Last week, the media was awash with a speech credited to the senator representing Ekiti South Senatorial District of Ekiti State, Mrs. Abiodun Olujimi, who raised the alarm over threats to her life. She alerted the nation to an alleged plot by the Ekiti State governor, Mr. Ayodele Fayose, to bring her to harm, simply because she is nursing the ambition of succeeding Fayose as governor of Ekiti State.
Specifically, Olujimi cited an instance in which the governor, out of desperation to foist his preferred candidate upon the Peoples Democratic Party in Ekiti, threw decency into the winds by allegedly saying to Olujimi, ‘Madam, you are very stupid.’ Here is a woman who had been commissioner, House of Representatives member and deputy governor, in Ekiti State.
Olujimi, in what has now become a Save My Soul message to the nation, opened up on the character at the helm of affairs in Ekiti.
Her words: “There is no doubt that the governor of Ekiti State, Ayodele Fayose, is seriously hunting for my life. I am not the only one; very soon, the bubble will bust. You will see him suspending almost half of the members of the Ekiti State House of Assembly. He would frame them up for one thing or the other. Not only that, his Deputy, Dr. Olusola Eleka, is already done with that government; he may be suspended any moment next.”
“Fayose behaves more like a thug who is not properly brought up to associate with a civilised group or society. He doesn’t want to be challenged and he doesn’t like people asking him questions. He is a semi-god. It is high time Ekiti people rose against him. Even before this time, I told him, your excellency, it is wrong to refer to yourself as the Speaker of Ekiti Assembly, it doesn’t sound civilised and it is undemocratic.”
Although, a response is due from Fayose on these allegations, his continued silence one week after the damning assessment of his rulership by a senator of the Federal Republic, is loud enough to give credence to the allegations thrown up by Olujimi.
Even shortly before this death threat saga came to the fore, the governor had been making some embarrassing gestures that completely run contrary to democratic etiquette. He seems to have completely pocketed the state’s House of Assembly in an aristocratic fashion. A recent harassment of two Assembly members over accusations that they were supporting the governorship ambition of Olujimi leaves much to be desired.
Indeed, one of the lawmakers was made to do an undertaking under duress that he would forever be loyal to the governor, and this was gleefully read out by the puppet Speaker installed by the governor, who said that all the House members owed their loyalty to Fayose, and to no one else!
It is almost a year now, that another lawmaker in the House, Mr. Gboyega Aribisogan, has been serving the punishment of suspension, over an allegation that he was sighted in a conversation with Kashamu Buruji, a PDP senator whom Fayose was quarrelling with. Despite strident denial by Aribisogan that he was innocent of the allegation, his colleagues shut him out of the House to which he was elected by his constituency, as they would only forgive him once Imperial Fayose forgives him.
Wrenched by this helpless situation and harried by the foreboding of being killed by Ekiti’s intolerable despot, Aribisogun fled the PDP and is currently hibernating in the All Progressives Congress.
It is sad, however, that in Ekiti, the un-endearing historical aphorism that ‘what one learns from history is that nobody learns anything from history’, has been fulfilled in the trajectory of Fayose, a governor with queer obsessions and infantile cruelty. Recall that when newsmen cornered him in 2014 to remind him of how he was chased out of power in 2006, partly for his roguery and embellished thuggery, Fayose responded by saying, ‘I am a changed person.’
It is numbing now to realise that rather than change for good as he promised, Fayose upon getting the people’s mandate, merely impersonated the mien of a gentleman for a few months, before the pretension collapsed. Now, the governor seems to have returned Ekiti to its dark past, through his dictatorial tendencies.
But that aside, not a few persons are shell-shocked that Fayose could turn suddenly to viciously fight against the ambition of Olujimi, a woman who suffered all forms of opprobrium, sneer and mockery, simply because she was an unrepentant supporter of Fayose. In the testy days of the impeachment saga when Olujimi as deputy governor was widely expected to play Judas and work in concert with the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidency to have Fayose impeached, she refused to play with the governor’s traducers. Instead, she stood solidly behind Fayose, even though she would have been the beneficiary of the governor’s sack. In the long run, he and Fayose were impeached together in what would later be declared illegal by a law court and duly quashed.
While Fayose then left the PDP to join the Labour Party in the course of his quest to return to prominence, Olujimi never left his pet party, the PDP, showing a consistent woman with focus and belief system.
Yet, Fayose can still repent in the few months remaining for him as governor by shunning gangsterism and allowing a level-playing ground in the coming Ekiti governorship election, so as not to sink the party and thus give his inheritance to the opposition. Above all, he will do well to tender apologies to this quiet and unassuming woman, Senator Abiodun Olujimi.
*Olupitan, a PDP chieftain, writes from Iluomoba, Ekiti State.
