Ekiti 2018: The long and arduous road ahead

Judging from the intensity and almost fatalistic mindset that are often brought into discussing the affairs of their state on different fora, most especially the social media platforms, there’s hardly any doubt that Ekiti State indigenes are intricately and unapologetically tied to its apron string. And were passion and psycho-emotional attachment to be the requisite qualifications to determine, if not the yardstick to measure growth and development in societies, Ekiti State would have long ago successfully negotiated the bend towards modernity as we know it that the rest of the states in the polity would still be several light years away in arriving at. But just as having the highest education level per capita probably before the country’s antebellum have not yielded any appreciable socio-economic growth, probably in-part because of the love-hate relationship between its elites and commoners, the state’s development also cannot come to fruition by the sheer preponderance of passion and psycho-emotional attachment that the indigenes have for their state in a 21st century world.

The electorates of the “Fountain of Knowledge” once again have a date with history on July 14, 2018 in a governorship election that’s all but billed as a referendum to either stay the course on the negative continuity trajectory of the present government or to allow a new and sustainable dawn in which their bright minds becomes the custodians of the levers of power for real, verifiable, people-centric growth and development of the state.

There has probably never been any time in the state’s history that more than 30 aspirants had jostled for the ticket of a political party to contest the July 14th governorship election, which, although, has been described as a good development for the All Progressives Congress (APC) in its bid to sack the government of the reprobate Ayodele Fayose’s ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP). But this unwieldy lot—-it seems to me—-speaks more to the levity with which political leadership is taken in this clime than anything else.

While the minimum constitutional qualification needed by aspirants to contest the highest political seat in the state is not in any doubt (and most, if not all, of these aspirants are rightly and eminently qualified for the job under the circumstance) and has been advertised in several ways by both the contestants and their supporters, there is one key ingredient, however—-although not known to the “Rule Book” but extremely important nonetheless—-which can be said to be the sine qua non in leadership but terribly missing in the CVs of virtually all the governorship aspirants—-except two. Nigeria probably stands out as one of those socio-economic backwaters where her people—-in the main—-are still wallowing in such chronic lack of understanding of what leadership really entails. It is, therefore, not uncommon to find someone who either had paid the school fees of some children other than his own in his village, or who was magnanimous enough to have bought some heads of cattle for his community during festivities, or had even been made a Commissioner of an obscure ministry or an ill-defined and inconsequential Special Assistant to a governor to feel very strongly that he is eminently qualified for a life-changing leadership position such as governor or even president.

Just as Nigerians felt somewhat that something was fundamentally wrong with former President Jonathan because the country’s social and economic conditions were very bad and that something must be done before they got worse which ushered in the opposition APC in 2015, there seems to be some sort of a “natural mystic” blowing through Ekiti State that has now cleared the eyes of its indigenes to see that they have been had in the most fantastic leadership by deceit ploy of their current governor Ayo Fayose. The state is now a shadow of its former self.

While Fayose’s second coming to spearhead the affairs of Ekiti State and its people has been described as that of a bull in a China shop may not be so frightening simply because broken ‘wares’ can be fixed and/or replaced within a short spate of time, his having turned the state into a pig’s sty where the population have been psychologically conditioned to see the socio-economic stench in their state as the new normal will require someone among the APC aspirants that’s not only made of sterner stuff, but also with the requisite experience (italics mine for emphasis) as the chief executive to redirect the state from this ruinous path. Only Chief Segun Oni and Dr. Kayode Fayemi fits this bill.

It must be recalled that not long after his inauguration, President Muhammadu Buhari announced that even though he knew that things were bad going into the general election, he never knew the extent of the damage unleashed on the polity by Jonathan and his men and women until he started to open the files. By this same token, whoever finds himself in the saddle in Ekiti after his swearing-in would discover to his unimaginable chagrin that the state’s condition is much worse than he could ever have imagined. This is where experience is absolutely indispensable in turning the state around in four years or even less. It must also be emphasized that the rot in Ekiti does not call for someone with a legislative experience neither does it require someone with a long stint in the private sector of the economy, or even a combination of both at this particular juncture in its history. The state can be likened to a patient with a malignant tumour who must first be stabilized through surgery before his regiment of drug-taking begins. Therefore, only a doctor with the right experience can perform this life-threatening procedure.

Since the man whose works were deliberately destroyed by the ‘pig’ at “Oke Ayoba” had expressed his intention to contest, once again, the governorship position, he should be the natural heir to the throne not because anyone of the other contestants cannot attempt to do a good job, but because he’s in a good stead to do far much better because of his unequalled experience and, more importantly, because he has the developmental blueprint with which he turned around the socio-economic condition of the state in his first coming that even his ardent critics could not dispute. Equally importantly is the fact that Ekiti needs a governor who would not be distracted by a second term ambition. The state is already behind the 8th ball in the comity of states, and especially among its sister states in the Southwest geo-political region that whoever finds himself in the saddle this time around must be told in no uncertain terms that he must focus on his job like a laser beam. So, a governor must be deemed to have lost his roadmap (assuming he has one in the first instance) if he’s seen grinning at parties and other inconsequential social events at least in the first half of his tenure or he’s waiting for some bureaucrats to tell him where the “bodies are buried” by Fayose after 2 months of his inauguration.

If an incontrovertible consensus already exists among the state’s political class and other major stakeholders that their beloved geographical space has truly been turned into a pig’s sty with such debilitating and suffocating stench, then it goes without saying that the job to ‘re-engineer’ Ekiti and turn it into an irresistible attraction for all eyes to behold should be given to John Kayode Fayemi not necessarily because they love him, but because they love Ekiti State more. Ekiti is in need of a new paradigm shift of which its best minds are deliberately thrown up to disrupt the prevailing counter-intuitive and Neolithic mindset being championed by none other than its chief of state in the name of “stomach infrastructure.”

Femi Odere is a media practitioner. He can be reached at [email protected]