Ayo Fayose seems a happy man these days. After a short spell of humility when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced him as the governor-elect, he has cruised into a summer of blusters. He is not the sort of man that would heed the exhortation of former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who said, among other things, “in victory, magnanimity.”
He is not only posting himself as the new king of Ekiti State, he is posing as the generalissimo of the Southwest and has put his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on notice.
Any party wheel horse, who basked on the rooftops before fate unveiled his new rise, should understand that he can pull them down. Inside his exultant soul, he is swooning with the quote of the buoyant actor, Al Pacino, that “vanity is my favourite sin.”
He has not even spared the Owu chief, Olusegun Obasanjo, his barb. And I know the second coming of Fayose is part revenge, part Oedipal vindication. Hear him: “This is the last time I would sound this note of warning to those people who want to disparage the party to stop. If you want to disparage the party, whether you are a former president, senator, irrespective of your position, we will sack you. When I fought with the party, I left the party, I did not stay in the party. You are free to go to any party you want, but don’t stay in the party and disparage it.”
Not even when the military gave us parties did we hear such peremptory orders. As Americans would say, come over IBB. Stay humble in the grave, Abacha. Fayose acted not like a politician but an emperor. He has not even become a governor yet. He is a governor-elect, yet all over him he is preening with the feathers of an impresario. The alawada potential of his governorship era of the second coming promises us some excitement, to say the least.
For me, it is the parable of the godfather and godson in a skein never before written in the Nigerian politics of prebendal deviance.
When he was a governor in his first advent, he was the son as loyalist to Obasanjo. Fayose was the crony as point man, sometimes his Rottweiler. He had stood as the party stalwart. He did his biddings, as a humble servant. But this was the son in whom Obj was well pleased.
But the story went sour. Fayose became the prodigal son, but in this case, the son wanted to return home to a big and lavish party. The father, now unhappy with the son with a vindictive fury, did not want the son under his eaves. Rather he heaved him out in the throes of impeachment. He was accused of thieving felony and that he was cat among the Ekiti chickens.
The florid son turned philosophical as the unflinching father set the machinery of the state House of Assembly in motion. In one interview that must pinch anyone’s tender parts, he referred to a Yoruba proverb: anyone who sleeps in a mattress should have a mat around him, because he may need it someday. He left the soft, dream-suffused majesty of the mattress and was on the mat in the past half decade. Now, he is approaching the saddle, while his godfather is in his party’s wilderness.
Power has changed hands. He now must wait to daze and to dream in the mattress of power. Hence he shouted to the rafters to an Obasanjo, whom he was referring to as former president.
Obasanjo in his era had the power to give Fayose power, keep him there, and order him out in a fleeting hurry. Obj exercised that power then not to a few sons of his party. Former Bayelsa State Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha was one of them. He organised his exit. The thickset man who oiled over with dollar pride cascaded down the power trolley before the eyes of all. The Ijaw chief is undergoing a sort of renaissance of pride as the beneficiary of his political son who jumped from obscurity to presidency. He, at least, has the humility to abandon his fatherhood the way Esau did to Jacob. As Tolstoy noted in War and Peace, “it is better to bow too low than not low enough.”
What is the meaning of Fayose’s boast? Is he going to trek out of his Ekiti precinct to preen even in the vaporous vipers of Owu waters? It is common knowledge that Fayose has openly defied the man who gave him bread in the morning and vinegar at night. Now, he has woken the next morning with the power of dew and due for battle.
What is going on in Baba’s mind, and is he saying to himself, “I should have thought differently when I supported that boy to be governor and kept him there long enough to insult his father’s age mate.”
Or is he telling himself, “what do I expect when you put someone in office? He grows into his own, and I should have left him there. I should not have impeached him. Now, it seems he is the winner and I the loser.”
Could Baba have that sort of soul-searching candour, a brutal introspection of self- accusation?
When he played godfather, he wallowed in the illusion that he would be father forever. A mistake indeed. Even natural fathers are not fathers forever. Sometimes, the sons become fathers, an idea that Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev played with when he examined the concept of nihilism in his classic, Fathers and Sons. But poet William Wordsworth’s immortal lines, the “child is the father of the man,” is the sort that a bloating Fayose would really love now, especially since he is the one issuing the orders. He is not interested in giving a bash even if the father- now-turned-son returns in his septuagenarian penitence. Knowing the Owu chief, penitence is not in the cards. So Fayose can keep his forgiveness.
Obj may also have thought that a day like this could never come. He never knew about the transience of power. Few who are there think of the transience of power. After all he once sought a third term. No one ruminated on the transience of power more than the Nobel laureate, Garcia Marquez, in his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. In one of the passages, an old man who held sway over a community declared in a moment of hallucinated lucidity: “I have found immortality.” When he died by drowning, his main follower says he is not dead, but preserves his body as it decays in pestilential odours for long. The era is gone; the denial, however, has morbid consequences.
Few leaders in history are like Charles de Gaulle, who did not want pomp or ceremony when he died, and visits from other leaders. Just him quiescent in his casket. He knew the time was up when he went down.
That is the nature of power. Fayose also does not appreciate this, and that is why rather than release a blueprint to raise Ekiti lifestyle that no one heard in his campaign, he is flush with self-promotion, strutting like a peacock.
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