If there was a prize for the most robust, sustained and unsparing criticism of Ayo Fayose as governor of Ekiti, as aspirant to that office and as a castaway from it, this column would be the runaway winner.
It has excoriated him again and again over his ill-conceived Integrated Poultry Project that gulped more than a billion Naira – double that amount in today’s money – without delivering a single egg. It has knocked him for his morbidity of thought and expression, for disrobing, in a manner of speaking, his own mother in the public square just to score a cheap political point, for his scattershot approach to governance, for his verbal incontinence, and for a general disposition that borders on megalomania.
By my reckoning, only General Ibrahim Babangida, the former military president, has figured more often in this space than Fayose as an unedifying subject, if not as an outright villain.
Seeing that this is yet another piece on Fayose, those who have found my strictures on him most agreeable would sit back, confident that this is going to be another sandbagging for the so and so. Those who have always found the strictures tiresome and uncharitable, and have communicated their displeasure to me with the forthrightness that becomes Fayose so well,will most likely yawn, shake their heads and turn the page.
Today, I am not going to follow that beaten path, and it is not just out of a desire to exercise a columnist’s sovereign right not to be too predictable. I am going to disappoint Fayose’s implacable critics who count me as their patron, and I am going to surprise his teeming admirers who hold me in especial loathing.
I do so not cavalierly but with great deliberation, on a matter that admits of no equivocation and no prevarication. The merit of the matter at issue is so transparent that anyone who cannot fathom it and rejoice in it has got to be practically unconscious.
To come right out it, I am thinking of the international airport that Fayose is set to build in the State capital, Ado-Ekiti. Construction will start any moment from now, inside sources tell me.
In their commentary, the usual naysayers —with whom I must today respectfully part company — have exhausted all the entries in the Thesaurus for “undesirable,” but they are not done yet. These people, mind you, are the elite. They did not vote for Fayose. Instead, they slandered him relentlessly.
Now, having catered adequately to the stomach infrastructure of the adoring masses, Fayose is against his better judgment giving the misguided elite an airport, and instead of praising him for being magnanimous when he could have been vindictive, they are denouncing him.
Some of them are claiming that the project was in fact conceived by former Governor Segun Oni, and that Fayose merely appropriated it. Such pettiness! What really counts is the person giving life and form to what was no more than a dream in Oni’s head. That person is Fayose. And he is doing so against all odds – plummeting oil revenues, unpaid salaries and pensions, educational levies and mounting unrest.
It is heartening that he is not in the least fazed by these pesky developments, nor by the base ingratitude of the elite, aforementioned. If the elite are too blinded by spite to see that the project is being undertaken in their best interest and that they stand to profit the most from it, well might Fayose say in pained resignation: So much for all their vaunted book learning.
The project will go ahead whether they like it or not.
I can now reveal that the facility will be officially known as Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan International Airport, Ado-Ekiti, with the telegraphic address GEJIA. This gesture is in grateful appreciation of the former president’s role in ensuring Fayose’s return to power eight years after an ignominious exit, and subsequently keeping Ekiti off-limits to other political parties.
The airport is also being named in Dr Jonathan’s honour because he has promised to employ his new status as an acclaimed and much sought-after international statesman to help mobilise funds and resources that will make the airport second to none in the ECOWAS region if not in Africa.
Those who think this is going to be another monument to folly are mistaken. The potential is vast, and it is sure to translate into actuality once the project is completed. In fact, I can reveal that the aviation community, led by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, has already asked to be identified with it at every stage.
Consider just a few of the staggering gains that are guaranteed to flow from the project.
Now, there is no academic specialism so abstruse or recondite that you will not find several scholars of Ekiti extraction at its cutting edge. For lack of opportunities at home, these scholars are scattered all over the world. A good many of them would like to give their homeland the benefit of their expertise through weekend seminars and boot camps.
But they have been deterred by the prospect of being mugged at Lagos airport or along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and at points in between, or being crushed by unlatched containers falling off rickety trucks.
A direct flight to Ado-Ekiti from London, Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, Moscow, New York, Boston, Bologna, Berlin, Vienna, Washington DC, Los Angeles and other centres of advanced learning where they reside is exactly what these scholars need to help consolidate Ekiti’s place as the Fountain of Knowledge.
With such a facility in place, the much-garlanded poet and Distinguished Professor of English, Dr Niyi Osundare, could take off from New Orleans in the morning, fly direct to Ado-Ekiti for an evening of poetry reading and return the very next day to his base in time to conduct a post-doctoral seminar on the Poetics and Aesthetics of Chaucer, Aeschylus, Okigbo and Walcott, with nary a hint of stress.
For foreign-based Ekiti indigenes, a visit home would no longer be an endurance test, with long waits at connecting points. You just fly direct into Ado-Ekiti, and within an hour, you’ll be home tucking into a hot meal of original pounded yam, not the insipid, synthetic stuff they sell in supermarkets.
Intrigued by Governor Fayose’s ideology of stomach infrastructure, some of the world’s leading social scientists have been studying that phenomenon, as well as the role of okada riders as agents of political mobilisation and social enforcement, albeit from a distance. With direct international flights to Ado- Ekiti, they can now converge on the entire state to conduct definitive fieldwork that will take these developments to the next level and place them in the proper epistemological context.
These scholars can sniff a paradigm shift or a theoretical breakthrough from the end of the earth, and they believe Ekiti is where it is happening. Hooray to the Fountain.
Consider also the boom that tourism will experience. I can already see jetliners from all over the world bringing tourists to the enchanting but under-patronised Ikogosi Springs and other wonders with which the Ekiti landscape is strewn, not forgetting the Idanre Hills close by in Ondo State.
Europeans and Americans seeking escape from the harsh Northern Hemisphere summer will flock to Ekiti to savour the equable clime of Efon Alaye and Iyin-Ekiti, less than an hour’s ride from the international airport.
The construction of JEGIA will create and sustain thousands of jobs, transform Ekiti’s economy from rural to global, boost trade and commerce and, in the process, generate so much revenue that the state will have to face the difficult task of figuring out what to do with such sudden affluence.
The foregoing is only a conspectus of what Ekiti State stands to gain by Fayose’s visionary plan to build an international airport in Ado-Ekiti. It is nothing less than a stroke of genius.
The usual critics can scoff to their hearts’ content. On this one, I am solidly behind him. Let the building commence. I can hardly wait to fly into the airport direct from Peoria, Illinois, confident that I would be home in Kabba within an hour of clearing my luggage.
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