Abuse of constituency projects in Ekiti South senatorial district, by Dr Dele Foluso Afelumo
With unprecedented enthusiasm and obsequious frenzy, Igbara-Odo indigenes from all walks of life trooped out massively to vote for then candidate Yemi Adaramodu in the 2023 Ekiti South Senatorial election. Igbara-Odo is a town centrally located among the three towns of Ekiti South-West. Although an agrarian community with a huge population, it boasts of many professionals in Medicine, Law, Academia, Business, Civil service et cetra. The list of career diplomats, businessmen and civil servants at State and Federal levels is long. But for some inexplicable behind-the-scene machinations, Igbara-Odo was to be the headquarters of the newly created Ekiti South-West LGA in the old Ondo State in 1976. Ekiti State would later be carved out of the old Ondo State on October 1, 1996. Late Dr B.A Ajayi, the commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy affairs in the old Western Region during the Premiership of Chief Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo was a proud citizen of Igbara-Odo. Professor David Oke, a second Republic Senator in the old Ondo State between 1979 and 1983 is also from Igbara-Odo.
The 2023 senatorial election was a battle royale between the then incumbent Senate minority leader, Mrs Abiodun Olujimi of the PDP and Raphael Adeyemi Adaramodu, of the APC.
Yemi Adaramodu, an erstwhile 3-time winner of the Media Merit award for cartoonist of the year while working with the Nigerian Tribune newspaper has had an upward trajectory since he delved into politics. He had been a Councillor; Chairman of Ekiti South-West Local Government and Chief of Staff to the former Governor of Ekiti State, Dr Kayode Fayemi between 2010 and 2014. He is the current spokesman in this 10th Assembly of the Senate and its Chairman, Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs. He burst onto the National Assembly with great éclat. He hails from Ilawe, the headquarters of Ekiti South-West LGA. His victory at the polls in the 2023 senate election was a resounding one. While Adaramodu won as a Senator, Rufus Ojuawo, a retired Air Vice-Marshal won on the platform of APC, the House of Representatives for Ekiti South-West, Ikere, Ise/Orun constituency in the 10th National Assembly.
Constituency projects are legitimate projects that are constitutionally provided for in Nigeria’s annual budgets. Two billion Naira is budgeted for each Senatorial zone while one billion Naira is budgeted for each House Representative’s Constituency. They are life-changing endeavours that have direct bearings on the generality of indigenes of a particular town in any Senatorial zone in Nigeria. While Hon. Ojuawo promised to tackle the perennial flooding from River Oruwo with impregnable channelisation in Igbara-Odo, Yemi Adaramodu promised to help complete the Igbara-Odo City Hall after the project must have been taken to the foundation level through communal efforts. At conception, the hall is to be a hub for meetings, social events, and centre for incubation and exchange of ideas. It will also have some business shops within the whole complex. The entire project is to positively enhance the business climate of the whole town and its environs.
In a video clip that has now gone viral, then candidate Raphael Adeyemi Adaramodu’s campaign train took him to Igbara-Odo where he promised in unmistakable terms that he would complete the city hall project from the foundation level.
It’s no news that the Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led adminstration has been so munificent to the States and the bicameral legislative chambers after the removal of the oil subsidy scams—a singular policy that exponentially increased monetary allocations to the three tiers of government.
Quite disappointingly, almost four years after the duo of Hon.Ojuawo and Senator Yemi Adaramodu have been in both legislative chambers, they have maintained a cemetery silence on the two projects they promised to execute in Igbara-Odo while many projects were carried out in Ilawe and other adjoining towns within the Senatorial and representative zones, none of the two constituency projects was ever executed in Igbara-Odo.
Both Hon. Rufus Ojuawo and Senator Yemi Adaramodu have become anonymous in Igbara-Odo. They have left Igbara-Odo people who voted for them massively in the lurch while they concentrated projects in their respective towns of Ise and Ilawe Ekiti with sheer bravado, aplomb and shameless smugness. There is a documentary evidence of about 3.08 billion Naira allocation routed through Ministry, Department and Agency of government for various projects in the zone. Alas, all these projects were concentrated in Adaramodu’s Ilawe. There is also a smoking gun that all the contracts were awarded only to Ilawe indigenes. Explicitly, 53 solar-powered boreholes, health centre rehabilitation and modern market construction were all done in Ilawe with absolutely nothing done in Igbara-Odo. Such acts, without any iota of sophistry or equivocation, amount to treachery. A Yoruba aphorism lends credence to an impotent man not suffering two afflictions. Lugubriously, what the duo of Adaramodu and Ojuawo did is akin to putting Igbara-Odo under their buses by making the town suffer two afflictions simultaneously through their uncanny poor representation.
Politicians, the world over, often lie perfunctorily because of a calculated cost-benefit analysis for their inordinate ambitions of gaining votes or deflecting scandals. The votes gained often overshadow the consequences inherent from the treachery against their electorate. Politicians also engage in chicaneries and intellectual legerdemain, especially in our country where many are uninformed, misinformed, ignorant, illiterate and hungry. Fact-checking a mawkish claim made by a politician is too abstruse for many to carry out. Therefore, they are often browbeaten into a transparent subterfuge.
Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, a Pulitzer prize winner, in his book titled “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying…” laments that calling out the fabrications and misinformation of politicians has not worked to change the behaviour of political actors and that the internet has worsened the menace of lying.
The primary motives for political deception include voter incentives by telling voters exhilarating news they want to hear as a soothing anodyne in spite of harsh realities to the contrary. Another reason is hyper-polarization which entails politicians speaking to partisan voters around some familiar talking points thereby lessening the cost of being caught lying.
In a manner too arcane and inscrutable, politicians resort to lying to avoid blame. This they do by the use of spin, omission and mendacity to shift responsibility for policy failures or scandals away from themselves and their parties.
Lack of direct repercussions often encourages lying. Also, the “dirty hands” Dilemma theorists argue that, statecraft inherently requires a degree of deception. In the case of overlooking Igbara-Odo in the scheme of not cascading dividends of democracy by her Senator and Representative, it could be situated on the vortex of convoluted, atavistic bugs of hate, pettiness and haughtiness that these politicians, just like many other politicians, found hard to exorcise from their genomic imprints. Senator Adaramodu has been carrying on as if only his Ilawe base voted him into office. This neo-hybrid variant of political ideology of “my town should take all” is too dangerous for our democracy and capable of breeding hostilities between two towns that were hitherto at peace with each other. There is no way both Honourable Rufus Ojuawo and Senator Yemi Adaramodu, singing hubristic tunes, can, in good conscience, plead self-abnegation or self-exculpation for their exclusion of Igbara-Odo in making dividends of democracy a reality in the town.The duo’s unusualness and grotesquery in the siting of constituency projects are discombobulating and egregiously unsettling. Both have ostensibly salved their loins with a cream of parallax and an elusive optical mirage too difficult to reach. In a nutshell, they are now seen as unidentified flying objects (UFO) in Igbara-Odo. In Igbara-Odo, there is now this certitude of an indestructible continuum of ordeal-survival-affirmation occasioned by these two political representatives at the federal level. Infernal fury flows from the once-glittering tureen of the constituents in the zone for being brazenly one-upped. Only their narrow servile fetid maggots, acolytes and myrmidons have access to them for their own parochial pecuniary gratifications.
While some politicians selfishly domicile constituency projects only in their ancestral homes, some are large-hearted by doing many projects in their senatorial districts and even doing projects beyond their senatorial zones. For instance, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan did not only spread democracy dividends to her Adavi/Okene Senatorial zone, she extended her projects to her Alma-mater of Federal Government College, Ido-Ani in Ondo State. In this category is Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, famously called Yayi, who has done many projects in his Ogun West senatorial zone by lifting many from the morass of poverty and joblessness. The two Senators are not only outliers among their many contemporaries, but are archetypes of bright longings and a shining light in our dark dungeon. They have proved to be our latter-day neo-liberal elitists with human milk and honey.
Are there repercussions for an elected representative or senator if he by-passes an area in his zone? The immediate repercussion may be rejection at the next polls by voting for an opposition contestant through protest votes. In the recently concluded primary for the house of representatives, Hon.Rufus Ojuawo was roundly defeated by a relatively unknown
political neophyte. This is not unconnected with what people perceived as his lack-lustre performances in the green chambers. Although Senator Adaramodu scaled through the hurdle unscathed, it’s not yet Uhuru for him as his political trajectory may still be assailed by landmines and boobytraps as he navigates a labyrinthine pathway in the forthcoming general elections, if many towns in the zone share the negativities observed in Igbara-Odo.
From aeons immemorial, there were litanies of apocryphal promises by political gladiators, lovers, friends and associates and also repercussions, too. William Shakespeare’s compelling eclectic perspectives brought these to the fore in his seminal play titled “The Deceit of Juggling Friends” in Macbeth Act 5, Scene 8, where witches gave Macbeth deceptive, comforting prophesies but when the true meaning of the prophesies were revealed, he lamented they were friends that he famously coined as: “That keep the word of promise to our ear, /And break it to our hope.”
Also, in another of William Shakespeare’s epic plays, “In Mighty Words, Nothing Else”, King Henry VIII ( Act 3, Scene 2), the fall of Cardinal Wolsey was described by evaluating his integrity and summed up as: “his promises were, as then was, mighty; but his performance, as he is now, nothing”.
Again, in Shakespeare’s poetry titled, “In the Broken Day” ( Sonnet 34), the speaker seriously complained about a lover who promised a beautiful day but was allowed to be assailed by a storm with insensate ferocity, coined as: “Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,/And make me travel forth without my cloak….”
In ancient Greek mythology, fake promises threaten the moral fabric of society. A broken promise invokes the wrath of mythological consequences. The goddess of Deceit seen in Greek mythology, as the physical embodiment of deceit, guile and fraud was Apate who was the daughter of Nyx and was famously released into the world alongside other evils when Pandora opened her jar. Her male counterpart was Dolos, the god of trickery.
The enforcers of oaths in ancient Greece was Horkos who personified the curse inflicted on anyone who swore a false promise. Horkos disguised as a crippled man, returned the very same day to drag an oath-breaker to the edge of a cliff. The Furies (Erinyes) were vengeful underworld deities responsible for hunting down individuals who violated sacred promises, bringing incurable ruin to the oath-breakers and their family lines.
Still on oath-breaking in Greek mythology, an oath taken in the name of River Styx was the most binding. If a god or mortal made a fake promise on this river, they would fall into a year-long breathless, coma-like state, followed by nine years of exile from the council of the gods. So, breaking an oath in those medieval times was a very serious crime that nobody would dare toy with.
In Hinduism, false promise signifies dishonesty in commitments, resulting in dire consequences including severe penalties in hell. In Buddhism, false promises symbolise betrayal, illustrated by the golden geese being lured to a sanctuary lake, highlighting the dangers of deceit and attachment that can lead to suffering and capture.
The politicians have always played on the psychology, cognitive dissonance and gruesome inappropriateness of their fawning electorate. They know that by the time some measly wads trickle down from their pockets to the few arrowheads and unctuous followers during electioneering, they are as good as elected to their plum positions without any catechismal rigours. Funnily enough, there is a comic sequel to the elusive politicians’ pietistic mantra of penitence slathered on the veneer of approbation in the next election cycle through perennial deceits, skull-duggery and vote-buying.
Domesticating projects only in one’s country home reeks of asinine, puerile Machiavellianism and calls for an evaluation of one’s state of mind which shows unbridled hollowness and shallowness. Equitable distribution of constituency projects is a pacifistic, all-embracing, fair representation for inclusivity. The duo of Senator Adaramodu and Honourable Ojuawo have to purge themselves of the evil precocity of lopsidedness. They should let that lopsidedness collapse on its own social disequilibrium, shorn of its external sustenance and let it whither like an aborted foetus if it will continue to smother the minds and sinews of the whole constituents of Ekiti South Senatorial zone and Ekiti South-West, Ikere and Ise/ Orun constituency of Ekiti State or threaten their peaceful co-existence, harmony and hegemony. Such Saul to Paul transmogrification will potentially avert any snafus, furore or ruckus that the current lopsidedness may breed. A stitch in time, saves nine. It is not too late for Senator Adaramodu and Honourable Ojuawo to retrace their steps.
Dr Dele Foluso Afelumo is a Physician and writes in from the UK.
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