The story, Ali and the Angels, in one of the books that were read in primary schools in the early 70s, comes to my mind as I ruminate over the political situation in Ogun State.
In that story, the king of a town, desired to have the best cloth ever made. Ali, a subject of the king, brought an imaginary cloth and told the king that it was the most beautiful cloth, only visible to those who are pure. Sinners cannot see the cloth, he told the king.
He gave it to the monarch and urged him to put it on. The monarch put on the imaginary cloth, since he wanted everybody to believe that he was pure, sinless. Though his subjects saw him naked, they, nonetheless, told him that he looked splendid in the cloth. He felt good, his ego massaged. But the king was naked. His subjects only told him what he wanted to hear.
Similarly, the Ogun State Governor, Senator Ibikunke Amosun, is politically naked. As in the folklore story, the only thing he wants to hear is that he is a semi-god and that is what his co-travellers in his new party, APM, are telling him. But they know that Amosun is naked, stark naked.
The Ogun State governor suffers a great delusion, believing that he has Ogun State in his hands. Of course, he has the State in his hands but it is an imaginary state, an empty vessel that he holds on to.
The Yorubas, in their wisdom, say that you will only know the true nature of anybody when you give him or her three things – _Owo_ (money), _Ogun_ ( charms) and _Ipo_ (power). Amosun has all – money, power and charms but he has failed the litmus test of Omoluwabi. He has mismanaged the goodwill that was entrusted to him almost eight years ago.
If anybody will succeed Amosun, it is not Akinlade and, definitely, the vehicle cannot be APM.
It is an open secret that Amosun is the masquerade behind APM. This is known to , not just the residents of Ogun State, but the entire country and the world. What goodwill does Amosun have to market his party of delusion and its candidates? Is it the roads he constructed in Yewa/Awori or Ijebu /Remo? Is it the civil servants he has suffered or the workers of the Tai Solarin College of Education, many of who have been sent on untimely deaths due to Amosun’s wicked and heartless withholding of their emoluments in the last few years?
Amosun has been arrogantly referred to as the architect of modern Ogun. This is very true. It is a new Ogun State with one of the worst road networks in the country; an Ogun State where projects are executed with the sole aim of siphoning the commonwealth; an Ogun State where only two local governments enjoy infrastructural enhancement; an Ogun State where Schools do not have subventions. Is it in Ijebu-Ode, where roads constructed over 40 years ago are being reduced in size in spite of explosion in population that Amosun and his APM apologists are hoping to have votes? Or an Ogun State, where MITROS rice, elaborately publicised to be grown in the state, is nowhere to be found, almost one year after the hoax? We knew that Ade Sunmonu Oje’s pictures of bags of sand that formed most part of the rice pyramid that Amosun invited the world bank, among others organisations, to launch, were real. Probably rice is not grown anymore in Egua where it was bought and repackaged as MITROS rice.
Amosun thinks that resident of Ogun State are fools and blind to reality. He is mistaken.
But he deserves no pity. This is karma, nature’s way of redressing injustice, at play. Those who the gods want to destroy, they first make mad.
Without the slightest claim to the powers of Nostradamus, I can easily predict that Amosun will meet his waterloo in March.
In times gone bye, when a king commits sacrilege, he pays the ultimate prize. He would open a sacred calabash ( a si igba) to pay for his deeds and exit the world.
Amosun has committed several sacrileges. He is on his MISSION TO PAY THE ULTIMATE PRIZE.
Ogun State will be better for it.
-Tunde Emilola-Gazal.
