There is no mess in Osun, only challenges

By Adekunle Owolabi

“Osun is in a mess”, written by Wale Fatade, makes a good reading especially for those in desperate search of materials with which to pillory the Governor of Osun, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola.

The writer, though in some brief aspects of his piece, acknowledged that under Aregbesola’s watch, the state has witnessed landmark innovative ideas, many of which were the reasons the people of the state became fanatical about their support for his re-election despite the orgy of assault and intimidation perpetrated by the marauding powers of the defunct Peoples Democratic Party-led Federal Government.

This is why before we go too far in this piece, we must celebrate the beautiful ideas that have come out of Osun many of them that bear great hopes and inspirations for the resolution of many of Nigeria’s fundamental problems.

From that state has emanated sustainable ideas to resolve the country’s problem of youth unemployment and its concomitant stress on the society. So also is the way the state has injected life into the education system that will create functionality. In some decades to come, Osun is certainly going to be a reference point with the seeds of ideas and projects that have been sown in the last three years. The state’s programmes in the areas of health, security, environments, social care and boost to agriculture are certainly ideas to look into by Nigeria if the Federal Government is truly committed to helping the country out of her problems.

But a la many who now consider the Aregbesola bashing a pastime, Fatade has equally fallen into the usual error of fallacies, fabrications, lack of verifications and lazy reliance on social media postings that bear little or no regards for facts and realities. No matter how good a writer ordinarily would have looked and sounded with his words, such easy ways out mar his writings and reduce them to nothing but tendentious pieces of innuendos.

And nothing demonstrates this fact in the write-up than the fact that the three instances the writer used to build up his angry case against Aregbesola have no basis in facts or reason.

In an attempt to paint the imaginary state of famine which the anti-Aregbesola campaigners want Osun to assume because of the unpaid salaries, many must have been scandalised by reports of a man who allegedly attempted suicide because of unpaid salaries as cited by Fatade.

He went ahead to add the unfortunate tale of a private school owner whose school has closed down because the pupils in that school could not pay fees. The last of his illustrations came last Sunday allegedly when a pastor of a church was reported by The PUNCH newspaper to have asked church members to bring foods for other members the next worship day to assist those in need of food. All these are according to Fatade, the shameful and harsh effects of the unpaid salaries.

While the man, Mr. Owolabi, whom PUNCH reported to have attempted suicide came out with his doctor and family members to condemn the PUNCH for its false report saying his medical condition had nothing to do with the unpaid salaries, the instance of a private school owner closing his school cannot be a credible evidence of his imagined famine in Osun. Had the writer probed further, I am confident his efforts would have yielded more reasonable causes of the private school’s predicament. Osun is home to several private schools some of which have actually lamented massive withdrawal of pupils by their parents to enroll in Aregbesola’s more sophisticated and ideal government schools.

And then the church in its passionate appeal for assistance! One needs to know whether at the best of times all over the world, mosques, churches, other religious places and charity homes have not been playing such roles as part of the demonstration of the milk of human kindness with which a every society must sustain itself because there will always be the clubs of the Haves and the Have-nots.

For a government that cares, the unpaid salaries undoubtedly creates unease; an agonising turn of events for an administration that had made welfare of its workers a priority to the loud admiration of the workers themselves.

We must admit that the state is owing salaries. And one must recognise the efforts geared towards ensuring that the backlog is cleared. But even in the face of the daunting task, these are not strong enough to obliterate the very tall achievements of that administration either in the area of welfare for the workers or in the quantum of physical developments of the state within such a record time.

When Fatade accused Aregbesola of failing to have “displayed the same energy in facing the poverty monster ravaging the state” he displayed prior his re-election, one wonders what information is at the disposal of the writer, that suggest this claim.

The Aregbesola administration is a work in continuity. Even if the state is not buoyant at the moment, the entire landscape represents one huge reconstruction of the dreams of the people. In the face of hunger of course, there are tendencies for the hungry man to be angry and carry his anger to the very extreme that helps him ventilate his inner boilings. But those who are not hungry, but in sympathy with the man who has not been paid must never be swayed to a point of blindly rubbishing the laudable efforts of the administration of which the man who is not hungry has been the beneficiary.

Aregbesola’s traducers may accuse him of owing salaries. What he cannot be accused of is lack of vision for good governance and implementation of the most people-friendly programmes.

Payments of salaries certainly cannot be the only criteria for judging the performance of a government. Even the most vicious critics of Aregbesola, if they are sincere, would not gloss over the grandeur nature of his projects, the ubiquitous spread of the projects and the enduring legacies they represent in terms of quality and standardisation.

Yes, because Osun’s government is owing salaries, no one can stop those who want to create sensations out of the unfortunate situation from doing so. However, it would also be fair to recognise and celebrate that before the challenge of unpaid salaries crept in, the Aregbesola administration had ignited a kind of development revolution that has set the state on a pedestal of enduring development.

No matter how we look at it, we cannot divorce the state’s predicament from the national revenue crisis ravaging the country. When a state begins to collect in four months, what is insufficient for it to meet salaries obligations alone in one month, we must recognise and appreciate that something must give. Nigeria’s army of writers must take this upon themselves for adequate probing, convinced that the resolutions of the critical issues around the cause rather than the effects, will help the collective wellbeing of Nigeria.

Owolabi, a journalist and Law student writes from Osogbo, Osun through [email protected]