By Wole Olujobi

When Dr John Kayode Fayemi (JKF) and I spoke on phone sometime in May 2005 on the need to rescue Ekiti State from the unedifying trend that the state had been forced to endure under the leadership of a government in power at the time, the innocence, candour, fervour and clarity of his mission in the course of our short conversation were unmistakable and the content of his vision resoundingly compelling.

Prior to soldiering for Ekiti sanity and liberty, former Governor Kayode Fayemi’s pro-democracy activities had been loud both in national and international media, as he was one of the top activists who led a coterie of other determined pro-democracy combatants in the struggle to wean Nigeria off the equally determined military officers who appointed themselves as rulers without the consent of Nigerians but who nevertheless ruled with horsewhips and bayonets, leaving in their trail a tell-tale anguish of economic and political misfortunes in the nation in chains.

As a scholar in War Studies with bias for security, civil relations and development, Fayemi, who is a political ideologue of the left with a welfarist communal etho as both his creed and bond, had no patience with the squalor and misery into which a potentially prosperous Nigeria was sunk.

Loud in a deep, penetrating echo of a freedom fighter’s tactics on Radio Kudirat International, Fayemi, deploying the grandeur of his scholarship and borderless networks, yet looming very large in the shadows, became the nemesis of the military rulers, whose geniuses could be located within the worst rank of evils, as scary looting and runaway political mass murders debuted in Nigeria. Chief MKO Abiola, Kudirat Abiola, Dele Giwa, Alfred Rewane, Alhaja Suliat Adedeji and Ken Saro-Wiwa, among several others, today, in their graves, are my witnesses, as they suffered the deadly fate of those dark hours when Nigerian soldiers hunted pro-democracy activists like antelopes and condemned their beautiful and golden souls to dusty deaths.

The bullets regime of the hell kites hawking at and feasting on the entrails of prominent pro-democracy elements under which the courageous Fayemi operated was succeeded by the terror of the more audacious vicious wolves in partisan garbs (all from the same roots) that seized the killing field called their Nigeria. For them, life in office (though a brief candle) was an eternity for the guns to rule over the affairs of men.

As thick as hail, flew bullets upon bullets, as guns boomed in the homes of pro-democracy figures. The roll-call of skulls of human games that adorned the battlements of the marksmen in the game of death included those of Chief Bola Ige, who was killed on December 23, 2001; Chief Victor Nwakwo (August 29, 2001); Isiaka Mohammed, September 24, 2002; Theodore Egwuatu February 2003; Marshall Harry was killed on March 5, 2003; Anthony Nwudo, March 21, 2003; Chief Ajibola Olanipekun, June 20, 2003; Aminosoari Dikibo, February 6, 2004; while Chief Phillips Olorunnipa was murdered on March 7, 2004.

Other victims included Sunny Atte, whose life was snuffed out on February 5, 2005; Alhaji Alabi Olajokun was trailed after a political meeting and killed at Gbongan junction in Osun State on May 15, 2005; and Chief Layi Balogun, who was murdered on December 7, 2006, among several other victims that paid with their lives over political partisanship.

One of the few exceptions was the foremost erudite and eminent lawyer, philanthropist and renowned education investor, Aare Afe Babalola, who had a rare luck to survive after receiving a barrage of death threats on his phone. But Dr Ayo Daramola was not that lucky, as he paid the supreme price on August 14, 2006. The lucky ones that cheated the bullets trusted their heels and escaped into exile.

Indeed, it was a period that the clamour for representative governance was more dangerous among the lovers of freedom than the business of kidnapping, courtesy of the hangover from the era of military-inspired regimental democracy of “five fingers of the same leprous hand” (UNCP, GDM, CNC, DPN and NCPN) and their autistic twin brothers, SDP and NRC, that died and interred at infancy.

Fayemi nearly paid with his life while lending hands to the efforts to peacefully send the military back to the barracks to enable Nigerians enjoy unfettered democratic governance. God and fate saved his flight that would have become his store-house to the eternity, with the Radio Kudirat transmitters tucked inside his pant. Operating in the murderous anonymity of the Nigeria’s tempestuous political waters, JKF braved the storm and sailed to safety unscathed!

Out of the shadows, Fayemi threw his hat into the political ring. Combining brilliance with the powerful contents of his conviction, resilience, devotion, courage, vision, verity and determination; these sterling credentials earned Fayemi the governorship ticket of his party, the Alliance For Democracy (AD), in the 2007 governorship poll in Ekiti State, which he won but which the Nigerian State led by the same devout power merchants and their devious potentates counterparts, would not allow for three and half years.

But the Nigerian Constitution triumphed in Fayemi’s case. The nation’s laws spoke loudly in courts, climaxing in JKF’s victory on October 15, 2010 at the Ilorin Appeal Court, which marked somewhat of a doomsday blues for the usurpers, but a triumph of ideal for Ekiti people, as the tenacious Fayemi held the trophy to a new dawn of sanity and development in Ekiti State.

Adept at a life of service complemented by his humanist wife and author, Erelu Bisi Fayemi, JKF in government, for eight years, (first between 2010 and 2014 and later between 2018 and 2022), recorded many firsts in Ekiti State’s political and development history. As the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, he also put Nigeria on the minerals development map of the world.

His scorecards: It is on record that Fayemi, a legacy governor and visionary of the progressive hue, changed the narrative of abandoned projects in Ekiti State by completing the uncompleted and abandoned projects by his predecessors. Fayemi’s introduction of community-based public participation in budget planning yielded unprecedented increase in road construction, water projects, electricity projects, enhanced health management system, opening of new schools for increased enrolments, record upsurge in hospitality and other small-scale businesses, encouragement of foreign businesses and revamping moribund state’s industrial assets, such as Ikogosi Resorts. Fountain Hotel and ROMACO; Ekiti Airport project, and a premier Knowledge Zone, among other life-lifting schemes, to create jobs, including strengthening bureaucracy to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, openness and transparency in public service.

For the first time. Fayemi bought the first batch of over 70,000 computer sets for distribution among secondary school students, which gave Ekiti students an advantage in computer-based public examinations, and renovated 183 secondary schools and 835 primary schools. During his first term alone, he commissioned five mini-water treatment plants while also erecting 167 water fetching points across the state such that for the first time in the state, moved water supply capacity to 52 percent as against 25 percent on assumption of office.

He also introduced social security for the elderly; the first in the West Africa subregion, and built legacy projects, such as the new Oke Ayoba Government House, stadium-sized Ekitiparapo Pavilion, Ekiti Cargo International Airport and Obafemi Awolowo Civic and Convention Centre, among other monuments that served as flowery mementos to the memory and legacy of credible performance, while some communities that had existed for more than a century without light were connected to the national grid.

Commercial farming in the Youths in Commercial Agricultural Development (YCAD) scheme was introduced by Fayemi, which took Ekiti State to lead Nigeria in cassava cultivation, also for the first time.

Fayemi facilitated the State Accountability and Voice Initiative (SAVI) of the British Department for International Development (DFID) to organise a training programme on Executive-Legislature partnership towards a sustainable collaboration for service delivery in June 2012 at the Royal Park Hotel in Iloko-Ijesa. DFID took cabinet and House of Assembly members through the rudiments of budgeting processes and tracking while also dissecting contemporary issues in Ekiti State.

Fayemi’s administration also sponsored the Ekiti State House of Assembly to the Gauteng Provincial Parliament in South Africa where the two parliaments signed agreements on various exchange programmes that were mutually beneficial to the two parliaments and governments for collegial cooperative relationship. Shortly afterwards, the Gauteng Parliament established Public Participation Unit in Ekiti State House of Assembly and provided books and other journals that could aid development initiatives in Ekiti State while another South Africa’s firm took over the management of the decrepit Ikogosi Warm Spring Resort and developed the facility to a world-class tourists’ delight.

Also in South Africa, Ekiti Assembly members were introduced to the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), a novel and innovative instrument for advancing good governance and people-centred socio-economic development.

The lessons learnt from the programmes, particularly the Iloko-Ijesa parley, produced the first Ekiti State Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), which led to the establishment of the Special Projects Unit, project monitoring framework, procurement process reform and realignment of the existing MDAs work plan to reflect new budget amendments, among others, which greatly helped to break administrative bottlenecks that hamper quick service delivery. That initiative created a momentum for accelerated development in Ekiti State. Most of these efforts by Fayemi later served as models for other governments in Nigeria in their governance and development strategies.

According to the Human Development Report (2012), Ekiti State under Fayemi was described as the most conducive environment to live, for long and healthy living with a life expectancy average of 55 years more than the National Life expectancy average of 50 years, including the lowest infant and maternal mortality rate and the lowest HIV/AIDS infection rate in Nigeria.

The United Nations acknowledged Fayemi’s innovative governance in September 2013 when the world body invited him to its session in New York on the basis that his state met many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agenda, even as Fayemi at home received the prestigious media award of “Best Governor of the Year” from some national newspapers, including Abuja-based Leadership Newspaper.

At his ministerial nomination screening session on October 13, 2015, at the Nigerian Senate in Abuja, that often features sentimental assessments, Fayemi, a debonair speaker, broke the ice, exuding the deep and vast brilliance of his scholarship.

Not for him the colourless and lifeless language of a political tramp that hangs loose for “just anything”! As usual, he had his day to draw plaudits from Nigerians.

Reeling out facts and figures in the charm, flair and eloquence of Cicero in his prodigious use of the Queen’s English in response to the questions posed to him on the floor of the Senate, the Senators hooted, as the urbane Fayemi held the Senate Gallery spellbound, while Nigerians at home stayed glued to the live broadcast of the session to see Fayemi’s first class erudition on display.

In my little hole in exile in my own country where I took cover to escape the bullets over my media activities in aid of my state and party, I suddenly found my voice, lept in rapturous delight, and lost my vocal cord to the ecstasy that greeted the sterling performance by a great boss.

The ministerial nominee, in the radiance of a Vatican cleric, shone like the Northern star to the applause of the nation. No wonder, shortly after he won his second term governorship election, he was unanimously elected Chairman by a multi-partisan Nigerian Governors Forum; the position he held dispassionately among his colleagues to advance the cause of democracy as a driver of development.

As the Nigerian Governors’ captain as well as the governor of Ekiti State, while his genius was hailed by his colleagues as exemplary, he remained a legend to Ekiti people who witnessed his magic firsthand in his development strategies.


For instance, for the first time in Ekiti State electoral contest, Fayemi broke the state’s succession bogey and opened the history doors for the first back-to-back victory for one political party to succeed itself in the Ekiti State governorship election. The magic was the continuity mantra of his party propelled by the milestones he recorded and as endorsed by Ekiti people, which ensured Governor Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji’s succeess at polls in 2022 governorship election, to post the first historic and historical same party victory in succession election in Ekiti State. As it turned out, Governor Oyebanji has proven himself as a worthy successor, judging from his pro–people stance in every action he has taken so far in government.

As former Governor Fayemi attains the Diamond Age of 60, history has placed him as an icon of his time in personal accomplishments and an epochal star in Nigeria’s political firmament.

In his class profiling thesis, the impossible Italian philosopher, scientist and astronomer, Galileo Galilei, had quipped; “Independent spirits spread like a foul disease, so men must keep their places; some up, some down.”

But the same Galileo also found relevance in the deeply ignorant people to complete his work and world. He had said: “I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him”, just like Fayemi is also at home with the grassroots people and their sentiments in planning their development strategies and he achieved sterling results.

As for Fayemi, he has kept his place high among the profound in philosophical thoughts to drive development agenda for the mass of the people; the philosophy that drives and shapes his vision and world view to lead a successful life.

Three scores in the life of a living legend is a short space within which to record a book of life. By merciful powers, the dawn of Fayemi’s new chapter of life opens tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, creeping in this petty pace from day to day, to record the last syllable of evergreen long years of service to humanity.
Cymbals and tambourines for the birthday boy on the Diamond threshold of the aged.

* Olujobi, a journalist and former spokesman of Kayode Fayemi Campaign Organisation, writes from Ado-Ekiti

By Festus Adedayo

Irish poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, in his lowest moment in prison, drew a comparison of how he sank from being one of the greatest writers of the late 20th century, into a bisexual pedophile. Son of Anglo-Irish intellectuals, Wilde was a writer with lacerating wit. He equally dressed flamboyantly and garnished his writings in flamboyant imagery. He was however bisexual, a precursor to the creed Trump detests today. Wilde’s ordeal began when he issued a civil writ against 9th Marques of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas, for criminal libel. John was the father of Wilde’s homo liaison, Sir Alfred Douglas. Though he won the suit, evidence from the trial made Wilde eligible for trial for gross indecency in homosexual acts. It became one of the first celebrity trials of the century. Overwhelming evidence confirmed that the writer of the famous The Picture of Dorian Gray indeed seduced teens into homosexual activities. At age 39, the court held that Wilde seduced Alphonse Conway, a boy of 16. Another teenager of same age, Walter Grainger, claimed Wilde threatened him with “very serious trouble” if he revealed their homo dalliance.



El-Rufai and Tinubu’s kernel

Convicted and sentenced to two years maximum penalty, Wilde was in jail from May 25, 1895 to May 18, 1897. He spent the term in Newgate Prison in London, Pentonville and Wandsworth Prisons and then to Londonto Reading Gaol. While, as prisoner, he was being moved from Wandsworth to Reading, he faced the lowest point of his life when a crowd which spotted him on the train’s platform jeered at and spat at him. In his De Profundis, also known as Letter to Sir Alfred Douglas, which he wrote in his last year in prison and published posthumously, Wilde had written: “She (his mom) and father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honored, not merely in literature, art, archeology and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into synonym for folly.”


I told the tale of Wilde’s unraveling above to illustrate how human beings and nations unravel. In the last two weeks, the world saw America unravel, its dirty entrails revealed to the world. Before now, the narrative was that, it was African and Third World despots and leaders who shared animal features with our ape ancestors. They reacted according to the stimuli of their whims and intrinsic human wickedness. They were emotive and made no effort to shroud their human passions and desires. Many African leaders have, over the century, been profiled as despots because they couldn’t tame their passions and emotions. They came across as wicked and self-centered, sometimes acting out as narcissists. No doubt a product of close to a century of colonialism, it was believed that some of these beastly leaderships the Third World produced could not be found in America. On the contrary, “God’s Own Country” was the manifestation of human purity and America epitomized the height of the purest of human character.

When a situation makes everyone equal in action, the Yoruba have allegories with which they justify it. One way they do this is to invoke the imagery of an African chickens’ pen. As a way of reducing costs of daily sustenance, most African homes maintained pens. They are enclosures within compounds where livestock or pets are kept. They serve as immediate relief from the rigour of dashing to the market for protein. At dusk, these animals, especially the local livestock, are lured from roaming round compounds into the various pens/cages, lest they become preys to reptiles. Because this practice is replicated in virtually every home, when it is time to equalize human action, it is invoked as an allegory. It illustrates a sense of similarity; that, what is done beyond the shores of individual localities is the same, irrespective of any allusion to sophistication. This is found in the aphorism, “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen” (ibi gbogbo l’a tií ńk’ádìye alé).

This aphorism has served as excuse for failure. It has also served as justification for horrendous human actions. It is a weak line explored to say that corruption or evil is innate in every man, no matter the clime or skin colour. Despots have invoked it to claim that their actions were normal human reactions. More importantly, the aphorism has served to legitimize and sustain that theory which says that, there is a beast in every man, apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s musical line, “…this uprising will bring out the beast in us”.


Many analysts who got sucked into the theory of American leaders’ ‘righteousness’ and Third World leaders’ beastliness, find another aphorism as justification. With it, they explain racial leadership character differences. So, they ask if it wasn’t the same rain that fell on and nurtured the bitter-leaf tree into its repulsive bitterness that also fell on the sugarcane which in turn comforts man with its sweetness (Òjò tó rọ̀ sí ewúro náà ló rọ̀ sí ìrèké). The bitter-leaf, in this case, was African leaders who were demonized for almost a century as wicked and selfish. The sugarcane is American leaders whose perceived purity lifted their countries to the zenith of positive global reckoning. This subsisted until about two weeks ago when America’s self-imposed righteousness unraveled.

Mobutu Sese Seko illustrates this bitter-leaf leadership thesis. Born Joseph-Dèsirè, he was President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997. Then came Robert Mugabe, who served as the president of the Republic of Zimbabwe from 1987. And Francisco Macìas Nguema, first president of Equatorial Guinea from October 12, 1968, till 1979 when he was overthrown. So also was Ahmed Sèkou Tourè, the first President of Guinea. From 1958 when he came into this position, he was there till 1984. The continent also had the likes of Abacha, Charles Taylor, Siad Barre of Somalia, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, Hissene Habre of Chad, Idi Amin Dada of Uganda and many more. America and the west constructed a cemetery for all of them and cast them in boulders of infamy. It must be said that virtually all these African despots claimed they did all they did to make their countries great. Like Donald Trump.

But, how were we to know that America itself was the proverbial ‘physician, heal thyself’? The last two American presidents, especially Trump, deconstructed America so badly in the eyes of the world, making them not different from Third World countries.

At the twilight of his administration, President Joe Biden shocked the world when he issued an official pardon for his son, Hunter. As at that time, Hunter was facing sentencing for two criminal cases. In September, he pleaded guilty to tax charges and was found guilty of illegal drug use and possession of a gun. He became the first American sitting president’s child to become a convict. In 2001, Bill Clinton equally pardoned Roger Clinton, his younger half-brother, who had been convicted in a 1985 cocaine-related offence. During the first coming of President Trump, in 2020, he equally pardoned Charles Kushner, father-in-law of his daughter, Ivanka. He has also recently announced that this same Kushner will be America’s ambassador to France. On his first day in office, in the confetti of Executive Orders he signed, Trump also pardoned more than 1500 of his supporters who were serving prison sentences for their participation in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.


The attack was said to be the final denouement of a seven-part plot by Trump to overturn the election. In 36 hrs, five persons died, one of whom was shot by the police. A police officer also died a day after being assaulted. Scores were injured, including 174 police officers and damage caused to the US exceeded $2.7m. While it was riot in America, if it occurred in one of those Third World countries, it was a coup. And whether successful or otherwise, the mastermind were coup plotters, susceptible to America’s usual paternalistic rhetoric. The prisoners were Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) fanatics protesting his presidential election loss. Trump was sentenced in over 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, in efforts to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election. These convictions signal that in Trump, America now has its first and only criminal elected to its presidency. Such self-serving actions and criminality were hitherto ascribed to nepotist dictators for which African leadership had incontestable patent.

Today, you would see Mobutu Sese Seko, Robert Mugabe, Francisco Macìas Nguema, Ahmed Sèkou Tourè, Abacha, Charles Taylor, Siad Barre, Omar Al-Bashir, Hissene Habre, Idi Amin Dada, all wrapped into one in Trump. He is as conceited as the typical African despot, arrogant in his self-righteousness as all of them rolled into one, and persuaded, like them, in his own vain conceit. President Trump recently hinted he would walk through the same ignoble track of a third term in office, though the US constitution forbids it. It was a low for which Olusegun Obasanjo suffers the worst unpleasant appraisals till today and for which all the despots above are reserved a place in the hell of global estimation. Trump, in a recent parley with House Republicans, said, “I’ve raised a lot of money for the next race that I assume I can’t use for myself, but I’m not 100 percent sure”. He continued, “I think I’m not allowed to run again;” and asked rhetorically, in a prodding of Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, “Am I allowed to run again?” He said further, “Mike, I better not get you involved in that”. All he got from Johnson, an ex-constitutional lawyer, was a chuckle, with other lawmakers sharing an infectious guffaw at this American Wonder.

Trump had previously dismissed insinuations of a third term when he said, “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you do something…Unless you say, ‘he’s so good, we have to just figure it out.’” That same week, Andy Ogles, a Republican House member, had introduced a bill which sought allowance for Trump to run for a third term. Ogles’ alibi, bowing to Trump’s prodding of ‘he’s so good, we have to just figure it out,’ was that Trump “has proven himself to be the only figure in modern history” capable of “restoring America to greatness”. If the world knows Trump enough, it will know that America would soon receive its first genetic transplant of an African sit-tight leadership. Trump is provoking trade war, withdrawing America from globally-beneficial institutions like WHO, threatening to harness territories like Greenland, all in the name of his MAGA.

Donald Trump’s son, Trump Jr., recently hallmarked his father’s Greenland harnessing when he made a surprise appearance there. Immediately, Nigerian maga on social media asked what stops President Bola Tinubu from cloning the same nepotist hubris and weave his son, Seyi, round Aso Rock. Trump should be made to know that, at the end of all these, yes, America will be lush once again for Americans. However, that country would have forever lost the savour of respect and dread for which the world stands in awe of it. By the time Trump ends his Adolf Hitler-like preferencing of his Aryan race as the most superior in the world, America would wake up lost and naked.


As Trump is busy affirming the “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen” to the world, in Nigeria, former Rivers and Kaduna state governors, Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir El-Rufai, are struggling to deconstruct the thesis. At an “Impact of democracy on the national economy” in Abuja last week, both acted from the playbook of a typical adulterous woman sent packing from her erstwhile home. Underlining their “dogo turenchi” is the theme that, while the present government, from which they are estranged, is performing horribly, if they had played prominent roles therein, it would not have been otherwise. That submission attempted to deconstruct the “ibi gbogbo l’a ti nk’adiye ale” thesis.

Quite frankly, Amaechi and El-Rufai were dead right. Nigerians are too docile and possess incredibly short-spanned memory. It is these two limitations that Nigerian politicians capitalize upon to catapult themselves into power. When you add the infectious poverty that afflicts the Nigerian to the mix, you have at your finger tips zombies. Evergreen Anikulapo-Kuti got it right. “My people sef, dem fear too much…” he lamented. While many attribute this to the sparse blood spillage in our fight for independence, some say our docility is a product of our comfort. You cannot also fault El-Rufai’s claim that there is no internal democracy in the ruling APC. But, if I may ask, which party in Nigeria observes internal democracy? The former Kaduna governor had equally lamented that, “You cannot afford to have illiterates, semi-illiterates, and cunning people as your leaders. This is why we end up with the poor leadership we have today.”

My take is that indeed, Nigeria, America and many parts of the world are today facing an Autumn in good leadership. Global leadership is fast decoupling from the people who constitute its foundation. If Amaechi and El-Rufai had been in plum offices today under the APC, there would be nil or marginal differences in the people’s sorrow. Nor any complaints from them. Their comments above are the usual initial traps politicians set to seduce electorates penultimate lunching new parties or entering into alliances. Both Amaechi and El-Rufai were in office when the Muhammadu Buhari government dealt incalculable blows on good governance. It was the most opaque, naive and directionless in Nigeria’s history. Yet, we didn’t hear any hoopla from the duo.

On the whole, Trump is teaching leaders of the world that indeed, “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen”. As Trump’s Third term ambition grows, it will trigger a wave of African leaders also nurturing perfect alibi for sit-tightism. This brings me to an intersection to disagree with El-Rufai’s claim that the present APC leadership is illiterate. I agree more with ex-Youth and Sports Minister, Solomon Dalung, who recently said that the combine that surrounds power today is educated but lethal. Cunning and sadistic, yes, they are. It is why I am of the opinion that it will be difficult to dislodge Tinubu from power

Rather than sounding sanctimonious, El-Rufai, Amaechi and the Nigerian opposition will need to abandon rhetoric. I am sure that what God deployed to drive Satan away from Heaven wasn’t mere demagogic narratives. What the Nigerian opposition needs to do to drive away the Morning Star is to recreate an American Donald Trump as an aspirant for Nigeria’s No 1 office. A Trump clone will dislodge the current ruling establishment. In Trump is a symbolism of leadership madness, unconventionality, criminality and unorthodoxy. Don’t our people say it is only a meek face that gets riven with pimples (Ojú tó rọ ni rore nsọ)? Yoruba reckon with this when they say, you must deploy madness to cure madness. While campaigning for votes, Tinubu himself said you cannot snatch the kernel from the palm-nut with rhetoric. What Nigeria’s opposition needs to dislodge the kernel from the hard palm-nut is a stone on the floor and another stone to smash it at the top.

By Festus Adedayo

All over the world, musicians are reputed to have patented argots, slang and jargon that signposted global conversations. In the tiny Island of Jamaica, the unkempt, locked-hair, weed-smoking, reggae music singer, Peter Tosh pioneered the word ‘Rasta’ as prefix for devotees of a new religion that began to reign in the West Indies. That religion believed that His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, formerly Abyssinia, and the last Emperor of the Empire, was “King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah and Elect of God”. In a musical track titled “Rasta Shook Dem Up” released in 1966, Tosh patented the usage of the word for worshipers of Selassie named “Rastafari.” It was derived from Selassie’s pre-monarch name, “Ras Tafari Makonnen,” “Ras” having come from an Ethiopian Semitic word meaning “Duke” or “Prince”.

In the early 1980s, when Yoruba Awurebe music icon, Alhaji Dauda Adeeyo, alias Epo Akara, was accused of couriering Indian hemp to Abidjan, Cote d’voire, his traducers had an upper hand in spreading the news. He had to denounce it in a track he called O wa l’Abidjan. In it, he sang that he was engaged in legitimate sale of Ankara clothes which was a major trade in the French-speaking country. A new kind of cloth style became known as L’Abidjan in the Southwest of Nigeria then.

About two weeks ago, Yoruba Fuji icon, Wasiu Ayinde, unwittingly added to the lexicography of the Southwest. His mother, Animotu Sadia, had passed and among a beehive of people who flooded his Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State home for the burial were Islamic clerics. In Yorubaland, clerics at such occasions, whether Christian or Muslim, have come to be synonyms with scavenging for perks and food. Islamic clerics are the most notorious. I remember that while growing up, a very unflattering but predominant phrase that was bandied about was, “If an Alfa goes to an occasion, how to know that the event was fruitful and he ate to his fill was that the Alfa’s elbow would be soaked in oil” (Bí Aafa ba lọ òde, bí òde bà dun, igbunwo l’a tí mọ, torí yíò mú epo dẹdẹ ni!).

An apparently clandestinely recorded video had Ayinde complaining that the flood of clerics to his house in the guise of condolences, was stomach-driven. This was not the novelty Ayinde pioneered. The lexicographic enrichment came from the musician’s usage of a barroom, society’s lowlife slang to describe the scavenging. He said the clerics had chosen his house, rather than his father’s house at Fidipote area of Ijebu-Ode, to “Ganusi.” Ganusi can be used either as a noun or verb and has literally shut down the social media in the various mutations it has suffered.

Many people have done a syntactic and lexical examination of “Ganusi” since then, many times without fruition. It is most probably a weave of two words “Ga enu” (prized open like a trap) and “si” (to) to arrive at a word which conveys the meaning of a deliberate ploy to fill the tummy. Such act of prizing open the mouth is deliberate, purposive and tendentious, while not being real as it is concealed. Ayinde was obviously communicating a tendency that is getting worse in society where everyone has become a scavenger of the other person.

Though uttered at the height of frustration with nectar-sucking propensity of virtually everyone in Nigeria today, an Islamic cleric who angrily replied the musician reminded him that Ayinde, being a beggar (alagbe) – as musicians are known from time immemorial – was equally a scavenger.

“Ganusi” has become a social commentary on how virtually everyone in Nigeria is scavenging for survival, either legitimately or illegitimately. Whether Ganusi is done by designer suites-wearing contractors in Abuja, babanriga, Isiagu or agbada, or by touts at motor-parks who demand to be given a piece of the pie who rudely demand, “Big man, let me also Ganusi your wealth” (Baba Alaye, e je ki n ganusi.)