By Wole Olujobi
When Dr John Kayode Fayemi (JKF) and I spoke on phone sometime in May 2005 on the need to rescue Ekiti State from the unedifying trend that the state had been forced to endure under the leadership of a government in power at the time, the innocence, candour, fervour and clarity of his mission in the course of our short conversation were unmistakable and the content of his vision resoundingly compelling.
Prior to soldiering for Ekiti sanity and liberty, former Governor Kayode Fayemi’s pro-democracy activities had been loud both in national and international media, as he was one of the top activists who led a coterie of other determined pro-democracy combatants in the struggle to wean Nigeria off the equally determined military officers who appointed themselves as rulers without the consent of Nigerians but who nevertheless ruled with horsewhips and bayonets, leaving in their trail a tell-tale anguish of economic and political misfortunes in the nation in chains.
As a scholar in War Studies with bias for security, civil relations and development, Fayemi, who is a political ideologue of the left with a welfarist communal etho as both his creed and bond, had no patience with the squalor and misery into which a potentially prosperous Nigeria was sunk.
Loud in a deep, penetrating echo of a freedom fighter’s tactics on Radio Kudirat International, Fayemi, deploying the grandeur of his scholarship and borderless networks, yet looming very large in the shadows, became the nemesis of the military rulers, whose geniuses could be located within the worst rank of evils, as scary looting and runaway political mass murders debuted in Nigeria. Chief MKO Abiola, Kudirat Abiola, Dele Giwa, Alfred Rewane, Alhaja Suliat Adedeji and Ken Saro-Wiwa, among several others, today, in their graves, are my witnesses, as they suffered the deadly fate of those dark hours when Nigerian soldiers hunted pro-democracy activists like antelopes and condemned their beautiful and golden souls to dusty deaths.
The bullets regime of the hell kites hawking at and feasting on the entrails of prominent pro-democracy elements under which the courageous Fayemi operated was succeeded by the terror of the more audacious vicious wolves in partisan garbs (all from the same roots) that seized the killing field called their Nigeria. For them, life in office (though a brief candle) was an eternity for the guns to rule over the affairs of men.
As thick as hail, flew bullets upon bullets, as guns boomed in the homes of pro-democracy figures. The roll-call of skulls of human games that adorned the battlements of the marksmen in the game of death included those of Chief Bola Ige, who was killed on December 23, 2001; Chief Victor Nwakwo (August 29, 2001); Isiaka Mohammed, September 24, 2002; Theodore Egwuatu February 2003; Marshall Harry was killed on March 5, 2003; Anthony Nwudo, March 21, 2003; Chief Ajibola Olanipekun, June 20, 2003; Aminosoari Dikibo, February 6, 2004; while Chief Phillips Olorunnipa was murdered on March 7, 2004.
Other victims included Sunny Atte, whose life was snuffed out on February 5, 2005; Alhaji Alabi Olajokun was trailed after a political meeting and killed at Gbongan junction in Osun State on May 15, 2005; and Chief Layi Balogun, who was murdered on December 7, 2006, among several other victims that paid with their lives over political partisanship.
One of the few exceptions was the foremost erudite and eminent lawyer, philanthropist and renowned education investor, Aare Afe Babalola, who had a rare luck to survive after receiving a barrage of death threats on his phone. But Dr Ayo Daramola was not that lucky, as he paid the supreme price on August 14, 2006. The lucky ones that cheated the bullets trusted their heels and escaped into exile.
Indeed, it was a period that the clamour for representative governance was more dangerous among the lovers of freedom than the business of kidnapping, courtesy of the hangover from the era of military-inspired regimental democracy of “five fingers of the same leprous hand” (UNCP, GDM, CNC, DPN and NCPN) and their autistic twin brothers, SDP and NRC, that died and interred at infancy.
Fayemi nearly paid with his life while lending hands to the efforts to peacefully send the military back to the barracks to enable Nigerians enjoy unfettered democratic governance. God and fate saved his flight that would have become his store-house to the eternity, with the Radio Kudirat transmitters tucked inside his pant. Operating in the murderous anonymity of the Nigeria’s tempestuous political waters, JKF braved the storm and sailed to safety unscathed!
Out of the shadows, Fayemi threw his hat into the political ring. Combining brilliance with the powerful contents of his conviction, resilience, devotion, courage, vision, verity and determination; these sterling credentials earned Fayemi the governorship ticket of his party, the Alliance For Democracy (AD), in the 2007 governorship poll in Ekiti State, which he won but which the Nigerian State led by the same devout power merchants and their devious potentates counterparts, would not allow for three and half years.
But the Nigerian Constitution triumphed in Fayemi’s case. The nation’s laws spoke loudly in courts, climaxing in JKF’s victory on October 15, 2010 at the Ilorin Appeal Court, which marked somewhat of a doomsday blues for the usurpers, but a triumph of ideal for Ekiti people, as the tenacious Fayemi held the trophy to a new dawn of sanity and development in Ekiti State.
Adept at a life of service complemented by his humanist wife and author, Erelu Bisi Fayemi, JKF in government, for eight years, (first between 2010 and 2014 and later between 2018 and 2022), recorded many firsts in Ekiti State’s political and development history. As the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, he also put Nigeria on the minerals development map of the world.
His scorecards: It is on record that Fayemi, a legacy governor and visionary of the progressive hue, changed the narrative of abandoned projects in Ekiti State by completing the uncompleted and abandoned projects by his predecessors. Fayemi’s introduction of community-based public participation in budget planning yielded unprecedented increase in road construction, water projects, electricity projects, enhanced health management system, opening of new schools for increased enrolments, record upsurge in hospitality and other small-scale businesses, encouragement of foreign businesses and revamping moribund state’s industrial assets, such as Ikogosi Resorts. Fountain Hotel and ROMACO; Ekiti Airport project, and a premier Knowledge Zone, among other life-lifting schemes, to create jobs, including strengthening bureaucracy to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, openness and transparency in public service.
For the first time. Fayemi bought the first batch of over 70,000 computer sets for distribution among secondary school students, which gave Ekiti students an advantage in computer-based public examinations, and renovated 183 secondary schools and 835 primary schools. During his first term alone, he commissioned five mini-water treatment plants while also erecting 167 water fetching points across the state such that for the first time in the state, moved water supply capacity to 52 percent as against 25 percent on assumption of office.
He also introduced social security for the elderly; the first in the West Africa subregion, and built legacy projects, such as the new Oke Ayoba Government House, stadium-sized Ekitiparapo Pavilion, Ekiti Cargo International Airport and Obafemi Awolowo Civic and Convention Centre, among other monuments that served as flowery mementos to the memory and legacy of credible performance, while some communities that had existed for more than a century without light were connected to the national grid.
Commercial farming in the Youths in Commercial Agricultural Development (YCAD) scheme was introduced by Fayemi, which took Ekiti State to lead Nigeria in cassava cultivation, also for the first time.
Fayemi facilitated the State Accountability and Voice Initiative (SAVI) of the British Department for International Development (DFID) to organise a training programme on Executive-Legislature partnership towards a sustainable collaboration for service delivery in June 2012 at the Royal Park Hotel in Iloko-Ijesa. DFID took cabinet and House of Assembly members through the rudiments of budgeting processes and tracking while also dissecting contemporary issues in Ekiti State.
Fayemi’s administration also sponsored the Ekiti State House of Assembly to the Gauteng Provincial Parliament in South Africa where the two parliaments signed agreements on various exchange programmes that were mutually beneficial to the two parliaments and governments for collegial cooperative relationship. Shortly afterwards, the Gauteng Parliament established Public Participation Unit in Ekiti State House of Assembly and provided books and other journals that could aid development initiatives in Ekiti State while another South Africa’s firm took over the management of the decrepit Ikogosi Warm Spring Resort and developed the facility to a world-class tourists’ delight.
Also in South Africa, Ekiti Assembly members were introduced to the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), a novel and innovative instrument for advancing good governance and people-centred socio-economic development.
The lessons learnt from the programmes, particularly the Iloko-Ijesa parley, produced the first Ekiti State Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), which led to the establishment of the Special Projects Unit, project monitoring framework, procurement process reform and realignment of the existing MDAs work plan to reflect new budget amendments, among others, which greatly helped to break administrative bottlenecks that hamper quick service delivery. That initiative created a momentum for accelerated development in Ekiti State. Most of these efforts by Fayemi later served as models for other governments in Nigeria in their governance and development strategies.
According to the Human Development Report (2012), Ekiti State under Fayemi was described as the most conducive environment to live, for long and healthy living with a life expectancy average of 55 years more than the National Life expectancy average of 50 years, including the lowest infant and maternal mortality rate and the lowest HIV/AIDS infection rate in Nigeria.
The United Nations acknowledged Fayemi’s innovative governance in September 2013 when the world body invited him to its session in New York on the basis that his state met many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agenda, even as Fayemi at home received the prestigious media award of “Best Governor of the Year” from some national newspapers, including Abuja-based Leadership Newspaper.
At his ministerial nomination screening session on October 13, 2015, at the Nigerian Senate in Abuja, that often features sentimental assessments, Fayemi, a debonair speaker, broke the ice, exuding the deep and vast brilliance of his scholarship.
Not for him the colourless and lifeless language of a political tramp that hangs loose for “just anything”! As usual, he had his day to draw plaudits from Nigerians.
Reeling out facts and figures in the charm, flair and eloquence of Cicero in his prodigious use of the Queen’s English in response to the questions posed to him on the floor of the Senate, the Senators hooted, as the urbane Fayemi held the Senate Gallery spellbound, while Nigerians at home stayed glued to the live broadcast of the session to see Fayemi’s first class erudition on display.
In my little hole in exile in my own country where I took cover to escape the bullets over my media activities in aid of my state and party, I suddenly found my voice, lept in rapturous delight, and lost my vocal cord to the ecstasy that greeted the sterling performance by a great boss.
The ministerial nominee, in the radiance of a Vatican cleric, shone like the Northern star to the applause of the nation. No wonder, shortly after he won his second term governorship election, he was unanimously elected Chairman by a multi-partisan Nigerian Governors Forum; the position he held dispassionately among his colleagues to advance the cause of democracy as a driver of development.
As the Nigerian Governors’ captain as well as the governor of Ekiti State, while his genius was hailed by his colleagues as exemplary, he remained a legend to Ekiti people who witnessed his magic firsthand in his development strategies.
For instance, for the first time in Ekiti State electoral contest, Fayemi broke the state’s succession bogey and opened the history doors for the first back-to-back victory for one political party to succeed itself in the Ekiti State governorship election. The magic was the continuity mantra of his party propelled by the milestones he recorded and as endorsed by Ekiti people, which ensured Governor Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji’s succeess at polls in 2022 governorship election, to post the first historic and historical same party victory in succession election in Ekiti State. As it turned out, Governor Oyebanji has proven himself as a worthy successor, judging from his pro–people stance in every action he has taken so far in government.
As former Governor Fayemi attains the Diamond Age of 60, history has placed him as an icon of his time in personal accomplishments and an epochal star in Nigeria’s political firmament.
In his class profiling thesis, the impossible Italian philosopher, scientist and astronomer, Galileo Galilei, had quipped; “Independent spirits spread like a foul disease, so men must keep their places; some up, some down.”
But the same Galileo also found relevance in the deeply ignorant people to complete his work and world. He had said: “I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him”, just like Fayemi is also at home with the grassroots people and their sentiments in planning their development strategies and he achieved sterling results.
As for Fayemi, he has kept his place high among the profound in philosophical thoughts to drive development agenda for the mass of the people; the philosophy that drives and shapes his vision and world view to lead a successful life.
Three scores in the life of a living legend is a short space within which to record a book of life. By merciful powers, the dawn of Fayemi’s new chapter of life opens tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, creeping in this petty pace from day to day, to record the last syllable of evergreen long years of service to humanity.
Cymbals and tambourines for the birthday boy on the Diamond threshold of the aged.
* Olujobi, a journalist and former spokesman of Kayode Fayemi Campaign Organisation, writes from Ado-Ekiti