By Olakunle Abimbola
At the zenith of his dashing rascality, even as a senator of the Federal Republic, Dino Melaye “waxed” a monster hit of a video skit — Ajekun Iya!
Touting rich Yoruba lore, earnest or witty, he told the tale of the weakling (read: Dino’s foes) that brawl with the mighty (all-mighty Dino) and swore, with swashbuckling conceit: such folly would fetch a hideous hiding — Ajekun Iya!
Poor Dino! He was predicting his very own gubernatorial thrashing of November 11 — Ajekun Iya!
It’s just surreal how art often imitates life — and Dino is living proof of such macabre art. It was so ugly in his eyes that he chickened out of voting for himself! That must be a record in Nigerian gubernatorial election history — Ajekun Iya!
No tears from here for Dino’s political doom at noon.
Everyone loves a nuisance, the Yoruba often scoff, but whoever claims such as golden children? That’s the long and short of Dino Melaye’s street autobiography of endless stunts. The Kogi collapse was a well-earned meltdown.
It was indeed self-doom foretold. November 11 was a harsh payday. But Dino was too garrulous, too soaked in his low show-boating, to hear the rumbling thunder of defeat.
But the Kogi electorate, not the least Dino’s own Okun Yoruba folks, were surely taking own notes. Good riddance!
Still, Dino’s politics-as-giddy-delinquency only mirrors the sad tumble of politics-as-high-ideals, despite the din from the opposition camp.
Take the duo of Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, twin losers that framed themselves as twin-winners, over a sole presidential prize they knew they lost fair and square!
Dino is following the example of both to lament his well-earned loss.
His ready punching bag — just as Obi’s and Atiku’s — is the calm Mahmoud Yakubu and his well-clobbered Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the automatic Judas for politicians’ election-day waywardness. How rich!
Obi never told a single lie all his political life. But he never lived a single truth too! At best, his ballyhooed political saintliness is rotten core forged in glittering gold!
Or, how else would you frame his gubernatorial era “savings” which, by the Pandora Papers’ expo, was no more than brazen private capture of public money: pouring Anambra funds into family business, yet swearing it was the zenith of pious frugality!
Thrift is being frugal with money. Obi’s Anambra case was being frugal with the truth! It’s the classic of public rot preening as public good.
Nine years later in 2023, Obi headlined his presidential run with weaning Nigeria from “consumption to production” — the same bloke that, by his NEXT retail outlet, has made a fortune from unbridled imports!
So long for Obi and his loud but gullible crowd!
Atiku, former Vice President of the Federal Republic, ought to know better; and ought to boast deeper introspection, if not outright wisdom.
But alas! The Wazirin Adamawa is often flighty and restless, with scant any grand ideological anchor, beyond the political equivalent of business profit and loss.
In his eternal quest for power, he flits towards any charmed platform: progressive, conservative, or even reactionary — like some swoony butterfly craving nectar.
That explains his peripatetic sojourns; and bitter retreats to hitherto scorned bases, to gobble hitherto hated vomits: PDP to Action Congress (AC); AC back to PDP — even before AC was defunct — PDP to APC, and APC back to PDP, when the elusive party ticket was far from sure!
After his umpteenth loss at the February polls, the former Vice President traduced the apex court; abused the INEC chair and swore the 2023 election was the “worst”!
That was plain hysteria blabbing! That was deep-felt bitterness wailing! Dino, his protégée, just joined the wailing and screeching party!
But Atiku knows tarring February 25 is pure gas. The Abel Guobadia-conducted 2003 elections, which handed Vice President Atiku and President Olusegun Obasanjo a second term, was far worse than 2023.
The 2007 poll, for which President Obasanjo appointed Maurice Iwu as INEC chair, is the worst ever — for it orchestrated Obasanjo’s “do-or-die” electoral heist.
Atiku was a beneficiary of 2003 but a victim of 2007. So, he should know!
Iwu’s INEC, Obasanjo’s special purpose vehicle for 2007’s blatant vote steal, could have rushed Atiku off the ballot, but for the courts.
Even at that, Prof. Iwu wasn’t sorry for his INEC’s outrage, unlike the mild-mannered Prof. Yakubu, who the delinquent losers of 2023 bash for their electoral seppuku, with Dino being the latest in that ignoble line.
Yet, from the Attahiru Jega-era card reader to present-day BVAS and IReV, all INEC has done is try to strengthen the credibility of the vote. But must INEC be pilloried for politicians’ roaring bad faith — bad faith that is a ruinous constant that never changes?
Indeed, Election 2007 is the worst ever! But don’t take Ripples’ word for it. Take the evidence in the public space.
Aside from the late President Umaru Yar’Adua who decried the disgraceful vote that earned him power — and put in place urgent reforms — the courts reclaimed no less than four stolen governorships from that brazen robbery: Edo, Ondo, Ekiti and Osun.
Edo’s Adams Oshiomhole and Osun’s Rauf Aregbesola would go on to erect model development governance, refreshingly alien to the PDP era of cooked votes and paralyzed governments — at least in Edo and Osun.
Unfortunately, the stellar heights of both, Oshiomhole and Aregbesola, were undone by the politics of sterile succession — ironically by successors who either didn’t share their predecessors’ high ideals or just couldn’t vault selves to those levels.
Ondo’s Segun Mimiko — the first to gain power with Labour Party after hire — boasted dizzying heights in political mobilization. Ekiti’s Kayode Fayemi posted a redemptive two terms, though the split terms sandwiched Ayo Fayose’s second coming, with its populist sweet poison of “stomach infrastructure” — which was a drag.
But all the four were a loud rebuke of the first eight years of PDP rule; and set the tone for the party’s democratic ouster eight years later — and today’s shadow of itself.
Which is why former President Goodluck Jonathan missed the point, big time, by decrying off-season elections.
A more introspective Jonathan should have hailed these elections. They are reminders of how the judiciary saved this democracy from the bold-and-merry rigging of the PDP era. But the former president earned a pardon: he lost the presidency with rare grace.
Not Atiku — or Obi for that matter — howling “rigging” when both knew their cross-ambitions crashed PDP in February, as Dino’s own rascality smashed his Kogi dreams in November.
Ironically, Dino serenaded Atiku during his doomed presidential run as much as Atiku serenaded Dino during his Kogi collapse.
Both should snap out of their well-earned bad dreams! Ajekun Iya!
Culled from The Nation
