Our Governor came to office in a suit, not as the son of his ancestors but as a visiting emissary from a foreign embassy. Since that day his most consistent policy has been the monthly Praise Night at International Conference Centre for Culture and Tourism, The Dome, where hallelujahs flow while hospitals cough and schools wheeze. He is Vicar-in-Charge, Bishop of Alagbaka, a man who mounts the Government House Chapel pulpit more faithfully than he mounts the seat of governance. To now ask such a man to declare August 20 as Isese Day is not an appeal, it is an ambush. It is like handing him a goat to slaughter at the altar of Malokun when his knife has long been sharpened only for communion bread.
Those agitating for it know what they are doing. They know he is no custodian of drums and masquerades, no patron of shrines or spirits. To expect him to stand shoulder to shoulder with other South West governors who have honored their roots is to ask a man in cassock to dance with egungun. They are setting him up for ridicule, parading him in a masquerade he does not recognize, a masquerade he has spent his time and suit fabric rejecting.
And yet, in the same breath, this governor preaches tourism as his gospel. But what tourism is left when Mare Festival in Idanre is suffocated, when Igogo in Owo withers, when Ogun in Ondo is ignored, when Iwo and Okute in Ikale are stripped of pomp, and when the Ijaw Boat Regatta floats without rhythm. Do tourists not have mountains in their countries, carnivals in Brazil, shrines in Asia, rivers that sing across Africa? Why will they fly across the Atlantic to come here to watch silence where drums should beat, to photograph chapels where masquerades should dance, to clap hands under fluorescent light where ancestral torches once blazed.
The real hypocrisy is not the governor alone, but those now pushing him into this pit. They know he is a tourist in his own land, an apostle of imported suits, a chaplain of government instead of a governor of culture. To demand Isese from him is to ask him to become what he has spent his career denying. It is a theatre of absurdity where the governor plays the role of a reluctant masquerade and the agitators clap as if they do not know the costume does not fit. Our ancestors deserve libation, not this comedy of errors where both priest and petitioners are actors in a play staged to amuse only strangers.
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