By Chris Otaigbe
As glasses clicked and cakes shared amid other abundant forms of merriment, in toast to Rauf Aregbesola’s 63rd birthday, on Monday, May 25, 2020, the immediate past Osun State governor would have seized upon the day’s merriment to reflect on his political race thus far.
One major dominant theme in his reverie would be a review of how far he had come right from his days as Student Union leader on campus. Using the Oranmiyan structure he planted to grow his political stems, perhaps, he may beat his chest and claim to have achieved Awo’s vision, especially as governor of Osun State for eight years.
Aregbesola came into Nigeria’s political limelight as a Commissioner under Bola Ahmed Tinubu, then Governor of Lagos State. Easily visible as Commissioner for Works and Infrastructure in Lagos state from 1999 to 2006, Aregbesola’s infrastructural plan for the state is what successive administrations post-Tinubu, have continued to build on.
In a congratulatory message, a first republic Senator in Nigeria, Pa Ayo Fasanmi described him as an ambassador of progressives’ ideology and a strong politician.
The former Senator said the Nigeria’s Minister of Interior shared the same vision with the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo on politics and governance, adding that Aregbesola’s eight years administration in the State of Osun, proved to people that there are differences between progressive and conservative governance, insisting that Aregbesola brought physical changes and transformation to the state.
Vice National Chairman of the defunct Alliance Democracy believed Aregbesola might have read or heard about Awolowo or what progressivism stands for when he was a youth. According to the former Senator, Aregbesola never lost hope for almost three and half years, which the case lasted, during the struggles to retrieve his stolen mandate.
“He stood firm; he didn’t deviate because he had faith that justice would prevail at the end of the day. He reclaimed his stolen mandate and proved to the people of Osun that there are differences between progressive and conservative governance. He performed very well. He brought physical changes to the state. He provided social amenities for the people of Osun. He constructed massive roads, built schools and he brought good legacies and made a name for himself in the history of Osun politics,” he said.
This must be the views of most of Aregbesola’s families, friends, fans and followers but not necessarily that of the majority of Osun State workers he owed for many months. Nor would it be the opinion of the female Judge who petitioned for his impeachment as governor for throwing the state and its citizens into massive poverty.
Outside Osun, this was what the rest of the nation and the entire world saw and noted with deep concern. How could a state owe its own workforce for virtually a year? His, sometimes cavalier, attitude did not help matters at the time. It seemed like it was the right of the governor to owe state workers without being accountable.
As reported in the May 30, 2017 edition of Encomium magazine with the headline: Workers groan as Osun government owes 12 months’ salary.
The publication reported that workers in Osun are still very much unhappy with the state government on account of the backlog of salaries it is still owing them despite the intervention funds (bailout) and Paris Club Loan it has enjoyed months back, just like every other financially troubled state.
Investigation conducted by the magazine, at the time, revealed that Osun State was still owing its workers about 12 months’ salary having been paying them half salary for 24 months, a development that left vast majority of the civil servants extremely incapable of catering for their families since the trend started.
According to the report, one of the workers, Muniru Kajewole, confirmed the terrible situation, and stated that it seemed Governor Aregbesola was grossly insensitive to their plight.
“We, civil servants in Osun State are really suffering now. Most of us can hardly take care of our families. The only saving grace is farming. Aregbesola has been dealing with us the hard way for the past two years. Even, the fact that the state collected bailouts and Paris Club loan has not in any way reflected in our standard of living because we’re still collecting half salaries. For instance, most of us on level 15 and above are worst hit. It has been 24 months we have been collecting half salary which can’t even solve any of our financial needs. And no matter how much you cry, the man doesn’t feel as if he understands your language. He’s defiant to our plight.
He pretends to be embarking on capital projects at the expense of workers. We’re tired of his game of deceit.” He said.
Another aggrieved worker, Isaac Oyawoye, lamented same plight and believed the state government at the time, reduced the workers to redundant, newspaper-reading loafers in the office.
“We have been denied full salary for almost two years. All level 15 and above working in various local councils in the state have been redeployed to Osogbo, doing nothing other than reading newspapers every morning. Aregbesola just keeps most people redundant there. Instead of funding the existing local governments adequately, he went ahead and created more local governments. What is the essence of the local governments that will still be underfunded?” said Oyawoye.
Published in the Cable, an online publication in its June 9, 2015 edition, Aregbesola’s response was that of blame-throwing.
In the report, he appealed to civil servants in the state to exercise patience with him over the inability of his administration to pay salaries in the last seven months, describing the situation as an economic tragedy.
He went further to blame the development on the alleged poor handling of the nation’s resources by the federal government under former President Goodluck Jonathan.
His lame excuse obviously did not go down well with the mass of Osun Workforce including the elite as represented by an Osun State Judge, Justice Oloyede Folahanmi, who wrote a petition to the State House of Assembly, in June 2015, requesting the impeachment of Aregbesola on claims of financial mismanagement, which had been a recurring allegation due to the large investments in several projects for the state by Aregbesola.
After many delays, a panel was set up by the House to probe Aregbesola, and the Governor appeared before the panel, which later found him not guilty of the allegations raised by the judge.
According to her, repeated attempts by her to communicate her opinion to Aregbesola about the poor handling of the State’s affairs and the deepening poverty and hunger, Osun Workers were going through, were frustrated by the Governor. So, she had no choice but to voice out her concern the way she did. In other words, Aregbesola left her no choice but to resort to the route she took to save Osun State from slipping into crisis of irreparable damage.
In 2016, the National Judicial Council recommended Justice Oloyede for compulsory retirement after it found that the petition written by the judge “contained political statements, unsubstantiated allegations and accusations aimed at deriding, demeaning and undermining the State Government of Osun, the person and character of the Governor, his deputy and aides”.
In a piece published on August 9, 2015, in defense of Judge Folahanmi, Farouq Abbas stated, in clear terms, his support for the Judge, despite castigations of her by more experienced Lawyers such as Prof. Itse Sagay, Folake Solanke.
In a press statement captioned, “The Illegality of Aregbesola’s Impeachment Petition”, which was jointly issued by Professor Itse Sagay, SAN and Chief Mrs. ‘Folake Solanke, SAN (“the learned jurists”) on 6th August 2015, the learned jurists stated that it was wrong for Justice Oloyede to have written the petition since she was neither a member of the Osun State House of Assembly nor a member of a Civil Society Organization. The learned jurists stated further that the petition was an illegal document and it ought to have been disregarded with contempt by the Osun State House of Assembly.
Farouq disagreed with the opinion of the learned jurists, that the petition is an illegal document, which ought to have been disregarded with contempt by the Osun State House of Assembly. “I also disagree with their opinion calling for the punishment of Justice Folahanmi Oloyese by the National Judicial Council. This is because section 128 of the 1999 constitution gives the State House of Assembly the powers to conduct an investigation into any matter with respect to which it has the power to make laws.
Therefore, since the fulcrum of Justice Oloyede’s petition relates to the alleged mismanagement of the resources of Osun State by Governor Aregbesola, it goes without saying that the Osun State House of Assembly had a legitimate basis to investigate the said petition since they have the constitutional powers to enact laws on the appropriation and management of Osun State’s resources.” He stated.
According to him, it is instructive to note that the 1999 constitution of Nigeria contain an exhaustive list of the category of persons who can write a petition to a State’s House of Assembly. Thus, it is submitted that a serving Judge can write a petition to a State’s House of Assembly since the 1999 constitution does not prohibit a Judge from doing so.
Farouq’s legal position found expression in the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of A.G. Ondo State v. A.G. Ekiti (2001) 17 NWLR (Pt. 743) 706 at 770 Para A, where Karibi Whyte, JSC which held that;
“It is important to bear in mind, the elementary and fundamental principle of law that what has not been prohibited is allowed.”
He submitted that Justice Folahanmi was on a strong legal footing when her Ladyship wrote the petition, as neither the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria nor the Code of Conduct for Judicial Officers prohibits the writing of a petition by a serving Judge.
Judge Folahanmi may not have found support among her colleagues, in the Bar and the Bench, especially outside the State, most of her friends, colleagues and the greater mass of Osun citizens at the time, welcomed her voice as the one elite who dared to risk her highly exalted position in her profession and the society to stand and speak up for the people of Osun State.
This was a testy time for Aregbesola in his eight years of serving Osun State as governor. But his journey to Osun State Government House was no easy road.
Aregbesola believed he was robbed of his victory in the gubernatorial election he contested with Olagunsoye Oyinlola, then the incumbent.
Following Olagunsoye Oyinlola’s declaration as winner of the 14 April, 2007 elections, Aregbesola immediately proceeded to the courts to overturn this outcome.
In May 2008, Aregbesola called over 100 witnesses and tendered 168 exhibits in his petition before the Election Petitions Tribunal, alleging violence and ballot box stuffing in the election.
In an October 2008 interview, he described Oyinlola as “a bully who came from a reactionary military arm”, stating that Oyinlola had done nothing for the people of Osun state. He also claimed that 12 people had died in the election violence.
In August 2009, the police arrested Aregbesola, apparently for involvement in the alleged forgery of a police report on the conduct of the elections. Later that month he sought bail so that he could perform the lesser Hajj in Saudi Arabia.
One year later in August 2010, Police summoned him to make a statement about a 14th June 2007 bomb explosion near the Ministry of Water resources. Aregbesola denied any involvement, stating that he was in Abuja at the time. Having gone through the tribunal of first instance, an appeal and a retrial tribunal, the second appeal court, delivering judgment on November 26, 2010, declared Aregbesola governor and ordered that he be sworn in the next day.
Presided over by Justice Clara Bata Ogunbiyi, who was flanked by four other justices; Honorable Justices M.L. Garba, P.A. Galinge, Chima Centus Nweze, and A. Jauro, the court unanimously nullified the election results of the 10 local governments pleaded for by Aregbesola and set aside the judgement of a lower tribunal which had confirmed the election of Oyinlola, after the deductions of the cancelled votes had left Oyinlola with 172,880 votes and Aregbesola with 198,799, thereby returning Aregbesola as the duly elected governor of the state, three years after the elections.
Oyinlola alleged that there was telephone contact between Justice Ayo Salami, head of the Nigerian Court of Appeal, and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) chieftains prior to the decision and urged the Attorney General of the Federation “to exercise his power of public prosecution entrenched in Section 174 (1) and (2) of the 1999 Constitution by initiating legal action against MTN Nigeria Limited” after he petitioned the National Judicial Council.
The Court rejected his application for Salami’s call log.
In a reply to a memo submitted by Aregbesola to a Truth and Reconciliation committee he had set up to look into the alleged atrocities committed by the previous government, Oyinlola described Aregbesola’s claims as lies.
Born on 25 May 1957, Ogbeni Rauf Adesoji Aregbesola is the current Minister of the Federal Ministry of Interior of Nigeria. Fourth civilian governor of Osun State, Aregbesola is a native of Ilesa, Osun.
A devout Muslim born into a family of both Muslims and Christians, Aregbesola had his primary and secondary education in Ondo State from where he had later attended The Polytechnic of Ibadan, to study Mechanical Engineering. He graduated in 1980.
Aregbesola’s interest and involvement in politics dates back to his undergraduate days when he was Speaker of the Students’ Parliament (1977–1978) at the Polytechnic, Ibadan, and President of the Black Nationalist Movement (1978–1980). He was also an active supporter of other progressive students’ movements nationwide, which earned him, for instance, a life membership in the National Association of Technological Students.
In June 1990, he became an elected delegate to the Social Democratic Party Inaugural Local Government Area Congress. In July of the same year, he was also a delegate to its first National Convention in Abuja.
As a pro-democracy and human rights activist, Aregbesola was a major participant in the demilitarization and pro-democracy struggles of the 1990s in Nigeria.
Upon return of Nigeria to democratic rule in 1999, he was a ranking member of the Alliance for Democracy, led by Senator Bola Tinubu, who would go on to become governor of Lagos State in the same year.
Aregbesola was Director of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Campaign Organization (BATCO), who drove the electoral victory of Bola Tinubu in 1999, and he performed a similar feat with the platform of the Independent Campaign Group, with which he ensured the re-election of Tinubu for a second term in office.
Clearly, the rough road to Aregbesola ‘s rise in the nation’s political space may have cost him friends, family and followership at certain critical points in his odyssey to serve.
Looking back now, he may want to review his movement on the political ladder in Nigeria and ask himself certain questions, especially in the privacy of his study or where he loves to be alone.
If situations were different, would he do it all over again, making the mistakes he made especially while as Governor of Osun State? His political hero and life mentor, Obafemi Awolowo ruled over the whole Western region as Premiere in the 60s and when Nigeria returned to civil rule in 1979, Awo ran the region now broken into states. This time, Baba Awo ran them from the shadows as Party Leader of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), providing free education across board to the six South West States, including Osun State.
Awo never owed any Southwest government worker and neither did he allow his South west governors to owe any government Civil servants in their various states across the region.
Would his hero have administered just this one state, he (Aregbesola) had the privilege of running, to the point it found itself owing workers, endlessly, for months? Would Awo have been comfortable seeing workers under his administration suffer lack, being deprived of their basic right to wages?
How would he have felt for a seating Judge to risk her judicial career to speak for the people?
Aregbesola may have succeeded in using the full force of his position as governor to galvanize and mobilize his political godfather(s) and the broad power spectrum available to him, to squash the pro-people welfare-Activist Judge. But as Farouq implied, Justice Folahanmi’s move against him was a naked show of the disapproval of Aregbesola’s indecent treatment of the Osun State workers in his time as the Governor of the State.
Considering his feigned compassion and feeble plea to the hunger-stricken workers and families of Osun citizens working for the government during his administration, this episode under his watch as Governor speaks to one of Awo’s quotes:
“There are times when even the greatest tactician in diplomatic cunning is outclassed in his own game. It is then that he discovers that all that he thought he had gained is but loss, and that what is left of national honor and dignity is but the shadow of an illustrious past that is gone forever, or of a potentially great future that will never come.”
As if talking to the situation, Aregbesola found himself, decades after he (Awo) passed on, (in his Call to Rededication and Reconstruction, 1961 and In Voice of Reason, 1981), the sage said those if placed in a position of leadership must be prepared to grasp the nettle if they unite in doing so, and if, in addition, they set a worthy example and a Marat on pace in probity, unselfishness, and self-sacrifice, the people will follow, all too readily, in our footsteps.”
Can Aregbesola, honestly, say the average Osun citizen would want to follow in his footsteps today with all they suffered during his reign as the State’s Chief Executive?
Today, unlike his days as one of the bright lights in the cabinet of Tinubu, he is virtually silent as Nigeria’s Interior Minister. Could he have been overwhelmed by the nation’s homeland responsibility?
In conclusion, Aregbesola’s trajectory on the political circuit in the country can only be better measured by his achievements as Governor because that was the platform. He had to prove all his theories about good governance and his avowed commitment to the well-being of the people.
Well, his mentor and hero had something to say about that too, in the 1980 publication of the Voice of Reason on Citizens General Well-Being: “He needs a healthy body which can be reared only on good food, adequate shelter, decent clothing, a reasonable measure of comfort and luxury, and a wholesome environment. He needs a sound and cultivated mind, which is free to know and meditate upon the things of his choice. He has natural, conventional and legal rights which must be protected and upheld, with impartiality and inflexible justice by government and the society in which he lives.” Said Awo.
Benchmarked against the backdrop of the Awolowo’s musings, who by the way, achieved most of the things published in his name as a Doer and a Talker, can Aregbesola say he has measured up to the plate of the sage?
All said and done, the former Governor of Osun State and now Nigeria’s Interior Minister can boast that he has come so far and survived storms he had confronted in his political career and in a current Nigeria, where standards and merits are nothing to go by, his fans, friends and families can congratulate him on a well-deserved birthday, being a successful 21st century Nigerian politician.
Birthdays by serving government officials and wealthy Nigerians usually last one week or more, so birthday wishes, even though, in arrears of the actual date, are in order.
Happy birthday, Rauf Aregbesola!
