By Rotimi Fasan
WHEN a couple of months ago the PDP came up with Ayodele Fayose as its candidate for the 2014 governorship election in Ekiti State, the desperation that must have motivated their choice was not lost on informed observers.

The PDP finally settled for Fayose when its hopes of regaining the governorship it lost when Fayose was all but stampeded out of office eight years before seemed up in flames. The party had become in Ekiti, as elsewhere in the South West, a spent force that didn’t seem able to summon the momentum that had brought Fayose his four-year tenancy in the government house in Ado-Ekiti.

After eight years in the political wilderness during which his modest achievement as governor had been virtually wiped off the records, Fayose was the most unlikely person the PDP would be expected to present as their candidate in an election in which he was standing against an incumbent that still seemed to enjoy popular acclaim. The victory of the APC candidate, Kayode Fayemi, was a foregone conclusion that was at this point obvious to everyone but the willfully blind. Which made the choice of Fayose all the more confounding for any right thinking person.

Anyone can now claim after the fact of the election that was won by Fayose that they were certain of the PDP candidate’s victory. But not even the most starry-

eyed PDP stalwart, perhaps with the possible exception of Fayose himself, could have been confident of their candidate winning that election. Fayose’s entry into the political fray that looked until the eve of his emergence like a two-horse race between Fayemi and his estranged comrade and former party mate, Michael Opeyemi Bamidele, gradually but steadily changed the political equation. Opeyemi Bamidele had resigned his membership of the APC in a huff to join the Labour Party.

The PDP had no credible candidate that could honestly give the APC a run for their money as at the time Fayose picked the gauntlet on their behalf. Indeed the participation of the PDP in the election was more or less a nonstarter, a mere ceremonial act that was not expected to achieve anything more than its nuisance value. But Fayose changed all of that in a space of two months even if not as dramatically as the final result would seem to suggest.

I had no doubt in my mind given the assisted manner of his emergence that the PDP never expected to win the Ekiti election when it picked Fayose as its candidate. What the party wanted was a candidate who could, just maybe, pick some credible number of votes along the way as could be expected of a former governor believed to have some diehard supporters of his own. What the PDP wanted was just a modest showing that could give it a fighting chance in the event of any unforeseen circumstances rather than being seen as having no say at all in the matter or being lost entirely in the fray. But more than all of this, the PDP wanted a candidate who, in my view, had the clout to withstand the rough and tumble of the election, one who could truly muddy the waters and make life difficult for the APC if matters came to it.

What the PDP anticipated with its choice of Fayose in my reading was at best some kind of stalemate in the aftermath of accusations and counter- accusations that might follow the election. Somebody like Fayose who has a healthy disdain for people who cross swords with him could be trusted not to flinch in the face of such post-electoral battle. That the PDP in neighbouring Osun State settled for no other person than Iyiola Omisore who promptly bludgeoned Isiaka Adeleke out of the PDP race reinforced my perception of what the party planned for both Ekiti and Osun, two stronghold states of the APC, and the South West in general in the 2014 elections. If Goodluck Jonathan’s ambition of staying on in office after 2015 is to have any meaning in the face of persistent opposition from the North, then it must find a way of sharing in the votes that will come from the South West or anywhere votes could come from.

But Fayose whose emergence as the PDP candidate must have seemed to him like a return from the dead seized the opportunity with both hands. It was his best opportunity to make a comeback. And what a time it was?! Fayose put his very soul into the contest. His zeal was no doubt infectious for the PDP leadership in Abuja and as he gradually shifted the ground so did the party leadership gradually saw an opportunity they could key into to make their way back into the South West where the APC in its present and previous incarnations has dominated in the last eight years. The ruling APC, at least the South West part of it, has done enough to alienate the mass of the Yoruba people. The fact of this alienation would have remained an academic issue at best but for the opportunity provided by the PDP when in desperation it turned to Fayose.

The loss of Ekiti is not just a matter of the elitism of the Fayemi administration, but his style of governance which the ordinary Ekiti people are said not to comprehend. It was far more of an expression of deep-seated displeasure with the Yoruba leadership of the APC whose so-called progressive credentials are no more than mere parrot formulas whose life span is not only limited to the lip but is in fact disempowering. Like the AD did between 1999 and 2003 and paid for it with its loss of the South West states aided by Obasanjo, the Yoruba leadership of the APC has become alienated from the very people th

at supported it. It has taken its control of the region for granted, banking on the people’s fascination and obsession with the welfarist governance of Obafemi Awolowo.

All the APC leaders do is to mouth the name of Awolowo for their own greedy and criminal ends. Their determination (especially of their governors) to worship at the feet of Bola Tinubu as if he was the be-all and end-all of Yoruba politics will cost them more than the governance of the South West states.

Ultimately, the people will be the better for it for what is the point in following a leadership that takes care of none but itself? What they appear to give with the right hand they take more than with the left. The propensity of some of the party leaders for primitive acquisition while imposing multiple taxes on the people beggars belief. These gods that cannot bring relief to the people should not be too eager to compound their woes.