by Demola Rewaju

There once was a man who was the best of them all – Bola Ige was his name and in many ways, he represented the best of the products of Chief Awolowo scions. Ige was initially not Awolowo’s choice to become the governor of the old Oyo State but after defeating Pa Emmanuel Alayande twice in the primaries, Awolowo for once allowed democracy to prevail and let Ige run to be governor. The major offence of Ige was that he was considered too close or too friendly with General Olusegun Obasanjo whom many felt was working for the Shagari/NPN agenda to the detriment of Awolowo’s presidential quest on the platform of UPN.

I was never sure of those theories but I believe strongly that Ige’s death was political but for some insider knowledge, I do not think Omisore is guilty of Ige’s death: he was only a fall guy.

Such was Ige’s politics: he had the ability to work closely with his enemies and sometimes stood against his friends if he thought the former were in alignment with his own core principles and the latter were against. On this, he quoted Awo as saying that “One should not be afraid to admit it when one’s enemy does the right”. Having pioneered the ‘siddon look’ movement of apathy against IBB’s transitional programme, Ige famously came up with the ‘five fingers of a leprous hand’ to describe the five parties formed under the transitional agenda of General Sani Abacha. Curiously, when General Abdusalami Abubakar started his own transitional agenda, Ige paid one visit to Aso Rock in company with other Afenifere leaders and called on all politicians to embrace the politics once again – effectively ending the ‘siddon look’ phase. He quoted Shakespeare to justify this move “ ‘there is no art to decipher the workings of the mind from looking at the face’ but I trust General Abubakar is committed to handing over to a democratically elected government”.

Many politicians at the state level had deployed their machinery in place for Abacha’s transition while the Iges of this world remained in apathy. And so it was that a certain Iyiola Omisore had become one of the strongest politicians in Osun State. But the Ige group enjoyed so much credibility from the death of Chief MKO Abiola that when they pulled out of PDP and APP to form their own Alliance for Democracy, Justice Ephraim Akpata chose to waive the mandatory national spread requirement for political parties and register the AD. Omisore’s ambition to be governor could only be fulfilled on the platform of AD which Ige and other Yoruba leaders declared was only an appellation for ‘Afenifere’. Ige wanted Bisi Akande, one of his commissioners in the UPN government of old Oyo state, to become the governor of Osun State but he neither had the clout nor the finance to run such a campaign and so a deal was struck with Omisore to become deputy governor, sponsor the AD campaigns and later become governor.

From day one in government, it was no love lost between Akande and Omisore – the former had gone to jail (alongside Ige) for diverting state monies to fund the UPN and so was very cautious and transparent with government funds. Omisore on the other hand was an investor who wanted to recoup the money he had invested. The crisis was managed inhouse until the State House of Assembly made the first move to impeach Bisi Akande as governor. The house was unevenly split with the Ige/Akande group having the upper hand but the Omisore lawmakers were the volatile type, led by a certain Hon. Odunayo Olagbaju. Akande survived the impeachment scare and after a public rally where Ige mobilised support for him, he turned the impeachment gun on Omisore.

To put this story in proper perspective, go back to 1998 when Ige was playing godfather in Osun politics and also battling for his own political future. Ige had a principle he had always lived by, espoused in his words “I do not answer hypothetical questions neither do I create political roles or ambitions for myself”. By 1998, Ige chose to run for president and as Deputy Leader of the Afenifere, Ige would automatically have gone uncontested but the elders of the party wanted Chief Olu Falae to run against Ige. A meeting was convened in Ijebu-Igbo at the home of Leader Pa. Abraham Adesanya. 23 men were in attendance, the oldest was either Pa Alayande or Pa Jonathan Odebiyi and the youngest was surely Niyi Adebayo who was to fly the party flag in the Ekiti election. Ige was so certain of being chosen ahead of Falae that he travelled to London for a medical check-up and bedrest in anticipation of a hectic presidential campaign ahead. But Ige got the shocker of his life when the 23 man conclave voted for Falae for two major reasons: Falae had been a minister at the federal level, Ige had only ever been a governor. Secondly, Falae having served under IBB would be more acceptable to the north rather than Ige who was a fierce critic of the northern establishment. Ige took it in good stride but curiously, when the time for presidential campaigns came, Ige was asked to lead the Falae campaigns in the north because only Ige could speak Hausa fluently.

In the PDP, Awolowo’s nemesis/Ige’s friend, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo emerged as the presidential aspirant and eventually defeated Falae and the AD. He quickly chose his friend Bola Ige to become the Minister of Power and Steel. Having been denigrated by his own establishment with the spurious reason of not ever being a minister, Ige was eager to go but he threw the matter to the Afenifere enlarged conclave where it was accepted that he should join Obasanjo is a quasi-Government of National Unity. The Adesanya camp was unhappy about Ige’s decision to join Obasanjo but the wily general had also chosen Modupe Adelaja (nee Adesanya) to serve under his government and Adesanya defended her by saying she was an adult and the appointment had little to do with him.

As the Osun crisis raged on, Ige was moved from the Ministry of Power and Steel to the Ministry of Justice but by 2001, he had become a liability to the hawks in Obasanjo’s cabinet. Chief S.M. Afolabi (Minister of Internal Affairs)likened Ige to a man who was invited to eat only to come and restrain the food-owner from eating. To this, Ige’s response was enigmatic: “I do not know what Afolabi is eating”. The man Afolabi would later die while standing trial for corruption.

Ige was loved by Obasanjo but was never accepted by the PDP family who saw him as a threat to them in the Southwest. Ige was walking what Prof. Adebayo Williams as ‘a thin tight rope with the confidence of a trapeze artist’. Ige was doggedly fighting for his party AD, castigating PDP while remaining loyal to the PDP. Omisore in the other hand was fast becoming a pariah in the AD and was looking to PDP. With the impeachment moves closing in on Omisore as deputy governor, Ige accompanied Mrs. Titi Atiku (an Ilesa woman married to the then Vice-President Atiku Abubakar) to Ife for a celebration at the palace of the Ooni. On that day, Ige received the shock of his life as he was molested by thugs under the command of a certain ‘Fryo’. Ige’s cap was sized and his eyeglasses removed – right inside the palace of the Ooni who made to assuage Ige to which Ige cryptically responded “Please get me my cap”. The cap was returned, Ige straightened in and placed it on his head.
The following day, Omisore granted a caustic interview to Tempo magazine that was published the following week where he spoke these very words: “Recently too, Bola Ige came on radio here to insult me and my family. That is his last one. He was beaten yesterday, the people of Ife beat him up and he was crying like a baby as they removed his cap and his glasses.”
In the impeachment saga, Hon. Odunayo Olagbaju led the move to block Omisore’s impeachment and he was brutally hacked down on the streets of Ife. Six days after, on the 22nd of December, 2001, Ige was at his Ibadan residence when all his security detail chose to go and eat at the same time and locked their arms away. Ige was killed.

The conspiracy theories have never helped the case: Ige wrote a weekly column for the Sunday Tribune from the mid 90s till he was appointed the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation when he handed it over to Odia Ofeimun for a period only to resurface about six weeks to his death under the pseudonym “Politicus”. For those of us who knew, we could identify Uncle Bola behind every word and every phrase. There were up to six theories at the time; some said an article he wrote soon after the 9/11 terror attack where he castigated the United States for creating the terrorist called Osama bin Laden was responsible for his death. Some said he had taken on an FG case against some drug barons and that is why he was killed and yet another theory had it that he was killed by political opponents within the Afenifere setup. I was never sure of those theories but I believe strongly that Ige’s death was political but for some insider knowledge, I do not think Omisore is guilty of Ige’s death: he was only a fall guy.

Ige’s closest friends say that he was prepared to resign from government by early 2002 was said to have written his resignation letter to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. Obasanjo insists he never received such a letter but three men claim they saw it: Prof. Wole Soyinka, Sola Adeyeye (now Senator) and one US-based Nigerian Professor whose name I forget now. Both the letter and Omisore’s interview were published in almost every newspaper in the weeks following Ige’s death. Ige in the letter had said he wanted to resign to reorganise his party against the threat of the PDP but he assured Olusegun Obasanjo of his support for his second term.

On the night of the 23rd of December, 2001, the present Minister of Police Affairs, Alhaji Jelili Adesiyan threw a party in his village Ode-Omu. This same man (popularly called Jallo) was made the Osun State Secretary of AD by Bola Ige and was regarded by the Iges as a family member. His house in Ibadan was very close to the Solemilia Court residence where Ige was killed. He and Omisore along with several others like Kunle Alao would later go to jail for two years on accusations of complicity in Ige’s murder. The police officers in charge of the case were transferred from Oyo state one after the other, the trial judges were removed or excused from the case one way or another and after watching one too many orchestrated delays, Justice Atinuke Ige, Uncle Bola’s wife passed on.

If you think this is a piece more befitting Y!History than Y!Politico, think again: the politics of Ige’s death reverberated loudly in Osun two weekends ago and was the major albatross of Omisore’s campaign. To put this in proper perspective: Gov. Rauf Aregbesola within one year of his becoming the governor of Osun State released the killers of Hon. Odunayo Olagbaju. If Omisore lost the Osun election it is because he did not learn enough from Ige before he died. Yes he learnt how to reward those who went to prison with him with political appointments but he did not learn how to work with his opponents.

So who killed Chief Bola Ige? We may never know but I know one of two men alive who may know the answer to a question that will point us in the right direction: Who insisted that Iyiola Omisore be given the PDP Osun East Senatorial District ticket even while he was in prison? Between Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Chief Audu Ogbeh (the then chairman of PDP), whoever can answer this question can answer the former question.

Have a splendid week, no matter what.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.