When the masquerader – a terrestrial being in the ancient cosmological beliefs of Yoruba and Igbo people – slips and falls, he immediately turns it into a corpus of art or craft he brought into the market square. The masquerader then immediately springs up from the fall, does some electrifying body gyrations and the watching crowd claps for his mastery of his craft. If you ask me, what President Bola Tinubu and his APC have done thus far with the fatal failure of the APC in the Osun State election is replicated in the masquerader or an Alálùpàídà – a magician – sustaining a huge fall and clandestinely turning the fall into a dancing magical art.
I do not know where a man whose stranglehold and fiefhold on an off-cycle election that was promoted as the most toxic in recent time could, by same token, be invested with a garland in a war he lost woefully. And fought to win.
It is why the optics of an Ademola Adeleke profusely garlanding the president with a trophy he did not deserve have riled all men of good conscience. It was why many Osun State indigenes and electors have warned that giving the president an undeserved victory in a war he fought to its hilt was political gerrymandering taken beyond its ken.
Proponents of political rightness have however lauded the Osun governor for doing well. He is fighting for his politicalsurvival by being a fawner of the president. The APC owns the courts, the purse and the breath that oozes out of Nigerian states. It is why many governors today, not minding that they cannot stand what the APC stands for, were trafficked willy-nilly into the ruling party. Many of them have humongous skeletons in their cupboards which only membership of the president’s party could render irrelevant.
The ease with which Ademola Adeleke embraced same set of people who fought to “kill” him speaks volumes. It beggars belief. It doesn’t explain why Tinubu’s fawning would come ahead of erecting monuments of martydom for those who were forcefully martyed for the governor’s victory. That he and his nephew – Davido – immediately threw selves into theembrace of the man who is a known enemy of Nigerian democracy and wholast week boastfully claimed, in what looks like a faux-pas, to be Tinubu’s Mr. Fix It – rigger of election – is a pointer to this.
As we walk into the 2027 elections, my advice to the Nigerian electors is tocarefully choose their fights. As my musical idol, Ayinla Omowura, sermonized: It is not all leaves that the herbalist, who plucks leaves as herbs, cuts;nor is every palm tree worthy of being climbed by a palmwine tapper. Some leaves are poisonous. Some palm trees are home to lethal and poisonous snakes.
By the way, having won a second term, Governor Adeleke should prioritize areas he acknowledged in his acceptance speech that he couldn’t accomplish. Education, health and the architecture of governance are key. In this way, sunshine, Ìmólè, will indeed shine on the people of Osun State.
