February 26, 2009
Kayode Fayemi, the Action Congress governorship flag bearer in Ekiti State is a man that approaches challenges with an I-can-do-it spirit. Honed in the gritty battle to rout the military from politics, Fayemi is famously noted as the driver behind the Radio Kudirat, an alternative platform for the ventilation of contrarian opinions to the scorched earth atmosphere that prevailed when the late dictator, Sani Abacha was holding suzerain court in this woe-laden country. Fayemi survived Abacha and even as the misty air of tyranny refused to clear with the dysfunctional democracy that emerged from the rump of the anti-Abacha years, he felt that he was eminently qualified to serve the people of Ekiti as their governor.
This was to throw fresher challenges to Fayemi as the ashes of Abacha were to breed a sphinx of no lesser devastating mindset against opposition. Indeed, the jury is still out on which between the Abacha epoch and the deceptive and very corrosive Obasanjo years did more to decapitate opposition voices in Nigeria’s sad history of mercenary governance. Fayemi entered the race for Ekiti on the platform of the Action Congress and here, he had to contend with a full house of other aspirants, most of whom commanded reputable credentials in pro-democracy advocacy. His emergence however was to shed the toga of social conscience from some of his rivals, who jumped ship and embraced reactionary beatitudes and the attendant attitude to governance; the very same disease they have spent the better chunk of their productive life fighting or pretending to fight. They all teamed with the devil to fight Fayemi for the Ekiti governorship.
Undeterred by these turncoats and very sure that his platform commands the grassroots in Ekiti State, Fayemi soldiered on. On April 14, 2007, the people of Ekiti turned out in their numbers and elected Fayemi to govern them. The first batch of results that emerged suggested a Fayemi routing of the PDP horses and men reined against him. At a time, his AC had pocketed 13 house of assembly seats to PDP’s six and that was when the devil in the system, manned by Iwu and other racketeers showed up. The remaining seats were allocated to the PDP to equal the tally at 13-13. To crown it all, the governorship was awarded to Segun Oni, a colourless politician with no known pedigree that equaled Fayemi’s. Nigerian democracy of the do-or-die genre, forged and forcefully laundered by the departing Obasanjo regime was in full bloom. The militicians and political turncoats in Ekiti threw a party and Oni set sail.
Fayemi went to the state tribunal, invited foreign forensic experts to examine the votes that gave Oni his so-called victories and after over one year, the tribunal embarked on what could pass as judicial gerrymandering as it embarked on a weird and extensive queer arithmetic to justify the award of the governorship to Oni and the PDP. The party continued. Slaves and eunuchs hooted and said they were vindicated when in actual fact, they knew they were celebrating another stolen heist.
Undeterred, Fayemi appealed and the Appeal just fell short of handing his stolen mandate to him. It ordered fresh election in 64 out of the 177 electoral wards in the state. This is spread in ten local councils in Ekiti State and the appeal tribunal threw out the impostor governor and after sieving through the valid votes cast, declared that Fayemi is in the lead. The verdict has been hailed by Nigerians for justifiably dispossessing the impostor of the stolen mandate he had been wielding for close to two years but faulted for falling short of declaring that the owner of a retrieved stolen mandate should step forward and claim his diadem. Many have asked why someone that has been proved to steal someone else’s property should even be given the opportunity to go for a re-run. However, these are larger questions for the country’s queer electoral system that seems to be programmed to reward electoral perfidy and such other malfeasances.
However, the order to re-do the Ekiti State governorship election has hit the prodigal PDP at the very ground level. For a party, which sources strength in visiting callous electoral fraud in the system and which believes the system will always avail them such stolen, heist, the decision on Ekiti caught them pants down. The reality that is dawning on them as the verdict sinks is that Ekiti is one hell of a different ball game from the many states where they have reduced the re-run elections to comic parodies-much dastardlier than the cancelled exercises. With each passing day and as the PDP comes to terms with its fast-withering artificial strength and the people’s general aversion to it, they are being ran ragged that they may not actually be allowed to steal the votes of the 64 wards in Ekiti State. They have gone back to their vomit of running after the ousted governor, Ayodele Fayoshe, they have empanelled a committee in Ekiti State made up of Goodluck Jonathan, David Mark and other big wigs of the notorious party.
But they may find to their sorrow that these persons exert no real electoral respect among the badly tossed Ekiti people who have been tossed from one imponderable governor to another acting governor ever since Obasanjo seized the state for his PDP in 2003. The PDP may soon discover that Ekiti State is asking out of the PDP dubious collecting bin and may not be moved by whatever a Jonathan or a David Mark of all people do in Ekiti. They may find out that it would be pretty hard to steal the votes of the 64 wards in contention and that it would be much more easier to steal the votes of Kogi, Enugu, Bayelsa, Cross River, etc. than that of the 64 wards in Ekiti State. It is not trusting on its strength either because the PDP knows that with Nigerians, it has no hold and much of its strength exists on commandeered and violently stolen mandates.
That said, Kayode Fayemi and his party should gird their loins because the PDP can never tire of vote robbery. Every attempt must be made to frustrate them this time around. Fayemi should have by now, gotten the list of polling booths in the 64 contentious wards, mapped them and must have recruited priceless agents that would man his booths. They need not be Ekiti indigenes but people that can never be bought to look the other way while stuffed ballot boxes and papers are shipped in. He should have the registered voters list in all the 64 wards by now and must have strategically equipped his agents and wards with good communications gadgets to coordinate their activities and the results. There is no way why genuine results of the re-run elections cannot be known, either through the electoral body or Fayemi, 30 minutes after the exercise because it is merely the aggregation of the collated and duly vetted results from all the polling booths in the 64 wards, added to the sanctioned votes from the remaining 113 wards. He should by now, have worked out a verifiable voter time analysis based on what it takes the average voter to cast his vote and the average voter response, using the vetted votes from the 113 wards that have been allowed. That way, it would be easy to prove cases of vote inflation using green, red, black, blue or any biro at all. Most importantly, he should have his forensic faculty still in place. This indeed is your game Fayemi and Nigerians are solidly behind you.
Fayemi has the intellectual capacity and the discipline to do this. He has the sympathy of the average Ekiti man, who is sick and tired of the corrosive politics of the PDP and who neighs for the uplifting political changes that recently happened in Edo and Ondo States and wont mind to share in that exciting and renewing experience.
But Nigerian forces of change must key into this critical opportunity, not for Fayemi but for all Ekiti people and the wobbly system that passes as the electoral system in Nigeria. Nigerian men and women of goodwill must relocate to Ekiti State for the re-run polls to send a warning to electoral thieves that Never Again, shall we allow reprobates and scammers to subject us to the kind of decrementing torture of April 14, 2007 from which we are still slaving under.
Peter Claver Oparah.
Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mail: [email protected]
This was to throw fresher challenges to Fayemi as the ashes of Abacha were to breed a sphinx of no lesser devastating mindset against opposition. Indeed, the jury is still out on which between the Abacha epoch and the deceptive and very corrosive Obasanjo years did more to decapitate opposition voices in Nigeria’s sad history of mercenary governance. Fayemi entered the race for Ekiti on the platform of the Action Congress and here, he had to contend with a full house of other aspirants, most of whom commanded reputable credentials in pro-democracy advocacy. His emergence however was to shed the toga of social conscience from some of his rivals, who jumped ship and embraced reactionary beatitudes and the attendant attitude to governance; the very same disease they have spent the better chunk of their productive life fighting or pretending to fight. They all teamed with the devil to fight Fayemi for the Ekiti governorship.
Undeterred by these turncoats and very sure that his platform commands the grassroots in Ekiti State, Fayemi soldiered on. On April 14, 2007, the people of Ekiti turned out in their numbers and elected Fayemi to govern them. The first batch of results that emerged suggested a Fayemi routing of the PDP horses and men reined against him. At a time, his AC had pocketed 13 house of assembly seats to PDP’s six and that was when the devil in the system, manned by Iwu and other racketeers showed up. The remaining seats were allocated to the PDP to equal the tally at 13-13. To crown it all, the governorship was awarded to Segun Oni, a colourless politician with no known pedigree that equaled Fayemi’s. Nigerian democracy of the do-or-die genre, forged and forcefully laundered by the departing Obasanjo regime was in full bloom. The militicians and political turncoats in Ekiti threw a party and Oni set sail.
Fayemi went to the state tribunal, invited foreign forensic experts to examine the votes that gave Oni his so-called victories and after over one year, the tribunal embarked on what could pass as judicial gerrymandering as it embarked on a weird and extensive queer arithmetic to justify the award of the governorship to Oni and the PDP. The party continued. Slaves and eunuchs hooted and said they were vindicated when in actual fact, they knew they were celebrating another stolen heist.
Undeterred, Fayemi appealed and the Appeal just fell short of handing his stolen mandate to him. It ordered fresh election in 64 out of the 177 electoral wards in the state. This is spread in ten local councils in Ekiti State and the appeal tribunal threw out the impostor governor and after sieving through the valid votes cast, declared that Fayemi is in the lead. The verdict has been hailed by Nigerians for justifiably dispossessing the impostor of the stolen mandate he had been wielding for close to two years but faulted for falling short of declaring that the owner of a retrieved stolen mandate should step forward and claim his diadem. Many have asked why someone that has been proved to steal someone else’s property should even be given the opportunity to go for a re-run. However, these are larger questions for the country’s queer electoral system that seems to be programmed to reward electoral perfidy and such other malfeasances.
However, the order to re-do the Ekiti State governorship election has hit the prodigal PDP at the very ground level. For a party, which sources strength in visiting callous electoral fraud in the system and which believes the system will always avail them such stolen, heist, the decision on Ekiti caught them pants down. The reality that is dawning on them as the verdict sinks is that Ekiti is one hell of a different ball game from the many states where they have reduced the re-run elections to comic parodies-much dastardlier than the cancelled exercises. With each passing day and as the PDP comes to terms with its fast-withering artificial strength and the people’s general aversion to it, they are being ran ragged that they may not actually be allowed to steal the votes of the 64 wards in Ekiti State. They have gone back to their vomit of running after the ousted governor, Ayodele Fayoshe, they have empanelled a committee in Ekiti State made up of Goodluck Jonathan, David Mark and other big wigs of the notorious party.
But they may find to their sorrow that these persons exert no real electoral respect among the badly tossed Ekiti people who have been tossed from one imponderable governor to another acting governor ever since Obasanjo seized the state for his PDP in 2003. The PDP may soon discover that Ekiti State is asking out of the PDP dubious collecting bin and may not be moved by whatever a Jonathan or a David Mark of all people do in Ekiti. They may find out that it would be pretty hard to steal the votes of the 64 wards in contention and that it would be much more easier to steal the votes of Kogi, Enugu, Bayelsa, Cross River, etc. than that of the 64 wards in Ekiti State. It is not trusting on its strength either because the PDP knows that with Nigerians, it has no hold and much of its strength exists on commandeered and violently stolen mandates.
That said, Kayode Fayemi and his party should gird their loins because the PDP can never tire of vote robbery. Every attempt must be made to frustrate them this time around. Fayemi should have by now, gotten the list of polling booths in the 64 contentious wards, mapped them and must have recruited priceless agents that would man his booths. They need not be Ekiti indigenes but people that can never be bought to look the other way while stuffed ballot boxes and papers are shipped in. He should have the registered voters list in all the 64 wards by now and must have strategically equipped his agents and wards with good communications gadgets to coordinate their activities and the results. There is no way why genuine results of the re-run elections cannot be known, either through the electoral body or Fayemi, 30 minutes after the exercise because it is merely the aggregation of the collated and duly vetted results from all the polling booths in the 64 wards, added to the sanctioned votes from the remaining 113 wards. He should by now, have worked out a verifiable voter time analysis based on what it takes the average voter to cast his vote and the average voter response, using the vetted votes from the 113 wards that have been allowed. That way, it would be easy to prove cases of vote inflation using green, red, black, blue or any biro at all. Most importantly, he should have his forensic faculty still in place. This indeed is your game Fayemi and Nigerians are solidly behind you.
Fayemi has the intellectual capacity and the discipline to do this. He has the sympathy of the average Ekiti man, who is sick and tired of the corrosive politics of the PDP and who neighs for the uplifting political changes that recently happened in Edo and Ondo States and wont mind to share in that exciting and renewing experience.
But Nigerian forces of change must key into this critical opportunity, not for Fayemi but for all Ekiti people and the wobbly system that passes as the electoral system in Nigeria. Nigerian men and women of goodwill must relocate to Ekiti State for the re-run polls to send a warning to electoral thieves that Never Again, shall we allow reprobates and scammers to subject us to the kind of decrementing torture of April 14, 2007 from which we are still slaving under.
Peter Claver Oparah.
Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mail: [email protected]
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