Election is a cathedral and a carnival.
As a music student, I was taught that a cathedral is not just a building. It is a sacred place of worship, of resonance, of moral compass. Its high vaults were designed to lift sound and soul upward and every note sung there must be true, because falsehood echoes.
Carnival, on the other hand, is drums, masks and noise loud enough to drown reason.
When a candidate enters the cathedral of democracy and chooses invention over intention, when he turns its sacred pulpit into a carnival podium, the state must take note.
Plato, that philosopher-king who insisted that only lovers of truth are fit to rule, called such desperation an ungentlemanly vice and the politics of shadows, where a man projects what never was.
Centuries later, Niccolò Machiavelli, the unsentimental anatomist of power, warned differently: the Prince who makes deceit his strategy may win the crowd for a night, but he loses the kingdom at dawn. For a throne stitched with lies is a mat spread on a river.
Oyo must now look closely at Mr. Bimbo Adekanmbi, gubernatorial candidate of the Allied People’s Movement, APM.
On radio, his campaign has become a theatre of shifting tales. One day, one new lineage. If his recent interviews on Ibadan airwaves are anything to go by, substance is giving way to storytelling.
His recent diatribe against Senator Sharafadeen Alli, flagbearer of the APC, on land matters; a claim already punctured by those who were there, including a former Chairman of Ibadan North, readily comes to mind.
Then last weekend, on another Television/radio programme, he said this, and I quote him verbatim:
“On Godfatherism, if they want to talk about continuity then this is not 3.0 but 7.0, it means all the past governors of Oyo state are my godfathers. From baba Ladoja ‘Kabiyesi oo’ to our late Baba Akala, to my later father Ajimobi, then to Gov Seyi Makinde, they are all my fathers and leaders and have worked closely with them, understand what needs to be addressed and this is why I’m the most fit for the job.”
What a convenient genealogy.
Our elders say: a borrowed agbada never fits its wearer.
Let us ask the profound question Oyo must ask: How, when and where did Mr. Adekanmbi work “closely” with Governor Rashidi Ladoja and the late Governor Adebayo Alao-Akala? What files? What council? What policy? What room? Let him tell us in public, with dates and witnesses.
You cannot adopt fathers on live radio. Leadership is not inheritance by declaration.
Oyo has danced to this tune before. We know the chorus of Omituntun. Our prayer is old and sacred: may affliction not rise the third time.
Oyo, shine your eyes. Reject continuity by convenience. Reject APM’s borrowed history. Say no to a manifesto built on memory that never was.
A word is enough for the wise.
