EXCLUSIVE: From PDP National Secretariat With Anger… A MUST READ

These are times which call for increased vigilance and studied watch, and the times try the soul of the State of Osun. Reason? The Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) governorship candidate in the State, Iyiola Omisore’s re-invigorated multiple missteps that have received unprecedented public bashing with the mood of Osun people as that of bewilderment, should be put at the door step of the PDP National Secretariat, Abuja.

Criminality, in expressive form has taken up permanent residence in the secretariat, just as criminality has become so sacred: appeased rather than chided, palliated instead of being excoriated, and reduced to the naked application of illegalities and absolutism.The PDP staggers from the commission of one criminality to another, and unable to mediate the oft-conflicting interests of the factions and fractions that constitute the party. Charity has ended at home a long time ago.

Foreign diplomats and accredited journalists including the writer, at the Wadatta House, the PDP secretariat had to keep a safe distance from the rankles and decay that stirred us in the face. We were not flabbergasted, but we felt exasperated, and angered. Apart from the crass opportunism, arrogance and unbridled hustling, scrambling, shoving, pushing and scampering for superfluous show of power at the party secretariat over the PDP’s federal government’s movement of fifteen billion naira (N15billion) to prosecute the Osun August 9 gubernatorial election; the picture that struck one’s eyes was depressing indeed. The victimization of the weak by the strong. The appalling lack of a sense of responsibility. 

The lack of room for ideals.No consideration for morality. No place for human compassion.No love. No trust. No altruism. And no self-denial. Everything was sacrificed to a squalid aggressive egotism. Almost every PDP big wig in sight at both the Waddata House, and Legacy House, the Goodluck Jonathan Campaign Headquarters, Abuja, is a tax dodger, with shady past who had made away with staggering sums of public money, or had cut a widow’s throat and snatched away her handbag. Yet, the bigwigs are the ones who call the shots in government circles.

Such were the bad mannered, gullible, fetid and mercurial characters in the PDP that seek political power at all levels of governance in Nigeria by the militarization of the polity to cow the electorate into vegetative submission to vote for them or their own particular candidates in elections. It is a combination of the weird, the bizarre and the incongruous when Omisore, the party’s governorship candidate evoked horrendous image of personified terror in the garb of masked hitmen with ripping muscles and streaks of ruthlessness and in the battle gear ostensibly always in a hurry for a sinister job,to engage in fisticuff in the least; and are on the prowl, bent on killing in the most, to do the biddings of Omisore, the source of their blood money.

Watched at close range at Ikirun Thursday Market where Omisore had gone on a mini-campaign for elections, each of his henchmen was issued a gun and bullet proof vest, hovered around him.They were not going to war, neither were they on the trail of fleeing armed robbers. Omisore was just on his rounds to canvass for the votes of the people to be governor of Osun. He had no reason to be armed to the teeth other than to pre-militarialise the state, punctuate the serenity of Osun and input fears into the electorate, playing out the rhythms of his party national secretariat to vote for him, and no one else.

Osun is still simmering as it erupted in rupturous frenzy with all attention still riveted on Omisore. And Osun people are largely inured by the Bonnie and Clyde larceny in Omisore. Criminologists and readers of detective stories may still remember Bonnie and Clyde, the treacherous, murderous couple that once ruled the American underworld. They robbed notable banks, and killed notable opponents. 

The Omisore masked hoodlums are as good as the PDP, the party that breeds the barbarians, the armed bandits. Call in the barbarians and the barbarians have come in the garb of masked guards as a prelude to a bloody onslaught against the electorate. And Osun dispirited by fear has become a metaphor of horror at this time of governorship election. No thanks to Omisore who has included the ridiculous among the sublime, put a stamp of legitimacy on the illegitimate, and thumbed up illegalities in the state.

Juxtaposing the logic of force with the force of logic, Omisore now throws money in high denominations at the people and distribute rice, salt and kerosene. It is no charity. He is far from being generous, but he is only assuaging his conscience that sometimes, somewhere he had blatantly stolen from the public treasury money that belonged to the people.But Osun can no longer be cast in feminine garbs. Osun is no longer a defiled woman; the woman as a defiled state. 

Osun is not crying to be raped by the Omisores, like the cry of Dioki in Camera Laye’s. The Radiance of the King after she had been raped by the snakes she kept as pets and protectors. Osun has passed the age when men would want to rape her. Osun, now perceptive and truculent has devised a foolproof litmus test of vision, mission and ambition.

From the motley crowd of twenty-three (23) governorship candidates this time around,the Osun voters will cast votes for only one of them who has a vision, the essential quality. But Omisore, the only candidate who arms himself to the teeth has no vision of utilitarian value. The horizon of his vision is merely the distance between his nose and his upper lip. And he should be put away in the slammer, more as his vision gets stuck in the mud of incompetence and in the colony of credibility crisis. It is public knowledge.

Omisore can not put a wedge to the re-election of Ogbeni RaufAregbesola, the incumbent governor of Osun and gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) whose political artistry and recorded incredible achievements with governance, have mesmerized Omisore and his PDP. Aregbesola, the first super brat of the contemporary Osun politics, has bundle of talents, vision and mission; and he is Omisore’s nemesis and nightmare. And as the nemesis goes on vengeance, the meeting between nemesis and nightmare is nightmarish for Omisore that tosses him about the way gentle breeze can toss weightless objects such as pieces of paper.

If Aregbesola at his re-election mega rallies is terribly ‘mad’ about his multiple unprecedented achievements in Osun, it is because, according to Aristotle, “no great genius has ever been without some madness.” And his performances as Osun governor are a statement that where the PDP failed in near eight years, the APC has excelled in near four years. Let Omisore be governor for just six months, every of Aregbesola’s laudable achievements will be touched and turned into dust and ashes and crumble in Omisore’s hands! And God forbids. Admittedly, without bashfulness, the touch will be the touch of Satan: the touch of Hell, as Satan aptly puts it in Paradise Lost: “which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”

Concerned always with sending a message of criminality, Omisore remains primitively dominated by primitive greed, primitive hatred, primitive bitterness, primitive resentment, and primitive crime. His political campaigns for the state’s driver seat have degenerated into all out confrontations in Ile-Ife, Iwo, Ilesha and other cities, and towns including Ifewara, Dagbaga and Ibokun in the run up to the election. The PDP 2007 carnage in Osun that shook the State to its very foundation would pale into insignificance with the PDP 2014 mayhem in the kitty of Omisore, as his PDP Waddata House and Legacy House have promised him politically motivated harassments, hounds and assassinations to run Osun aground, mar the governorship poll grandiose and win the state for Omisore, come August 9, 2014.

Abraham Lincoln must have been baffled at the irrationalities of PDP, and rattled by what could have impelled the PDP to always want to spill the blood of the electorate to come to power, as he gave his evocative definition of democracy in his Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, at the Gettysburg battle field, Pennsylvania, United States in the midst of the stench, blood and carnage associated with Civil War, Battle of Gettysburg. His definition of democracy as “government of the people by the people and for the people” was not given at a state dinner or at an inauguration marked by pomp and grandeur.

Omisore’s political rabble-rousing has gained him public attention. But, mark you! When ambition is patently weird, wild and unguided, it often digs the grave for its own burial. “All men that are ruined,” reasoned Edmund Burke “are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.” It is true, and more true that not all ambitions have redeeming features. Omisore may be arranging a rendezvous with disaster as he marches against the changing tides of growth and development of Osun as are presently being witnessed and applauded by all.

To Omisore, schools are a haven of dissent, violence and rebellion.All of that, a preserve of the idiots were what Omisore learnt in schools. Afterall, “in the first place, God created idiots. This was for practice” in the words of Mark Twain, the great 19th century American writer in his book, “Following the Equator”. The national secretariat of the ruling PDP at the center, acting out its scripts in Osun has disgraced the nation. Politics, supposedly the tool with which man orders the society has always been used by the PDP to reactivate contradictions; and the crippling contradictions engendered by the poverty of vision of the PDP cannot be resolved in favor of forcing the Osun electorate to vote for the party. It can only be resolved in favour of permitting a free, fair and transparent election as germane to the growth and development of democracy in Nigeria.

In his “Post-Ilesa Crisis in Retrospect” (Osun Defender, Tuesday, 14 August, 2007) Isaac Olusesi writes: ”The controversial verdict of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on the April 12, 2007 governorship election, in concert with the PDP created confusion all over the state. The INEC declaration of falsified result pitched the PDP against the rival parties, particularly the Action Congress (AC) on one hand, and against the electorate state-wide on the other hand. Bloody riots spontaneously broke out in Ilesa and the riots spread very fast, and very vast.

“Ever since the INEC announcement of the falsified election results, Ilesa, the headquarters of Ijesaland and hot bed of Osun politics became a time bomb, ticking away. Like a scene from the Gulf War, staccato of gun shots engulfed Ilesa. Over five hundred armed policemen and soldiers lay tormenting siege to the city and opened fire on anything, anybody in sight. Ilesa became a theatre of war, and guns of varying sophistication were used indiscriminately on the residents. “In a twinkle of an eye, several innocent citizens were mowed down by the bullets from the rampaging soldiers and policemen, and the streets of Ilesa became littered with corpses, oozing out hideous, nose-wrenching odours days after. Members and supporters of the opposition parties particularly Action Congress (AC) were blown up by bullets, scores of people suffered injuries; and several buildings and vehicles were not spared. 

They were sprayed with petrol and set ablaze. Still, several opposition members were said to have been abducted to God knows where.

“The fall-out of the Ilesa mayhem is that the entire Ijesaland has been polarized along the PDP-AC lines, with AC having its shoulders high and above PDP. Aside from the physical assaults and human assets losses recorded, the mayhem left in its wake mental trauma and created a permanent suspicion and phobia among the residents. Everywhere in Ilesa, the mayhem and its destruction readily evoked near-scenes of the Nigerian Civil War. What was amiss in my last report on the mayhem was that some prison inmates of the Ilesa Prison had tried to capitalize on the political situation to break jail, but for the eagle eyes of the vigilant prison officials, in contrast to the highly Fakaied police in the state.

“For the survivors, anxiety underlined their existence. Anxiety about the whereabouts and safety of the abducted political soul mates and relatives. At the Wesley Guild Hospital, Ilesa, they queued up for a chance to find the corpses of relatives who might have been kept in the mortuary. The soldiers, manning the hospital gate would bark: everybody clear from here! If they no clear, clear them, and a very elderly man who desperately was looking for the corpse of his wife, was truly roughened up.

“The lull in protests and consequently lift of the curfew, paradoxically paves way for silent killing or what a resident would describe as a genocide in many locations in Ilesa and entire Ijesaland.The reports of genocide could not be confirmed, but what is clear is that some, in Ilesa identified as “very powerful local PDP chieftains” have embarked on underground fierce campaigns to have the Owa Obokun of Ijesaland, His Imperial Majesty Dr.AdekunleAromolaran molested by the government as a prelude to his eventual dethronement”

Let not Omisore kill himself on the heels of the announcement of the August 9, 2014 gubernatorial election in Osun as he’s bound to lose out. A word for him. The road of life is pockmarked with pumps, pitfalls and a myriad of unseen hazards. He may still be driving his luxury cars, using his escorts, masked guards and sirens. He may keep himself frolicsome, in pampered leisure and provide self with newspapers, coffee boy, cognac and cigars; obsessing self with free women in town and untamed appetite for clothes and golden necklaces, wristwatches and finger rings. Otherwise, life for him after his failed governorship ambition in August may be a siren of silence: dull, drab and dreary.

•OLUSESI is Assistant Director, Directorate of Publicity, Research and Strategy, All Progressives Congress, State of Osun.