ONGOING CONCERNS: When Daniel becomes the lion

By Tolu Ogunlesi

I met Ogun State governor, Gbenga Daniel, in 2007, at the African Business Leaders Forum in Accra, Ghana. I was there with a hundred other young persons from across the continent, sponsored as youth delegates by LEAP Africa.

I walked up to the governor after one of the Forum sessions, introduced myself, and asked to take a photo with him. Mr. Daniel was warm and obliging.

He was the only Nigerian state governor at the Forum. Ogun State had an exhibition stand, manned by the Commissioner for Finance, Mr. Kehinde Sogunle. I recall very clearly the commissioner showing a handful of us young‘uns PowerPoint documents on his laptop, detailing the governor’s ambitious development plans for Ogun State.

But apparently those were the days when Daniel was still Daniel. Today Daniel has become the lion. At his paws, Ogun State lies prone, bleeding from multiple bite wounds, hunted into submission by the man (s)elected to be its guardian.

If you don’t understand what this Daniel and the lion business is all about, turn with me to the Holy Bible. Daniel was a young high-flying Jewish technocrat and administrator in the court of the Babylonian emperor, around 600BC. (The Babylonians had conquered Judah, and taken many of its people captive). Envious of him, a band of senior government officials manipulated King Darius to have Daniel thrown into a den of lions. Inexplicably, the lions showed no interest in devouring Daniel. A miracle.

The import of that biblical account was not lost on Mr. Daniel back in 2002 when he sought to become the governor of Ogun State on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party. I clearly remember one of his campaign jingles, which played regularly on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) station in Abeokuta. (This being Nigeria, OGTV, the state-owned television station, firmly in the grip of the ruling party (AD), was out of bounds to him. They wouldn’t touch Daniel’s campaign jingles with a ten-foot microphone).

It was a song in Yoruba, which started thus: “A gbe Daniel sinu iho, iho kiniun nla…” (“Daniel was thrown into a pit, full of huge lions.”) It went on to narrate ‘Daniel’s’ miraculous triumph. The chorus then said: “E lo so f’araye, pe Daniel n bo…” (“Go and tell the world that Daniel is coming!”) Forget not that at that time the South West lay tightly in the grip of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) – purportedly the 21st century incarnation of Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group.

So at that time Daniel, PDP candidate in an AD-dominated region, was a rank outsider. Indeed he was in a den of lions. I remember him lamenting the destruction – by unknown persons – of his campaign publicity material across Abeokuta, the state capital.

Eight years later, however, Ogun State lustily sings: “Go and tell the world that Daniel is leaving!” After eight years of Daniel, the state lies traumatised. Salaries of government workers routinely go unpaid; floods have sacked the state capital, and the state creaks beneath a debt profile of billions of naira. Daniel’s consistent line in recent months has been, “no money!” No attempts are made to explain where all the billions of past years went. And the unofficial line in all of this is: “Criticise Daniel at your own risk!” I wonder, like many others, at what point things flipped. Where did it all go wrong? When did Daniel become the lion? Or has this always been a case of a “lion in Daniel’s clothing”?

The biblical Daniel left the lions’ den after his deliverance. Sadly, it seems Governor Daniel did not get that memo. After his deliverance from the lions of a previous dispensation, he forgot that the den was not meant to be turned into a government house. It was the place of miraculous deliverance quite alright, but not the place for lasting development.

Daniel, having silenced the lions, apparently decided that there was a vacancy for new improved lions in Ogun State. And so, here we are today. In July his wife Olufunke Daniel led a battalion of battle-ready policemen on the 100-plus kilometre trip from Abeokuta to Itele-Ijebu, on a mission: to deal with Mr. Tunde Oladunjoye, the man they believed caused the publication, in a tabloid, of photos of the lion’s cubs partying in London.

It is her husband’s turn now. What a lioness can do the lion can do better. On Monday the lion thus caused the mathematically-inexplicable impeachment of the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, the election of a new Speaker and the suspension of fifteen members – all these accomplished by a group of nine in a 26-member House. The new Speaker’s first official duty: to approve the governor’s questionable request to issue a N100 billion naira bond for “developmental projects”.

N100 billion. That is the equivalent of the amount budgeted by the state for 2010 (“Budget of Reality”, they called it). Go figure. It is barely eight months to the end of the lion’s 8-year hunt. Having devoured the present, the famished King of the Jungle, it seems, is now ready to take on the future.

The rest, clearly, will be history.