No politician is worth killing or dying for

One day in 2005, on my way from my Offa, Kwara State, home to my Ife, Osun State, school, I was dropped at Gbongan junction by a family car traveling to Lagos, and left to find a commercial bus going to Ile-Ife from Ibadan. I waited for like half-an-hour at the Gbongan junction before finding Ife-bound bus. I got to school mid-day.

Few hours later, I heard breaking news on a local radio station that one Alabi Hassan-Olajoku, a Lagos politician and supporter of governorship aspirant, Rauf Aregbesola, had been assassinated. Guess where? At Gbongan junction. Yes, same Gbongan I waited for at least thirty minutes in search of Ife bus. The incident happened less than one hour after I left same place. I was imagining where I would have fled to if I had not gotten a bus before the incident happened. To the bush? To the road? Stray bullets? Deliberate termination of lives of witnesses? Or even fainting from just sounds of gunshots? The report said Mr. Olajoku himself engaged his assailants to save his life. So it couldn’t have been an incident that happened within the twinkle of an eye. 

Of course, the killing was political. It was at the heat of the battle for Osun Government House between the incumbent Oyinlola Olagunsoye and his challenger from Lagos, Aregbesola. 

Mr Olajoku was one of the many casualties of the tug of war. There were more deaths, reportedly from both camps. There were fatalities in Ilesa, Ile-Ife and Osogbo. The Oroki Day celebration also turned into another battlefield between the supporters of Oyinlola’s PDP and Aregbesola’s ACN.

The war was also taken to the media. I followed with amusement, how my brother and senior friend, Mr. Lasisi Olagunju, Oyinlola’s media henchman, and Aregbesola/Tinubu’s literary undertaker, Mr. Joe Igbokwe, engaged in creative media brickbats on the OP-ED pages of newspapers, dramatizing a whole book – George Orwell’s Animal Farm – in the media battle. 

Now that both Aregbesola and Oyinlola are back in same camp, is it not a lesson for die-hard supporters of politicians that there is no permanent enemy? So why go for a kill in defence of any politician whose enmity with his opponent is only temporary? Truth is, no politician is worth killing or dying for. A word is enough for the wise. 

Suraj Oyewale