Fayemi APC and imminent defeat in Osun by ADEWOLE JOHNSON The Ekiti State gubernatorial election of June 21 has come and gone, yet the All Progressives Congress, APC, which was comprehensively defeated at the polls by the People Democratic Party, PDP, has been behaving like the ostrich, citing some imaginary evidence of ‘photocromic’ rigging or intimidation of voters by the presence of armed security agents as the cause of its woeful defeat at the poll. The haughty and loquacious governor of Osun State, Rauf Aregbesola, has been the loudest proponent of the thesis that APC did not lose the elections in Ekiti, boasting that the outcome of the forthcoming Osun election would prove him right. Every objective and rational observer of the Ekiti political scene prior to the election knew that Kayode Fayemi was spending his last days as the state governor and that Ayo Fayose would emerge victorious in the election. The APC in its folly was supremely confident that its propaganda and barefaced lies would hoodwink the people and make them vote en-masse for Fayemi, whose achievements are found more on the pages of newspapers and television than in any identifiable part of Ekiti. Now that the chickens have come home to roost, even the rabid pro-APC columnists of The Nation newspapers have started to enumerate and analyse Fayemi’s original sins – bothering on lack of sincerity, accountability or transparency and his preoccupation with the fanning of his own ego and that of the clique that surrounded him. Aregbesola’s sins are more grievous and more unpardonable when juxtaposed with those committed by Fayemi in Ekiti. A critical analysis of these transgressions point in the direction of another comprehensive defeat for Aregbesola and the APC on August 9. Osun people are no fools and are witnesses to the demolition of houses, shops and property (without due compensation) by the Aregbesola government. They are also witnesses to the total destruction of the educational system through whacky and wrong-headed policies by a man whose claim to education is at best tenuous. The consequence has been declining performance by Osun students in public examinations, yet Aregbesola insists that his policies are the best for the sector. The reckless acquisition of loans to finance phantom and inflated projects have left Osun in a state of financial asphyxia and when it dawned on the APC apparatchik that non-payments of months of arrears of salaries will jeopardise its electoral chances in Osun, it hurriedly secured another round of loans at very exorbitant interest rate to pay months of arrears owed teachers, civil servants and the OYES cadets whose arrears run into about nine months. The government is presently looking for more loans to pay pensioners. An already heavily-indebted Osun State will be further impoverished by an additional burden of hurriedly- contracted loan agreements. The Omisore Campaign Organisation is happy that workers are being paid money owed them, but we are absolutely sure that Osun people are not deceived by the sudden “feel-good” and “wooing” tactics of the Aregbesola administration. They are aware that the APC government in Osun has shown itself to be antipeople in the four years it occupied the seat of power and unless they want a return to the days of government by deceit and propaganda, they will not vote for Aregbesola’s continued occupation of Abere. Till date, no one except Aregbesola knows the true state of indebtedness of Osun State as Aregbesola and his aides have not been able to give, in any written document or interview, an account of how much Osun owes creditors. When asked, they’ve always dismissed Omisore’s figure as false but has failed to provide the true figure of the state’s indebtedness. Who is fooling whom? It is a tragedy of monumental proportions that Osun, which occupies the 28th position in land mass as well as the 17th position in terms of population among the 36 states of the federation, now has the unenviable reputation of being the 4th most indebted state in Nigeria. The depth of the financial quagmire which the Aregbesola administration has thrown Osun into is better imagined than described when one realises that Osun has received nearly N400 billion from the federation account between December 2010 and May 2014,. Today in Osun, there is poverty written on the faces of the generality of the people who now look back with nostalgia on the days when the PDP was in the saddle. Under the PDP administration, money went round because government invested Osun’s money in Osun, but under Aregbesola, local contractors have been sent out of business, money circulates only within his Lagos clique and Lagos-based contractors got all of Osun’s major contracts. The implication of this is that capital flight takes place daily and Osun people have become more immersed in poverty and squalor. The response of Aregbesola and his APC goons is that they are not interested in building “stomach infrastructure” when we all know that they build “stomach infrastructure” only for the governor and his coterie of friends from Lagos. Infrastructural development that is not matched by raising the people’s standard of living and providing food, clothing and shelter is untenable and anti-human. The APC-led government in Osun State is like a dog that eats its vomit because what it condemns during the day, it practises at night. In several interviews between 2010 and 2013, Aregbesola called former Governor Oyinlola and his administration unprintable names. At different times, Olagunsoye Oyinlola’s administration was described as “visionless,” “technically insolvent”, “shallow and without mission” by Aregbesola, yet he and his bosses ran to Okuku to seek political succour and wisdom from the same “visionless” Oyinlola after their woeful loss at the June 21 election in Ekiti. Such hypocritical and opportunistic janusfaced behaviour has become characteristic of the APC and its leaders. When all political parties in Osun protested against the continued supervision of Osun election by the former Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Resident Electoral Commissioner, REC, Amb Akeju because his impartiality was questionable on account of his personal relationship and friendship with the leaders of the APC, INEC correctly excused him and had him replaced. Curiously, Osun APC has since been crying louder than the bereaved, issuing statements decrying Akeju’s ouster probably because of its sinister intention to use Akeju to perpetrate fraud at the August 9 election. The APC hack writers rained abuses on Ekiti State governor-elect, Fayose, saying that he bought Ekiti peoples’ votes with rice. Recent revelations from their own camp showed clearly that Fayemi and his wife equally gave rice, recharge cards, cash and bought vehicles, sewing machines, etc to people in Ekiti even up until the eve of the elections. In Osun today, Ogbeni and his cronies have also stared distributing rice and money to people as if that will stop their ultimate rejection by an overwhelming majority of voters for whom life has been made more difficult by four years of imposed selfish, misguided and misdirected anti-people policies. One of the most intriguing paradoxes of the administration in Osun is its penchant for embarking on mega projects that may not likely be completed several years to come, even though it claims to be populist. It is curious that Aregbe’s government cannot see the wisdom in embarking on cost-effective pro-people projects that can be accomplished within the four year tenure of the administration. Even more baffling is the usual noticeable discrepancy between the gargantuan amount spent and the questionable end- product of such investment. For example, it recently announced that it invested N2.3billion in the construction of the Aiyegbaju market in Osogbo. Earlier, it announced that it pumped N3.6 billion annually into its school feeding programme; N8 billion into the ill-fated “Opon – imo” project; N27billion into hospitals renovation project (which is yet to be accomplished); acquired a helicopter (in a relatively crime-free state) for area surveillance and “quick emergency response” at a cost yet to be disclosed; spent N10 billion on rehabilitation of intra-city roads many of which are either 0.16 kilometre (Fagbewesa – Odi Olowo junction, Ebenezer Hotel road) or 0.85 kilometre Balogun Biro/Oke Baale road in Osogbo). In addition, it spent a whooping N4.5billion on the Eastern bye-pass road in Osogbo named after Oba Adesoji Aderemi, while a humongous N20 billion has been sunk into the 45 kilometre Osogbo/Ila Odo road. Clearly, Osun people can see the wide discrepancy between close to N100 billion already spent on road construction and the reality of inter and intra-city impassable roads that they have to contend with on a daily basis. Can we not also link the appetite of Aregbesola for billion naira contracts with his unequalled but suspicious decision to remain the Commissioner for Works in Osun for four years while his deputy, Mrs. Titi Laoye-Tomori also presided over the contracts for construction of mega schools having remained Commissioner for Education for four years? Final word for Aregbesola is that the clouds of his defeat in Osun are gathered and neither his propaganda machine nor his “state boys” or his recent pretentious populist gestures can stop the rain at the polls on August 9. Johnson writes in from Osogbo
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 03:50:30 +0000