One read with dismay the puerile response of one Dapo Falade, the media aide to Senator Kola Balogun, to a piece written by this author on how Mr Kolapo Kola-Daisi, a Senatorial hopeful, was ready to rescue Oyo South from the clutches of misrepresentations Senator Kola Balogun plunged the Senatorial District into. It’s shocking that Dapo Falade, a former Correspondent with the Nigerian Tribune, covering Ekiti, Rivers and Oyo States as well as the Nigerian Senate at various times, and a former Deputy Editor with the same national newspaper before his appointment as media aide to Senator Kola Balogun, displayed crass inexperience in responding to issues affecting his principal. One would expect a supposedly experienced journalist to respond to issues affecting his principal without attacks.
The first wrong Dapo Falade committed was to call this writer a hungry, hatchet writer. Didn’t Dapo Falade know that it’s natural to be hungry and equally natural to seek ways to satisfy the hunger as long as the ways to satisfy hunger are legal? Someone should educate Dapo Falade that it’s not immoral to be hungry, and not immoral to write to get money to satisfy hunger. This writer will tell you what’s immoral, unethical, as ascribed to Falade later in this response! What’s also dramatically ironic in Dapo Falade calling this writer a hungry, hatchet writer, is that Falade himself does media aideship for his principal in order to get money to satisfy hunger in him. Let Falade be told that nobody could be a more hatchet writer than he whose duty is to write to lick his principal’s ass and to protect his image.
Why Dapo Falade should find it needless to respond in amateurish manners to what this writer opined about his principal was because Falade agreed with the writer on almost all the issues he raised except the areas that asserted his principal’s lacklustre representations of Oyo South in the Senate. What an ingenious journalist would do is to state what his principal has achieved in both legislative and empowerment terms without being ferociously attacking and within the limits of what professional decorum dictates.
Dapo Falade in his hasty attempt to attack this writer said thus: “Asudemade, hyping his paymasters, inadvertently described Oyo South Senatorial District as being the most prominent among the three senatorial districts representing Oyo State in the Nigerian Senate. Without seeking to downgrade the other two senatorial districts, namely: Oyo North and Oyo Central, Oyo South Senatorial District, given its size and being the most cosmopolitan among the three, is truly the heart and soul of Oyo State”. We may well ask, what did Dapo Falade disagree with in the statement he made above, corroborating what this writer said about Oyo South being the most prominent? What then is the correlation between ‘hyping his paymasters’ and the rest of the statement which agreed with what the writer said? Does Dapo Falade have a good grip on his thought process?
One is not sure that Dapo Falade comes to journalism, handy with sound logic. Or else, what could anybody deduce from this statement of his?: “To start from the basic, is it not an absurdity that Oyo South enjoyed a so-called glorious moment of quality representation by a set of politicians from the same political party from 1999 to 2019, safe for between 2007 and 2011 when Senator Adedibu of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) won the election to represent the district?”
From Falade’s statement above, it’s glaring that he has issues with comprehension. There’s no where in this writer’s initial piece where he said Oyo South enjoyed glorious representations from 1999 to 2019 except during the senatorial tenure of Senator Kamoru Adedibu. What this writer said was that Oyo South enjoyed glorious representations from 1999 to 2019, not excluding the tenure of Senator Kamoru Adedibu. A media aide to a highly placed public official like a Senator must pay attention to details!
And, Falade’s next statement gives him away as either a neophyte in political reporting and analysis, or a mischievous media aide. Hear him: “If, indeed, that era was glorious, what could have made the PDP, a party in political limbo for eight years, since 2011, to win the election in a senatorial district which had a then sitting governor, the late Senator Abiola Ajimobi, who also contested for the same election? What could have gone wrong to have made a people who were enjoying the largess of quality representation, as alluded to by Asudemade, to become ingrates, turning around to give their votes to Kola Balogun who turned out to be a modern-day David who overwhelming defeated an almighty Goliath (the late Senator Ajimobi) in the epic electoral contest in 2019? …”
Dapo Falade needs to be reminded what led to the loss of the last senatorial election in Oyo South by the APC represented by the late Senator Abiola Ajimobi. Senator Soji Akanbi was the outgoing Senator in Oyo South then and the wind of his meritorious achievements as a Senator were ubiquitous that even a blind person would feel it. But the internal conflicts within the APC led some groups within the party to leave the party to join forces with the PDP and the ADC. It was the same alliance that ensured victory for Seyi Makinde worked in favour of Senator Kola Balogun. Kola Balogun’s victory had nothing to do with non performance by the then APC Senator before he left for ADC. Obviously, Dapo Falade is quite ignorant of what the results of the senatorial election looked like because if he knew what the results said, he wouldn’t have been quick to conclude ashamedly that the APC and Ajimobi lost to Kola Balogun and the PDP because of non performance or because the APC and its candidate were rejected by the good people of Oyo South Senatorial District. Declaring the official results by INEC, Kola Balogun of the PDP polled 105,720 as against 92,217 polled Senator Abiola Ajimobi of the APC. The incumbent then, Senator Soji Akanbi came third following Kola Balogun and Abiola Ajimobi closely. Senator Kola Balogun won the election with a paltry difference of 13,302 votes. A candidate and his party said to have been rejected by the people of Oyo South won’t poll almost a hundred thousand vote as against the winner who polled a little over a hundred thousand votes. Assume that Senator Soji Akanbi did not leave APC to contest under ADC, would Senator Kola Balogun have won, especially that the votes Soji Akanbi got would have been for Abiola Ajimobi or whoever the senatorial candidate of the APC was. These are the kinds of political intrigues that escaped Dapo Falade’s understanding, reason he was making spurious conclusion on why APC/Ajimobi lost the election to Kola Balogun. So, Falade’s biblical allusion of David and Goliath was irrelevant in his watery response.
Dapo Falade went on to reel out legislative achievements that Senator Kola Balogun has made. What comes to mind reading all the grandiose achievements of the Senator is it’s either these achievements exist in the figments of Falade’s imagination or he, Falade, fails to live up to his duty as the media adviser to Senator Kola Balogun. Apart from the few background information about who Senator Kola Balogun is, not much was said about his legislative and empowerment activities on either traditional or social media. In this era when Google is there to help anybody, it’s dispriting that news and features about the so-called legislative and empowerment achievements of Senator Balogun could not be found on Google. If it’s true that Senator Balogun has recorded some achievements but we can’t find reports of such achievements in the media, then, the media aide of Senator, Dapo Falade in this case, must be more lacklustre in performance than his principal. How lazier can a media aide be! A media aide has a duty to publicize the activities of his principal and to ensure that his achievements get to relevant media. Where such media aide is found wanting performing these basic duties, it’s laziness and incompetence at their best. As this writer said at the beginning of this ‘interaction’ with Dapo Falade, it’s not wrong and immoral to be hungry and to write to get means to satisfy the hunger. But it’s intensely wrong and acutely immoral to be lazy and incompetent, both of which are an ascription to Dapo Falade, the media aide to Senator Kola Balogun.
