THE one-state fallacy argued by the contemporary Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) leadership in the South-West mirrors the abysmal low level to which governance has sunk in the region since 1999. If the sanctity of even an ideologically sound party were canvassed for, the entire region in the face of the complexities of political participation and reception, it would be doomed to failure even from the first sentence in such an endeavour. How much more anomalous, then, is the one-state argument proposed by a perennially undisciplined, ideologically vacuous and dogmatically backward contraption'Indeed, the profile of the ACN makes any thought of South-West advancement under it chronically uninformed. The ACN, famed property of one man, is notable for a number of practices, none of them suitable to national development. The party is noted for its mindless imposition of candidates on party faithful, the cornering of elective positions for family members and cronies of the leadership, all of them of the Yoruba stock leading to the marginalisation of even the children of the late MKO Abiola, the main political martyr of the present democratisation effort; the displacement of candidates at the whims of the Leader, leading to a scenario where persons, unknown to a particular local government are foisted on the people as their representatives; the yet unchallenged alleged structured plunder of state resources in the guise of tax consultancy; plain rascality in governance, policy discontinuity, leading to the scrapping of schools established by their predecessors; ideological vacuity, witnessed in the seizure of the ''progressive' tag in the face of barbaric conduct; the gradual emasculation of the civil service; gross rape of human dignity through 'mega city' drives which reduce the masses to the margins of existence (bread sellers are regularly put in Black Marias in Lagos); programmed brainwashing of the masses, among many other crimes, to the extent that many have bought into the fallacy that Lagos, a domain where learning is done under terrible conditions and where schools serve as disincentives to learning by virtue of their near total decay, is the new capital of the West African development drive.Theorists of the post-colonial bent mention hybridity, alterity and marginality but their postulations are not sufficiently broad enough to accommodate the endless streams of self-created dislocations within the marginalised entities, in this context, of Black Africa. For the South-West, these dislocations are constantly threatening to erode the dignity of the impoverished populace, and the road to its gradual destruction appears marked by, among others, the policy of school scrapping embarked upon by the ACN leadership, a group which an analyst, Lere Olayinka, sees as political locusts. Indeed, the price for visionlessness should go to those who attempt to merge institutions with different founding philosophies and goals while taking over Ondo, the only state in the South-West which is currently projecting the Awo vision, on the pages of pamphlets fighting a losing battle.However, in the setting up of agricultural estates (for instance in Ore) with limitless opportunities for young graduates and even the less educated, the continued creation of state-of-the-art neighbourhood markets, creation of mega schools with hardly any parallels in Africa, building of mother and child hospitals informed by socio-revolutionary goals targeted at the uplift of the downtrodden masses raped by successive governments, the setting up of an international auto mart in Akure, the provision of potable water by revamping waterworks abandoned for ages, setting up of change agents acting as community development officers in revolutionary synergy with local communities, the setting up of the only Quality Assurance Agency in the country for quality control in government's activities, the creation of unique microcredit schemes, revolution in sports, urban recreation drives and many more, Dr Mimiko has demonstrated that government can work when not encumbered by the presence of a godfather ripping off generations yet unborn by looting IGR, converting state polytechnic land into a private residence, perpetually busy with drugs, loose women and a coterie of misgoverned governors prostrating and cowering before His Worshipful Majesty. To indicate how familiar with the terrain we are, let us present a scene in April 2011 in Yagba State: the godfather shouted the driver down in the middle of an expressway and said: 'Yagba fe to.'(Yagba wants to urinate). It was the dead of night. Our man, in his delusion, is the state and so when he obeys the call of nature, it is the state doing so.Indeed, politically, Mimiko's positive vision transcends the boundaries of revolutionary aesthetics, which Udenta (1999) conceives of as a reactive aesthetic philosophy, being a deterministic outgrowth of a historically inevitable process; a realism of protest, of alternative tradition whose rise is predicated on the crises of bourgeois and semi-feudal societies and the need to not only critically examine their moribund values but also to posit an alternative that is clearly people-oriented. And hear Dr Mimiko, speaking with Sunday Tribune (March 4 edition): 'Progressivism...involves those who by choice and disposition make economic choices in terms of policies and programmes on behalf of the downtrodden. A progressive is someone who strives at all times to reduce the inequalities in the system. A progressive is someone who has passion for the people. In most cases, progressives are not comfortable with the status quo. They are interested in change while the conservatives are interested in maintaining the status quo.' Just how have the ACN governors who attempt to force Mimiko into their retrogressive contraption in their deluded grandeur re-fashioned society' How have they engaged the dynamics of people-oriented economies in their morbid capitalism and unending pauperisation of the beleaguered masses while pontificating with misplaced candour' And if, just 13 years ago, there was no Labour Party or ACN government in the South-West, just how will an integration fashioned strictly in the ACN's terms fare in the next 30 years at least, if time endures' How do you fashion integration in terms of blind party politicking rather than visionary economic blueprints anchored on a visionary reconstruction of society to confront head on, contemporary challenges while simultaneously laying down structures for positive engagement with future challenges' Dr Mimiko argues the point so well that I find him relevant in closing this piece: 'I made it clear from the beginning that if we wanted to establish a structure that would outlast us and that would be sustainable, we must leave political affiliations out of it. I believe in integration basically because we can leverage on our contiguity.... We are already partnering to build a power project by leveraging on the Escravos/Lagos gas line that passes through Ore. We are working to build a power plant... Instead of building 50 megawatts of electricity, we can partner to build 100 megawatts. We can link a rail line through the South-West down to Edo State.' Awolaja is on the staff of the Nigerian Tribune.
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