Osun: Just Before Dawn – Wale Adebanwi

And judgment is turned away backward, and justice stands afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter – Isaiah 59:14
Just before you start speculating about the popular “evangelism” that yours truly intends to inflict on you this week with the above quotation from the Bible, let me quickly state that I do not intend to remind you about the ultimate Paradise, but to draw you again into our perennial debate about the creation of a good society in the here and now. As I read reports about the consolidation of injustice and the growing impudence of the vote rogues that litter the Nigerian landscape, I was reminded of Peter Abrahams popular novel, Tell Freedom.
Reading Tell Freedom as a high school kid, I was particularly struck by the lines from the Book of Isaiah with which Abrahams opened his narrative. Living and growing in country in which judgement is constantly turned “away backwards”, where “justice” often “stands afar off” as truth falls in the street and equity takes flight, Abrahams’ narrative of the gravest cruelties against our collective humanity in the South African case never left my mind.
As I read reports of the latest ordeal of Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, the man who was popularly elected Governor of Osun State, but had his mandate stolen in broad daylight under the cruel credo of “do-and-die affair”, I was again reminded of the dark state of affairs so poetically rendered by Prophet Isaiah. In the spirit-crushing atmosphere under which we survive in Nigeria it would seem that we can never witness the worst. Something is always in the offing that would darkly trespass even the nastiest limits of injustice.
In the cultural history of Ibadan, the city is celebrated as the place where the robber gets justice against the robbed. It would appear that the whole country has appropriated this cultural epithet of the Ibadan people. From the presidency to the local councils, under President Olusegun Obasanjo’s dreadful watch, the whole country became a bizarre bazaar where robbers – sometimes armed, at other times unarmed – were not only seeking and getting judgement over the robbed, but, in many cases, were even sitting in judgement over the robbed. Welcome to Anini’s world – and no pun is intended!
Osun State continues to advertise itself as one of the most frightening in this culture of cowardly and impudent robbery. The greatest theft in a democracy is the theft of a people’s mandate. It is such a brutal violation of the fundamental rights of the people, the very essence of democracy, that were African democracies less tolerant of such crimes, it ought to be punished in the same manner as treason. Nothing can be more treasonous than a group illegally arrogating to itself the “right” that the people ought to legally exercise as a collective. This is why, where democratic revolutions have arisen in world history, particularly in Europe, it often involved the beheading of kings who stole the people’s fundamental right to decide on their collective future.
As you read this, Aregbesola is standing trial for “alleged forgery of a Police report”. Convinced of the diabolical plans of Mr. Ologunsoye Oyinlola, he ran to the court to seek protection, but he was refused this protection. The court was right, ordinarily. No one should seek to protect himself from legal arrest. But the arrest that Aregbesola feared was an immoral arrest that would get the full cover of legality. It eventually came from a police force that is perhaps the most compromised in the whole world. Under the craven Mike Okiro, the police force sank further into the abyss. They have since allowed the man to go home and have started a trial whose primary essence, ostensibly, is to derail the new tribunal that is examining the monumental fraud that was perpetrated by the PDP in Osun State – as elsewhere in Adamawa, Ekiti, Edo, Ondo, etc. etc.
When did the PDP realise that the police report was forged, you will ask? When that same report was first tended before the first tribunal that was headed by a judge alleged to have been hideously compromised, one who the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti would have described as “Mr Injustice…”, the Police counsel objected on the grounds that it was marked secret. Of course, the embarrassing tribunal rejected the evidence as it also found excuses to reject the report of the forensic examination of the ballots which it had allowed.
When the matter went on appeal, the Appeal Court held that the rejected stone could be the corner stone of the case and, therefore, ruled that it should have been admitted. The Court, on the basis of this and other points, dismissed the verdict of the tribunal and ordered a re-trial of the case.
As would be expected of the PDP, the man with the stolen mandate and his hirelings got into what medical science would describe as panic disorder. A new way had to be invented to ensure that the new tribunal, which appears not be ready to fulfil the base motives of the PDP, would not enter a verdict that is faithful to the electoral verdict which the majority of Osun State people delivered in April 2007. Oyinlola, who has virtually driven the opposition underground with police harassment, would stop at nothing to ensure that the man robbed of electoral victory would not even have the freedom required to reclaim his mandate.
For now the police are obliging him and helping to foist a dispiriting injustice. And they shout out their injustice in the cognomen that Oyinlola has acquired: “Oyin ni o!” (Literally, “Honey is it!”). This is the bitterest honey imaginable! While all this lasts, Osun State continues to experience an official incompetence and ineffectiveness that disgrace the four years of Chief Bisi Akande’s efficient, effective and frugal government.
Between 1963 and 1964, in the same region of Nigeria, some electoral rogues acquired a dark conceit which propelled them to declare that their stolen mandate would never be taken back by the rightful owners. “The ritual ring has been inserted into the finger of the ritualist, no one dare remove it!” they announced. By 1966, thunder broke the ring and crushed the finger.