Oranminran, A Reactionary Idea, Is Dead! -By Festus Adedayo

My last week piece entitled Osun: Excavating the ruins of the Oranmiran years, provoked hidden dusts in Osun State and Nigeria as a whole. Many wondered why the shocking information therein about the monumental education ruins in the State of the Living Spring, was, according to them, just now being excavated. Some also wondered why, if the allegations were true, the Fuhrer of the ruinage should be rewarded with a ministerial position. It was thus not a surprise when architects of the ruins chose to send my friend, my namesake, Wale Adedayo, to me via his rejoinder entitled Oranminyan: A progressive idea cannot die. You would pity Mr. Adedayo as he feebly struggled to legitimize the Rauf Aregbesola calamity in Osun, hiding the ruins under the veneer of ideology.

You should excuse Adedayo on his claim that the performance-enhancing drug which Aregbesola swallowed in office was a so-called progressive ideology. He also claimed that this was the motivation for the awkwardness in character and policies of the Rauf era. While Adedayo is external to the calamity that is the Aregbesola education policies, friendship to the Fuhrer being his only link to Osun, I showed in my earlier piece how I was a victim of Rauf’s abstruse governorship.

Throughout the piece, Adedayo didn’t explain how Fakunle Comprehensive High School should be pulled down for a supermarket and how Aregbesola’s protégé should be the sole monopolist distributor of school uniforms and why the Fuhrer should owe 34 months of half salaries. I am not Adegboyega Oyetola’s mouthpiece and so cannot even attempt to defend him but everyone knows that Rauf, a despot of the first order, would brook no dissent to his destructive educational policy and not even an “ordinary” Chief of Staff dared to stand in the way of his decree.

Adedayo’s most unpardonable sin was comparing Rauf to Immortal Obafemi Awolowo and likening the dross of his eight years to the evergreen accomplishments of the avatar. I doubt if the alale ile (Owners of the Land) of Yorubaland will pardon my friend who prides himself as Babalawo, for this sacrilege.  Awolowo himself would never have imagined that a day would come, even after his departure, that some arrant-minded fellow would be made to simulate his good name. I remember writing a piece entitled WAEC results: Of Awo’s mud classrooms and govs’ model greed on August 20, 2017 while Aregbesola was still basking in the insipidity of his Oranminran mis-ideology. He was my target in the piece.

In that piece, I had submitted: “Many of today’s governors are so fixated on the illicit wealth they can make from office… It is unfortunate that we need to continue to make Awolowo, who 65 years ago, administered a Region which today approximates nine states, a model of analysis. By 1952, even before the Universal Primary Education (UPE) began, Awo had come up with its blueprint. Confronted by a #10m estimate for both the UPE and the free health program, even when the projected 1954 expenditure stood at #5m, Awo first cut capital costs on school buildings and cancelled housing subsidy for civil servants. He opted for mud blocks in place of pre-fabricated block cement classrooms and budgeted capital tumbled down by 70 per cent. His critics said he was opting for ‘substandard’ buildings but by 1955 when the scheme started, 400,000 pupils turned up, contrary to his projected 175,000. Assured that the quality of teachers held the ace rather than cozy classrooms, in 1956, Awo established many Grade 3 Teacher Training Colleges and trained, between 1955 and 1958, 11,000 teachers.

“Many states with those shameful WAEC results are manned by governors who are captives of the fad of gigantic classroom structures, at the detriment of training teachers. Some of them invest in neither of the two, preferring the infectious obsession with stacking billions of naira on infrastructure. The results are scores of unnecessary dualised roads and humongous bridges from where substantial billions of naira kick-backs are funneled into governors’ ghost foreign accounts. In South West today, the rotten cake of education that is kissing the canvass is decorated with glamorous icings of roads/overhead bridges that are at best white elephant.”

Adedayo should answer the question of why Aregbesola, the “Awoist,” chose to dismantle, merge and rename many of the schools built by Awolowo. In Yorubaland, what name is given to such self-professed child who turned his father’s house into ruins? Most of the secondary schools were founded by Bola Ige. More importantly, the Awo educational policy emphasized that pupils must school within a mile radius to their parents’ homes which was why Ige established Community Secondary Schools in the old Oyo State, all of which Rauf merged with the ensuing pains of students and pupils trekking kilometers to school while the Fuhrer lasted.

It should be obvious from the above that my friend doesn’t know who a reactionary is simplicita. Of a truth, the Nigerian definition of reactionary politics was what Aregbesola foisted on the people of Osun State, contrary to the model of Awo’s education policy. I chose not to veer into the Oranminran “ideology” and the totality of the 8-year rule of a self-proclaimed ideologue which the people of Osun State can attest was a monumental catastrophe; a Lagos boy came to Osun and left a miasma of total ruins