Can we exhume Oloye too?

MY verdict: Kwara State O to ge governor, Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq is not a good administrator. I will explain.

Hours after I landed in Lagos as the chief servant (pray, where thou hideth Babangida Aliyu)  over seven years back, Nigeria’s one and only Oloye passed on, no, not in Ile Arugbo in Ilorin, Kwara State, where he had his shrine as the deity of the land, but in comfy Lagos, where he began making the money that transmogrified him from being a successful medical doctor to an influential national politician, before becoming god of lazy men and women, the layabouts, who wanted to eat without working. Didn’t the Word of God forbid such an arrangement and actually decree they should go hungry?

But no, Abubakar Olusola Saraki would not allow the Word of God to be true for his people. He sustained his own version of gbegiri and amala politics, evolving variants, until his death, including decreeing men in and out of offices. Before we come to the greatest insult to his memory, let’s examine his peculiar ideology of living forever in the hearts of men. For sure, only Oloye could tell the underlying factor for the motif he chose for his hypnotical canonisation, but the objective was clear: make able-bodied men and women go so lazy and economically-dependent, to lose their power of reasoning to daily steaming broth and a few shillings and helping himself to what should be for all, while they are at their finger-licking experience.

New Salsa heartthrob, Ayo Fayose, rebranded the muwonleru (slavery) concept and dubbed it stomach infrastructure. To his credit, he unabashedly identified with his creation, unlike his political opponents, locally and nationally, who deride stomach infrastructure in the open and do nocturnal embrace with public monies. Yoruba will call it, using Abu’s money to entertain Abu. Is that not the same concept under a different nomenclature that consumed all the recovered Abacha loot? Yes, it can be argued that what is currently on, is social security or safety net, for which responsible governments in leading nations of the world, have been applauded.

Well, nobody should have any problems with governments taking care of the poorest of the poor under a specialized scheme, but such becomes a specialised fraud when deliberate official moves are directed at keeping the poorest consistently poor, until their last breath. Those doing social security and food stamp, race against time to take beneficiaries off such an arrangement and actually get to celebrate reducing beneficiaries’ numbers as an evidence of governance dividends. But no, not here. In fact, the more beneficiaries, including cooked figures from crooked officials, captured into such schemes, the louder the celebration of “promise made, promise kept.”

You ask how those out to better lives, as seen in unmitigated nepotism, are the same keeping their people down and I point you, the pauperising policy of using religion and acquired culture to take away God-giving capacity to break poverty yoke, at cradle. Any human being you programme into inferiority complex is irretrievably damaged, except God decides to work His wonders into the equation. God created every man with talents and capacities, and has helped men to fashion out platforms to develop them, with formal education leading the pack, but immediately you label the man in a boy, educationally-disadvantaged and consistently encourage him not to compete with his peers, but helping him to cut corners at different levels, using 7 to secure admission in a national school with a cut-off mark of 68, you have taken a noble future away from him, regardless of how you continuously prop him, to attain certain heights in life.

If Northern elite would be truthful, the complex issue is most unmistaken over there and in an average him or her, from their yonder. The southern counterpart is subsequently seen as arrogant and proud; hence the hate drive, because without the Holy Spirit working inside of you, destructive anger is always the end-result of unevenness. I remember my days in Yobe State and the story told us of how able-bodied young men, but starkly illiterate, completely unskilled, would sit and droll endlessly about taking ownership of properties of successful migrants. We were told these eye-popping autos and mansions are usually the first set of target in a sectarian or communal crisis.

This army of grabbers is what Ile Arugbo and its kind elsewhere represents. Even from its identity nomenclature, the disparate nature of its symbolism, is very glaring. Ile Arugbo practically means a hospice, providing succor, but is that what the “haven” provided, for its four decades of funny “charity?”

When O to ge was cooked in Lagos and used to light-up Kwara pre-2019 poll, the emancipation to follow, was expected to, first, be a deconstruction and reconstruction, so that men in bondage of free breakfast, lunch and dinner without a future would start thinking differently, and then, developmental activities, that would give a future. If a thinking departure from the past, had been adopted, Ile Arugbo and the generation sustaining it, would have been too ashamed to keep identifying with it, and possibly wish it was never erected in the first place. Like the Badagry slavery path and other mementoes, Ile Arugbo should have remained a poignant campaign against an undesirable past. But no, a petty governor has, in a fit of uncontrolled emotions, changed that path of history. Without doubt, the law empowers Abdulrahman to pull any building down, including his own father’s yard. But no, laws aren’t absolute on their own, there are historical facts to even the most ancient of them.

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What about the ones handed straight down to man. No, I don’t mean the Mosaic Law. I mean the all-encompassing two Jesus brought us; love God with all your heart and love your neighbour as yourself. You can break them down to the seven fruit of the Holy Spirit and get as elastic as you want, as long as you don’t get presumptuous. Why can’t this petty governor see beyond breaching land laws and properly situate Ile Arugbo  for what it is; a past not to be trodden again, and leave it for easy history for generations coming after him.

Now, in destroying this fantastically ugly history, he’s returning the old gang of beneficiaries to winning ways. No, I don’t mean, Wailing Bukola Saraki and his group will be back to political power soon, though Abdulrahman’s childishness, could be paving that way. For sure, it is not in Bukola’s mouth to wail of the desecration of his father’s memory and legacies by his adversaries in power. Bukola “finished” his father in the latter’s lifetime, when he used the old man’s tricks to defeat his sister Gbemi, who had their father’s backing, for governor in 2011, handing the old man, his first shame as a godfather. Whatever Abdulraham is doing to Oloye’s memory now, is just using his porcelain plate which his son Bukola called a potty, to carry poo-poo. If anyone should genuinely wail now, it should be Gbemi, who substituted blood line for political ties last year, to sack the Saraki gang in Kwara. Her silence in the face of the provocative demolition of her father’s memento, suggests she is sticking with politics as Buhari’s minister and APC stalwart. That should be tragic.

For the governor to start with his worst, he should expect the worst. Public sentiment is already heavily against him like his equally-foolish brother, who paid a heavy price for a demolition, this time, of industry and perseverance.