Tomorrow is my ex-boss, former Governor Abiola Ajimobi’s 70th birthday. I have written so many things about Ajimobi that another would be a repetition; from the negative to the positive. Like all human beings, Ajimobi’s life is a binary configuration. His foibles are plenty and his greatness huge but one thing you cannot remove from him as an administrator is his passion for development and knack for excellence.
Ajimobi is extremely finicky, so much that if he enters an environment, he will begin to re-arrange its disarranged chairs. You can see this in the quality of infrastructure that his administration laid its hands upon.
As a critique, his undoing, like most Nigerian leaders, was being surrounded by mostly fair-weather aides. For fear of their daily breads, aides of politically exposed persons scarcely tell them what they don’t want to hear and thus, refrained from telling them the truth. Having studied their psychology, I found out that they love to be placed on what Yoruba call the back of the cockroach-horse. They like their inadequacies to be wrapped with beautiful cellophanes and their praises sang like that of the Kabiyesi in pre-colonial Africa. Having seen through this foible, their aides effectively place them on the back of the cockroach-horse. They tell some of them that the way they talked was exactly how Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello and Nnamdi Azikiwe talked. This is their bane and they are cloaked in the apparel of Super humans. It is only when they leave office that they see how human they are afterall but by then, the fair-weather aides have taken their flights, leaving their bosses to their fates.
Ajimobi is however blessed with a gift: he may be annoyed if you told him a singeing truth but he will later return to you with thanks. The Ajimobi that I knew could not put up with mediocrity but he put up with so many mediocre, for the sake of politics. One thing you can be sure of is that, Ajimobi will not gravitate towards the mediocre for an assignment of grave import. That was why the mediocre who thronged him in large numbers have found their course now, leaving the few who love him for who he is.
Being with him in the first four years, I can testify that Ajimobi loved Oyo State with a baffling candour. He bent over backwards to ensure an Oyo that was at par with the best. He spent sleepless nights on the Oyo Project and testimonies abound that he out-performed his predecessors during this period. I am however not unmindful of criticisms of his hitting his feet against the stone during the second term. I do not have any defence to those criticisms.
Someday, if opportune to do a biography, I will put the two ex-governors I was lucky to serve on a scale. Ajimobi would not weigh low, and certainly, neither will Chimaroke Nnamani, the man who made me to cross many rivers to a land whose people’s language and customs I understood seldom and who gave me a detribalized embrace that is still fresh in my memory.
This is wishing my oga, Abiola Ajimobi, a happy 70th birthday.
