A press release by Otunba Adegbenro Fagbemi and Eng. Gbeminiyi Ayodele, Chairman and Public Relations Officer of the Inter Party Advisory Council (IPAC) created, at best, some sad amusements. Yorubas would call such ” oro buruku toun terin”.
The subjective views by the duo is not a new thing in our electoral patterns.
It has become a fashion for election riggers to look for some funny individuals who are privileged to hold some positions to try and use them in a desperate bid to create a semblance of acceptance and legitimacy.
The old trick could be likened to the wisdom of hiding a piece of meat in the mouth, ” ogbon ka fi eran senu, ka waa ti”.
Certainly, the two individuals must be representatives of some mushroom political parties in Oyo state who, perhaps, hardly presented one or two councilorship candidates for the election and this is with due respect to the political parties they represent.
How such individuals who did not have party Agents in all the over six thousand plus polling units of Oyo state hope to convince right thinking people of Oyo state that they have valid information about the election still amuses me.
The charade and illegalities that pervaded the sham of a Local Government Election was well captured by the press on 27th of April, 2024.
A reasonable human being will rather believe such accounts as against the afterthoughts by Fagbemi and Gbeminiyi.
Their position is just like the case of the two harlots who fought for paternity of a baby before King Solomon.
To Fagbemi and Gbeminiyi, the baby could be butchered since it doesn’t belong to them.
Though, given a hatchet job, the duo didn’t even do a good job.
Their statement clearly betrayed the one who gave them the job.
You would think that the duo are Olagunju’s spokespersons rather than the Leadership of the IPAC.
How does any reasonable person infer that an election is free, fair and transparent just because opposition political parties participated in the said election?
Why is it an election in the first place?
Or, are the two clowns telling us that Olagunju did us a favor by allowing opposition political parties to participate in the election?
The claim that the IPAC had monitoring Agents without giving the numbers of such monitoring Agents, publishing the reports submitted by the Agents is laughable.
In our societies today, people make outrageous statements just because no one would bother to ask them to prove them.
I challenge Fagbemi and Gbeminiyi to publish the report submitted by their pseudo “Agents” which supports the jaundiced position contained in their press release.
We are conversant with the likes of Fagbemi and Gbeminiyi.
Their likes surface at every election cycle.
They even likened Olagunju’s sham election to the election conducted by INEC!
No matter how poor INEC is, may we never witness a situation where INEC will one day conduct an election in the likes of the sham conducted by Olagunju.
The two funny individuals even went overboard to defend the peaceful conduct of the election.
According to them, ” the election was peaceful in all the polling units with no reports of violence”.
One would be tempted to think that the Commissioner of police did submit a copy of the security report about the election to the clowns.
We are in a season where individuals who made themselves to be used for ulterior motives are being used by the perpetrators of evil.
A couple of individuals just got used.
However, I will like to disappoint Fagbemi and Gbeminiyi.
We will not take the advice that those who are aggrieved should just proceed to the Tribunal and leave the one who wasted the resources of Oyo state on a sham of an election alone.
We will continue to put this malady in the public view so as to elicit continued discussion with a view to making a better society.
I can assure them that the one who sent them have murdered sleep, he will sleep no more.
SOLA ABEGUNDE.
