OSUN ELECTION: SHIFTS AND OUTLIERS
Between the dancing steps of Ademola Adeleke and the Spartan outlook of Rauf Aregbosola, Osun people seem to be at loss. And it showed in the inconclusive announcement of the INEC. Three thousand four hundred votes stand between the two and those votes define the outliers either in the negative or in the positive. The end could show if the Osun people are great people of shades of dancing steps or great people with Spartan looks. The announcement come Thursday, will show and it will say a lot about what humans in Nigeria are shifting to. Going by the outlier polling booths that will decide, Iyiola Omisore had been made the great challenge for the Osun people.
The basic shift is that unlike Ekiti State, Osun State moved from stomach infrastructure to heart infrastructure – emotional vote casting paradigm. The spartan sadistic base of that paradigm which demanded more sacrifice of the Osun people as opon imo seemingly or ironically or even deceitfully, balanced the sacrifice of deferred gratification overstretched by the wretched outlook of the teachers and workers, who had their salaries unpaid for months. The tablets given to the young ones which looked like human capital build-up faced the opposition of a dancing prospect in the person of Adeleke who was making the sacrifices look uneventful by his own personality and his façade success as against indepth success, so far, in the greater Nigerian polity featuring a former senator with defective intellectual background. It reminds one of the persons of Barkin Zuwo of Kano State and Mbakwe of Imo State who both exhibited such tendencies; that is, spartan and dancing steps, which in the end landed them in prison as the boots of BuhariIdiagbon caught up with them on the stage in 1982.
Shifting to heart infrastructure was what both Mbakwe and Barkin Zuwo exhibited. Mbakwe cried to Shehu Shagari like Aregbesola cried for bail out and Barkin Zuwo was feeding his poor populace by not keeping any money in the bank but in the government house and appeasing to their heart to accept him as one of them as he had no known bank account like them.
Now the outliers in the Osun elections are the changed attitude of the Osogbo people and the Omisore – Ife stance of: “give us Omisore, the iconoclast”. Omisore has refused to go away from the Osun people’s mindset, notwithstanding his detention experience.
The conclusion of the election is certainly going to be a drift of either All Progressives Congress or Peoples Democratic Party to the mud pond set by Omisore as INEC feels that he is still in the contest; and that means an outlier decision that could never find the average Osun person agreeing to, but makes for tolerance. People would have wished an outright re-run of APC and PDP alone.
And, indeed, tolerance is the greatest gift of the mind like it is said by experts in behavioural sciences.
Nigeria is going to see what it looks like tolerating the Omisore’s brand as 2019 elections beckon. It is going to be difficult but that is where understanding human emotion lies and making the shifts that move countries forward or keep them in the abyss. The expectations are that the abyss should be avoided and whatever APC or PDP makes out of their victories, the personality of an iconoclast still counts, and it must be factored into governance in Nigeria; as the de facto watchdog, while Nigeria’s await the free press to fully assume the de jure and de facto watchdog. The agenda setting of the free press did not give clues to what Osun became as at the inconclusive result seen; hence, more work for the free press, I mean the press not owned by emotional hackers. Professor Victor C. Ariole University of Lagos