BY ABIODUN NEJO
Renowned poet and university lecturer, Professor Niyi Osundare, has charged the new governor of Ekiti State, Dr Kayode Fayemi, to prioritise eradication of poverty and ignorance, which he says has debased lives of the people.
Osundare charged Fayemi, who will be inaugurated governor of the state on October 16, to share the people’s joys and reduce their sorrows, saying: “Let salaries and wages arrive as and when due (as happened during your first term); let us banish the desperate, extreme need and deprivation that have turned a proud people into ‘alaterunje’ exponents of the stomach infrastructure infamy”.
The professor of English at the University of New Orleans, USA, who spoke in a lecture entitled “Still, in Defence of Lasting Valuea”; Ekiti of Our Dream”, that he delivered in Ado Ekiti on Monday as part of activities for the inauguration of Fayemi as governor of Ekiti State, said Fayemi’s second chance “is a rare, significant opportunity waiting for holistic fulfilment and purposive accomplishments”.
He said: “Ekiti cannot wait for the hope and promise which that Restoration bespeaks. So, nose to the ground. Governor, nose to the ground; ear to muffled cries, more closeness to the people, your hand on their pulse, your goal the eradication of the poverty and ignorance which debase their lives”.
The don, who lamented that ‘stomach infrastructure’, which he described as abomination, had manipulated the people’s reasoning abilities, said Ekiti people used to know their rights “and how to defend them without trampling on the rights of others.
“That was when our heads stood straight on our upright necks; for we knew, without being told, the difference between wrong and right; between fake and true, between the dissembling demagogue and the genuine leader. That was when we knew the difference between night and day. That was when an abomination called stomach infrastructure had not replaced our brain with our innards”.
Osundare said politicians had been hiding under the sliding moral values of Ekiti people and poverty caused by culture of laziness to cheat the system, said the next government must tackle the menace for history to judge him well.
Making allusion to the outgoing governor, Mr Ayodele Fayose, who he described as a demagogue, Osundare stated that the moral degradation accounted for the promotion of stomach infrastructure among Ekiti populace.
The poet regretted how Fayose had made people across the globe to brand Ekiti people, who had hitherto been known to be highly knowledgeable as people who had no values by his conduct and utterances while in the saddle of governance.
He urged Fayemi to clean the Augean’s stable by instituting policies that would combat poverty and all forms of social ills that had crept into Ekiti through the actions of politicians, saying: “Ekiti were people that place priority on knowledge, wisdom. They know the values of these virtues. They were regarded as extremely stubborn people because they won’t compromise their integrity for anything.
“These were times when education was a pride and we had the brightest academics like: the late Professor Sam Aluko, Professor Adegoke Olubunmo, Chief Afe Babalola, Prof. Ojo Ugbole, and many others. We placed values on hard work, knowledge acquisition and our parents sold their farms and clothes to send their children to school. They knew the rights from the wrongs at that time.
“But there came a demagogue who ran authoritarian government in Ekiti in a manner that had never been experienced by any State in Nigeria,” Osundare said.
