Fayose victory, Fayemi kudos

I woke up early morning of Sunday to receive two breaking news—one good, one disappointing. The good one is the news that our embattled Super Eagles had managed to beat hard-fighting Bosnia and Herzegovina against all expectations by emotionally frazzled Nigerians. The second news was that my friend, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, the Governor of Ekiti had been beaten by grassroots man, Ayo Fayose.  At the campaigns period, I had stuck out my neck on Governor Fayemi’s side and still do so even much more now.

First, the good news. Once the Super Eagles could not overrun a determined Iranian team, ending up with a goalless draw, the naysayers went to town. They took potshots at their favourite target—Coach Stephen Keshi. (It is Coach Keshi today but it could have been Christian Chukwu, Amodu Shuaibu, Samson Siasia or any other indigenous coach!) Did they not say it that he was not a world-class coach? How could he not have beaten Iran, a mere Iran! If he were a world-class coach, would he not have read the match well and devised a tactical magic to dismantle Iran’s determined negative soccer?

And the players—oh, the players! Lacklustre, benchwarmers, lackadaisical, unserious, uncreative and wasting goal chances! Even the coach’s selection and substitutions are defective.

In matters of soccer, every Nigerian, even if he is a carpenter or a dignified palm wine tapper, is an expert, a soccer analyst, a great tactician all rolled into one. So, watch out, this is the season of 170 million soccer experts!

Keshi-bashing became a national sport. In an article titled, “Keshi Is the Wrong Coach for the World Cup”, a respected scholar, Dr. Femi Aribisala, declared flatly that, “Keshi is tactically deficient coach.”

He added, “The assumption that because Keshi managed the Super Eagles to World Cup qualification he is the right man to lead us to the World Cup itself is wrong. In 2006, Keshi led the Togolese team to World Cup qualification. However, realizing what Nigeria has failed to realize, they dropped him for the World Cup itself and chose a far more experienced world-class coach, Otto Pfister of Germany to replace him.”

Aribisala didn’t push the argument further. For the inevitable question should be, how far did the “far more experienced world-class coach, Otto Pfister of Germany” who replaced Keshi push the Togolese at the World Cup? Where was this famous coach during African Cup of Nations which Keshi won and World Cup qualifying series after Keshi left Togo? How come Togo is not at the World Cup this year? Perhaps, no more Keshi to qualify them and a foreign coach to take them to the World Cup?

I don’t know where this anti-indigenous coach syndrome is coming from. Is it a case of black man’s congenital inferiority complex or what? If a coach who won the African Cup of Nations and qualified your team to the World Cup  is not good enough to take you to the World Cup tournament, what then would qualify such a coach for the job? Perhaps, if he wore a white skin, speak through his nose and is called a tongue-twisting name, then a World Cup coach would have arrived on our shores.

How would Aribisala feel if somebody were to suggest to him that though he holds a doctorate degree, he certainly lacks the intellectual depth to hold down a job in his field merely by the simple fact that he is black, from Nigeria and should be replaced by a white counterpart from the Western world? If that would be unacceptable to him, why is it only in soccer matters that our local products become inferior compared to global benchmark? What is World Cup glory if we can only win it with imported manpower?

Even before Keshi’s victory over Bosnia, it took one of the world’s soccer superpowers, Argentina, who battled Iran for 90 minutes without a goal to prove that Iran is no pushover after all. Perhaps, without the extraordinary ingenuity of the world’s greatest soccer player, Lionel Messi, who scored a classic goal in the injury time for Argentina, Iran would have ran away with another goalless draw despite the Argentine’s world-class coaches with all their tactical dexterity!

And need I point out now that despite the anti-Keshi’s mob and Aribisala’s prediction that Nigeria’s cookies would come crumbling at the World Cup and that Nigeria won’t win a match, Nigeria is still running while great soccer nations like Spain and Britain boasting of the world’s costliest and whitest coaches are on their way home! Meanwhile, Bosnia is out and by the grace of God, it will be Nigeria, not Iran, that would move to the next round with “inferior” Coach Keshi at the helm. You can quarrel with anything, but only a fool quarrels with the result.

It is precisely because I do not fancy myself as a fool that I am commenting on the Ekiti State governorship election won by Fayose. I lost interest in the election when the federal government unleashed soldiers and police on the state in a needless of show of power that was a shame to democracy.

Planes carrying opposition governors coming to round off campaign support with Fayemi were barred from landing. Governor Chibuike Amaechi whose plane had been so repeatedly grounded on political grounds, opted to drive into the state by road, but then he too was ambushed by soldiers who ordered him to turn back. Meanwhile, the same security forces had conveniently or brazenly turned a blind eye when PDP leaders including the Minister of State for Defence, Senator Musliu Obanikoro, now an ubiquitous player in such power games whether in Lagos or other states, Minister for Police Affairs Alhaji Abduljelili Adesiyan and grandee of political underhand games, Chris Uba, among others, moved into the state.

I can’t recall when shutting the airspace against the opposition elements or preventing even governors from moving into a state has ever been deployed as a tool of political power game as we have it now. However, the expectation that with such massive show of power and abuses might be prelude to a massive rigging of the election has turned out groundless.

The election results published by the newspapers with the Sun and Punch doing exceptional job of scooping out details of the result on Sunday showed a pattern that do not suggest any rigging. In other words, to President Goodluck Jonathan’s credit, despite the pointless abuse of the rights of opposition leaders, the security forces had not interfered with the voting process. This meant that Jonathan had sustained his “one man, one vote” philosophy.

I had written in my column that Fayemi, rather than Fayose, was the right man for the job. I felt that from my interaction with Fayemi, he had the right intellectual and moral gravitas for the job. Fayemi had invested substantially in developing the human capital in Ekiti. But such investments often turn into abstraction when people need concrete things to see. As it were, the Ekiti people preferred Fayose, rather than Fayemi. The people have spoken and loudly too. Their voice was reflected in the widespread superior electoral showing of Fayose over the incumbent and the third contender, Opeyemi Bamidele who may now turn out, from the perspective of the Fayemi camp, to have played more of a spoiler’s role.

But then, Fayemi did something extraordinary. He called to congratulate Fayose for his victory. “I have spoken to my brother, Mr. Peter Ayodele Fayose, congratulating him on his victory,” he broadcast to the state. “In a few hours from now, I would be meeting the governor-elect to discuss the future of our dear state and how we would work together to institute a smooth transition programme.”

This is a historic departure from our rancorous ways of politicking. Didn’t somebody say that the way you exit an office is even more important than the way you entered into it? On this score, Fayemi has scored high on statesmanship. Then, he added, “Despite our diverse party affiliations and regardless of which way we voted on Saturday, we must remember that we are all sons and daughters of Ekiti State. Ekiti is ours to build together.”

Reading those lines moved me to my bones. Am I dreaming? This is the Nigeria of our dream unfolding before our very eyes. This is the basic decency and moral principle for which I extolled Fayemi in the past and still do now.

In our recent history, I can’t quite recall where an incumbent governor so promptly and willingly conceded victory to the winner rather than threaten fire and brimstone and then spent the rest of the years in court contesting the people’s verdict. OK, now I remember that former Governor Ikedi Ohakim extended similar gesture to Rochas Okorocha who defeated him at the polls. Ohakim had decided that he would not contest Okorocha’s victory at the tribunals in order not to distract the incoming governor in the manner he (Ohakim) who spent much of his tenure in the courts fighting battles against those contesting his victory, was distracted from focusing on delivering the goods.

Of course, Ohakim’s gesture didn’t last long before he and the new governor were stalking each other. That is to say that even though Fayose has promised to work with Fayemi, we should not put so much stock on it.

What Fayose’s broad-based landslide victory shows is that he is a popular grassroots man who would have won decently without the gratuitous military braggadocio displayed by the federal government. In other words, harassing the opposition leaders in the manner the federal authorities did was not only pointless, it was also an avoidable dent on our journey to democratic best practices.