STAR ARTICLE: Ekiti, it is time for restitution - by Tatalo Alamu
Mobolaji ALUKO
EKITI NORTH SENATORIAL DISTRICT: ARISE (PDP) Vs. ADETUNBI (AC), VERSION IIFor the map of Ekiti, please click here
For the map of the local government, click on it below.
|
NO |
LOCAL GOVERNMENT |
Area (sq. km) |
HEADQUARTERS |
Registered Voters |
No. Of Wards |
No. Of Polling Units |
State Constituency |
Federal Constituency |
|
1 |
320.62 |
Ikole-Ekiti |
43,037 |
12 |
182 |
Ikole I, II |
Ekiti North I | |
|
2 |
507.04 |
Oye-Ekiti |
72,837 |
12 |
190 |
Oye I, II | ||
|
3 |
231.57 |
Ido-Ekiti |
47,587 |
11 |
139 |
Ido-Osi I, II |
Ekiti North II | |
|
4 |
199.47 |
Otun-Ekiti |
51,263 |
11 |
112 |
Moba I, II | ||
|
5 |
94.92 |
Iye-Ekiti |
42,155 |
10 |
91 |
Ilejemeje | ||
|
TOTAL |
1353.62 |
256,879 |
56 |
714 |
Note: the recent Ekiti gubernatorial re-run elections of April 25/May 5, 2009 were over 10 local governments (not including Moba and Ilejemeje), 63 wards and 794 polling units.
Ekiti, it is time for restitution
- By Tatalo Alamu
Arise
Dearest Ayo,
Compliments of this absurd season. I do hope all is well with you and your family as you discover, at least temporarily, that there is life after the senate. We live in tumultuous times when events cascade with unremitting confusion and uncertainty. Today, you can be a hero. Tomorrow, you are zero. I do hope your final dismissal from the senate, or enforced absence, may afford you the opportunity for spiritual stock-taking and deep political reflection.
The problem with majority of our politicians is that they lack the landscape within, the rich hinterland for the cultivation of the intellect and deep reflection which is the fountain of principled politics and creative and visionary social engineering. Without this, the politician is but a master-thug, leading other thugs into savage battle. But remember, a king among slaves is still a slave among kings.
Ayo, take a cursory look at the great politicians who have made a difference to their respective societies. You will discover that they are men and women with outstanding intellect and a prodigious capacity for deep reflection. Churchill, Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Charles De Gaulle, Kwame Nkrumah , Obafemi Awolowo, Golda Meir, Lee Kuan Yaun, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy and hopefully Barack Obama. As our own Obafemi Awolowo has summed things up, only the deep can call to the deep.
Now, are you surprised that despite its manifest failings the First Republic continues to be the gold benchmark for purposeful governance in the country? Take a glance at the leading actors of that era and see why we have come a sad cropper. Awolowo was a world class thinker and philosopher, Nnamdi Azikiwe was in the first rank of anti-colonial intellectuals and decolonising theoreticians. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was a notable novelist, Ahmadu Bello was deeply versed in Islamic lore and scholarship.
To compare these titans with their current epigones is to be confronted by a malicious joke; a cruel travesty. As Okonkwo famously lamented, how could a proud and sterling man like himself beget a worthless and spineless efulefu like Nwoye? It is not as if these people lack formal schooling. What they lack is education. Bernard Shaw has put this paradox with gripping clarity. "My education", he observed, "was continually interrupted by schooling".
I suspect I am beginning to bore you with this unwarranted and unsolicited political treatise, this needless statistics of political sainthood and uninvited audit of greatness. As a proactive political hell-raiser of considerable mettle, you must begin to suspect political partisanship, an attempt to lead you down to the political abattoir in the guise of objective public critique.
You are both right and wrong. I may have to rein in my polemical ardour here. I suspect my anger is beginning to get in the way. But as Fabien Contactor, the great Roman general and outstanding military strategist has noted, preliminary skirmishes must never be fought with major artillery. If you remember Zik cautioning the great Allah De about this during their epic duel about Diarchy in the golden seventies, then we thank god for small mercies.
I write to you on a forlorn and drizzly Friday morning when the elements themselves seem to have gone bunkers. Lagos wears a depressing and miserable look. The weather is dank and overcast. There is an icy distemper abroad. Everybody seems be getting into everybody’s way. Nigeria is like a great movie in which everybody is a mad hurry to reach a dead end. The cynic will say that if the heavens will tear apart, it is not going to fall on one person.
It is this pervasive cynicism in the land, particularly among the political elite, that is the source of my sorrow and dismay. I write with anger and dismay particularly against the background of political turbulence in Ekiti state, a state that was famous for the industry and forthrightness of its people and the academic distinction of its elite, a reputation that is fast receding into history only to be replaced by violent rancour and bitter division.
First was the now infamous guber rerun which was marred by much brigandage and violence and in which you were fingered as the main merchant of mayhem. Up till now, your victorious party colleague has not been able to come up with a decent cabinet, which points to a temporary and Pyrrhic victory. The second development was the rapid nullification, in less than a fortnight, of two senatorial seats one of which was yours. After an epic legal duel lasing over two years, you finally kissed the canvas.
You would have noticed the great reluctance of this column to come down hard on you, even when it appears you have lost the plot totally. My belief is that except in the cases of those who are irredeemably lost and those who are beyond soap and water, politics is all about bridge-building and not about narrow sectarian exclusivity. As long as politics is politics and not a jihad or a revolutionary uprising, it will always be a game of number and a game of sober persuasion and conversion and not of grim terroristic hectoring.
I am one of those who believe that the outcome of the AC primaries in Ekiti state could have been better managed. I still hold firmly to this belief, and that it was the bungling that led people like you, Dare Babarinsa, Segun Oni, Dayo Adeyeye and many others to abandon your progressive habitat for the enemy terrain. In the case of Adeyeye, he seems to have decided to burn all his bridges, which is the prerogative of every adult. The tragedy of Ekiti state is that it has been turned into a battlefield by former fellow travellers; it is a war of progressives against former progressives.
But the question is: why must you allow a temporary disadvantage or a temporary setback to cause you to abandon your post if you truly believed in the ideals in the first instance? A political advantage does not last forever. You did not become a progressive because of an individual but because of firmly held beliefs about how a society should be organised. The wisest and smartest thing to do would have been to hunker down until the equation changes and the equation is bound to change eventually because the only thing permanent in politics as in life itself is impermanence.
As the history of Nigerian politics has shown, once you allow yourself to be displaced from your natural political environment by your internal adversaries, you are set firmly on a course of irreversible self-destruction. Check out the fortunes of those who allowed minor quarrels with their former progressive associates to lead them to the warm embrace of the old enemy. They have ended up as human fiascos and a pathetic parody of their former self. In their bid to sound more catholic than the pope, they became a tragic nuisance. But because a tree trunk does not become a crocodile simply because it has spent some time in water, they are never completely admitted into the fold by their new found family. It then becomes a case of double jeopardy.
My dear Ayo, it is this terrible fate that I fear may be your lot. See the way Adeyeye was summarily decisioned by the old crocodile when his name came up for ministerial preferment? Yet the poor chap has continued to churn out some delinquent hallucinations about the true political situation in Ekiti. This is what happens when you allow bitterness and hatred of individuals to drive your politics. You push yourself farther into the land of the unreturnable., with apologies to Amos Tutuola.
I could not believe myself when I saw you fielding questions on television on the eve of the Ekiti Guber run. You sounded bellicose and serially embattled. What has happened to the courteous and well-comported fellow I once met somewhere on Victoria Island, I asked myself? Is this what adversarial politics does to people? In no time, you have been canonised as the patron saint of political violence in Ekiti, with your country home in Oye reportedly overflowing with psychedelic stalwarts..
The events of the next few weeks will confirm whether this evil reputation is richly deserved or whether it is just callous propaganda. However it turns out, Ekiti state deserves some respite and restitution. There has been too much suffering and misery in that heroic land. The problem has never been with the people.
The people of Ekiti have never wavered in their support for progressive governance which brings progress, modernisation and prosperity not the biblical suffering of feudal servitude. It is the elite who have chosen to violate the electoral will of the people. The bitter division in the state is a war imposed from above, a troubling contradiction arising from the surplus production of over-schooled elite without much political education.
If you must run, please make sure that it is violence-free and devoid of the do or die politics of your current patrons. Do not join in the electoral humiliation of your own people any further. The people of this area have the memory of an elephant. This is the road to restitution. Like the other good people of Nigeria, the sturdy people of Ekiti have it within their large heart to forgive, and a prodigious capacity to forget. You may yet warm your way back to their heart.
I wish you well, despite my sorrow and indignation, and regards to B.O.B, your friend and my beloved aburo...
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