Fayose moults, begins reign of terror Posted by: ADEKUNLE ADE-ADELEYE in News 17 hours ago UNLIKE Rivers State where police lions seek presumptuously to ‘tame’ political leopards in a fierce struggle for power, and where newly posted police commanders struggle not to be ‘provoked’ by both a governor they describe as obstinate and a 1999 constitution they consider disagreeable, Ekiti manifests a different political and social ecology. With the cantankerous and excitable Ayo Fayose on his way to the State House after winning the June governorship election, political entertainment of the first rank is about to break upon all of us again. In Ekiti, we learn, when snakes moult, they don’t become anything but snakes. Well, Mr Fayose, the governor-elect, is about to begin moulting, and it is hard to say what the people of the state who voted him into office after a scandalous and abridged first term expect of him after shedding his skin. Before the election, analysts had warned Ekiti that Mr Fayose, notwithstanding his pretensions, could not change a whit, but the hopeful and optimistic Ekiti electorate believed Mr Fayose’s contention that he had changed comprehensively and fundamentally, both politically and socially. He had become a genial politician, more reflective, less impulsive, still accommodating, and in every sense absolutely likeable, he swore. Don’t trust him, this column warned. But it was too late. By a plurality unheard of in those parts, especially given his appalling human rights records and poor performance, Mr Fayose was herded, together with his follies and foibles, into victory lock, stock and barrel. But even before he is sworn in, he has started to display his boisterously manipulative side. For a simple court process, in which someone questions his competence to contest last June’s governorship poll, Mr Fayose’s men attacked Ekiti courts, injuring lawyers, judges and litigants and chasing away onlookers and the media. He swore he knew nothing about the attack, but he indirectly defended that brazen judicial subversion, for in his startling logic the party that lost the election was trying to trash his electoral victory and gain entrance into the State House through the window. No sensible political leader, not the least a politician who has just won an election to govern a state, should conflate the issues of litigation and physical attack on the courts, but Mr Fayose is not your usual politician. He is not more reflective, as he suggested grimly, and not less impulsive, as he privately hoped. Bearing some affinity to the Visigoths, the Germanic tribes who invaded Rome in the Fourth century, he prides himself more substantially on his ability to lay waste anything that smacks of civilization, discipline and order. Hear his justification for the attack on the Ekiti court: ” I am not aware that a judge was beaten up. In fact, this is strange to me. This is reckless and strange to me…How can I order the people to beat up a judge that has nothing to do with me? At what point was this judge beaten? Was he a member of the tribunal? Because I went to the tribunal and not the regular court. But I want to point out that a situation whereby judges or judicial officers , who should be custodians of the law, got compromised with politicians, then anarchy will set in…If you have been defeated in all the 16 local governments areas and you now want to come through the window, it won’t be like ice cream party to APC. I would not be too cheap like Segun Oni. I am not going to be cheap at all because I am elected by the people…I don’t care about whatever they write about me because I have grown a thick skin. The strategy of APC will not work. Nobody, no matter how highly placed, will remove me cheaply.” Well, now you know the truth, in case you thought the man had changed, as he facetiously swore before the election. Instead of taking his grievances to the Appeal Court, as he has eventually done, he first laid down the justific
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 20:32:39 +0000
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