Before we sat for discussion, about five over-dressed corporate fellows, I guess three guys and two ladies, had sandwiched the chubby accountant in a photo-op, for his graduation! Yes, he took a crash course on, I sum it up as, how to be a good governor, with particular emphasis on public conducts, communication and I guess, courtesies. It was his graduation moment, with a display of certificate and banters.
While my friend was upbeat about his party’s candidate preparedness, I watched with concealed bemusement.
Yeah, I’m an unrepentant advocate of packaging and re-packaging of public officers at all levels, because even a focussed councillor, who is an exception to the collateral damage his ilk have become to the polity, can make a lot of difference. How much more a well-situated local government chairman, who is functionally-groomed, by institutional and logical braces for optimal delivery.
While governors in US states are dragged into public consciousness, often, by raging tempest of different human names and destructive power, performing council mayors are discussed more both in home and foreign media, mainly due to the sensitivity of their responsibilities to the everyday citizen. A couple of them had moved from being mayors, equivalent to Nigeria’s council chairmen, to greater things in the polity, for handling their grassroots assignments very well. Such “promotion” reward is always a testament to how positively they affect their immediate communities and one of them, a former Mayor of New York City, Michael Rubens Bloomberg, is already a front-running Democratic Party candidate for 2020 presidential election. He needed not the New York State governor to promote him.
However, there is an archeology-material mansion in Ilesa that carries weighty wisdom with its now-sagging pillars. It is called the Oturarebi Mansion (mansion of someone who underwent self-rebirth or rediscovery). The building may be only of medieval grace today, but it was once the cynosure. That is a life lesson on its own. Itan laye (the world is a story). Today is always the story of tomorrow and yesterday, the history of today. The best of yesterday is the worst of today and the most beautiful of today, is the most optically-offensive of tomorrow. Our wardrobe is the most telling of life lessons we can have. One moment, a racy designer cut is raving everywhere. A fortune is shelled on it. Someday, you just realise the cut everyone is praising as heaven-made on you, just yesterday, is not even worthy of low-class socials again. Or you suddenly got out of shape and after struggling to get into it, you look monstrously incongruous. You jumped out faster than you crawled into the cut. It has become outdated or useless. That is the story of the life we have, which real understanding, is certainly beyond our understanding.
I return to Ambode, but as a metaphor for all in borrowed comfort today. It is dangerous to stay in what men, either professionals or amateurs, cut for you to be. It will serve everyone, either in public or private life, to cut and re-cut themselves, unto divine perfection. Man will never be able to please men.
But man can run slaving errands like a true and well-born. Ambode’s godfather won the argument against those pleading his cause by constantly pointing at the subdued dude’s alleged anti-party elders’ posture. Those managing the governor squealed that the claim wasn’t true on two legs. The first counter was that the directive to shun party elders and leaders, to allow for profitable and engaging governance focus, came from the godfather to the godson. It was claimed that the godfather recommended gboju e (shun distractive elements) as the success formulae from his own sojourning in the government house between 1999 and 2007. To further whitewash the governor on the alleged grave partisan harakiri, a list flickered all over the social media, detailing various sum of largesse the so-called marooned party elders, licked from the alleged snobbish fellow’s pouch. Nobody confirmed, nobody denied. That is the dark heart of politics the uninitiated will never be able to navigate. When it gets to personal or cult interest, the popular Bini dumb-leaf that allows the initiate, at most, the luxury of grunts, when required to explain the mystery of their dark fortresses, is suddenly gummed the politician’s lips. They don’t get to shake tables to that extent.
Does anyone still remember the “you talk, I talk” warning shots between erstwhile paddies-for-Rivers’ jungle, Nyesom Wike and Rotimi Amaechi. In a more sensible anti-corruption crusade, both should be doing the fast and furious, about who knows what on Rivers’ monies. But for where? Both go about with blood-shot visage, with more billions in private accounts, that what an Omoluabi generation, may not make, of course legitimately, in many lifetime.
Even teenagers now know how to edit adults’ manual, especially the not-too sensible pages. You don’t just go banging everything into smithereens because someone handed you a giant flyswatter and signalled a hot war. When you run a slave errand like a slave, God has a way of making those you spat in their eyes, be the ones to get you out of the pit of the slave masters. I’m certain the outgoing governor in his now-genuine sobriety can relate to this analogy, regarding a couple of his below-belt hits known to me, but minded relaying here. Imagine the governor not picking or replying SMS from the common friend who introduced us, for a whole year! Haba.
Pastor J.T Kalejaiye has a popular saying; everyone you meet in life is either a blessing or a lesson. Akinwunmi Ambode, I believe, is going through his rebirth and self-discovery; by the mercy of God, he would be politically relevant again after his on-going wilderness experience. For the rest of us, emergency pontificators, agent provocateurs, devil-in-the-detail patent owners, including the yokolu yokolu (we have shamed him) hip-shakers, can we pause for a moment, to see the fallen governor for who he really is, to us all; the biblical fig tree?.
and then