Ekiti State has been going through a radical branding since the once and still hugely discredited Ayo Fayose returned to power as governor. It used to pride itself as a Fountain of Knowledge on account of being reputed to have, household per household, the largest number of holders of earned doctoral degrees in Nigeria, and one of largest in the world. It had long been settled that there is no academic specialism so recondite or arcane that you will not find at least one person in a household in Ekiti holding a doctorate in it.
Fayose seems to have made peace with that characterisation of Ekiti. What he apparently finds it hard to reconcile himself with is Ekiti’s other profile as a land of two of the most prized assets among the Yoruba – íyì and éeyè, which translate into honour and propriety. He served notice the other day that he would strip the Ekiti Coat of Arms of those enduring values, whether as aspiration or actuality.
He may even have done so in the manner that becomes him so well. But that is not the subject of this piece. Nor is Fayose’s solicitous catering to the stomach structure of Ekiti State residents during the Yuletide the concern here, remarkable as it was, what with people from all over Nigeria and even from the ECOWAS region pouring into the state capital to obtain a portion of the Fayose Bonanza – rice, hens, cooking oil, salt, pepper and onions, together with pots and pans and other utensils guaranteed to do justice to such a special occasion.
I gather that the next edition of the Stomach Infrastructure Initiative, or Fayose Special, is scheduled for Easter. Personally, however, I will not be surprised if Fayose were to decide to stage the event much earlier in deference to those complaining that Easter is too far, great democrat that he is. Plus, remember that the reason he connects so well is that he hears the people even before they begin to talk.
Again, that is not the subject of this piece. Between his election and his inauguration, Fayose had gone from one bank to another warning of dire consequences if they granted his predecessor loans to service the administration’s financial obligations. And when that administration could not pay civil servants in its last month in office, Fayose had latched on to that as proof, were any still required, of the wickednessand callousness of Governor Kayode Fayemi and his team.
Now finding himself similarly circumstanced, Fayose is appealing to civil servants to appreciate why their salaries had to be delayed. While campaigning for the governorship, Fayose had declared that President Goodluck Jonathan had promised to give him anything he wanted if he could capture Ekiti for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Why is Fayose not rushing to cash in on the promise to bring in huge federal assets to stave off the growing popular discontent? The whole thing should take no more than a phone call to Aso Rock. So, what is Fayose waiting for? Again, that is not the subject of this column.
By now, everyone knows how seven of the 26 members of the State Assembly, all elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), defected to the PDP several hours after Fayose was declared winner of the gubernatorial election, and how the defectors, their ranks swollen by three infiltrators of identities unknown, purportedly convened a meeting of the Assembly during which they had claimed to have impeached the Assembly Speaker, Dr Ademola Omirin, and to have replaced him with one of their own.
Everyone one knows how, drawing on a variation of the peculiar mathematics of the PDP and the Jonathan administration under which 14 is a larger number than 18, Fayose decreed that the seven defectors constitute a majority of the total membership of the House vested with law-making. The public knows how the seven defectors and their unidentified confederates had purported to carry out, in the appointed chambers, and under the full protection of the police, the business of the Assembly, to wit, approving Fayose’s nominee for State Attorney-General (ha!) among other appointments, and passing into law the State’s 2015 Appropriations.
Everyone also knows how the 19-member majority of the House was reduced to meeting at secret locations to countermand the legislative acts the defectors purported to have carried out. They had to meet in such circumstances because Fayose and the police could not or would not guarantee their safety. The public knows these developments all too well. Those developments are consequently not the subject of this piece, merely a backdrop to it.
To finally come right out with it, this column is about the recent transformation of the Police Command in Ekiti from a force accused of passively watching elements of the ruling PDP harass and intimidate and brutalise supporters of the opposition when it is not actually siding with and aiding and abetting the lawless rule of the PDP in Ekiti, to an institution dedicated to the peaceful resolution of disputes.
To get to specifics, the police that had stood by as thugs invaded the Ekiti High Court, beat up judges, tore up lawyers’ robes and shredded court documents now want to reconcile the minority seeking to usurp the legislative functions of the Ekiti House of Assembly, and tne majority that have refused to submit to Fayose’s threats and blandishments and who knows what else from Abuja. How this improbable mission came about it remains for now a secret, but since it was announced by the Ekiti Commissioner of Police, Taiwo Lakanu, there can be no doubt that, at the very least, it has been approved from the very top. I doubt whether the police would have embarked on such a radical departure from its standard operational procedures without that kind of approval.
If this is not another false dawn, the implications are far-reaching. Instead of dispersing protesters and demonstrators with main force, the police will henceforth function as honest brokers between them and the institutions they are protesting against – between Labour and Capital, between students and the university administration, between perpetrator and victim.
The more perceptive observers of the political scene would have sensed the coming of this new dispensation when, in the dispute over the competence of Aminu Tambuwal to continue to function as Speaker of the House of Representatives after defecting from the ruling PDP, Police Inspector-General Sulaiman Abba made it emphatically the province of the police to have the last word on the Constitution.
From that singular act, it was but a short step to re-constituting the police into an institution for settling disputes and resolving conflict. Some may question whether the police are trained or otherwise equipped to perform such a function. But they cannot question the function itself. Somebody or some institution has to perform it. If, as in Ekiti and increasingly in other parts of Nigeria the courts and traditional rulers or so-called “royal fathers” cannot or will not perform that function, who can blame the police for stepping into the breach, even if that moves the country farther and farther along the toad to a Police State?