However bizarre his (Fayose’s) public pronouncements and however disgruntled some elements outside the system are about his private life, Ekiti people still prefer the savvy 52-year-old Fayose to anyone else on the political turf in Ekiti.
As strange as this preference seems to outsiders, there are several very salient reasons for Fayose’s ongoing hold on politics at home. In the interest of full disclosure, Ekiti electorate have a long tradition of concealing their private lives and the choices they make from “outsiders” and as a result, people rarely know what they are voting for.
The June 21, 2014 election was no exception. A lot of critics had come heavy on the Ekiti electorate, casting aspersions on the choice of Fayose over Fayemi as the governor of the state. Two issues they played up was that Fayemi’s performance was enough to earn him another term. Secondly, that Fayose is not an ideal candidate to present as the governor of the state. These are the two hot button issues that some analysts, with no idea of how knotty the Ekiti politics could be, threw up before the election.
After the election, self-serving critics of the entire process are still wallowing in the thought that there were indeed underhand deals from voters to scuttle Fayemi’s ambition. Critics, pundits and cynics have failed to ask the salient questions of what tilted the pendulum for Fayose and what pulled the carpet under the feet of Fayemi? How did Fayemi who phantom opinion ratings favoured before the polls, fall flat without a victory even in his local government? What was Fayose’s magic wand?
For all his apparent grandeur, Fayemi was never tipped by the major Ekiti stakeholders to win that election. It is important to situate who these stakeholders are. They are the artisans, market women, tailors, hairdressers, shoemakers, commercial motorcycle riders, commercial vehicle drivers, unemployed youth, petty traders, civil servants and pensioners. If the critics who are crying and blowing hot from their comfort zones had painstakingly engaged these people in tete-a-tete before the election, they would possibly have had a real grasp of the goings-on.
The crack politicians in the APC’s midst knew it was a sorry case. They honestly without inhibition knew Fayemi stood no chance against the behemoth that Fayose had become in the new political calculation. They were also feeling the heat in their party. The issue of “stomach or belly support programme” which the ruling party in the state have used to deride the Ekiti electorate, surprisingly was what did them in. It would surprise not a few people that the campaign for “stomach infrastructure” began right in the APC before the election. Some of the governor’s top aides had complained frantically that they had consistently avoided their constituency because their people had not felt their “impact”.
If they are deriding Ekiti people today for kicking Fayemi out and voting for “stomach infrastructure”, it would be proper to also note that Fayose got ample support from many APC members in the state. If a reality check is done, majority of the critics would realize that Fayose got a fulcrum of support from loyal party members of APC who were displeased and disenchanted with the way the party had become a personal fiefdom of a tiny clique in power .
They only struck when the iron was hot. That is why the Ekiti people would always remain calm in the face of provocation. They will always remind those who seem to be more Catholic than the Pope that Ekiti people have a time-honoured idiom that clearly marks them apart from others. For full measure, there is a wise saying that, “ Oju mi la l’eko, iya lo mu ni je ni Ekiti” (No matter how well exposed you are in Lagos, you will be pruned to size in Ekiti’’.
The APC goons began the campaign shortly after the defeat as some sort of palliative to portray their candidate as a man who was a victim of circumstance. They have failed woefully in their quest to denigrate the Ekiti people by making them look cheap and hungry. I have heard some hare-brained analysts spew invectives at Ekiti people, saying, “they expect Fayemi to line them up and give them money. How many people would he give money and what difference would that make?” If that was in stout defence of Fayemi, the hatchet man made a kill of it, at least he proved his point, but if I were to offer a suggestion to him, I would simply tell him that Fayose’s model of “stomach infrastructure is that the people of the state must benefit directly from the socio-economic activities in the state. He is not saying that you should line them up and give them money.
He is saying that if you engage expatriates to construct or repair roads, patronize local contractors and traders. Let the expatriates teach our local contractors how to ply the trade. Let them engage our youth. Teach our food vendors how to make the food that they would eat in the entire duration of their project instead of eating breakfast in Ibadan, lunch in Akure, and dinner in Lagos . Teach our local farmers how to export their produce. Is this too much to ask? What we have in Ekiti is different. The natives are not patronized. The construction companies do not fully engage the teeming youth. There was capital flight. That was why things went awry for Fayemi. It is easy to cast aspersions and it is even easier to apportion blames, but those who know would say that Fayemi couldn’t have done otherwise; conceding defeat, congratulating Fayose and offering to assist in ensuring a smooth and seamless transition was simply the way to go.
While Fayose’s adversaries may disdain him and some of his bimbo eruptions, they should ask genuine questions on how he has guided the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to healthy wins in two elections. The most important thing any student of history remembers about Fayose is the legion of people that were empowered during his three -year tenure. Local contractors were better for it; contractors were mandated to purchase their products from traders in the rural areas. What was the multiplier effect? Your guess is as good as mine! Fayose’s critics seem to forget that his persona finds ready expression in the words of former British Premier, Tony Blair who sometime ago said of the Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel: “She is one of the easiest politicians to underestimate and its one of the stupidest thing any politician can do”.
•Igandan wrote from Igbara Odo Ekiti
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