Ajimobi: Glimpses of an elephant

The story is told in an Indian fable of six blind men who encountered the corpse of an elephant for the first time on display in the village square. Each one of them touched the elephant, but had different perceptions about it because they touched different parts of the elephant. The first blind man touched its leg and said the elephant was a pillar; the second blind man touched the animal’s tail and said it felt like a rope, the third said it was like the thick branch of a tree when he touched the trunk of the elephant; the fourth exclaimed that it was like a big fan when he touched the ears; the fifth proclaimed that the elephant was like a huge wall when he touched its belly while to the sixth blindman, the beast felt like a solid pipe upon touching its trunk.

Though Senator Abiola Ajimobi, the governor of Oyo State, fancies himself as a lion, he is, like the elephant to the Indian blind men, different things to different people in the state, and since we are celebrating six years of Ajimobi as the Governor, it is appropriate that we try to unravel this enigma and see him in his different slides.  Some see him as tough, loquacious and unfeeling; to some, he is kind and empathetic, while to some he’s a dictatorial, distant and aloof man. But having worked for the man for a year now, I have caught glimpses of the Governor that negate the portraits painted of him by his political traducers. But before giving you snatches of the Governor, you need to know what I thought about him before meeting him in person and working with him. Though one had encountered him in the media before he won election in 2011 as governor, Ajimobi came into full public glare when he became governor. But before then he was a senator representing Oyo South (Ibadan), and as the Deputy Minority Leader in the Senate, he did well and operated on principle.

In the 2011 elections to the Office of Governor, he faced the incumbent, Chief Alao Akala of the People’s Democratic Party and another former Governor, Chief Rasheed Ladoja of the Accord Party. There was no doubt from the campaigns that Ajimobi was the better candidate. He was the most eloquent of the three, the most persuasive, and the one with a better programme and plans for the state. He was able to put his case across convincingly to the masses that if they voted for him, he would not disappoint them.

On compassion, I will cite two instances of his empathy with the common man on the streets. One day while on an inspection of canal and gutter dredging projects to prevent the recurrence of flooding in Ibadan at the Iwo Road interchange, we met traffic jam caused by a minor accident. A man had rammed his car into the back of another woman’s car and there was an argument between the two with the man not ready to admit his fault. On seeing Ajimobi approaching the scene, the man ran away. When he got there, the governor asked for the owner of the cars, the woman came out of her car to narrate her ordeal, and the Governor ordered that the man’s car be towed away. Upon hearing this, the man came out of hiding and prostrated begging the governor for mercy.

Ajimobi then demanded that he should admit his guilt and compensate the lady. The man admitted his guilt, but said he didn’t have the money to pay the woman for the repairs of her damaged car. Ajimobi eventually gave the woman fifty thousand naira to repair the damage done to her car, which in actual fact would not cost her more than ten thousand naira to repair, and ordered law enforcement agents to release the man’s car to him. That showed a man of compassion.

The second incident also happened at the Iwo Road Interchange on a different occasion. The Governor had gone again to inspect the commencement of work being done on the expansion of the Gate-Iwo Road currently going on. When he got to the interchange, he met a woman selling roasted plantain (boli), and Ajimobi loves boli and epa (ground nut). He stopped to buy some from the woman and ordered that she be given thirty five thousand naira. The whole of the woman’s merchandise was not worth up to five thousand naira. Upon collecting the money, the woman abandoned the remainder, including all her paraphernalia and went away in joy. These two cases are not isolated incidents. Nobody ever came to Ajimobi in need and left empty handed. He manages both his own personal and state resources with utmost frugality. Even at that the Ajimobi administration has spent over two billion naira on feeding the poor, through the Ajumose Food Bank spearheaded by the First Lady of the State, and hundreds of thousands of people have benefited from this.

Whatever you may think or say about Abiola Ajimobi, love him or hate him, he is a man of tremendous courage who runs a government of “fearlessness and fairness” with a magnificent vision for Oyo State, and has embarked on breathtaking development projects embracing all corners and crannies of the state, and all facets of life: Roads expansion, industrialization, education, health, agriculture, housing and social services. By the time Ajimobi is through in the next two years, he would have left indelible footprints on Oyo State etching his name in history as “The Builder of modern Oyo State”.

• Ganiyu is the Oyo State Commissioner for Special Duties.