Ayo FASORO

 

It was Monday, 17 August 2026, the first working day following the 2026 Osun State governorship election. Muibat did not wait for her husband to conclude Fajr, the Muslim early morning prayer before setting out for her shop. She knew she needed to arrive early like the bird wishing to catch the fattest worms.

 Muibat calculated her earnings. Some of her frequent customers who had bought food on credit promising to pay after the election would make good on their promises. Paying customers will ask for an additional scoop of rice, or an extra piece of meat. She also expected some unfamiliar faces to show up. Monday after elections, is a day of plenty, just like the boarding students’ week of pride ‘ose igberaga’. It is ‘ojo aje’ with a difference.

This time, she was not disappointed. Jimoh Igbira the carpenter sat opposite Sunday Ijesha, who works as a security guard at a local bank. Next to him sat Monday Abriba, an apprentice at a building material shop. Each voted for different parties two days ago. They traded banters, boasting about how much they were paid for their votes. Jimoh’s party paid the least, but it paid earliest and extracted fetish oaths from payees. Monday got more the night before the election. But the crown went to Sunday who was paid more than the other two combined. He got his own pay for voting in the mid-morning of Election Day, when the pendulum had started to swing, and desperate contestants were ready to up the ante of vote scouting. It was by then, injury time, and the game was about to be lost.

The three did not talk about their political differences because they had no different convictions; they are merely petty traders, their votes being their wares. Merchants who bought from them are not any more committed to noble ideals beyond their pockets. It ended up being a bazaar of sort.

 Jimoh is a Muslim; Sunday a Pentecostal; and Monday was a Catholic before turning atheist. They did not talk about their religious differences. They have long learnt that the surest way to a man’s soul is his stomach. A hungry man is deaf to any preaching. Neither did they talk about their ethnic differences. Tribalism remains an elite concept, deployed when sharing a loot from privileges. It is a fraud perpetrated by those seated at the table of our collective patrimony. A strategy to get more than the other person.

Our friends, the sellers of votes, did not discuss political party programmes. Their customers, the merchants of votes sold no such wares to them. An exchange of votes for credible programmes had long turned into the exchange of votes for cash. Stomach infrastructure once derided is now the currency of political wisdom. We are all witnesses to a decadence with no end in sight.

 As for gubernatorial helpers, they returned to their respective state capitals to continue diligent attention to state matters. Some rumour mongers say that their excellences left town in the hours long before dawn. Their visit had been unproductive; their presence was no longer needed. This battle gave victory to the one without foreign aid in the form of gubernatorial assistance.

Aside from financial transactions, another disappointing factor in Osun governorship election was the level of violence. Threats of violence against opponents; actual violence visited on the innocent and the partisan, leading to disruption of normal daily activities of the citizenry. Traders who routinely travel from Ekiti to Ibadan suspended their travels through Osun State for fear of violence. Lives lost are numbered in double digits.

 Sadly, politics and violence found their way into local government administration. For several months leading to the governorship election, local government allocations got trapped in the fight for control of the seats of councils. Nonpayment of council workers, inability of council members to function, desertion of council headquarters became flashpoints of violent clashes, resulting in at least one reported assassination.

Why do we have to return to the promise of 2002 that “the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood”. Why have we forgotten the 2015 heroic stance of “my ambition is not worth the blood of any Nigerian”?

When shall the politics of ideas replace the politics of stomach infrastructure?

 

Ayo Fasoro

Non Sum Dignus