OSUN: Defending PDP-Fadahunsi On World Bank Grant

By ISAAC OLUSESI

Think of what it would mean if everyone has same intelligent quotient (IQ). And think of what it could have meant for the State of Osun, Nigeria, if all that matters were to be lies like water from faucet, the manner of Senator Francis Fadahunsi hangs on his neck a ring of tragic irony of lying through his teeth, a sardonic virulence against reason, playing haughty, naughty and nasty a front for the oppositions’ political blitzkrieg, apparently to heat the polity and cause obstruction in the way of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state.

When the lotus strategies of opening up internal dissension and division in the inner recess of the Osun APC topmost hierarchy failed him, Fadahunsi, of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) extraction, currently representing Osun East, demonstrated the avant-garde stuff and proceeded to dynamite the state to earn free, cheap publicity for his very discomfiture, largely damaging leak: “Osun government has nothing to show for #9billion World Bank Fund,” credited to him, that came first as a whisper, a trickle and then, an uproar, thundering rumble, rancour and decibel of murmurs. And by that, he has drawn the sword of partisan wrangling from its scabbard, appropriating, albeit unruly, the task of mobilization, orientation and sensitization of the governed against Governor Gboyega Oyetola.

But the Distinguished Senator goofed both in circumvallation and contravallation, diving into the abyss of dissent and rebellion, not in the closet, with his gigantic scheme of notorious lies in the public glare. His brutish, pedestrian lie only acquired the reputation and attribute of incomprehensibility and had himself pulled down from the pedestal of immiscible integrity and profundity of ‘Distinguished’ prefix, to the denizen of shame as his regurgitated grand hogwash lie of ‘’#9billion World Bank grant to Osun’’ with noisy insistence is actually $20.5million US dollars World Bank Fund as health grant to Osun upon Oyetola’s well accredited high performances in the Saving One Million Lives programme.

The refutation humiliated the lie spit by Fadahunsi, the state chief thriller, jester; collapsed his grand scale bid to warm himself politically into the heart of Osun people en route lying adventure; and crashed the prefix to his name with a deafening cacophony and devastating thud in a heap of open shame of false, incorrect information disseminated to the unsuspecting publics by one who ought to know and he knows but chose to be spurious! In the familiar animal analogy, Fadahunsi has the characterization of a lazy assessor of public affairs, proverbially an idle baboon being fed by the monkey. The Senator, living in opulence, self-indulgent luxury is similarly only being fed with false information, digesting such tales hook, line and sinker and acting on them, ever prepared to have the “Fulani’s cow-stick laid across his (the) back”, in the George Orwellian characterization in Animal Farm.

What came from Fadahunsi with the proficiency of a stubborn prostitute, asking for her money after the act, is not a trivial matter, not one undeserving of attention. It is his huge flotsam of damaged truth, debris of baseless hints, unproved allegation, chunk of mere noises, unpolished lies, unfounded disclosure, untrue story, sinister tales and un-Distinguished commentary on Osun affairs, deliberately looking away from Oyetola’s development projects in all nooks and crannies in the state, connecting the Osun economy to Osun wealth and attracting investments.

It is a case of Fadahunsi, more sinning against Osun than being sinned against. How? The $20.5million World Health Organization fund, ‘warehoused’ in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) was only released in tranches to Osun upon due process after project survey, examination and auditing, and Oyetola judiciously committed the fund to the construction, rehabilitation and revitalization of the Osun 332 Primary Healthcare Centers (PHCs), one per ward in the state, with 256 of the PHCs inaugurated and in full use, including quite a number of them in Fadahunsi’s Obokun local government area and his Ijesaland, with 25 of such PHCs in the state all commissioned for full use in just three days! A feat, no government in the nation’s history has achieved. But the Senator, not a new face out of the old body, has oiled the wheel of lying and raised fawning hypocrisy to the status of his own kind of virtue as alibi for playing public favour-seeking pseudo game, merely demeaning self. He is a vivid example of poor peddling of malicious lies, what Antonia Gramsci (1891-1937) called “the war of maneuver” in one of his several writings on the political unrests in Italy, following the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Oyetola’s straight giant strides in health care for which the global health fund was meant and spent also included the rehabilitation of the General Hospitals in Ifetedo and Ejigbo to the standards of the latest medical technology elsewhere in the world; implementation of 100 percent of Consolidated Medical Salary Structure (CONMESS) and Consolidated Health Salary Structure (CONHESS) for all health workers in the state; completion of 120 bed wards and units of Doctors’ Quarters at Asubiaro Specialist Hospital, Osogbo, state capital; 600 surgical operations in collaboration with a non-government organization; 350 bed spaces isolation centres built; test kits, drugs and other medical items worth #251.8million, procured and supplied to all health centres and hospitals; #100,000 handout to all health centres as running cost; state Intensive Care Unit (ICU) equipped with ventilators that have continued to contain the COVID-19 pandemic; and invested about #630 million in the state Health Insurance Scheme.

Yet, Oyetola has not exhausted the global health fund, domiciled with CBN as government interventions in the health sector, on-going, are attracting warmest commendations from the global high-ups. MS Claire Pierangelo, the US Consul, wrote of Oyetola, in the first quarter of the year: “We are aware that Osun is one of the best states in the implementation of Health Insurance Scheme. We must congratulate the state on this feat particularly for being the model for a programme around the country”. And Osun is adjudged the Best in the 2019 PHC under One Roof assessment by the
Federal Ministry of Health.

Fadahunsi’s paranoid defence of his lies, for him, not a self-indulgent talk, is, if he must be relevant in the state PDP top-secret opposition missions, then he must insinuate the total triumph of his presence and readiness through the accumulation of a thick dossier that casts more doubts on his image inexorably, bite by bite, exciting the opposition elements in the state to see the hairy hands of hoary fate in the further development changes in Osun; activating oppositions to see the thin, skeletal hands of evil in the diverse infrastructure development projects in the state; and accelerating oppositions to have a hung of how and where Osun government gets finances of the infrastructure projects across the state; while propelling himself on the dangerous lying escapades but sure to have self-degenerated from the serious Senate business to the comic, from the sublime to the ridiculous that would rather obscure his image as Osun people do not share any dogged obsession with his cult of heady lies. His goal, a variation of the PDP lotus strategies is to penetrate the heart, mind and soul of APC and still remain invisible.

In the main, the ecstatic quest in Fadahunsi’s to join the opposition PDP egghead at the state level from his Ijesa cave, has goaded him into grotesque distortion of truth of Osun affairs, manifest disdain for fact finding about Osun affairs and contempt for unbiased assessment of Osun affairs, spiritedly flagging his lying preferment. If wishes were horses, he would have sculptured for himself more mouths to spew forth more lies vertically and horizontally at a time, had the Creator of man forgotten to fix up just one, glued in the anatomy of man.

It is for the Fadahunsis of all nations that the dictum: “make haste slowly” is invented. Let the Senator go to his Ilase-Ijesa backyard and he will find the Niagra of encomium if he can try the mythological words of a Latin poet Publius Papinius Statius, “Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.”

OLUSESI is Assistant Director, Directorate of Publicity, Research & Strategy, All Progressives Congress (APC), State of Osun