Fayemi’s day will come

It is a shame that promising progressive politicians like Kayode Fayemi continue to repeat the mistakes of the past, and are falling by the wayside like a pack of cards simply because of their flawed perspectives of progressive politics.One of the key ingredients that drowned Kayode Fayemi in the 2014 elections, in my opinion, in […]

It is a shame that promising progressive politicians like Kayode Fayemi continue to repeat the mistakes of the past, and are falling by the wayside like a pack of cards simply because of their flawed perspectives of progressive politics.
One of the key ingredients that drowned Kayode Fayemi in the 2014 elections, in my opinion, in spite of his superlative performance in the state is what the people termed “stomach infrastructure”. This term, when properly defined does not translate to the wasteful spending of the people’s resources on largesse, such as gifts to friends, cronies and political associates, as I suspect, Ayo Fayose, the Governor-elect is wont to believe. Instead, it is the prudent management of state welfare and the scarce resources available in the state for the benefit of the common man. If John Kayode Fayemi had known what this means and how to equitably and judiciously apply it, even the devil would have danced over Ayo Fayose’s electoral fall.
But alas, that was not to be! Apparently, Fayemi happens to be a student of the neo-liberal school of economics thought who, for all intents and purposes, would rather amplify the capitalist or even Keynesian economic theory over a well thought out welfare state, which was what he wanted or what his masters prescribed, but without the people in it. And as soon as the defeat of Fayemi, which had long been realistically predicted, was announced I drew a friends attention to an article I read sometime in 2013, precisely in the February of that year, to buttress the way the Fayemis of this world disparage progressive politics at their own detriment.
It reads; In “the lion and the unicorn”, written in 1941, George Orwell invoked the spirit of England in a handful of images—“solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and windy roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes”. When this correspondent tried to summon up appropriate images for the spirit of the Nordic region he found himself turning to the welfare state: Swedish fathers enjoying a leisurely lunch while their children sleep in prams (Sweden’s paternity leave is among the most generous in the world); Danish mothers cycling, helmetless, through the early morning mist with their children in sidecars (Copenhagen has more than 350km of cycle lanes, and a third of the population cycles to work); a Finnish physics teacher discussing the nature of elegance with a class of 15-year-olds (Finland regularly comes near the top of international league tables for educational attainment).
And I wondered what was wrong with all of these welfare states as enumerated above? But instead of taking away the quality in the livelihoods of these citizens of the Nordics, the writer in The Economist went further to disparage it in the following paragraph.
“The Nordics still have the world’s most generous welfare states, but a succession of crises put an end to the region’s magical thinking about welfare. Denmark went into a freefall in the early 1980s. Finland imploded in the early 1990s when the collapse of communism killed its most reliable market. Sweden and Norway faced serious financial crises at about the same time. These events are still fairly fresh in people’s memories”.
Which is not entirely true as there still remains an unending nostalgia for the welfare state in Scandinavia.  The people continue to battle neo-liberal economists in search of their lives.  As you can see from the above, there is a decade each between the problems in the Nordics, as the Scandinavian countries are called. However for reasons best known to the writer he plays up the downsides of the region to show readers that welfarism is inimical to man. We all know however, that the reverse is the case as Fayemi would readily testify. In fact, if anything, the welfare state has turned out over time to be most attractive and reliable, apart from being most humane, but the west, because of the over-bearing influence of the rich, who would rather waste money on idle fancies than make the world a home for all, have continually kicked it out the window.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. However, the question is, where does JKF come in here? Many agree that he lost the election because he lost sight of the people’s stomachs. But that would have been an easy equation in the math if he had not been an adherent of western neo liberals, who thought less of people and more of infrastructure;  a euphemism for a government of the rich, for the rich and by the rich. Imagine a governor offering close to a million naira monthly to a consultant who, by her confession, did nothing more than massaging his ego.  The mileage that those millions would have won him, in four years, if the money was channelled into some social welfare scheme for unemployed graduates who could be conscripted into any government projects at the sound of a whistle, whenever the need arose, would have been monumental. I am sure Fayemi has learnt from this.
Politics of the stomach is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a strategic thing. It is also the most important tool for vote-catching, which a politician only neglects at his own peril. Fayemi did and is paying dearly for it. If he had followed the Swedish model of empowerment, in which government agencies took cognizance of the dangers of populist disenchantment with public figures, things would have been different now. He didn’t. It hurt him. However, that is not to say that Ekiti state has seen the last of JKF. He may return after the madness and that return shall come with a bang after Fayose’s deed is done.