Last Man Sinking – In Touch, The Nation Newspaper

Seyi Makinde is one of the politicians that has the look of the meek but acts with the stealth of a reptile, especially the green variety. The reptile can do nothing until its back is against the wall in the home, and then it tries to deliver its strike. The thing is, the reptile is not supposed to be in the house and so its anger should belong to the landlord.

That is the problem with the Oyo State governor. He is now in a corner and all he can do now is try to strike. But Makinde first showed a lack of creative flair. He wanted to fight Nyesom Wike and yet he borrowed his style. He gathered journalists in Ibadan, and the sitting arrangement is also like Wike. His is like what in literary tradition is described as the anxiety of influence in which you imitate the person as though they are imitating you. You have to perfect it or else they will call you a copycat and it will mean you are trying to flatter your model. In this case, Wike may not be impressed.

Then he turned it into an ego booster for himself. He told us how good a business man he is and how he can be president. He lies to himself in public about the tranquility in PDP. Everyone has fled, even his fellow governors. There was a pity of a picture online where he was sitting at a one-man southern PDP summit. He probably did not get the memo. Or he got it, but lost his memory. He is suffering because of his insistent illusion. As Roman sage Seneca wrote, People “suffer more in the imagination than in reality.”

He wants to imitate President Bola Tinubu, who is known as the last man standing. Makinde is like a passenger in a ship that caught fire in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Youth. A fire was already gutting the ship. The first to know were the rats that were leaping out of the vessel. By the time many on board like Makinde knew, the ship in its magnificence had been lapped up by flames. That is Makinde. He is the last man sinking. He just does not know. First, he needs to answer Fayose’s poser about another fire under his watch and a certain saga of N50 billion.