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Wumione@AOL.com New York, NY, USA

AN SOS TO ONDO STATE VOTERS:
MAKE IT THE BIGGEST LANDSLIDE VICTORY IN OUR STATE HISTORY

t is premature to start congratulating ourselves for a job well done last Saturday, April 12th. We did a fine job, though, serving Pa Adefarati notice that the worse is yet to come on April 19th when we are going to add the icing on the cake, by returning our current President and our next Governor and his running mate in a landslide victory that will be remembered for a long time to come in our State. Like I have accurately predicted in my latest article, "Two more days to a Regime Change in Ondo State", a terrific wind of change is blowing through our State and country.

I am dead serious about that prediction because the word "Regime" goes far beyond the Governorship position alone. I was equally as concerned about Ondo State's representation in the Lower and the Upper Houses in Abuja, but I wanted to make Agagu and Oluwateru the catalyst for that change in the Sunshine State. Abuja is the place where the real power gets played out in our Presidential system of Government. The President or a Governor does not, and cannot act alone. Yes he is powerful as the Head of the Executive, but his power is also limited by the other two arms of Government namely the Legislature and the Judiciary, in a check and balance arrangement so deeply embedded in our Presidential system.

Our representatives in Ondo State from time immemorial, have always found themselves sitting in opposition to the Federal Government because we have always voted one way, and just for one party, and one man, which is not good for us, at all. We have decided for once to go a different route this time around, and to try a Party we have never tried before. My advice is not for us to simply change the AD tyranny for the PDP tyranny by going monolithic again in our support for the PDP. Let us try the PDP for a change. But that must not translate to completely demonising the other parties or choices we have in any given Election.

We sure don't want a House of Representatives or a House of Assembly dominated by one Party alone. Every good Government needs a very effective and virile opposition to keep them on their toes much like is done in the Israeli Parliament or the Indian Parliament, where a loss of confidence vote may well lead to a fall of the Prime Minister and the members of his kitchen cabinet. Even though the Presidential system we have adopted in Nigeria is slightly different, if we allow one Party to, disproportionately, dominate the House or the Senate, we hurt ouselves and our interest as the kingmakers.

Let us try and learn something from the curreent American Government where the two major political parties are equally matched in their representation. One of them cannot lord it over the other Party because they know they need each other's co-operation to get anything done for America. The President himself knows he cannot simply rely on just his Party, to carry out his plan for the country. He has to reckon with the Opposition before embarking on any major initiative, otherwise the initiative will not pass.

It is good that the ruling party must be aware there is an alternative to them, if they don't deliver on what they have promised, or if they allow their landslide victory to get into their heads. That is the ideal we all must be shooting for in our coutry. The party in opposition has to be seen as the Government in waiting, if the Government in power fumbles. Same thing with the President or Governor we voted for. If they don't do right, we, as the voters, must reserve the right to show them the way out the door , every four years, and to throw them out, if we are convinced they have not performed up to our expectation, and if they have not delivered what they have promised us.

I have had a few commentators write to me, complaining that voting for PDP in this Election year in Ondo State would be tantamount to deserting Awo, and all he had stood for in his life time. I beg to disagree. Awo would be smiling in his grave, if he can, if he knows we have finally reached a point in our political development, where blind loyalty to any one party should never be allowed to ever enslave us again. That was what Awo about, when he had preached "Freedom for all and Life more abundant" You don't get Freedom for all when you feel compelled to be voting for a Party or an individual you, decidedly, know has been a disaster.

It is no freedom for all if you are forced to reelect Governor Adefarati whose Chancellor of the Exchequer, the man holding the key to the Ondo State treasury, should have been languishing in detention today for mindless grsft and corruption, if he had not been able to find enough money to bail himself out, while waiting for his day in Court. That, in of itself, is a big shame for Governor Adefarati. If he has got any sense of shame, it was enough reason for him to even throw in the towel. The man he had appointed as his first attorney General has today run out of the country in an attempt to avoid arrest and prosecution for colluding with the Governor and the Commissioner for Finance to empty the Ondo State treasury. All Governor Adefarati had told us, in defence of himself, was that he was misled by the people he had trusted, and he also admitted he was guilty of an error of judgment.

To me it was more than an error of judgment, because he must bear vicarious responsibility for the sins of the individuals he has appointed into his Government, because the bucks always stop at his desk. Governor Adefarati would also have found himself in the awkward position of looking for money and people to bail him out of detention, today, were it not for the undeserved immunity granted him by a provision added by Professor Emeritus of Law, Sanni Abacha. The maximum Dictator had doctored the 1999 Constitution, by adding that provision, to protect himself and people like him who had plundered Nigeria so much, that they no longer know what to do with money. All the same, we still have to hold Adefarati accountable.

I personally encouraged you the good people of Ondo State to also vote for Obasanjo, not because he was a man on whom the Nation does not have some serious reservations. I did so because I totally agree with Chief M C K Ajuluchukwu's assessment of him as "the best of the worst" among the choice we have to make in the list of people seeking to be our President in this Election year. My late father, in his infinite wisdom would have said it best by applying the adjective "buruku" (bad) to Obasanjo while applying the word "buruja"(terrible) to the other choices we have in the other presidential candidates around the country. If we have to choose between "buruku" and "buruja", it makes some sense to go for the "buruku" rather than the "buruja".It is like comparing bad, worse and worst or good, better, and best. You go for the best available. You go for the lesser of two evils, if you are given a choice.

Some of you would be right to wonder why I would be placing a man like Gani Fawehinmi, General I.O.S. Nwachukwu, Odumegwu Ojukwu, or even General Buhari in the "Buruja" categrization. if you want to know why, I would like to refer you to go read the series of articles that Professor Omo Omoruyi have done on all of these candidates in his recent artcles posted on the Webmaster at Lagosforum.com or on the Nigeriaworld.com. While you and I may not agree with everything said by the learned professor, I am of the view that Professor Omoruyi talks a lot of sense in his writings. To me, he is an authority on what he is talking about. I encourage many of you who have not read any of those articles to go look for them. You will be glad you did.

Gani for all his popular appeal as the Senior Advocate of the Masses,and an amazingly gifted man by any standard, is not the type that could easily win an election as important as the Presidential election, if you understand where Nigeria is, in the scheme of things, and how the great majority of our people think as a people, and as voters, even if the elections were free and fair. Gani will not, and cannot do what it takes to win election in today's Nigeria. Never. Don't get me wrong. Gani is a good man. If my vote alone is enough to make him President, I would definitely vote for him. But in Nigeria yours and my vote will get him no where. Why? Because of the way Gani is still perceived by the great majority of Nigerians across the country, more so in the North, which, has remained an albatross we cannot all wish away from our equation. They think Gani should have acquired more experience, and build some track record, may be as a Senator or Governor in Lagos or Ondo, before seeking to be President. The North and their interest cannot be dismissed with the wave of the hand because it is legit. It is like some of us dismissing Ndigboism as a spent force in Nigeria. It is not, because Ndigboism represents one of the three tripods holding up Nigeria any day. If you remove one of the tripods, Nigeria will not stand. That is the bitter truth. Let me not digress too much.I must return again to my thesis on Obasanjo and why he is going to win again, and win big, ispite of his apparent, and so much talked about weaknesses or lackluster performance in the last four years. He could hardly have performed any better than he did, because of the odds, the man was up against.

Before I end this thesis, I must of necessity define those weaknesses or the one that has crippled Obasanjo the most, in the last four years. That is the fact that he was believed not to have a political base. Some elements in the North knew that weakness, and had decided to take undue advantage of it. That was the more reason, he was the candidate of choice for them. They had expected the weakness to make him more vulnerable to their manipulations. They wanted him to just be a President in name, but the king of muppets in fact and reality. It was a classic muppet show. They were the ones pulling the ropes, and whoever is pulling the ropes is the one that dictates what the muppet does at any point in time. They truly succeeded in having their way in his first year in office, by constantly reminding him, every step of the way, he had to dance to their tune or else. But they also forgot Obasanjo is a survivor and the son of Oduduwa who came to this Earth at Ile Ife with the mysterious and magical rope dropped from the sky. There is something about Obasanjo that defies logic, I might add.

Obasanjo has proved himself a breed apart from the rest. He knew what he had to do to reclaim or retrieve his home base and to get his freedom back from the people holding the rope to the muppet once and for all. Okikiola, Matthew, Aremu Olusegun has done just that and a lot more. He started with the Middle Belt Strategy which he executed with the genius of a Solomon and the persistence of a demon. Then he took care of the jinx of coups and counter coups which have always haunted Nigeria, and then he went back to securing his base by doing what? By simply trying to maintain a level playing field, which is exactly what his siblings in the Yoruba enclave had wanted him to do all along. The had thought Obasanjo could never be fair to any other group, but the one that put him there, because he was a quid pro quo president per excellence. they had expected him to be more northerner than the North. He has proved them wrong. He had tried to meet the North half way, but the North like the fabled Oliver Twist was always asking for more, and would not settle for less. But in the fullness of time, the sensible ones among them knew they had to let go, and that pushing the envelope too hard, might do more harm than good in the end, so, they have decided to pipe down. Those who could not stand Obasanjo have had to move to join other parties, and in the process, had given Obasanjo some respite to concentrate on his Home Base strategy. The end result is what the Nation has witnessed on April 12th. I used to think that Africa had only one Osagyefo before Obasanjo showed up. I now know we have two. The first was born at Nkroful in Ghana,the second was born in Owu in Egbaland.

Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you Osagyefo Olusegun Obasanjo. He had done it before in Biafra, he has done it again. He did it in 1979 by becoming the first Southerner to ever rule Nigeria. He has repeated the feat again in 1999, and he is about to do it again in 2003, in a wave of a Revolution, never before seen in our country. The D-Day is April 19, 2003 when the wind of change would again re-enact for us what Orlando Owoh has been predicting for years in one of his national bestseller album, "Araba tu ra mu, odo ngba Rere" The re-enactment had started on April 12, and is bound to reach a crescendo on April 19th, 2003

Ondo State voters across the board and the State Capital voters in particular must not allow ourselves to be left behind by this mighty train. We have got to get on board, if not for anything, at least in remembrance of some of our illustrous sons who had lost their lives in the 1983 Election War in Akure. We must do this for the gipper. Do it forthe late Olaiya Fagbamigbe. Do it in remembrance of Sashere Robert Akesoge Agbayewa, "Olowu opoto pata, kiribojo Ugboyegun yele yele, o ye odidi oni" Do it for Lawyer Agunbiade, "odo ule Oda, obere m'oye" from Oda Alaojo in Akure North Local Government.Do it for the late Chief Akogun of Akure and so many "Akure M'osu mo pe ra ule Oye" who were the first to see this revolution coming, but were not privileged or destined to see it happen. On to victory on April 19th for Olusagun Obasanjo,Olusegun Agagu, and Omolade Oluwateru in a landslide victory, never before heard off in our State.

I rest my case.