The Discourse: Attack On Ayinke Towers

“Ogbeni: The Osun Renaissance Years is a book written by a prominent Nigerian columnist, Olakunle Abimbola. The book details the administration of former Governor of Osun State, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, and the ideological leanings that shaped his approach to governance. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of the book”

RA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA – and the racket of excitable humanity outside vanished, replaced by a deathly quiet!  

It was the night of 7 April 2007, exactly a week to the 14 April 2007 gubernatorial election.  In his book, Fayemiwo put the time of attack at 9:30 pm.  Ayinke Towers (now Oranmiyan House), Aregbesola’s Campaign Headquarters, was deserted.  Apart from the media team trio of Roy Jibroma (head consultant, Aregbesola Campaign Media), Fayemiwo (long-term Oranmiyan/Aregbesola Osun spokesperson), the author (co-consultant) and their support staff, the building was empty.  O yes: there were also Kola Olabisi, Osun Defender editor, and his team holding newsroom strategic sessions, on their next offering, at the peak of the campaign period.  Osun Defender, the Aregbesola campaign voice that Olabisi often called “project newspaper”, had their office somewhere up-road, on Gbongan road, the main artery connecting Osogbo to the Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa expressway.  But because of worsening election-time violence, Osun Defender, faced with threats of arson – or worse – had deserted their office, for the consolidated security of the Aregbesola Campaign Headquarters.

Normally, as the media people did their stuff, sundry groups of politicians streamed in and out of the building.  Many different groups, from varied wards and constituencies, also held different strategy meetings, such that the building was always a beehive of activity.  When Aregbesola himself was around, it acquired a heightened bubble and frenzy.  Mrs Laoye-Tomori, his running mate, also held routine meetings, in her second floor office, and adjoining conference hall, with the campaign womenfolk; since the Aregbesola Campaign was determined to take maximum advantage of the gender plurality that the Aregbesola/Laoye-Tomori ticket offered.  That was no monopoly though, since Erelu Olusola Obada, sitting Deputy Governor and Governor Oyinlola’s running mate in the 2007 election, was also a woman. On that fateful night, however, Ayinke Towers was near-empty.

Not so, outside.  Beyond the Towers’ fenced and extensive forecourt was still enough space to spare, since Gbongan road was not yet a dual carriageway up to that point.  So, that space played merry host to happy campaign-era guests, who every evening always flocked the Aregbesola Campaign Headquarters.  This excited and excitable band of humanity was a sundry mix of ordinary folks: men, women, Okada riders leaning on their auto bikes, chatting with friends after a hard day’s work, to catch up with the latest news and gossips on the ongoing campaigns.  Neighbourhood children too streamed into the crowd; turning the lit-up space into an exciting night playground.  In that medley and its roars of laughter, you could even hear one or two swear that the Governor, en route to his Abere office, always scowled, from behind tinted car windows, at the gathered chattering and animated crowd with envy and distaste; seeing them as negative plebiscite of sorts, on his person and tenure!  No hard facts backed up that claim, though. 

The especial pull of Ayinke Towers was the campaign’s multi-media segment – the big screen, from which the Aregbesola Campaign, every evening, beamed its daily electioneering tours.  So, many who could not follow the trail, but wanted a feel of the AC candidate’s message and campaign vibes, always massed around the area, to have their fill: bantering, joking, arguing and generally enjoying themselves.  

But aside from campaign stuff, the big screen also showed movies, during which the crowd cheered or hissed; roared or cursed: the unmistakable babel of film goers, having the fun of their lives – and this time, it was free!  Besides, the African U-17 championship was also on (from 10 to 25 March 2007), in neighbouring Togo, where Nigeria’s Golden Eaglets featured.  The big screen served the matches live, sizzling hot and fresh – and you could hear the rolling thunder of the gathered denizens, as they cheered the Golden Eaglets, kilometres away: either from the Orita-Olaiya junction down town, or from the Abere end, up road.  It was additional excitement – call it a boon, if you will – that the Nigerian team was doing exceedingly well, as the crowd soaked in the thrills and tension of all the matches.  After the Golden Eaglets pipped Togo 1-0 in the final match, on the night of 25 March 2007, the crowd went berserk: kids yelling, women dancing, men hugging and back-slapping and some children screaming and screeching, darting into adjoining streets and alleys. 

Such was the normal buzz, on the night of April 7, when bullets started whizzing – and the whole place melted into sudden quiet!  As the staccato of hot lead sent everyone outside scurrying and diving for cover, those bullets smashed through the first floor glass windows, where the Aregbesola Media Team and the Osun Defender folks huddled, a few of them frozen with shock and fear.  The author, informal campaign media bureau chief, who dished out Aregbesola campaign news for newspaper publications, grabbed and hugged his lap top.  It was a desperate though laughable reflex, suggesting his torso could protect the news materials in the computer, against flying bullets!  The initial shock wore out, only for Rasheed Mabayoje, ex-Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) Osogbo  reporter and head of the media broadcast media, to belt in from the stairs.

“Kola Olabisi has been shot!” he screamed.  “Olabisi has been hit!”

That screech snapped everyone out of their stupor.  It was a great relief that no one, in the hall, had been hit.  But that relief and fleeting joy only sparked fresh panic, to confirm the worst, about the Osun Defender editor, who but a few seconds ago, was with his team, in that same hall.  So, the dash downstairs started.  But somewhat, Olabisi emerged, wrapping what remained of his torn red-laced-with-black Yoruba native fabric around his torso, looking like a stunned ghost who just stumbled on the living!

“Kola,” someone asked rather stupidly, “are you dead”?   

Of course, he was not – and that again was a great relief!  But he recounted, after coming out of his shock, half-talking, half-shrieking, how he went to get something in his Mercedes Benz 200 car, and how bullets singed through the windscreen, and rammed into the car’s fuel area, but miraculously missed him!  By the time the rest of the team got downstairs, the babble of excited folks, some three minutes before, had vanished.  The big screen too was gone.  So were the projectors.  

Upstairs, at the fourth-floor office of Aregbesola, bullets had slammed into the windows.  A bullet also homed in on the head rest of his chair. Were a sitting Aregbesola there, holding a meeting with campaign staff and sundry folks, as he was wont to do late into the night after each day’s exhausting campaign, it probably would have zoomed into his skull! The four-storey Ayinke Towers, with a penthouse, sat in a valley; and the theory was that the sniper, who let fly the hail of bullets, had picked a spot, level with Aregbesola’s office window at the adjoining hill!

Needless to say, that attack was the end of the campaign’s multi-media segment, though the electioneering, to round off the following Thursday, still had five days to run its course.  The audacious attack was the latest but most brazen attempt to cripple that campaign segment.  Vans, bearing smaller screens, driving into communities in Ilesa and other places to beam Aregbesola on the hustings, had earlier also been attacked and smashed, by opposing partisan thugs.

The Ayinke Towers attack might have been a rude cap to a most violent campaign season.  But it was also a signpost of the 2007 election as no more than a maiming and killing field in Osun.  President Olusegun Obasanjo had, after all, sworn that for his ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the election was “do-or-die”.   PDP partisans in Osun, basking in that horrible presidential charter, really took this “do-or-die” credo to heart!

All through the campaign swing, Fayemiwo also documented a rash of attacks on AC partisans and supporters, starting from the very first day the Aregbesola Campaign kicked off at Ile-Ife.  Also, the Osogbo grand-finale of the campaign, a mega-rally scheduled to hold on Thursday, 12 April 2007, at the Osogbo Township Stadium, was put off because the Police cancelled the permit. They cited the worsening security situation.

Meanwhile, in this violence-wracked build-up, Governor Oyinlola himself set up the Justice Kayode Esho Peace Committee, to ensure a peaceful election.  Though the AC side saw the cant and pretence in it all, since it felt the government/PDP side was unleashing nearly all of the violence, it decided to write a detailed memorandum to the committee, which it titled “An orgy of Violence: Osun State People’s Democratic Party (PDP) on Action Congress (AC), PDP on Osun Opposition, and PDP on PDP”.  

In that lengthy memo, it cited a sweeping breadth of violence that the Osun PDP allegedly inflicted on the AC, the Osun opposition parties in general and even PDP-on-PDP violence, dating back to the immediate post-election days of 2003; and the judicial challenge to that election.  The memo alleged that PDP thugs invaded the High Court premises, at Oke-Fia Osogbo, where the election tribunal was sitting; and attacked AD witnesses in court to give evidence, on the alleged rigging of the 2003 election.  It claimed that that very act led to a miscarriage of justice, as far as that election petition was concerned.

But much of that memo also focused on the illiberal atmosphere of the 2007 electioneering, citing specific instances: the 1 April 2007 violation of the Aregbesolas’ J.69 Ogbon Arogbo Street, Ilesa, ancestral home by alleged PDP thugs; the attack, again by PDP thugs in Ilesa, on the Aregbesola Campaign Media pair of Ayodele Okiki (video cameraman) and Taofeek Adejara aka “Akeyinje” (still cameraman), and how both fled for dear life, darting for refuge, into that same Aregbesolas’ Ilesa ancestral home; the attack on the Oranmiyan secretariat on Isokun Street, Ilesa, allegedly by Wale Oni, a well-known PDP enforcer in Ilesa and his thugs, who tumbled out of an 18-seater bus branded in the colours of Idera De (“Comfort is here”) – one of the election season pressure groups sympathetic to the PDP; Imole De (“Light is here”) was the street moniker for Oladimeji, the AC defector to PDP, who allegedly attacked ex-party mate, Musefiu Alade and others in Osogbo on 19 March 2007, while the group was returning from a campaign swing to Ede; the same Imole De was also accused of, with gusto, destroying AC/Aregbesola campaign billboards – a very common and recurrent arson throughout that campaign season; the 14 March 2007 attack on AC partisans in Elemo compound in Ila; the stoning of the Aregbesola campaign train at Okuku, Governor Oyinlola’s home town, on 21 March 2007 (Fayemiwo recalled that former Governor Akande endured a similar stoning experience, at the campaign stumps at Okuku, in his failed re-election bid in 2003); the alleged sword dangling on the neck of Mudashiru Toogun, ex-PDP who defected to AC but earned the spleen of his former comrades when he refused to re-defect to PDP, as they ordered him to; and therefore had to live in the shadows, throughout the campaign and election season, among other cases.

But much later on 25 May 2011, in his response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, former Governor Oyinlola insisted that the violence of that era was not one-sided.  New Governor Rauf Aregbesola had set up the Commission, chaired by Justice Samson Uwaifo, to banish the ghosts of the violent past.  

Oyinlola said the military clampdown on Ilesa and the imposition of curfew on Osogbo, followed the arson and violence on prominent PDP members by AC supporters, protesting the alleged stealing of the 2007 gubernatorial election.  He claimed that the 15 May 2005 killing of Hassan Alabi-Olajoku, one of Aregbesola’s earliest financiers in his bid for the Osun governorship, was more of armed robbery than political assassination; and that Oroki Day 2006 was “violently disrupted by Mr. Aregbesola and his hoodlums, when he arrived ringing bells”.  

He also averred that the rape and sexual humiliation in Ilesa, of Tosin Ajakaye, a teenage school girl, by PDP elements, was a crime his government never covered up.  In truth, Tosin’s rapist would later be jailed for life.  But that was long after Governor Oyinlola had left office; and after his rather cold attitude towards the case, which ran throughout his voided second term.  Besides, not a few were aghast that the First Lady never issued any statement on that rape; or displayed any empathy towards the victim, thus showing a worrying disinterest by the Osun First Family. Oyinlola also insisted that the 14 June 2007 bomb blast at the Osun State Government Secretariat, Abere, was deliberate violence against his government, by alleged AC partisans.   

The former Governor might be right that violence is not often one-sided, especially during an election season, when passion is up, adrenalin is high and those who cannot compete on high ideas often hug the sewers of violence, powered by armed thugs.  Still, on the Osun 2007 election case, it was clear which side had more motives for violence, in the desperation to halt a momentum which was clearly on the side of the AC opposition.  But the electioneering violence was no more than a grim window into the horror to come on Election Day.

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not represent the opinions or views of OSUN DEFENDER.