“Oyo APM/Makinde Rally”: Monday Morning Charade | By Yusuf Olatunji Alabi

It is pathetic to see a sitting governor who takes pride in elitism and expertise shut down government activities and declare Monday a work-free day to receive political defectors.

This is nothing but a charade of an amala political and administrative system.
If Hon. Bimbo Adekanmbi is who he claims to be, and not a puppet character to the governor, he should issue a disclaimer and distance himself from the impunity that happened on a Monday morning.

Oyo State won’t stay here; we have to move ahead. These are not the kind of political elites we expect in the 21st century.

A governor on holiday while he was supposed to be resuming, with all appointees and senior civil servants abandoning their work to welcome him on Friday. The same people then mobilised their people to join the Monday charade and concert.

It is a show of decadence, where priorities are misplaced and values are lost. The political season is still at its early stage, yet government work is already being shut down on Monday morning for campaign activities.

At this rate, let’s expect no governance until the end of this administration in May. This show is evidence that the most important work now is politicking and electioneering.

It is also pathetic that we found able-bodied youths, men and women, mobilised to appear at a campaign ground on a Monday morning, under the scorching sun and later in the rain. This is nothing but a failure of government.

They have kept the people in abject poverty, so that penury can be weaponised to mobilise them whenever they need a crowd for their political purposes.
The population present there should send a signal to the governor that there are highly jobless people in the state. It shows that the governor has not provided enough in terms of job creation and empowerment for the people.

A well-employed person would not sacrifice a gainful job to attend a campaign for a mobilisation fee of ₦2,000.

Enough jabs were thrown, as usual, but they keep revealing how intellectually incoherent the governor can be.
The Light Up Oyo project started in 2019, a few months after its inauguration and four years before the beginning of the current presidential administration. To our surprise, the governor blames his awkward diesel-powered projects on the President whose administration started four years after the project began.

To rebut his attempt to shift the blame for his plight in front of his civil servants and the unemployed crowd. it is worth recalling that the Federal Government, on 9 June 2023, signed the Electricity Act 2023 into law. The Act gives state governments the power to generate, transmit, and distribute electricity.
Yet, after three years, the state has failed woefully to generate sufficient electricity, even for its own streetlights. Despite this, the Engineer Governor continues to blame the President for the failure of his diesel-powered streetlight project.
How reasonable is this position?

He didn’t spare Sen. Alli in his myopic jabs, as usual.

The governor needs someone to educate him that when one is called to the Nigerian Bar, the person is enrolled as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court.

Barrister: the courtroom lawyer.

Solicitor: the boardroom lawyer.

Not every lawyer goes to court. Some are boardroom lawyers, and not being a Senior Advocate of Nigeria does not imply that a lawyer is unsuccessful.

He became a Fellow of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (FNSE) in December 2019 after becoming governor, a conferment that his political position could have influenced. He had no such title to his name before becoming governor.
He needs to jerk up his civic education.

The biggest dot was those behind the defection campaign: a strong political ally of the former minister. Boye Nation cannot be making such moves without the knowledge of his paymaster.

The former minister has made it clear, through his boys, that he is no longer with the party. The same party that made him a minister ahead of party loyalists; he has shown a politics of personal interest and desperation.

Time shall tell. All these charades, from the governor to the former minister, will eventually become their reality. History has a way of bringing political theatre back to those who stage it.

Oyo State deserves to move •AHEAD than Monday morning political charade.