Comic Relief! Making Sense of Mimiko’s Zenith Labour Party

Former Governor of Ondo State, Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, has caught the funny bug. He cuts the sharp, narrow silhouette of an aggressive jester. Only a jester can be audacious enough to do what he has been doing the last few years. You couldn’t have forgotten so soon that he started as a member of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) in 1999. He joined the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2003 and left for the Labour Party (LP) in 2007 to run for governor. Towards the end of his eight-year tenure, he moved back to PDP. Recently, he returned to LP. Finally, last week, he left LP for the Zenith Labour Party, allegedly accusing APC’s National Chairman, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, of using labour unions to hijack the party. However, in the annals and cut-throat world of Nigerian politics, the successful politicians have always passed off as ‘made-men’ or the Nigerian version of Italian gang-lords; the unsuccessful ones however, always pass off as lesser gangsters - disposable muscles at the bottom of the totem pole of the country’s political class. More often than not, the latter manifest on the political circuit like 50-cent prostitutes, or N50 commercial sex workers, if you like, jumping from one political party to the other, in desperate pursuit of the next plum political office or deal. Mimiko emerges as Ondo’s most pitiful politician. Like a starved greyhound, Mimiko, has swallowed his own vomit.

If there was an avatar for instability and inconsistency, Iroko, as he is fondly called, would clearly fit the bill. To avid followers of Mimiko’s chequered trajectory, this recent development did not come as a surprise. Now, his whirlwind soap opera romance with the ZLP has been likened to a moth’s fatal attraction to flame, by political pundits. He will certainly get burnt, so argued a source within the LP.