BY ISAAC OLUSESI
In Nigeria, State of Osun, Senator Francis Fadahunsi is not yet discharged, going by the Monday, this week, ‘Frank Talk,’ a radio programme aired in Osogbo, state capital.
He simply featured self-contradictions, and acted the Shakespearean creation. What is known is the fact that he had earlier reportedly stated, “Osun has nothing to show for the World Bank health care grant,” and the fact that his spokesman, Pastor Segun Progress, in a disavowal roared on air: “Senator Fadahunsi never made any such statement. Osun really needs deliverance.” But somewhere between the two facts is a foggy terrain walked into by Fadahunsi that Monday which defiled accuracy, expressing treachery and betrayal in dissonance with his conscience and the conscience of his spokesperson.
And if Fadahunsi had any defence, it ought to have been a profound defence of the irreducible spotlight-the disavowal, already in the public scrutiny and adjudged circumstantially sufficient to acquit and discharge Fadahunsi free of his outright falsehood on the World Health Organisation (WHO) fund and health care of Osun. But the Senator succumbed to the badly riddled internal cohesion of his People Democratic Party (PDP) and exposed his different personages – ‘No, he didn’t say that,’ yesterday; and ‘Yes, he has just said it,’ today. His configuration on the $20million WHO health grant to Osun oscillated, albeit erratic, was helped by a whiff of conspiracy of the PDP Elders, personified in the party’s Acting State Chairman, Sunday Atidade’s invocation of party cohesion that dramatically reinforced the claim already disclaimed by Fadahunsi through his spokesperson.
Atidade, the assuming arrester of Fadahunsi’s initial disclaimer, baked the cake of reinforcement and provided the ice on the cake that illuminated the disorderly dynamics of PDP’s internal mechanism. The irony is compelling: Distinguished Senator, supposedly to be aloof, adding up the mystiques of his office, one to be treated with courtesies and respect is one now found hoisting at full mast the flag of disunity in the state to accentuate danger signals frantically flashed for the state, awful reminiscent of the exploits of the condemned conspirators of the British countryside. What was “Ilesa General Hospital in my constituency is not rehabilitated from the health grant,” said by Fadahunsi on ‘Frank Talk,’ with the impurity of the heart meant to achieve? To cause social dislocation in the state, threatening to its very fabrics?
In the era of unreason prior to the APC-Rauf Aregbesola government, Osun had a sour taste of the PDP’s museum of politics of malignant dislocation that crept in unabated from the 16years of the PDP misrule at the centre and Fadahunsi, part of the monstrous system that put Osun through the mills of unedifying process of misery across the alley and abyss of damper, remains one of the PDP custodians of errors who nth time told their willing flunkeys that the wrinkles of the party‘s misrule were in fact beauty lines.
The mood of Osun was that of bewilderment, not a few of the ‘Frank Talk’ radio listeners were clearly alarmed at Fadahunsi’s inept readings of one General Hospital per senatorial district for rehabilitation modality. Accordingly, Asubiaro Specialist Hospital, Osogbo, Osun Central; Ejigbo General Hospital, Osun West and Ifetedo General Hospital in Osun East. Is Ifetedo not the constituent of the Senator, representing Osun East in the federal parliament? No one was persuaded that Fadahunsi meant well for the state; Osun people raved at his intent to put the state out of joint as they would not harbour any such dislocation, grumbling to uproot the APC-Oyetola government but the government cannot be uprooted out of office because it a
Godfearing outfit.
In Osun, Oyetola runs a people-centered government with leadership and governance as expression of people’s will, and also consistently inoculates the Osun public service with high sense of accountability to the public. Fadahunsi’s lie as nauseating as it is provocative cannot therefore be an index of God’s anger or displeasure. After all, the fact that the lie has not questioned Oyetola’s government distinctions on all fronts has rendered the lie barren and untenable. And Oyetola is not even riled by the lie, yet he has not for a moment held Fadahunsi in any disdain; he has warm memory of him.
And the 1-hour radio ‘Frank Talk, monitored by me showed that Fadahunsi had a rough deal, trying to respond to questions as he was almost trapped in the interview elevator, grasping for breadth. His logic was weak, and spiced with the PDP conspiracy. He talked false that belied the truth. There were “ifs” in his talk that swayed his determination to want to rubbish the APC government into mucky waters but the “ifs” remains an authoritative instance of scholarship of falsehood, ignorance, confusion and misunderstanding inaugurated on the crest of opposition bout to drown the truth of the matter. Not scholarship of facts and figures on Osun health and WHO health fund. His distorted understanding of how the health fund was spent, with the unspent still ‘warehoused’ in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is the loudest voice of straight hatred for the government of APC in the state, a didactic stick wielded in a classic case of fuzzy disgust for APC, the enemy to be zapped.
Pity Fadahunsi, if you will. I gave myself ample time and concluded that his ‘U-turn at the radio house on the health grant to Osun, reinforced by external factors decked in the garb of Osun PDP’s elders practically made him unhappy, sad and mournful inside, pointing him up as a man of double deals, post-fixed with ‘common informer’- “a cynic, pessimist, gossip, lair and sycophant, with pity or disgust for the evil in the sycophant’s gestures, sacrificing any semblance of honour or virtue and reducing self to ridicule,” in the words of Anatole France , a French novelist, poet and respected social critic of his time who relied on a deep sense of fact-findings to make his brilliant satires socially relevant and meaningful.
Acquitted and discharged or not, Fadahunsi’s ‘’statute’’ on Osun healthcare ‘’is a currency of mediocrity which he stamps with his own portrait,’’ quoting Ralph Emerson, the Late American philosopher. And for note, the statute has no obsessive meaning as it does not have any compulsive visibility, an indispensable element for public support in Osun.
OLUSESI is Assistant Director, Directorate of Publicity, Research & Strategy, All Progressives Congress (APC), State of Osun
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