The unraveling of Rashidi Ladoja

There is this interesting character in late South African author
and activist, Alex La Guma’s book, entitled, In the Fog of a
Season’s End. In somber prose and very lucid representation,
La Guma tries to capture the mental and physical torture of
Apartheid, the travails of prisoners like Nelson Mandela and
the long wait that freedom represented in the 1960s South
Africa. What will interest any reader of this book is not strictly
Elias and Beukes, two consequential characters whose task in
undermining the white regime was to distribute handbills
informing of a forthcoming strike and by that very fact, calling
attention to the evil of Apartheid.
In the Fog of a Season’s End begins with the story of the
capture, imprisonment and torture of one unnamed character
by the Apartheid government. Gradually, La Guma unravels
this character to his reader who only finds out his totality
only towards the end of the book.
Like this La Guma character, Senator Rashidi Ladoja, former
governor of Oyo State and leader of the Accord Party, was
unraveled to the world recently. Before now, his bush
telegraph propaganda had carved a unique place for him in the
hearts of country folks. Told with a mixture of high dosage
lies, frightening myth and illogical reverence, his disciples
went about all sorts of places, from mechanic workshops to
food vendors’ shacks, preaching the gospel of Saint Ladoja.
This endured for years. By the time he was venturing into full
politics in 1999, Ladoja came onto the political turf with a lot
of promises. A billionaire shipping magnate and businessman
who had carved a niche for himself, especially in his acclaimed
linkage to fellow billionaire, MKO Abiola, Oyo State, felt it
would benefit from his wide clientele of links and buttons. At
times when Ladoja felt it was right to preen his own feathers
like a turtle-dove, he reminded anyone who cared to listen
that his linkage with MKO Abiola was a testimony of his flirta­
tion with pro-democracy activism during the campaign
against the evil of military juntas.
At the polls however, ex-teacher and columnist, Lamidi
Adesina, made mincemeat of his party to become the
governor of Oyo State in 1999. But, between 1999 and 2003,
time for another gubernatorial poll, Ladoja had effectively
understudied the prevailing politics of the Lamidi Adedibu era
which was predicated essentially on recruiting legmen with
minds fecund enough to manufacture unimaginable falsehoods
to tar-brush incumbent administrations. Like the recruitment
drive of insurgents done through brainwashing and mind-
control, in a jiffy, he had recruited thousands of such disciples
whom he held in his palms. They in turn went round the nooks
and crannies of the state detonating political missiles and
explosives and swearing by their mothers’ graves on the
political sainthood of Senator Ladoja.
This gambit worked like a magical spell in 2003. Effectively,
the old Lam, a true born and bred Ibadan man, had been sold
to the electorate as an Ebira man from Kogi State by the
Ladoja disciples; new houses springing up in Oluyole Estate
and several other nouveau-riche estates in Ibadan had their
umbilical cords tied to the alleged acquisitory greed of the ex-
teacher by the Ladoja disciples in the bid to make him
worthless in the eyes of the electorate. Before you could shout
‘jack’, Lam was out of the Agodi Government House, for the
ascendancy of Ladoja.
But nemesis was waiting at a corner for him. Former local
government chairman and well-known sybarite, Adebayo
Akala, was nominated as his deputy by the petrel of Ibadan
politics, Adedibu. As Ladoja went about demonstrating his
ancient recalcitrance and standoffishness to elders of
Ibadanland and throwing jabs at the Obasanjo presidency,
Judases were being groomed to take him to the cross for his
political crucifixion. By the time he was taken out of the
Government House by a House of Assembly, his fabled
miserliness and bad leadership failed to rein to his side,
Ladoja had courted the hatred of the Alaafin of Oyo, the Soun
of Ogbomosho, the Olubadan of Ibadan and elders of the land
who saw his exit as good riddance to bad rubbish. But he
fought back like a beheaded puff-adder, only to be enmeshed
in allegations of financial improprieties which are still before
the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) .
In spite of his political travails, the Ladoja make-me-a-saint
disciples never for once took their hands off the plough.
Rather than court disdain for his well-known miserliness to
himself and to society, as well as the uninspiring drawls that
attend his public speeches, Ladoja received adulations, no
thanks to the yeo-man job of his disciples. His zero sense of
sartorial presentation notwithstanding, Ladoja’s representation
by his retinue of make-me-a-saint disciples as a lover of the
masses sticks like a deodorant. Like a friend once said, even
though the Yoruba say that you cannot enjoy the luxury of
being miserly and at the same time court public respect, the
Ladoja make-me-a-saint disciples ensured that he had the
twain in dexterous quantity.
The fart of his well-known antecedents, especially while in
government, confronted by the gospel of the make-me-a-saint
disciples, fails to fly. Allegations of having no time for
governance while he was governor, to the extent that one of
the wives in his harem read and signed government memos,
when they stand face to face with his disciples’ deodorizing,
fall face flat. So, also is the allegation that the former
governor is a hyper polygamist whose harem is populated by
wives playing second motherhood in his home. When the
make-me-a-saint disciples tell the world that Ladoja is a man
of peace, seldom does anyone remember that his
administration was one of the ones that shed the highest
ounces of blood in the history of governance in Oyo State.
At every public forum he attends, with his flowing Ankara
apparel that he adorns like a preying-mantis, Ladoja
garnishes the well-laid pack of make-believe that constitutes
his myth with icings that make the world fall at his feet. All
through his public life, he had always had the masses in
mind; he says. While he was governor, he relished education
so much that he had only 30 students in a class. When he ac­
cuses his successor of lacking human face because he
removed traders from the streets and he is reminded that he
did same as governor and never provided alternatives to the
traders, he relapses into badinage of immense proportion.
About three weeks ago, like the house spoken eloquently
about by the Yorubas in their aphorism which was built with
spittle and which is consequently brought down in a haze of
drizzling mist, face down on the floor yakata, apology to Ze­
brudaya, was Ladoja and his propaganda-constructed house
of cards. Unlike all political parties of reckoning who
conducted party primaries to pick their candidates, Ladoja
selected his loyalists inside the living room. They were the
ones he had over the years attracted like ants are to the pee
of a diabetic. Returnee overseas residents invested their life
savings in his Accord Party, spending a fortune on the
propaganda of the party’s “Chairman Mao.” Aggrieved Action
Congress of Nigeria (ACN) chieftains and later the All
Progressives Congress (APC), as well as Peoples Democratic
Party (PDP) faithful nested in his party, trying to best one
another in spending for the “Chairman’s” comfort and the
party’s ascendancy. Today, they ask for a refund of their
money, for the furniture they gave “Chairman Mao” and allied
comfort for his home.
While all other parties advertised the results of their primaries,
Oyo State Accord Party put a heavy shroud on its, leading to
speculations and apprehensions. News began to trickle in and
alas, the list was unfurled. On the final list of the “Chairman’s”
nomination loomed big spenders who had oiled the palate.
Those who had weathered the storm all these years were
thrown off the saddle.
All of a sudden, a mini-war broke out in Ibadan, where
“Chairman Mao” controlled the party’s destiny like a panjan­
drum. Protesters stormed the Ondo Street residence of Ladoja,
wielding cutlasses and all forms of attack weapons. Eggs, to­
matoes, pure water sachets were flung at the “Chairman’s”
house with scalding-hot anger. Hell broke loose, so much that
police had to deploy an Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) to
the “Chairman’s” house. Nigeria was so hot that he fled to
his mansion in Great Britain to take few days shield from the
anger of his erstwhile lieutenants. Right now, the political
profiling of Senator Rashidi Ladoja has sunk like a punctured
balloon. It was as if an ancient veil which covered the faces of
the people just dropped off, or like a spiritually entrapped
people who were all of a sudden set free and led out of
darkness. The freedom from the Ladoja bind tells the story of
the ephemeral powers of propaganda. It confirms the ancient
Yoruba aphorism that no matter how widely a lie travels, truth
will someday overtake it and the spinner of yesterday will fall
yakata.
Adedayo is Special Adviser on Media to the Governor of
Oyo State.