IT was just a simple call to a cousin who lives in Ado Ekiti. We exchanged pleasantries and had some family tittle-tattle. I closed the session by asking, “Hope our governor is doing well?” He responded in our deep Ekiti dialect. I will just give the English paraphrase of his response. “That one that is busy digging graves all over the place. Just pray for us that Fulani herdsmen do not kill us for Fayemi to bury in his graves”. What? He asked if I did not read it in the newspapers or online, the other week that Governor Kayode Fayemi commissioned a 260,000-capacity cemetery, somewhere in Ado- Ekiti. I answered in the affirmative.
Then he asked: “When a governor makes a cemetery his priority, what does he want to bury there?” Before I could answer him, he parodied the late Elemure Ogunyemi’s popular song about death and the feferity of akara. Elemure, in that song, prayed that he would not die for his enemies to eat akara. My cousin is a fecund humour merchant. I ended the call. That the Ekiti state governor on Tuesday last week commissioned a necropolis is no longer news.
The “colourful” event was given wide publicity. Politicians do that a lot. No matter how frivolous a “project” is, they spend more money on publicity to show the general public that they are working.
The 260,000-capacity burial ground is located at Eminrin area of Ado Ekiti, the state capital. According to Governor Fayemi, the project was conceived to avert environmental hazards and safeguard the health of the citizens who naturally bury their dead in their homes. Good thinking, you will say? But not so with an average Ekiti resident-cum-indigene, who is yet to see anything tangible that can serve as a poster accomplishment of the Fayemi era as a governor.
The governor, who was represented at the commissioning ceremony by his Commissioner for Environment, Iyabo Fakunle-Okieimen, opined that the cemetery is a government’s effort geared towards encouraging private investors in the state. Don’t laugh!
“The smooth take-off of this business is a testimony that Ekiti is encouraging private investors to invest their hardearned money in the state. With this investment by a private body, Ekiti is no longer a rural setting,” Fayemi gleefully told Ekiti people. He veered off into the environmental and health hazards of Ekiti people burying their dead at home. He noted that such, besides causing water pollution, equally devalues the buildings and reduces their aesthetic outlook. Then he made a passionate appeal to the owners of the “public-private initiative”, CitiGate Park and Gardens Cemetery, to “replicate this across the 16 local government areas in the state so that our late parents can be buried easily in cemeteries that are neater and well laid out”. If the company considers the governor’s appeal, in not too long a time, the entire Ekiti landscape will be dotted by graveyards that “are neater, cheaper and well laid out”. The way the governor’s representative put it, one may be tempted to die in this season of “neater, cheaper and well laid out”
Fayemi’s version of ‘garden of remembrance. And for other “investors”, possibly cist makers, the governor assured of protection for their investments and tax holiday, through government backed up “legal framework.”
Kayode Fayemi is a two term governor of my dear Ekiti State. His first term was broken in 2014 when Ayodele Fayose, then an exile returnee, ‘interrupted” the second term ambition by defeating Fayemi in all the 16 local government areas of the state. However, in 2018, Fayemi staged a comeback and won the governorship again. Besides being a two-term governor, Fayemi was at a time the Minister of Solid Minerals Development in the first term of General Muhammadu Buhari. He also holds a doctorate in War Studies from King’s College, London. So he is a widelytravelled individual and well educated, exposed and cosmopolitan such that we cannot accuse him of ignorance in governance.
Since the cemetery commissioning ceremony, I have had cause to listen to a lot of people, especially workers and residents of Ekiti. The only area where Governor Fayemi is scored high grade is payment of salary. In all other sectors and departments of governance, his report card is not something a pupil would want to show his parents. Not a few people are disappointed that Fayemi will be high in spirit, celebrating a 260, 000 capacity cemetery when other sectors of the state are in a shambles. I must add that I am personally disappointed that in this global economy, Fayemi will be gloating over a public-private cemetery project as his way of “encouraging private investors to invest their hard-earned money in the state”. If by 2021, Governor Fayemi is seeing a cemetery as an “investment” in Ekiti, something is definitely wrong. Come to think of it, what is the per capital income of an average Ekiti man or woman?
How much does a civil servant earn that he or she can afford to buy a private vault to bury his or her dead? How much is the cost of a grave in that burial ground? Is that the priority in Ekiti today? How does the cemetery empower an average man on the street? Yeah, there will be grave diggers; there will be bricklayers to set the blocks and plasters and there will be those who will tend the flowers. Now ask: what percentage of the population are those mentioned?
How frequently will Ekiti people die for the “empowered” workers of the graveyard to have something to do? Will death become ten for ten Kobo to fill up a 260, 000 capacity necropolis?
And when such is “replicated” in all the sixteen council areas of the state, who does the governor want to bury there as asked by my cousin? Do we also talk about the culture and tradition of the people? What is the attachment of the Ekiti people to their dead relations? The governor talked about “In USA, Britain and other European countries, you can’t just bury your dead at home”, while commissioning the cemetery. Do we ask Fayemi if Ekiti is now the United States or Britain? We have a saying in Ekiti: “Oju mi la l’Eko, uya li mu ni hi je l’Ekiti”- you don’t bring Lagos civilization to Ekiti without suffering for it. How in the 21st century, a governor of Fayemi’s calibre regards the establishment of a public-private cemetery as an investment beats my imagination. Is this the level we are as a people or our leaders simply think that we are simply stupid?
Trust politicians. The opposition PDP in the state is already making a mincemeat of the cemetery project. The party, in a statement endorsed by Raphael Adeyanju, its spokesman, asked Fayemi to build hospitals and not a cemetery. Building a cemetery, the PDP said, was to make the ruling APC to profit from the high mortality rate occasioned by the growing insecurity in Ekiti as in other states of the federation, and bad economic policies, both at the state and the national level. “We are not surprised that Governor Fayemi has decided to make provision of the cemetery his major priority since his administration is not interested in building good hospitals to promote sound health for Ekiti. This is a government that takes joy in taking food from the table of Ekiti people and watch them starve to death”, the PDP said.
One is tempted to agree with the PDP, save that there is little or no difference between six and half a dozen! When an old man ties a cob of maize round his waist, he becomes an object of ridicule for fowls. The health sector in Ekiti State is in a shambles. This is not the best of time to encourage “investors” to put “their hard-earned money” in cemetery projects. The Medical and Dental Consultants’ Association of Nigeria, Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital, (MDCAN EKSUTH), recently raised an alarm over the “imminent collapse of quality health care delivery in the tertiary hospital” in the state calling on Fayemi to urgently ameliorate the poor working condition of staff in the health sector. Don’t forget that resident doctors in the state have been on indefinite strike over irregularities in the payment of their salaries as well as the reduction in the monthly subvention to government hospitals in the state.
The doctors, through their leaders, Dr. Lateef Oluwole, chairman and Dr. Anthony Agbesanwa, secretary, noted that the subvention given to the hospitals had not been increased since 2013 thus hampering the delivery of quality health services to the people of the state. The consultants argued that they would not be able to guarantee any further health care delivery in the hospital if government failed to urgently address their grievances in the interest of residents of the state. That is where, to the best of thinking, the governor should get his cemetery investors to put “their hard-earned money”. Give good investors proper “relevant legal framework and tax waiver” to invest in the health sector instead of preparing a befitting burial ground for people who are likely to die from preventable and curable diseases and ailments because of quality health care delivery services. Fayemi must dare to be different.
He cannot be like the Governor Samuel Ortom of 2017, who “empowered” Benue State youths with wheelbarrows. Sure, my Ekiti State governor cannot be like Usman Jaha (Babawo), Borno State Commissioner for Higher Education, who in 2018, while aspiring to contest the 2019 House of Representatives election, distributed shoe polish kits and other items to the youth as a “welfare programme package”. Fayemi with his Ph.D in War Studies must show credible and distinctive qualities that will show that he is better than his Jigawa and Kano State counterparts who once donated bags of oranges to youths in their states as “empowerment.” How many are we in Ekiti that Fayemi is celebrating a 260, 000 graveyard and still asking for more in all the council areas? Rather than promote death by encouraging “investors” to build more funeral homes, he should get them to put more money in the Ikun Dairy Farm so that there will be abundant milk in Ekiti and people will not have to die for lack of the necessary nutrients.
Rather than venerate fatality by preparing “neater, cheaper and well laid out” graveyards for the people, Fayemi should encourage private investors to support the state security architecture, especially the Amotekun Corps, and save the people from killer-herdsmen, who daily pillage the land, rape the women and kill their husbands. It is good that Fayemi wants to take Ekiti out of its “rural setting”, but I daresay without a jot of equivocation that a beautiful and well-manicured graveyard is definitely not what will make Ekiti to be like United States and Britain, or any other imaginary Eldorado of his dream.
and then