When You Can Understand The Drummer, The Singers, and The Dancer By Hon Rotimi Makinde

Politics is rarely a quiet affair of manifestos and policy papers. It is a performance staged under the watchful eyes of history, where the drummer sits in the middle, the singers line up by seniority, and the dancers move to whatever rhythm they hear. If you can read the drummer, the singers, and the dancer, then you understand the current of politics in Ife Federal Constituency. If you cannot, you will spend time, resources, and goodwill, only to discover that the music changed while you were listening.

The most consistent drummer here is not a man. It is money. _“Olówó ló ń lùlù, aláìní ló ń jó títí owó fi tán.”_ The rich man beats the drum, the poor man dances until his money finishes. Money does not debate or consult elders. It arrives quietly, reshapes incentives, and sets the tempo for meetings that were scheduled for something else. Once it starts beating, yesterday’s position softens, today’s priority shifts, and tomorrow’s outcome becomes suddenly clear to everyone except those who came to listen for conviction. Like a wildfire in the harmattan, it spreads with alarming speed, leaping from ward to ward, from youth forum to elders’ caucus, leaving behind a landscape where trust burns faster than ambition. By morning, many will swear they have always heard the same rhythm, even when the drummer changed in the middle of the night.

The drummer may be far away, but his beat is loud enough for the dancer to echo it, and rich enough to make even a wealthy man dance. Distance does not matter when the drum is funded from outside. A call, a transfer, a promise from afar is enough to change the rhythm in Ile-Ife by morning. The dancers do not ask who is drumming. They move, because stopping means losing out. That is how consensus gets reechoed even when the original meeting was one-sided, and how politics stops being about conviction and becomes about resonance with the money behind the sound.

The singers are the stakeholders, the elders, the opinion leaders who know every lyric of loyalty, unity, and discipline. They sing with conviction, and they sing loudest when the microphone is open and the hall is full. But listen closely and you will hear that they rarely choose the song. They choose the key that carries furthest and resonates with those holding the microphone. _“Ẹni tó bá sanwó fún orin, ni ó ń yan orin tí a ó kọ.”_ He who pays for the song chooses the song that will be sung. Political history everywhere shows that when process is replaced by patronage, the voice of the community begins to echo the voice of the highest bidder. Over time, the singers learn that their credibility is tied not to principle but to proximity to the drummer. When that happens, the people stop being sung to and start being managed.

The dancers are the delegates, the ward executives, the committed members who will carry the flag forward. They are expected to move with discipline and purpose, yet a dancer without agency becomes a performer for hire. _“Bí ilẹ̀ bá gbóná, gbogbo ohun tó wà lórí rẹ̀ á gbóná pọ̀.”_ When the ground is hot, everything on it gets hot together. This is why money behaves like a wildfire in internal contests. It does not burn one person. It burns process, it burns the idea that service and record can stand on their own, and it burns the belief that a vote is a sacred trust. Once the fire passes, what remains is a cycle of cynicism where everyone assumes the next contest will be decided the same way.

Every political community eventually faces a choice between transaction and trust, and Ife is at that point now. If the rhythm of money alone determines the outcome, the result may stand on paper but not in the minds of the people. Those who feel bypassed will disengage, and a house that cannot argue and reconcile internally will struggle to persuade externally. If, however, the process is allowed to run as scheduled and observed, the outcome will carry legitimacy. Losers who were heard are more likely to stay and build. Winners who earned their mandate will govern with fewer questions about how they got there. That is how a contest becomes momentum.

There is a hard truth that must be spoken plainly. If calamity and death cannot humble a man, but cash alone can revive a sorrowful heart, then legacy and integrity become afterthoughts. A town’s hope rests in those it watches triumph. And when some men hold the steering wheel, their conduct on the road tells you where the journey will end. When integrity dies, a society stops producing leaders and starts producing survivors. Survivors do not drive for the destination; they drive for the next fuel stop.

So a word to the drummer: play with restraint. A word to the singers: remember that songs outlive the night. A word to the dancers: your steps belong to you, even when the drum is loud. When the fire dies, history will ask one question of this moment. Did we choose through a process we can defend, or did we outsource the choice to the loudest drum?

Ife calls itself _“orísun ìṣèlú Yorùbá”_—the source of Yoruba politics. Sources matter. If the source is polluted by the idea that only money can conduct the tune, the entire stream downstream will carry that taste. History in Ife has a long memory. It remembers those who respected the process, and it remembers those who replaced it with noise. The choice, as always, is ours.