari is the insecurity that pervades the entire country, chiefly caused by Fulani herdsmen whose Life Patron Buhari is said to be. It is over-generosity to say that Buhari treats the murderous herdsmen with kid gloves; his administration, in fact, keys into what the herdsmen are doing. Statement after statement by Buhari himself and from key officials of his government backs the herdsmen’s atrocities to the consternation of right-thinking and conscionable Nigerians.

The gory sight of the killed – infants and the suckling, toddlers, children, pupils, students, pregnant women with their stomach ripped open, the aged, name it – and the cold-blooded aloofness of Buhari and other APC leaders have shocked even the international community. Now everyone realises that it is for this pogrom and ethnic cleansing that Buhari deliberately put the country’s entire security architecture in the hands of his tribe and religion. So, it is not accidental but deliberate and pre-planned; their faint and deceitful protestations notwithstanding. Then, of course, internal crisis has never left APC from Day One. The cracks, which widened by the day, have now factionalised the party into APC and Reformed APC.

The party is split down the middle; has lost control of the National Assembly; is losing many governors; and a grand alliance of political parties is afoot to wrestle it to the ground. APC at the national level is collapsing like a pack of cards. And there is no way this will not rub off on the fortunes of the party in Ekiti State generally and the Saturday’s election in particular.

To make matters worse, Fayemi, the APC governorship candidate in Ekiti, is not on ground at all. He is not loved by the people. His first tenure is seen by many Ekiti people as a disaster. He got huge allocations and frittered them, leaving nothing substantial as justification. He still went ahead to pile up huge debts which, today, incapacitates the state and makes regular payment of salaries and pensions impossible. Every month, a whopping N1.1 billion is yanked off Ekiti allocations from source to offset Fayemi’s debts and this bleeding will continue up to 2036. To make matters worse, he is elitist and acts condescendingly to the very people he seeks to govern.

Segun Oni would have made a far better candidate for APC than Fayemi because the former is more grassroots and better loved than the latter. And Ekiti APC is not coordinated and cohesive at all. As we speak, their campaign has no D-G in the real sense of the word, with the one so named undergoing treatment abroad as a result of gun-shot wound sustained at a party event. APC’s campaign has generally been tainted by violence and this has scared many away from them. They have done far less campaigning than PDP but have antagonised more critical stakeholders. Traditional rulers have been treated with scorn; okada riders fear they will be banned if Fayemi returns as governor; and road transport workers see themselves as being in Fayemi’s “black book”. Fayemi has made speeches that frightened workers. He said no LG should have more than 200 workers and that Fayose owes salaries because he carries too heavy wage bill; meaning he would retrench if elected.

Workers prefer to be owed salaries than lose their job outright. When everyone expected Fayemi to choose a Muslim as running mate, he did not. When they expected him to placate Ekiti South senatorial district, which has never been governor, with his running mate slot, he did not. All the failings of Fayemi have been cleverly exploited by PDP.

At a “SITUATION ROOM” interface organised by Clement Nwankwo’s civil society organisation in Ado-Ekiti recently, fears were expressed about so-called “Federal might” and collusion of INEC and security forces to rig the election for Fayemi. INEC representatives at the event and the State Commissioner of Police gave assurances the election will be credible. The State SSS Director however ran into trouble waters when she admitted that Fayemi’s former Chief Security Officer (CSO) was in a team of SSS deployed in Ekiti for the election. The said ex-CSO has been fingered as the arrowhead of those arresting and detaining teachers, further straining Fayemi’s troubled relations with Ekiti teachers. Ekiti is tense. To all intents and purposes, the state may be sitting on the keg of gunpowder. What is needed to ignite it is little election malfeasance.