Fayose’s insufferable political rascality: Accusing Makinde, as Fayose did without any shred of evidence, of orchestrating the Oyo school abductions to embarrass President Tinubu, is arrant nonsense which can only emanate from a diseased mind. It is unbridled, insufferable rascality, the height of political irresponsibility… Is Fayose unhinged? There is no doubt about that. But his gravely diminishing mental health does not give him any license to make utterances that could further aggravate an already festering national tragedy.
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Nigeria is at a crossroads – politically, economically and socially. There is no easy way out of the bind. You believe President Bola Tinubu’s preachment of ‘Renewed Hope’ at your own peril because blind trust is always a risky proposition. And that is what the administration wants Nigerians to do – trust blindly. They want you to believe, despite your lived experience, that the worst is over and Nigeria is on the cusp of a new dawn, a promising turning point.
The country is not and those who are making the bogus claim, simply to wheedle the unwary, know they are lying. But they peddle such lies with a straight face, nevertheless, because they know many Nigerians, beyond being docile, are pathetically gullible.
Which is why they continue to tolerate the insufferable rascality of former Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, who constantly spews toxic language. To dismiss his horrible utterances as evidence of an unhinged mind is to miss the point. While not doubting that he is unbalanced going by his unbecoming conduct, that should not absolve him of responsibility.
On Friday, May 15, 2026, terrorists attacked three schools – one secondary and two primary – in the Ahoro Esinele community, Oriire Local Government Area, Oyo State taking along with them 39 children aged between two and 16 and seven teachers. A teacher was killed in the course of the raid. As if that was not bad enough, three days later, a mathematics teacher, Michael Oyedokun, was beheaded and the video clip of the gruesome decapitation posted online.
Families are grieving. Friends are mourning. Hapless citizens are flummoxed. The entire country is on edge. Strong-willed individuals have been brought to their knees in agony. The best anyone could do in the circumstance is not to politicise the tragedy.
But on Monday, June 1, Fayose did the unthinkable – politicise the heart-wrenching saga – when he alleged, without any shred of evidence, that the Oyo State governor, Seyi Makinde, orchestrated the abductions to embarrass Tinubu. In a bizarre attempt to exonerate the ever Teflon President, Fayose, a former governor, now claims that state governments bear primary responsibility for local security challenges.
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Questioning Makinde’s response to the macabre event, Fayose claimed that political considerations may have influenced its handling. “Let me branch to Oyo State, before you get to the president in the hierarchy of leadership and governance, there is local government, there is state; state has security votes and there are people that are supposed to be working,” he said.
Accusing Makinde of failing to respond timeously, he said: “In Oyo State, I strongly believe, though I might be wrong, but this sometimes might be orchestrated. The governor of Oyo State had his nomination and that of his candidates in the face of this abduction. He did not take any action, no steps were taken, and it was after those nominations that he went to the families to visit them… I sometimes believe that the abduction at Oyo School was orchestrated by the Oyo State Government to blackmail President Tinubu.”
That is arrant nonsense which can only emanate from a diseased mind. It is unbridled, insufferable rascality, the height of political irresponsibility.
So, Makinde will organise the abduction Nigerian citizens, schoolchildren for that matter and their teachers, by hardened terrorists just to demonise Tinubu? Perhaps, when the abduction didn’t seem to have convinced Nigerians enough to hate Tinubu, he also instructed them to behead the mathematics teacher. How callous can a human being be!
Is Fayose unhinged? There is no doubt about that. But his gravely diminishing mental health does not give him any license to make utterances that could further aggravate an already festering national tragedy.
The fact that a man who has been a state governor could be “so consumed by the politics of vindictiveness, vileness, deceit and hate, that he would further endanger the lives of those in captivity and distract security agents from handling” what, indubitably is a sensitive job, as Makinde noted in his response, leaves much to be desired.
Fayose said governors should take the blame when security fails in their states because they are the chief security officers. But he is lying to himself. When it comes to security, governors have no say, the president calls the shot because he is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federation.
Fayose knows better. When he was impeached as Ekiti State governor on October 16, 2006, by the State House of Assembly over allegations of financial corruption and serial killings and then President Olusegun Obasanjo declared a state of emergency in the State, why didn’t he, as the fabled chief security officer, stay back to mobilise his loyal troops on a counter offensive? Instead, he fled the country.
He further accused Makinde of failing to respond promptly to the abductions because he prioritised political activities over extant insecurity matters. But that is hogwash. He wanted the governor to put on hold his party’s primary elections at a time when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has set rigid electoral timelines, but he had no word for Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) that went ahead with their own primaries nationwide.
Fayose conveniently forgot that on the same day terrorists struck in Oyo State, they also attacked Mussa Primary and Junior Secondary School in the Askira-Uba local government area of Borno State.
Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume, who represents Borno South Senatorial District where the attack took place, told AFP that about 42 children were abducted. But some accounts put the number at over 50 – children aged between two and five years. Even as all national attention is focused on the Oyo abductions, the Borno infants, taken from their nursery, are still marooned in the forests, almost forgotten.
Borno is an APC state. Tinubu, who is the leader of APC, didn’t call off the primaries there. Going by Fayose’s illogical claim, do we now say that Governor Babagana Zulum orchestrated the abduction of Borno schoolchildren in order to embarrass President Tinubu?
And since the Oyo and Borno abductions, there has been a surge in insecurity across the country. In Ayegunle Bunu, Kogi State, two people were killed and 30 others abducted. Violence in Gwom-Ajang village, Plateau State, led to five deaths. All these are APC states. Did the governors also orchestrate the attacks to embarrass Tinubu? That is how ridiculous Fayose’s claim is.
But he is not alone in these perfidious tales. During a recent interview on ARISE News, Minister of Defence Christopher Musa claimed that the March bomb attacks in Maiduguri, which killed at least 23 people and injured over 140 others, were calculated attempts to force a cancellation of Tinubu’s state visit to the United Kingdom and weaken Nigeria’s international image.
On April 14, at the launch of the Nigerian Revenue Service (NRS) corporate headquarters in Abuja, Senate President Godswill Akpabio claimed that the current spate of insecurity in the country will stop two weeks after the 2027 general election, alleging that political opponents, frustrated by Tinubu’s performance, were deliberately sponsoring the violence.
These hackneyed tales by Fayose and his ilk are desperate attempts to shield Tinubu, who has failed woefully on the issue of securing lives and properties, from well-deserved blame. It behoves Nigerians to hold his feet to the fire as he did to his predecessors.
Following the April 14, 2014 vicious attack where 276 teenage schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists from the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, Tinubu went on a ferocious twitter rant claiming that the Jonathan administration lacked the capacity to protect Nigerians.
In one of the tweets, he wrote: “A government unable to protect its citizens deserves to be queried,” insisting that in any civilised country, Jonathan should have resigned. Not only that, speaking at the palace of the Emir of Kano on December 8, 2014 when he led APC chieftains to condole with the monarch on the multiple bombings at the city’s central mosque, Tinubu blamed Jonathan for the insurgency.
“The Federal Government has failed the nation in its entrusted responsibility to track insurgency. It is a leadership failure and it is an embarrassment to the nation. We must rebuild our intelligence and make it work properly and efficiently to bring lasting peace to this country. The current insecurity in the country has nothing to do with religion. It is rather an issue of leadership deficiency and we must not allow this to continue,” he pontificated.
Earlier, he excoriated Jonathan over attacks by Boko Haram in Borno and Adamawa states. “The slaughtering of Christian worshippers is strongly condemnable. It calls into question the competence of Jonathan to protect Nigerians,” he tweeted on January 29, 2014.
By April 2014, amid escalating violence including the Nyanya bombing in Abuja, Tinubu doubled down: “My heart bleeds for our people and the country over the deaths in Nyanya. A government unable to protect its citizens deserves to be queried.”
Apparently, Tinubu’s heart no longer bleeds. But Nigerians agreed with him then and threw Jonathan out of Aso Rock. Eleven years thence, insecurity still persists on a scale far worse than during Jonathan’s presidency, and the clueless Tinubu, who has displayed absolute lack of competence in statecraft, wants Nigerians to compensate his own abject leadership failure with a second term willy-nilly.
That advocacy which is what Fayose is championing through his utterly insufferable political rascality is irresponsibility pro max. Those on this appalling trajectory don’t mean well for the country.
