Who is the Thief Between Agagu and Mimilo?

By

Dr. Wunmi Akintide

WUMIONE@aol.com

The next election in Ondo State, if ever the whole election  nationwide, is not going to end up in total mayhem and confusion and be summarily canceled, is going to go down to the wire because our fumbling  President has made it so.

He has simplified for us the choice of who best deserves to be elected Governor by limiting the choice to only two candidates out of close to a dozen or more candidates that want to be the next  Governor of what used to be one of the poorest states in the Commonwealth of Nigeria in 1983 and up until mid 1990s. Most Nigerians reading this article would recall that Ondo State, after so many years of being treated like a pariah state by the giant Federal Government, suddenly shot herself into prominence by finally claiming her right  as an oil producing state in Nigeria. By so doing she suddenly became qualified to draw from the 13% of all revenues flowing to the whole country from oil and liquefied gas. It was a Napoleonic rise and a sea change that should have transformed our state and made life a lot easier for all her citizens across the board, if those resources had been properly managed. The truth is that all the money was stolen by pen robber- Governors and leaders who love their own pockets more than they ever love our state and people by pursuing white elephant projects all over the place. I was the pioneer Director of DIFFRI in Ondo State and I know how some Governors award contracts to dig wells in communities, but insist that the contractors be paid the price of boreholes without any conscience. Good leaders do things that eye can see and that generations yet unborn can feel and touch and benefit from. It makes little sense when a Governor tars 600 kilometers of rural roads for trillions of Naira. Come on, give me a break! Go tell that to the mountains!

I recall on August 16, 1983 when The NPN Federal Government at the time had tried in vain to impose Omoboriowo on Ondo State voters by openly rigging the election for him. The day light robbery was not taken lightly by our people. When hell broke loose and Akure was suddenly turned into an inferno, Omoboriowo had to be smuggled out of town, wearing a lady's skirt inside a Police jeep, in much the same way like the former Governor of Bayelsa State  had managed to fool the London Police to get away from the Law.

Ondo State voters were ready to maim and to kill in defense of their votes. If they were prepared to do that in 1983 when Ondo State was a totally bankrupt state living on mere crumbs and doll out from the Federal, only God knows how they would react, if their votes are stolen again in a do or die battle that our President has declared in covering up for his cronies like Olusegun Agagu et seq who have arguably stolen a lot more money than they would ever need, if they live for a thousand years. I am deliberately using the word "arguable" because we were told Agagu's name was on the list initially forwarded to the Presidency by EFCC, before it was doctored by the President himself who then sent back a list putting his own search light on the names of his political enemies in large part.

Ondo State voters were expecting him to add the name of Mimiko whom he had openly blackmailed as a thief on his last visit to our state in order to let Agagu cruise home to victory thru false pretenses and leaving voters in Ondo State to draw the conclusion that Agagu who cannot do wrong in the opinion of the President, must have been working for the President in all the strategic Ministries he has headed as Minister before becoming Governor. The President has chosen to leave out Mimiko's name because he knew like a born- again Christian that he was, that he had lied against the poor boy. He was also scared Mimiko could end up taking him to court for defamation of character. Even though it is clear the President is no respecter of the Law, I think his frequent defeats, (nine or ten times at the last count) in the Law Courts by Atiku  Abubakar was probably getting to him or he simply forgot to add Mimiko's name in his rush to get the list out.

But the damage was already irredeemably done to Mimiko's reputation. But the President had done Mimiko and Ondo State voters an unforgettable favor by helping us to frame the main issues in this Election . Our people have had the choice of having to choose between two candidates with the same first name "Olusegun". The President knew that for a fact. He just decided to make the choice easier for us by telling us one of the two candidates is a thief. Left to the President alone the thief is Mimiko, but left to the EFCC and Nuhu Ribadu and the overwhelming majority of Ondo State voters and the Commission of Enquiries that have so far probed Agagu, we know who the real thief is between the two, and we thank the President for once playing his role as the father of the nation by helping us to easily reach that conclusion. If Adefarati could lose to Agagu in 2003, so can Agagu lose in a landslide to Mimiko in this election, if the election is free and fair. Ondo State voters should take Agagu money, but vote for Mimiko because the money Agagu is spending is our money. Yes. It is our money.

Party label is not going to matter in this election and it should not matter. What is important is for us to be able to tell the thief or the armed robber from the decent candidate as deposed by our President.Both Agagu and Mimiko have had a track record in our State. Agagu, a senior Lecturer by profession, has once served our state as Commissioner, then as Deputy Governor, and later on as Federal Minister and now as Governor. By the same token, Mimiko, a medical doctor by profession, has served as Commissioner, and then as Secretary to Government and later on as Federal Minister before deciding to run for Governor.

We all know how much they were both worth when they first served in public office. We also know today how much each of them is worth. In trying to measure or decide which of them is a thief, don't let us take the President at his words, let us go down to the wire and find out who is fooling whom.

We cannot afford to let this President mislead us because he himself we were told had less than 20,000.00 in his Ota Farm account, when he was brought out of the prison in 1999 to run for President in an election that cost more than 500 million Naira or more, bankrolled for him by political colleagues and fellow colleagues in uniform. Today, eight years later, the same President is worth more than the total amount that General Abacha had stolen from our country.

We all know how much the Nigerian President makes per month and per year. But we also know that this President was in charge of the Ministry of Petroleum as revealed by Atiku, and he never shared with any single sole in his cabinet how the total revenues from that source was disbursed, and the criteria for allocating oil blocks to his cronies and friends around the world.

This point would not have mattered so much to me or to other Nigerians if the President was not pretending to be the only Saint in our country who truly understands what is good for us, and who the villains among us really are. If this Nuhu Ribadu of a man is ever going to redeem his credibility as the very conscience of our nation, he has got to get to the bottom of all the allegations made against the President and his cronies without exemption. That is the only path of honor for him, because what goes around comes around.

  I rest my case.

Dr. Wunmi Akintide.