ACHIEVING DIVIDENDS OF DEMOCRACY: OSUN AS A CASE STUDY Being the full text of a speech delivered on 29 May 2013 at the Igbonnibi Town Hall, Ila Orangun, at a democracy day symposium organized by the MPA. BY DOTUN OYENIYI The starting point for me is to thank the organisers of this event, very deeply, for their ‘new dimensional’ approach to the development of democracy in fatherland. Well, not really a completely new dimension perse, but a reawakening and resuscitation of a dying, yet very vital ‘organ’ of democracy – DISCOURSE! While I thank you for your efforts, may I quickly add, that 29th May, does not deserve to be our democracy day. It is an impostor, forced on the nation by General Olusegun Obasanjo, a wily, vindictive retired army General turned politician, who for esoteric reasons, was and still is, hell-bent on obliterating from our collective psyche, the allocation of any vestiges of credit to the Late Chief Moshood Abiola for the latter’s contribution to Nigeria’s democracy, which of course the June 12 symbolizes. To me, and numerous other Nigerians, June 12, and not May 29 is the authentic Democracy Day. Be that as it may, I repeat my appreciation of your organization of this event. What my generation met on the ground as we were ushered into what is called “Second Republic” democracy in 1979 was DISCOURSE! The engagement and involvement of the people in the political process via continuous, incessant and pervasive discussions, campaigns, symposium and brainstorming. This practice was held sacrosanct by the leading politicians of that era, especially those of the progressive leaning. The progressives were, and continue to be, of the opinion, rightly, that THE PEOPLE are the real repository of power and that one could not properly represent or serve the people if he doesn’t know them and you don’t get to know your people until you engage them in discussions. Chief Bisi Akande’s first step on the political ladder was to serve as a Councilor, part time, and he told me that prior to holding that office, it was his practice to sit down in the motor parks and the market to discuss with the people with a view to understanding their needs, to the utter astonishment of the local community, who marveled at “this specie of alakowe who freely mingled with the unlettered people.” In 1980 or thereabout, while still basking in the rays of a better future thrown at us by the Free Education Programme of the Old Oyo state Government under the Late Chief Bola Ige; we, then secondary school students received a 2-page letter from our Governor. I cannot recollect the title of the letter again but on top of it was the picture of the Cicero himself and it began with the salutation – My dear Child, and ended with Uncle Bola’s own signature. In that letter, what the government did was to engage even young children by telling us what the government was doing and asking for our opinion on them. During the 1979 elections, the presidential aspirants of the five political parties reached all the nooks and crannies of Nigeria. Even my own relatively remote hometown, buried within the borders of Kwara, Old Oyo and Ondo States, with dusty and bumpy road then, was incredibly spoilt as the very unlikely host of Nigeria’s political bigwigs. Chief Obafemi Awolowo arrived in Ila in an helicopter which landed on the football pitch of the L.A. Primary School, Oke Aloyin, much to the people’s delight, most of who were witnessing,for the first time, the landing and taking off of an helicopter. Chief Nnamidi Azikiwe arrived at about 8pm in a Mercedes Car; Alhaji Shehu Shagari came around 12 noon and was hosted at the Late Prince Isaac Adebayo’s house while both Alhajis Ibrahim Waziri and Aminu Kano came in the evening. Each of them mounted the podium and spelt out their vision and mission for Nigeria. They told us what dividends we must expect if we voted them into power. Regrettably, ever since that time, no other presidential aspirant has deemed my community worthy of a visit again. The above – participatory democracy through DISCOURSE is the essence and cornerstone of true democracy and unfortunately, it is gradually being eroded in our clime, and lending credence to this is the fact that no other presidential aspirant has visited my hometown till date. What we now have as a substitute for campaign and discourse is the dolling out of gifts to electorates as a means of electoral bamboozlement and the submerging of the voices of the people by the more raucous voice of an ever-increasing band of slavishly subservient political hangers-on and gangsters. It started with the NPN – the National Party of Nigeria in the earlier referred Second Republic. With its henchman, Mr Umaru Dikko appointed the Chairman of presidential taskforce on rice importation; the NPN used the distribution of rice, available in almost inexhaustible quantity, and other basic food items, tagged “essential commodities” like milk and sugar, then very precious possessions given the vast decline of the Nigerian economy under the profligate NPN; as a veritable weapon to buy continued loyalty of party members. Children and wives of party stalwarts were pampered with ‘chopper bicycles’ and mini milling machines respectively – princely possessions. Despite these showers of largesse, the then west, now southwest, certainly the most politically sophisticated in Nigeria, rejected the NPN, decisively, in the general elections of 1983. But the NPN used its thugs, supported unashamedly by Mr Sunday Adewusi, the Police IG and his rank and file, and bought-over electoral officers to carry out massive rigging of the elections. Elections over, and the masses waited for the dividends of democracy. And they did come – increased poverty and joblessness. When confronted by the press to seek reasons why the NPN promised the people fish and gave scorpion instead, the loquacious Rice Taskforce Specialist, Mr Umaru Dikko provided a most contemptuous and unkindest response. “Nigerians are not yet eating from the dustbins,” said Dikko. But in reality, Nigerians had then begun to eat from the dustbin as it was at that time that a new, bizarre and appalling economic activity started in the land. Able-bodied young men would descend on garbage mounds, like vultures on dead meat, armed with long iron bar, used to reap the bin of sellable recyclable items like plastic and metals. For the NPN, the dividends of democracy were the rice, the milk, the mini milling machine, and the bicycles that were distributed prior to the elections. After the elections, the dividends of democracy became the exclusive right of the elected. NPN principal party men, and elected representatives became creatures of enormous wealth and ostentatious and vulgar display of wealth by the NPN bigwigs amidst endemic poverty was the order of the time. The Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN, like the Biblical Peter, had “neither silver nor gold”, no rice to distribute, no milk to give away but “what it had it gave’ to the masses– Free education at all levels, Free health services and so on, geared towards making life more abundant for all. These by all yardsticks were, and still are the veritable and quintessential dividends of democracy which any party that genuinely wants to serve the people must itch to give and for which the populace who care for the betterment of today and security of the future should be concerned. The NPN did not only send the people to the bins to scavenge for food, it also starved the states of statutory allocations, so much that those who became Governors on the back of the thoroughly fraudulent elections were not able to pay, even staff salaries. One of the beneficiaries of the electoral fraud, the brilliant but erratic mathematician turned politician, Dr Omololu Olunloyo, then the new Governor of Oyo State declared, no, not in the inner sanctuary of his Agodi government house, but at a press briefing, that he and his deputy, Olatunji Muhammed, were going to hand power back to Ige/Akande, the true winners of the elections, if the federal government could not afford to disburse money to the states. It was General Muhammadu Buhari who helped to deliver a good riddance to the bad rubbish of that time in December 1983, the rest as they say, is now history. 16 years after, one of the principal victims of the 1983 electoral fraud, Chief Bisi Akande returned to power as Osun Governor. He met a thoroughly over-bloated civil service, inherited from the Old Oyo State, dominated by ghost workers and underemployed staff. To give just one out of several examples, some secondary schools had as much as half a dozen teachers for one subject like Yoruba language with no single teacher for subjects like mathematics and physics. Some staff were surplus to government’s needs. Osun state inherited a massive, financially suffocating staff strength from the former Oyo State and successive governments have failed, due to incompetence and/or fear of consequential backlash, to confront the problem head-on. The monthly revenue allocation to Osun was something like N150 million while its monthly wage bill was N250 million. Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) was negligible. If the status quo was to remain; by the end of his 4 years in government, Chief Akande would have been unable to deliver a single dividend of democracy, atop which he would have accumulated a suffocating debt of N4.8 billion, just on salaries alone. The choice was either to keep the status quo or take a bold, courageous step that was certainly unpopular but in the long run beneficial to the state. Chief Akande chose the latter. Chief Akande was determined to give dividends of democracy to the voters. What is more? The civil servant was just an infinitesimal part of the total number of voters that gave him a mandate of office. He carried out a painstaking, meticulous and far-reaching ‘weeding’ of Osun workforce with a view to pruning out the ghosts and the surplus to requirement. With that done, Chief Akande led by example. He made sure his personal maintenance, that of his office and his home were financed with utmost probity, frugality and prudence. He rode a fuel–economical Toyota car as his official car while other Governors were acquiring state of the art Jeeps that were voracious in fuel consumption. His wife, Mrs Omowunmi Akande remained a wife and a mother, she didn’t transform overnight into ‘a goddess among women” under the cloak of First-ladyship, an unconstitutional office that served as a conduit pipe for public funds. The random and haphazard dolling out of cash to notable personalities in the state to massage an already bloated ego was stopped by Chief Akande’s government. And, predictably, within four years, Chief Akande practically squeezed water out of the proverbial stone. Roads were constructed across the length and breadth of Osun, even into remote villages, which hitherto appeared anonymous to the government. Staff salaries were promptly paid. And an expansive government secretariat, an ambitious project that cynics dismissed as ‘an impossible task’ at conception was successfully executed, to everyone’s’ amazement. Prior to Chief Akande’s regime, houses of friends and cronies of the government scattered across Oshogbo, were let to serve as government offices at juicy rent, several folds higher than what private tenants paid. A stop was put to this with the construction of this massive secretariat. Then in 2003, an ignoble rape of democracy, same as was perpetrated two decades before in 1983, but now of a more appalling dimension and on a much wider scale was repeated across the states of the south west, except Lagos. The latter rape was carried out, not by the NPN but by a more vicious and more lethal reincarnation of the NPN, the PDP - People’s Democratic Party. And the new beneficiary was not Dr Omololu Olunloyo but a soldier turned politician, blue blood from Okuku, Olagunsoye Oyinlola. Olagunsoye Oyinlola had previously been a Military Adminstrator in Lagos State where he gained notoriety as “Mr No Bitumen” following a report that he claimed that the reason why Lagos roads were very bad under him was because his administration could not find ‘anywhere to buy bitumem.’ It was also during his time in Lagos that Alhaja Kudi Abiola, the wife of the winner of June 12 1993 elections was murdered by Government sponsored hitmen, in front of the 7Up bottling company, virtually under Oyinlola’s nose. With the military back in the barracks, Oyinlola came ‘home’ to partake in the democracy which he and his military colleagues worked strenuously to deny the nation of, just a few years before. His ambition was to become a Senator and he had already produced posters and billboards to promote his senatorial bid before Late Chief Samuel Afolabi, then PDP kingmaker in Osun state, said ‘No.’ The office that was befitting of a prince and a retired Colonel, reckoned Afolabi, was not senatorial but governorship. After all, Princes were known in history to have their own territories, inherited or conquered, over which they ruled. Why wouldn’t Oyinlola prefer to ‘rule’ over Osun, instead of the boredom of endless arguments and debates at the national assembly where even an elected lowly peasant may have the effrontery to contradict a prince and a possible future OLOKUKU? In Osun’s PDP, Chief Afolabi’s words were law. A native of Iree, Afolabi first rose to prominence when he delivered a violent slap on Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola’s heavily scarified face at a campaign rally inthe first republic. In 1979, Chief Afolabi emerged as the deputy governor to the Late Chief Bola Ige and three years later, as he failed in his ambition to displace his boss, Chief Afolabi left the UPN and joined the NPN to ‘capture’ the west ‘by all means possible.’ And capture they did in an unprecedentedly diabolical style. With Olagunsoye Oyinlola as the anointed candidate of Chief Afolabi, the road to the state house started to be paved with fraudulent machinations. It was a familiar territory for Chief Afolabi, the same old road of 1983 ‘landslide.’ “The 36 Kiniuns” of the PDP scattered across Osun also rolled into action. Each had and maintained his own band of vicious thugs with a reasonable cache of ammunitions. These thugs ravaged the land, moved about like a ferocious hurricane, beating, maiming and in some cases killing opposition candidates, with impunity. The police could only watch in helpless horror as the political terrain became a theatre of the absurd. The police cannot help because of the bad precedent, already laid in Ibadan, Oyo State. There, a certain barbarian, Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu and his large band of murderous thugs held the city by the jugular, and committed all sorts of atrocities with latitude. Over their heads did the federal government cast a protective umbrella. By and large, on the platter of thuggery, intimidation, coercion and electoral fraud, Olagunsoye Oyinlola and other PDP governorship aspirants coasted to victory. Indeed, of democracy, there are dividends and there are dividends and Osun did reap her own share of the PDP’s dividends in close to eight years of Oyinlola’s stolen mandate. Of the 36 Kiniuns, Olagunsoye Oyinlola has the wiliest personality. For example, with Iyilola Omisoore, one always knew you need a long spoon to dine with him. But not so with Oyinlola, he had quite an unassuming personality. A cool and calm look that sways within innocence, timidity and puzzlement. And at every opportunity, he threw himself on the floor in atavistic reverence to any Monarch that he met. However, behind that postures was a ruthless politician capable of using any means, however diabolical, to gain an office. Under him, Osun became a theatre of political thuggery. Its resources spent with wanton profligacy. Infrastructural developments were at their ebbs. Party bigwigs and supporters, including a few powerful potentatesclustered around Osun State’s massive dining table, feasting lavishly while the masses starved. Their music was bamubamu ni mo yo, - overfed we are, we care not about the hungry. But for every Pharaoh, there would always be a Moses. And as Osun people continued to wallow in palpable perdition under a ‘Pharaoh’ Oyinlola that they did not vote for, a ‘Moses’ Aregbesola’ whose mandate was stolen by the former, continued to put up a doggedlegal challenge to reverse the banditry.And in November 2010, three years into Oyinlola’s second stolen mandate’s term, there was a remedial ocean, deep and lengthy legal ocean of the Elections Petition Tribunal, - the ‘red sea’ of democracy which parted before Engineer Aregbesola and consumed Oyinlola and his band of electoral fraudsters. Engr Rauf Aregbesola is a man of vision and mission. The breathtaking alacrity with which he rolled into action after the retrieval of his mandate is an evidence of a man who has thoroughly prepared himself for the office of Governorship. 20,000 jobs within a hundred days or so in office; O –Ambulance, O –YES, O- this; O –that. His hands are scattered all over innumerable projects across the state of Osun. These are indeed the genuine dividends of democracy; given to the masses in a peaceful environment devoid of anxiety, apprehension and violence which were the hallmarks of Oyinlola’s Osun. Before I end this speech, may I sound a note of caution, that dividends of democracy are not manna. They don’t fall from heavens. They are an harvest that only come from the sowing of seeds. To get a bountiful harvest, the sower needs good seeds and fertile land. The two are complementary. To transpose this into democratic analogy, the good seeds are the competent and visionary candidates with clear-cut and definable people oriented programmes. The good land is the political platform, the party, whose ideological cornerstone must also be people oriented. A good candidate cannot achieve any good result in a bad party just like a good party cannot field a bad candidate and expect good results. We must therefore thoroughly assess our potential candidates for their ‘good-seed-ness’. The distribution of largesse and financial inducement by potential candidates should not be major guiding yardsticks BUT the treasure of enormous, inexhaustible dividends of democracy, buried in the skull of a competent candidate, like the Aregbesola’s example has shown. Thanks for listening.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 17:18:57 +0000
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