What does your governor do for a living?

In his chapter titled “At home with Eunice” in The Road to Lalupon, a 2001 book he edited (Ibadan: Frontline Books), Akinyemi Onigbinde, Professor of Philosophy, narrated an encounter that I have found impossible to forget. Mrs Eunice Fajuyi, widow of Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, a former Governor of the Western Region, was travelling  in a public bus from Ado Ekiti to Gbagi, Ibadan, and then someone who recognized her at a point in the journey and could not keep the information to herself suddenly unmasked her identity. Here’s what followed: “She became the recipient of different forms of financial donation. And on getting off the vehicle at the terminus, others pitifully apologized to her for their inability to offer her their appreciation in material terms, but prayed that God would be with her and members of the family. What her fellow commuters could not understand was why Her Excellency, the wife of a former Governor, would share company with lesser mortals in a rickety 18-seater Urvan bus.”

For context, Fajuyi ruled the whole of what is now called the South-West, but he owned only a half-completed house in Ado Ekiti. He did not steal a kobo of public funds. The story is told how, during his tenure, some expatriates who wanted to site a factory in Ibadan came to offer him a bribe at the Government House. They gave him a huge amount of cash and left. The moment they left, Fajuyi called his SSG, one Odumosu, and instructed him to pay the money into the treasury. He said the thieves had returned part of the people’s money that they had stolen! Fajuyi was slaughtered by the July 1966 mutineers, but even in death he remains more popular than they will ever be. And if his widow was found many years later travelling in a public bus, it was because she didn’t own a car. She owned a lock-up shop in Ado Ekiti where she sold textile materials. That was the business she was doing before her husband’s death, and it was the business she did many years later.

Time was in this country when many people loathed corruption, and when traditional rulers did not reward robbers with chieftaincy titles. In his January 15,1996 coup speech, Major Kaduna Nzeogwu listed “bribery or corruption” among the offences punishable by death. He could barely contain his disgust with corrupt practices, the same practices that continually hobble our military these days when even Major-Generals are being tried for mindboggling corruption.  Nzeogwu said that “smuggling or trying to escape with documents, valuables, including money or other assets vital to the running of any establishment” would attract the death sentence. In case that was not clear enough, he said: “Our enemies are the political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand ten per cent.”

Yakubu Gowon, the man who took over as Head of State after the July 1966 counter-coup, could not pay his wife’s hotel bills in the UK after Murtala Muhammed threw him out of office. Mrs Gowon had travelled there to buy cheap clothing. Indeed, it was fellow Heads of State who gave Gowon money to start life in the UK. It was said that at the time, Gowon did not own a house anywhere. Hear former military governor of old Kaduna State, Colonel Dangiwa Umar (retd), recounting an experience with the Gowons many years later: “When as Governor of Kaduna State, I visited Gowon’s family house in Wusasa, Zaria, in 1987 in the company of the then Inspector General of Police (IGP), Gambo Jimeta, we met Gowon’s mother in the same mud building where he was born. Her room furniture comprised a Vono bed, a wooden chair on which IGP Gambo sat, while I sat on a bag of grains. Gowon’s sister took her position on a straw mat, while the mother sat on her bed. Her other daughter was making haste to fry bean cake for us, of course, using a firewood stove.”

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If Nzeogwu were alive today, he would immediately have a heart attack seeing the career thieves, 90 percenters, and sexual perverts ruling the length and breadth of this land. If he could grab the current criminals donating billions at book launches while having zero history of honest labour; the governors without CV; the wild, analphabetic thugs; the depraved individuals; tin pot dictators and smugglers and forgers of all kinds, he would order them to be decorated with bullets! At the moment, the robbers are preparing for 2027 and across this land, the praise singers and drummers are ready to play. Women wearing Ankara are ready to serenade them to the skies, eating amala and collecting N5,000.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo was a trader, a journalist and a lawyer. Tafawa Balewa was a teacher, just like Adekunle Ajasin. Everybody knew what these people did for a living. Long before Dr Olusegun Mimiko became Governor of Ondo State, everyone knew he owned Mona clinic. His life was in the public domain. There was no mystery about his history. Today, all sorts of criminals are occupying Government House, or aspiring to do so. Some of them may be illegal miners running different criminal cartels; retired or practising fraudsters; cultists of different kinds; people who in civlised climes would be either dead or serving multiple life terms!

So, here’s my question to those loading the public space with praise: What does your governor or aspiring governor do for a living? Is he a teacher, mechanic, farmer or trader? I ask because if you want to know what the great leaders who have passed on did for a living, the records are readily available. Today, all sorts of criminals would just come from Europe or America, load party primaries with criminally huge sums, and pronto, they get into office! Nobody asks what they did for a living where they came from. I say: Mr Honourable, are you a retired thief or fraudster? Let us know how you acquired your billions.

Since 1999 when Nigeria returned to civil rule, at least 58 ex-governors have been investigated for corruption. They are alleged to have stolen ₦2.187 trillion, a figure that does not include properties seized abroad or money still under investigation. And that’s not to talk of cases that were never detected or reported in the first place. So I ask again: what does your governor, senator or honourable do for a living? Where did he get the money he is throwing around like water? Where did he get money to build his palatial mansions and acquire those exotic cars that Lateef Jakande could only have seen in a dream?

The madness is enabled by jaundiced journalism. In this country, certain journalist once gave a “Best Governor Award” to a man who was yet to take the oath of office. People calling themselves journalists interview utter failures and begin in this manner: ‘Your Excellency, Mr Projects, you have carried out a revolution in this state..”

Yeepa! Where are the projects? It is finished!