19
months after, the June 21, 2014 governorship election in Ekiti State is
still making news and has forever remained a kind of puzzle to many
people. Deputy Editor, SAM NWAOKO, unmasks the dramatis personae in the
new wave of issues in the election.
Fayose, Fayemi, Bamisile and Aluko
THE
June 21, 2014 governorship election in Ekiti State has refused to go
away from public discussion. The election might have long been forgotten
if the All Progressives Congress (APC) had allowed its candidate in the
election, Dr Kayode Fayemi, who is now the Minister for Solid Minerals
Development, to follow his conscience and let the election go. Fayemi
had announced in the aftermath of the election that if it was the will
of the people, he had accepted their verdict and would live by it.
Fayemi and Fayose had even met on Monday, June 23, 2014, at the governor’s office, the day after the announcement of the result of the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on the invitation of the then Governor Fayemi. At the meeting, they agreed that Ekiti was more important than the election and announced that they would work together to ensure a smooth transition. They agreed to form a joint transition committee to work out a transition plan and present records to the incoming administration of Fayose.
However, the leadership of the APC overruled Governor Fayemi and announced that it was not satisfied with the outcome of the election. The party, through its national publicity secretary then, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said it would challenge the outcome of the election in court and adduced several reasons, including the conduct of INEC as among the reasons for their party’s move. Among others, a former governor of Lagos State, who is also now a minister, Mr Babatunde Fashola (SAN), and several other stakeholders in the APC could not understand why their party lost the election, and so woefully too. They felt that with the performance of Dr Fayemi in the state in terms of physical development, the people should not have had problems in reelecting him for another term.
The election and its outcome remained a hot debate for months. Not a few peolple outside the state found Fayemis’s electoral loss intriguing. But while the debate of the election lasted, the months between June 21 of the election and October 16, 2014 when the new administration of Governor Fayose was sworn in, was one in which the state perched on a cliffhanger. Numerous citizens of the state still recall that the transition months were among the most tumultuous in the life of Ekiti as a state.
There were also a myriad of court cases both against the election and the person of its winner, Mr Fayose. The APC was in court; a group of Ekiti indigenes who described themselves as “non-political, not partisan” and known as E-11, was also in court. Of a fact, in the Ekiti of the transition months, many watchers of political events in the state strongly believed that the case instituted by the E-11, in which they were challenging the eligibility of Fayose to contest the election, was the cause of the palpable anxiety. The E-11’s matter was premised on a claim that Governor Fayose was impeached in October 2006 and therefore was ineligible to stand for election.
But while all these were on, the state and its people also looked forward to a new administration. There were no doubts among the people that they voted for Fayose and they wanted him to be their governor. Thus, the various plots to ensure that Fayose did not become the governor did not really go down well with the people. Many politicians were actually in the state to sensitise the people and worked hard to explain to them the real reasons the state was in turmoil after an election that they saw as having gone well without an incident. The election was seen by local and international observers as free and fair and a kind of benchmark, and they published these opinions. However, the people were confused with various news items emanating from different sources regarding alleged rigging and untoward actions in the election.
Among the people, who worked hard to educate the people on the need to stand firm and against any plot to cheat them and take away the mandate they said they had given to Fayose, “through the back door,” was Dr Tope Aluko. TKO, as Aluko is popularly known, was a key component of Fayose’s team beginning from the pre-election period and was always seen around the then governor-elect. To many people in the state, Aluko was already playing the role of Fayose’s “Chief of Staff”, which had been the rumoured position reserved for him in the incoming administration. What is more, The embattled PDP secretary, who has now fallen out with Governor Fayose, was the chairman of Security and Intelligence Committee of the Fayose Campaign Organisation.
Aluko was the secretary of the PDP in the state and was always among the executive members of the Ekiti PDP who received tens of the aspirants who wanted to get the party’s ticket, whenever they called at the party’s secretariat in Ado Ekiti. Among the people of the state however, there were speculations that the PDP in the state might go South in search of a candidate to slug it out with Fayemi. This speculation was strong among the people of the six local government areas that made up the district. And given the fact that the claim that the state had never had a governor from that district gained currency, the aspirants from the Ekiti South district greatly outnumbered all the others from other districts put together.
However, it took a lot of politicking and intrigues from leaders of the party in the state, including the state executive members to arrive at the choice of Fayose among no fewer than 20 aspirants who had entered the race. Part of the problems faced by Ekiti PDP in the build up to the election was the division in the party’s executive on how to arrive at the choice of a candidate.
For instance, the chairman of the party at the time, Chief Makanjuola Ogundipe, was said to have favoured the selection of a candidate through a consensus. But Tope Aluko, Femi Bamisile, it was claimed, as well as some other members of the Ekiti PDP executive, reportedly worked against that arrangement, although they were extremely discreet about their actions. Thus, Ogundipe ended up alone in the quest for a consensus candidate. He was so alone in the matter that he was even taunted by some senior members of the party in the state as “Consensus Chairman” in their private discussions and even at some ‘soft’ formal occasions.
Another component of the Fayose team in the months preceding the election is Mr Bamisile, a former deputy chairman of PDP in the state. Bamisile, who had also served as a Speaker of the state’s House of Assembly, was, interestingly, also a governorship aspirant in the PDP while also in office as the deputy chairman of the party. He was almost always part of the PDP executive that received the other aspirants whenever they called at the party’s secretariat and while he sometimes stood in for the chairman (Ogundipe), it was always a puzzle what would become of his governorship aspiration.
But the emergence of Fayose as the candidate of the party, after a primary, laid the consensus issue to rest and created new issues for the PDP. Some of the PDP aspirants, including Senator Gbenga Aluko, couldn’t stomach the emergence of Fayose as the party’s standardbearer. After a television programme in which he expressed his anger against on the party and the person of Fayose, he became a pariah in the party. Soon after, he left the party and only recently, formally announced his defection to the APC. But some of the other aspirants, including Chief Abiodun Aluko and Mr Bisi Omoyeni didn’t seem to see the matter beyond politics. Stakeholders only observed that they went quiet and didn’t join in the running down of their party and from all indications, they are still members of the PDP.
However, Bamisile on his part, never spoke about his governorship aspiration again. But he raised issues of “betrayal of trust” on the part of Fayose soon after. This issue which seemed serious and was believed to have driven a big wedge between the two politicians. Sources, while explaining Bamisile’s anger and his falling out with Fayose, claimed that there was an “agreement among some senior stakeholders to make Baimisile Fayose’s running mate.” The sources added that soon after Fayose got the ticket, he looked elsewhere for a running mate, insisting that he didn’t want a politician as the deputy governor, citing his experiences of the past.
The sources in the party had also contended that Fayose was wary of the kind of team he would form with a strong personality like Bamisile, considering the strength of his own personality. The sources said: “it just didn’t add up and would not have been a smooth ride for Ekiti with Governor Ayò Fayose and deputy governor Femi Bamisile.” Thus Fayose jettisoned the idea and went for another running mate. Bamisile couldn’t contain the anger and he decided to pitch tent with the APC. He defected formally from the PDP on the last campaign date of the APC. He was presented to the crowd at the state’s pavilion on the Thursday preceding the election. The media made a feast of the defection of Bamisile then.
But there didn’t seem to be any problem between Fayose and Aluko until months after all the battles to ensure that Fayose was sworn in as the governor. In the early days of Governor Fayose in October 2014, Aluko was a prominent part of his close aides. Everything pointed to the appointment of Dr Tope Aluko as the Chief of Staff until the announcement of appointments began to be aired. Chief Dipo Anisulowo, was announced as the Chief of Staff, while Dr Modupe Alade was announced as the Secretary to the State Government. Then, tongues began to wag among politicians in the state.
Many of the politicians expressed the belief that “Aluko would, somehow, be part of the government” but it didn’t seem to be looking like that for a number of months. Soon, the discussions changed to “Tope Aluko is the secretary of the party and he is still in the government through that.” And this seemed to have lingered for a period until things took the current shape as espoused by Aluko.
Before what many people have come to see as “the Aluko revelation of Sunday,” he had been at loggerheads with both the leadership of the PDP in the state and Governor Fayose. He had, on several occasions told newsmen in Ekiti that he had been schemed out of government by “my Oga,” referring to Governor Fayose. Aluko had always contended that the governor had caused some of them to be relegated in the scheme of things and that they were not happy with the situation of things in the party.
For Aluko, the number one issue he said he had with Governor Fayose, apart from the fact that he wasn’t brought into the government, was that the governor had made people he said were outsiders in the party the leaders. He was referring to the current acting chairman of the party, Chief Idowu Faleye, whom he alleged was not eligible to serve in that position.
Following his falling out with Faleye, of the vice chairmen of PDP in the state, Mr Olatunde Olatunde, assumed the leadership of the party, with Aluko remaining as the secretary. They had some other executive members of the party with them, including the Women Leader and the Youth Leader. Following the squabbles, Aluko and his faction of the party announced the suspension of Chief Faleye from the party and declared that he was not eligible to hold the position. In a counter-move, the Faleye faction also announced the suspension of Olatunde, Aluko and others.
The ding dong remained in the state chapter of PDP until an announcement by the national leadership of the party that Dr Aluko and others had been expelled. Following this announcement, the matter went in the cooler and had literally been off the news in the state until Sunday.
Thus, the new angle to the Aluko story is that former President Goodluck Jonathan assisted the governor of Ekiti, Mr Fayose with $2 million to prosecute the primaries and $35 million for the June 21, 2015 election. Aluko had also claimed that the military equally assisted during the election and made victory possible, adding that “we went into the election with 1,040 recognised soldiers and another batch of 400 unrecognised ones brought in from Enugu.”
Some observers had seen the Aluko revelation “as nothing new because we have heard all sorts about the Ekiti election.” A member of the PDP in the state claimed that “with this, there’s nothing more we won’t hear about the election. All they are trying to prove is that the election was rigged but we all know that this is not true.” The party stalwart alleged “if he had been given the settlement he wanted, would he have been saying all this? All he wants is settlement. Recall that he once accused Faleye of not paying them honorarium from the money in the party’s account and said Faleye had to kowtow to the governor before taking decisions.”
But the state government had reacted through Speacial Assistant to the governor on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka. It is the belief of the government that “Aluko was already beclouded by his desperation to seek revenge against Governor Fayose because of the governor’s refusal to make him his Chief of Staff.”
Olayinka refreshed the issue of aluko’s expulsion and that of APC not letting go 19 months after losing an election, saying it was “shameful that the APC has refused to accept a scandalous electoral defeat it suffered 19 months ago.” He said a question that needed an answer was “if it was also soldiers that rigged the 2015 presidential, Senatorial, House of Representatives and state House of Assembly elections that the party lost woefully in Ekiti.”
On the money to prosecute the election, the government said: “As per his claim that $37 million was given to the governor for the election, the governor got financial support from various sources, as it is usual of anyone contesting election and it is not for him to begin to advertise in the media the level of support the governor received from individuals, corporate organisations or groups.
“However, if money belonging to the APC is missing and they suspect that the money was stolen by Dr Goodluck Jonathan to fund Ekiti State governorship election, they can approach the Economic nad Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).”
The Ekiti State chapter of APC has also reacted to the development and said the “Justice Minister must prosecute Ekiti election riggers.” Spokesperson of Ekiti APC, Chief Taiwo Olatunbosun, said in a statement that the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, should “prosecute all indicted people in the election rigging scandal,” and explained that “the party said it had on two occasions petitioned the Office of the Attorney General,” and Minister of Justice on the same matter, stressing that “the latest revelations by PDP scribe had made it imperative that the nation’s chief law officer must act now.”
Olatunbosun admitted that “even though there was nothing new in the PDP’s secretary’s revelations, it has become pertinent to prosecute the suspects as the revelations were again emanating from the insider who participated fully in what is now known as Ekitigate.
“By Aluko’s revelations, we are justified in our claim that our candidate, Dr Kayode Fayemi, never lost that election, but was criminally toppled by a coup d’etat orchestrated by Fayose in cahoots with President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration that illegally deployed money and the military to ensure victory for Fayose.”
It was once reported that Aluko and other embattled PDP members were set to join the APC but they vehemently denied the speculation and said they would stay in the PDP and fight it out because, according tp them, PDP was “a house we built.” With the current state of affairs for both Aluko and the PDP in Ekiti, observers are wondering where he would pitch his tent in the coming months.
Fayemi and Fayose had even met on Monday, June 23, 2014, at the governor’s office, the day after the announcement of the result of the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on the invitation of the then Governor Fayemi. At the meeting, they agreed that Ekiti was more important than the election and announced that they would work together to ensure a smooth transition. They agreed to form a joint transition committee to work out a transition plan and present records to the incoming administration of Fayose.
However, the leadership of the APC overruled Governor Fayemi and announced that it was not satisfied with the outcome of the election. The party, through its national publicity secretary then, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said it would challenge the outcome of the election in court and adduced several reasons, including the conduct of INEC as among the reasons for their party’s move. Among others, a former governor of Lagos State, who is also now a minister, Mr Babatunde Fashola (SAN), and several other stakeholders in the APC could not understand why their party lost the election, and so woefully too. They felt that with the performance of Dr Fayemi in the state in terms of physical development, the people should not have had problems in reelecting him for another term.
The election and its outcome remained a hot debate for months. Not a few peolple outside the state found Fayemis’s electoral loss intriguing. But while the debate of the election lasted, the months between June 21 of the election and October 16, 2014 when the new administration of Governor Fayose was sworn in, was one in which the state perched on a cliffhanger. Numerous citizens of the state still recall that the transition months were among the most tumultuous in the life of Ekiti as a state.
There were also a myriad of court cases both against the election and the person of its winner, Mr Fayose. The APC was in court; a group of Ekiti indigenes who described themselves as “non-political, not partisan” and known as E-11, was also in court. Of a fact, in the Ekiti of the transition months, many watchers of political events in the state strongly believed that the case instituted by the E-11, in which they were challenging the eligibility of Fayose to contest the election, was the cause of the palpable anxiety. The E-11’s matter was premised on a claim that Governor Fayose was impeached in October 2006 and therefore was ineligible to stand for election.
But while all these were on, the state and its people also looked forward to a new administration. There were no doubts among the people that they voted for Fayose and they wanted him to be their governor. Thus, the various plots to ensure that Fayose did not become the governor did not really go down well with the people. Many politicians were actually in the state to sensitise the people and worked hard to explain to them the real reasons the state was in turmoil after an election that they saw as having gone well without an incident. The election was seen by local and international observers as free and fair and a kind of benchmark, and they published these opinions. However, the people were confused with various news items emanating from different sources regarding alleged rigging and untoward actions in the election.
Among the people, who worked hard to educate the people on the need to stand firm and against any plot to cheat them and take away the mandate they said they had given to Fayose, “through the back door,” was Dr Tope Aluko. TKO, as Aluko is popularly known, was a key component of Fayose’s team beginning from the pre-election period and was always seen around the then governor-elect. To many people in the state, Aluko was already playing the role of Fayose’s “Chief of Staff”, which had been the rumoured position reserved for him in the incoming administration. What is more, The embattled PDP secretary, who has now fallen out with Governor Fayose, was the chairman of Security and Intelligence Committee of the Fayose Campaign Organisation.
Aluko was the secretary of the PDP in the state and was always among the executive members of the Ekiti PDP who received tens of the aspirants who wanted to get the party’s ticket, whenever they called at the party’s secretariat in Ado Ekiti. Among the people of the state however, there were speculations that the PDP in the state might go South in search of a candidate to slug it out with Fayemi. This speculation was strong among the people of the six local government areas that made up the district. And given the fact that the claim that the state had never had a governor from that district gained currency, the aspirants from the Ekiti South district greatly outnumbered all the others from other districts put together.
However, it took a lot of politicking and intrigues from leaders of the party in the state, including the state executive members to arrive at the choice of Fayose among no fewer than 20 aspirants who had entered the race. Part of the problems faced by Ekiti PDP in the build up to the election was the division in the party’s executive on how to arrive at the choice of a candidate.
For instance, the chairman of the party at the time, Chief Makanjuola Ogundipe, was said to have favoured the selection of a candidate through a consensus. But Tope Aluko, Femi Bamisile, it was claimed, as well as some other members of the Ekiti PDP executive, reportedly worked against that arrangement, although they were extremely discreet about their actions. Thus, Ogundipe ended up alone in the quest for a consensus candidate. He was so alone in the matter that he was even taunted by some senior members of the party in the state as “Consensus Chairman” in their private discussions and even at some ‘soft’ formal occasions.
Another component of the Fayose team in the months preceding the election is Mr Bamisile, a former deputy chairman of PDP in the state. Bamisile, who had also served as a Speaker of the state’s House of Assembly, was, interestingly, also a governorship aspirant in the PDP while also in office as the deputy chairman of the party. He was almost always part of the PDP executive that received the other aspirants whenever they called at the party’s secretariat and while he sometimes stood in for the chairman (Ogundipe), it was always a puzzle what would become of his governorship aspiration.
But the emergence of Fayose as the candidate of the party, after a primary, laid the consensus issue to rest and created new issues for the PDP. Some of the PDP aspirants, including Senator Gbenga Aluko, couldn’t stomach the emergence of Fayose as the party’s standardbearer. After a television programme in which he expressed his anger against on the party and the person of Fayose, he became a pariah in the party. Soon after, he left the party and only recently, formally announced his defection to the APC. But some of the other aspirants, including Chief Abiodun Aluko and Mr Bisi Omoyeni didn’t seem to see the matter beyond politics. Stakeholders only observed that they went quiet and didn’t join in the running down of their party and from all indications, they are still members of the PDP.
However, Bamisile on his part, never spoke about his governorship aspiration again. But he raised issues of “betrayal of trust” on the part of Fayose soon after. This issue which seemed serious and was believed to have driven a big wedge between the two politicians. Sources, while explaining Bamisile’s anger and his falling out with Fayose, claimed that there was an “agreement among some senior stakeholders to make Baimisile Fayose’s running mate.” The sources added that soon after Fayose got the ticket, he looked elsewhere for a running mate, insisting that he didn’t want a politician as the deputy governor, citing his experiences of the past.
The sources in the party had also contended that Fayose was wary of the kind of team he would form with a strong personality like Bamisile, considering the strength of his own personality. The sources said: “it just didn’t add up and would not have been a smooth ride for Ekiti with Governor Ayò Fayose and deputy governor Femi Bamisile.” Thus Fayose jettisoned the idea and went for another running mate. Bamisile couldn’t contain the anger and he decided to pitch tent with the APC. He defected formally from the PDP on the last campaign date of the APC. He was presented to the crowd at the state’s pavilion on the Thursday preceding the election. The media made a feast of the defection of Bamisile then.
But there didn’t seem to be any problem between Fayose and Aluko until months after all the battles to ensure that Fayose was sworn in as the governor. In the early days of Governor Fayose in October 2014, Aluko was a prominent part of his close aides. Everything pointed to the appointment of Dr Tope Aluko as the Chief of Staff until the announcement of appointments began to be aired. Chief Dipo Anisulowo, was announced as the Chief of Staff, while Dr Modupe Alade was announced as the Secretary to the State Government. Then, tongues began to wag among politicians in the state.
Many of the politicians expressed the belief that “Aluko would, somehow, be part of the government” but it didn’t seem to be looking like that for a number of months. Soon, the discussions changed to “Tope Aluko is the secretary of the party and he is still in the government through that.” And this seemed to have lingered for a period until things took the current shape as espoused by Aluko.
Before what many people have come to see as “the Aluko revelation of Sunday,” he had been at loggerheads with both the leadership of the PDP in the state and Governor Fayose. He had, on several occasions told newsmen in Ekiti that he had been schemed out of government by “my Oga,” referring to Governor Fayose. Aluko had always contended that the governor had caused some of them to be relegated in the scheme of things and that they were not happy with the situation of things in the party.
For Aluko, the number one issue he said he had with Governor Fayose, apart from the fact that he wasn’t brought into the government, was that the governor had made people he said were outsiders in the party the leaders. He was referring to the current acting chairman of the party, Chief Idowu Faleye, whom he alleged was not eligible to serve in that position.
Following his falling out with Faleye, of the vice chairmen of PDP in the state, Mr Olatunde Olatunde, assumed the leadership of the party, with Aluko remaining as the secretary. They had some other executive members of the party with them, including the Women Leader and the Youth Leader. Following the squabbles, Aluko and his faction of the party announced the suspension of Chief Faleye from the party and declared that he was not eligible to hold the position. In a counter-move, the Faleye faction also announced the suspension of Olatunde, Aluko and others.
The ding dong remained in the state chapter of PDP until an announcement by the national leadership of the party that Dr Aluko and others had been expelled. Following this announcement, the matter went in the cooler and had literally been off the news in the state until Sunday.
Thus, the new angle to the Aluko story is that former President Goodluck Jonathan assisted the governor of Ekiti, Mr Fayose with $2 million to prosecute the primaries and $35 million for the June 21, 2015 election. Aluko had also claimed that the military equally assisted during the election and made victory possible, adding that “we went into the election with 1,040 recognised soldiers and another batch of 400 unrecognised ones brought in from Enugu.”
Some observers had seen the Aluko revelation “as nothing new because we have heard all sorts about the Ekiti election.” A member of the PDP in the state claimed that “with this, there’s nothing more we won’t hear about the election. All they are trying to prove is that the election was rigged but we all know that this is not true.” The party stalwart alleged “if he had been given the settlement he wanted, would he have been saying all this? All he wants is settlement. Recall that he once accused Faleye of not paying them honorarium from the money in the party’s account and said Faleye had to kowtow to the governor before taking decisions.”
But the state government had reacted through Speacial Assistant to the governor on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka. It is the belief of the government that “Aluko was already beclouded by his desperation to seek revenge against Governor Fayose because of the governor’s refusal to make him his Chief of Staff.”
Olayinka refreshed the issue of aluko’s expulsion and that of APC not letting go 19 months after losing an election, saying it was “shameful that the APC has refused to accept a scandalous electoral defeat it suffered 19 months ago.” He said a question that needed an answer was “if it was also soldiers that rigged the 2015 presidential, Senatorial, House of Representatives and state House of Assembly elections that the party lost woefully in Ekiti.”
On the money to prosecute the election, the government said: “As per his claim that $37 million was given to the governor for the election, the governor got financial support from various sources, as it is usual of anyone contesting election and it is not for him to begin to advertise in the media the level of support the governor received from individuals, corporate organisations or groups.
“However, if money belonging to the APC is missing and they suspect that the money was stolen by Dr Goodluck Jonathan to fund Ekiti State governorship election, they can approach the Economic nad Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).”
The Ekiti State chapter of APC has also reacted to the development and said the “Justice Minister must prosecute Ekiti election riggers.” Spokesperson of Ekiti APC, Chief Taiwo Olatunbosun, said in a statement that the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, should “prosecute all indicted people in the election rigging scandal,” and explained that “the party said it had on two occasions petitioned the Office of the Attorney General,” and Minister of Justice on the same matter, stressing that “the latest revelations by PDP scribe had made it imperative that the nation’s chief law officer must act now.”
Olatunbosun admitted that “even though there was nothing new in the PDP’s secretary’s revelations, it has become pertinent to prosecute the suspects as the revelations were again emanating from the insider who participated fully in what is now known as Ekitigate.
“By Aluko’s revelations, we are justified in our claim that our candidate, Dr Kayode Fayemi, never lost that election, but was criminally toppled by a coup d’etat orchestrated by Fayose in cahoots with President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration that illegally deployed money and the military to ensure victory for Fayose.”
It was once reported that Aluko and other embattled PDP members were set to join the APC but they vehemently denied the speculation and said they would stay in the PDP and fight it out because, according tp them, PDP was “a house we built.” With the current state of affairs for both Aluko and the PDP in Ekiti, observers are wondering where he would pitch his tent in the coming months.
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