Probing Oye-Ekiti clashes

By Kola Ajeigbe

Oye-Ekiti, a quiet and peace-loving town, the home of notable politicians like the late Chief E.A. Babalola, first Minister of Works in the old Western Region and the late Mr.Agunbiade Bamise, former Party Manager of the old Action Group, recently woke up to a rude shock of political violence on Monday, March 9, 2009, the date that had been advertised with posters, by town-criers and with house-to-house campaign for Dr. Kayode Fayemi’s Free Health Demonstration programme.

By the way, for clarity, Dr. Fayemi is the AC governorship candidate in the forth-coming re-run election in Ekiti and he is from Isan-Ekiti in Oye Local Government Area. He was running his Free Health programme in Oye-Ekiti, the home-town of Senator Ayo Arise, which contains the two wards where re-run election will hold in Oye Local Government.
The two wards in Oye town had delivered over 17,000 votes to PDP in 2007 from which Engr. Segun Oni from Ifaki-Ekiti in Ido/Osi Local Government and Senator Ayo Arise had benefited as winners of governorship and senatorial elections respectively.

By returning over 17,000 votes for PDP in 2007, Oye-Ekiti had turned out to be the most voter-populous community in Ekiti after Ado-Ekiti, and by scoring the voting mark of 17,000 plus, Oye-Ekiti could then have inadvertently made itself a battle ground for desperate vote-seekers; a battle which manifested itself on the fateful morning when Dr. Fayemi was staging a Free Health Demonstration programme at the local government Multi-Purpose Hall, Oye-Ekiti, which is currently under a PDP local government administration.

On the fateful day, the doctors and the patients were already seated at the Multi-Purpose Hall, Oye-Ekiti, and the programme had actually commenced when a man who introduced himself as the vice chairman of Oye Local Government came to try to halt it on the excuse that the local government wanted to use the hall for a meeting.

His request reportedly met with resistance, naturally. He was said to have stormed out of the hall with his small team, only for the programme to be forcefully disrupted by a new set of angry miscreants who dispersed the patients and the doctors shortly after.

This writer’s investigation was easy up to this point, if not sacrosanct, but a public inquiry may be the real organ needed to dig out the facts of the clashes between the PDP and the AC at Oye-Ekiti on March 9, particularly concerning the after-effect of what happened in the hall that fateful day.

There have been claims and counter-claims but there are some other corroborating facts that are incontrovertible about the incident. It was a fact that one Ojo Omowaiye, PA to Senator Ayo Arise was injured right in the Multi-Purpose Hall premises. Unless he had, on a most unlikely event, gone there to enjoy Dr. Fayemi’s Free Health facilities on an emergency, he had no business in the hall.

Another fact is that Senator Arise and Engr. Segun Oni were at Oye-Ekiti that day, unannounced. All true patriots should be bothered, feel troubled, and scandalized by an event such as this at this stage of our political growth, particularly if we are serious about electoral reforms. We should be interested in a public inquiry too if we truly mean to right the wrongs in our system in Nigeria.

If permission was obtained to use a hall and the owners of the same hall went to disrupt the programme for which it was hired, the issue at stake was more of civility/ militarism than politics, a human rights matter. Even in the military era, human rights were not so grossly violated.

If Senator Arise who was said to be proposing to use that hall later zoomed away with Engr. Oni ostensibly to a meeting in Abuja when his home-town was in turmoil, what are we to deduce from all that? That two political parties merely sized each other up? What sort of close-marking was that which exposed the people of Oye-Ekiti to such terrible danger when it was least expected?

Were those sporadic gun-shots those of the mobile policemen assigned to guard the hall and those in the convoy of the ousted governor and the senator? Were they gun-shot from rival politicians? These are the questions calling for answers. Mere instigated, selected arrests that have been going on in respect of this event would not do or help in anyway. Ekiti had such types before — trumped-up charges — which led the state to nowhere but fuelled anger or helped to build up tension.

If the incident at Oye-Ekiti- was PDP’s ploy to intimidate the opposition to have a a free reign over the town’s 17,000 votes, didn’t the PDP get the reverse as result? Up till the next morning, the vexed AC youths were still hunting the PDP stalwarts with matchets as one Chief N.S. Oguntoye recounted. The AC youths protested the shooting of the previous day!

This is why it can be costly to assume that the proverbial sleeping dog of that event at Oye-Ekiti will lie without proper attention. So Hon. Tunji Odeyemi, the acting governor of Ekiti State, should stand up for Ekiti and investigate the matter. That is how to love Ekiti and be less partisan.

Ajeigbe sent this article from Oye-Ekiti