Dele Alake and the defence of bastardry

By Haba Alosike

Of all the reactions to calls for cancellation of the recent presidential polls in Nigeria the one I have found most intriguing is that of Dele Alake who is aformer Editor of the defunct Concord Newspapers. Dele later found extensive favours while working with Bola Ahmed Tinubu when the latter was governor of Lagos State. Alake is now the Special Adviser on Media, Communications and Public Affairs for the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council.

While rejecting the calls for cancellation of the presidential polls made especially by the PeoplesDemocratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party, Alake described them as attempts to “abort” a “process” that is moving towards an inexorable conclusion, like an unstoppable train.  Dele’s position on those calls is clearly understandable: his principal and presidential candidate of the APC in the disputed election is Bola Tinubu who appears to be on course for Aso Rock, despite the political catastrophe he suffered at the hands of the LP presidential candidate Peter Obi, who gave Tinubu his first statewide electoral defeat since 1999.  

In this moment that his APC party appears to be coasting to victory Dele Alake will certainly not be in any mood to countenance calls by the other parties to disrupt this APC Oriental Express that appears to be coasting to victory.

Neither is a giddy Dele likely to listen nor pay attention to another important fact: not every pregnancy does or should result in the birth of a child.

Let’s imagine this scenario where a married woman approaches her husband with the news that she is pregnant. It is good news, no doubt, but the husband who is the receiver of the news knows the circumstances of the pregnancy he has just been informed about are far from usual, or normal, nor that the news is even a good one.  While striving not to be too graphic with the realities of the particular situation, the specific problems are that the man / husband knows he travels a lot and hardly has “relations” with his wife, particularly during the period she became pregnant; and that he has had other reasons to suspect his wife engages in infidelities when his back is turned even though he had no specific proof, etc.

Faced with this otherwise-joyful news of his wife being pregnant with a child the husband can safely assume is not his, despite the fact he still loves his wife, the husband now makes a fateful decision: the wife has to abort the pregnancy, so he would not be saddled with a bastard as a child and his wife and mother of his other children he knows are legitimately his can continue to be his wife and mother to those legitimate children.

Of course, Dele Alake’s position on the quandary presented above is quite apparent with his condemnation of the calls for review of the recent presidential polls that is known to be fraught with many irregularities and threatens to produce an illegitimacy as president of Nigeria.  Of course, Dele would welcome this particular electoral bastard with open arms into his “home” and life even though he is aware of the illegitimate process during the recent presidential election that ensured results were not immediately uploaded to the portals of INEC from the various electoral centers across the country, as INEC’s own internal rules and the Electoral Act demanded.

Dele’s stand on this particular issue within the context of the “illegitimate pregnancy” scenario presented above is quite emblematic of the problems, policies and personalities that have worked for decades to consign Nigeria to eternal laughing stock status within the comity of world nations. This country that has embraced illegitimacy and bastardry at every turn and at every given opportunity has spawned politicians and public holders who loot and plunder Nigeria at every turn, just as a bastard would manifest similar behavior within the household that has the misfortune to host its birth.  In short, such elements have ensured Nigeria’s contemporary history since independence is that of a “permanent K-leg”.

Dele Alake and his ilk will settle for anything that will continue to guarantee them maximum comfort and pleasure within the much-bastardized Nigerian polity. They will insist on the status quo of decades-long bastardization and hollowing-out of what they claim to be their own country. They will insist on that path even when there is a slight glimmer of hope that, for once, the process appears set to legitimately produce a president who is truly a product of the efforts of all who are genuinely of and for Nigeria and who tried their hardest to make their dreams and aspirations in this regard come to fruition.

The shrill-like cry of an upbeat Alake—whose last name is a Yoruba moniker for a woman or girl, among other possibilities—is symptomatic of the endless excesses of a class of Nigerian elites, politicians and their cronies who have fed fat on the Nigerian state and will not be satiated. A Dele that claims an illegitimacy cannot be “aborted”, like the one that heavily-scarred the electoral process during the recent presidential election in Nigeria, is among those now intent on turning public office into a “royalty” of sorts, with the fathers involved passing the succession to their children. Dele’s own child who had no record of distinguished public service or even at anything in his young life up to that point was appointed a Special Adviser in the Babajide Sanwo-Olu government in Lagos State in 2019 soon after the ascension of that government.

Why would the same Dele Alake, the acknowledged father of that patently unqualified Special Adviser in Lagos State, now not say Nigerians should look on helplessly as another electoral bastard is birthed in their midst, while they do nothing to prevent, stop or avoid the onset of that illegitimacy?

Alosike is a public affairs analyst