BABAFEMI FALAYI – RANDOM NOTES
Ekiti has further proven to us that a people’s government is not one that directly caters for the poor, it is not the one that empathizes with the lower class, it is not one that organizes selective rural empowerments and politicized poverty ‘elevation’ programmes that only make the lower class oscillate between poverty and penury.
A people’s government is one that is acceptable to the middle class and accessible by the lower class. We need to understand that the prosperity of the middle class is the happiness of the lower class hence when the middle class is comfortable the lower class also is.
Now, if you look at the majority of those who constitute the middle class, they are the civil servants and government workers. When this group is hungry and angry, the lower class will suffer. It is a direct effect! That is how it works in a capitalist society. Such government is disconnected from the middle class and aloof to the lower class. Any government that does not have the support of the middle class is a goner.
How can a governor be running an ‘elitist’ government where he has put a price on everything including higher education that even the elites need to take loans to pay the price for the university education of their children? If Fayose is Mr. Rice then Fayemi is Mr. Price!
Apart from eating in local bukaterias, buying roasted plaitains by the roadside, apart from riding on a commercial motorcycle to the Government House, Fayose as a sitting governor had visited villages and helped farmers to make heaps on their farms. He was accessible to the lower class. The people saw these! The people heard these!
Thus, it is a mental misfortune for anybody to think it was bags of rice that are beyond surplus in the golden fields of Igbemo-Ekiti that made Ekiti, the Fountain of Knowledge to vote Fayose. It is only an evidence of sheer cerebral reduction or political shamefacedness on those who think the highly intellectual Ekti people prefer stomach infrastructure to social infrastructure that does not exist. Of course, it is bags of conscience not of rice that gave Fayose the victory.
Now, every other government in the southwest is on its toes, the victory of Fayose has made them to begin to review their anti-people policies or how can an incumbent governor loose in all the LGAs including his home base? Indeed the fear of the electorates is the beginning of wisdom.
Give it to the Ekiti people, they had to choose between Scylla and Charybdis, they prefered to hide under a punctured umbrella than align with the broom that whips.
