“Beware the quiet man; for while others speak, he watches. And while others act, he plans. And when they finally rest, he strikes.” Not all quotes have the fortune of being attributed to an inventor; the above is one of them. Author known or author not known, the quote is fit for my use and I use it here, guardedly. Reticent Oyo State governor, Seyi Makinde, packed a punch last Tuesday with a media chat that landed like a cluster bomb.
Exactly like America’s missile strike of Thursday, lethal fragments from Makinde’s verbal Tomahawk hit widely, leaving mortal marks on both intended and unintended targets. At a time when everyone ran for cover, the man stood apart and spoke as a rebel with a cause. He had enough firepower for everyone on his firing line. The whole country heard his words and took note of his allusions, what he said, what he left unsaid. That, perhaps, is the paradox of quiet men: they speak sparingly, but when they do, the impact lingers long after the echoes fade.
The quiet man has since gone back to his quiet default mode while proxies have taken up the fight on behalf of those bruised by him. History lends this posture a familiar logic. “Politics is war without bloodshed; war is politics with bloodshed” (Mao Zedong). Historian John Keegan looked at the wars of the Middle Ages and marked the pivotal roles of surrogates. From the Italian condottieri to Sweden’s companies-for-hire, contractual warriors fought at arm’s length for their principals. Surrogates and proxies are baying for the blood of the quiet man who dared to speak out. The governor made revelations and held back revelations. His ‘victims’ are using proxies. This is a season when the worst of us “are full of passionate intensity.” Get your popcorn and watch.
To be dumbstruck is “to be shocked or surprised as to be unable to speak.” The dumbstruck are answering the governor through emissaries. Read John Keegan’s ‘The History of Warfare.’ Read Geoffrey Parker’s ‘Dynastic War’ in ‘The Cambridge History of Warfare.’ Read Shakespeare’s Claudius and his agents in ‘Hamlet’, read Edmund and his tactics in ‘King Lear.’ I would have said read ‘Julius Caesar’ but I cannot see in the Abuja surrogates the moral proxy of reputable Brutus. Besides, the governor appears to be a man with enough capacity to take on adversaries shot for shot.
So, I am waiting for the quiet man’s next speech or chat. Wait for it too. “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”
W. B. Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’ in 1919. Chinua Achebe picked the title of ‘Things Fall Apart’, his best, from the first stanza of that poem; I picked the above quotes from the second. Read the entire poem, twenty-two lines, two stanzas.
The foregoing is for the ‘friends’ of Makinde; the following is for his sons.
Forty-eight hours after his hard-hitting interview, Governor Makinde calmly crossed into an entirely different realm – the almost meditative opposite of the combative warfare of the previous two days. His birthday.
I was invited to Governor Makinde’s birthday gathering in the thin hours of Christmas morning. As the night made to leave and the D-day raced to release its rays, the man arrived quietly, with his wife and children forming a small human hedge around him. There was music, there were quizzes, there was laughter, there was food. Delight coursed from table to table; the air held a sense of observance and warmth.
Then the celebrant was asked to speak, and the room shifted. If anyone wanted or expected further broadsides to his friend, Nyesom Wike, they were disappointed. Neither did he need to use his day to cite the weeks of darkness in Ibadan to amplify the lack of capacity of those who promised Nigeria electricity.
Makinde stepped forward, thanked everyone, turned to an introduction of members of his family. First, a young lady’s birthday falls on 24th December, and because of that, the lady claimed that she is the governor’s senior by one day. Laughter. Then, the governor called out his last child, his son, whose university in the United States had recently been visited by terror. A gunman had invaded the campus. “He called me,” the governor said, “and told me he had just left the lab when the gunman came and struck there.” The crowd gasped. What followed was not a speech so much as a testimony, a song of victory lifted from Ebenezer Obey: When a good person stands a breath away from the ditch, lightning breaks the dark to show the way. That was it. A governor singing gratitude, counting mercies, acknowledging the invisible hands that sometimes intervene between life and death. As the Book of Psalms puts it, “He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone” (Psalm 91:11-12 KJV).
Then came an introduction which turned the birthday event into a bowl of questions. His five-member family, the governor said, became seven in 2020/21. Two boys added by fate, by circumstance, and by the unexplainable. He asked them to come out. One, graduating in eight months’ time with a Law degree from a UK university. The other, eighteen months away from a Master’s degree in Architecture, also in the UK.
Who are they?
The governor offered no further details on how a family of five in 2020 became a family of seven grown-ups in 2021.
But, that moment, a whisper whistled by: “They are the Ayoola boys.”
Who?
At the beginning of this democracy, Hon. Kehinde Olatunji Ayoola stood at the centre of Oyo politics. Born in Oyo town in January 1965, Ayoola lived a life whose chapters were many in a book of 55 pages. He was Speaker of the Oyo State House of Assembly at the dawn of the Fourth Republic; a campaign organiser; a gifted narrator and storyteller; and, finally, Commissioner for Environment under Governor Makinde. Then, one bad Thursday in May 2020, he died—55 years old. He lived in a hurry and died so soon in a way that life has not bothered to explain. Ten short months after Ayoola’s death, fate returned to complete its sentence. Ayoola’s wife, Oluwakemi, Professor of Agronomy and lecturer at the Institute of Agricultural Research and Training, Ibadan, also died, leaving behind two teenage boys. The French would read this and exclaim: Quand il pleut, c’est le déluge (when it rains, it pours). Shakespeare warned in Hamlet that “when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” For the Ayoola children, sorrow did not knock; it ambushed.
Someone said there are deaths that end a life, and there are deaths that interrogate the living. Ayoola’s was the latter. He belonged to that rare category of men who were friends to many and friendly to more. Between us there was mutuality of affection and respect. I love gifted writers; Kehinde Ayoola was one. I loved the elegance with which he glided between English and Yoruba, never losing cadence and precision in either. I admired his courage – and loyalty to his friend. I suspect I was not alone in that admiration.
When Governor Makinde announced his death in May 2020, the tribute was intimate, almost private. He did not speak as a governor mourning a commissioner; he mourned as a man remembering a friend, a comrade of trenches; he reminisced their days together in the Rashidi Ladoja campaign days of 2002, the long and unrewarding marches of 2015, and the eventual victory of 2019. It was grief stripped of protocol.
At its best, a friend said politics should be friendship with a public purpose. When Aristotle was asked, ‘What is a friend?’ he replied: ‘One soul dwelling in two bodies’. Roman orator, Cicero, gave a similar definition in his essay ‘On Friendship’. It would appear that Ayoola and Makinde embodied that ideal. In the aftermath of the transition of one, we see politics unfolding itself not as transactional but relational. We see friendship anchored in shared memories, in shared responsibilities; we see humanity in political friendship. That is my takeaway here.
The death of father and mother, almost at the same time, is enough to derail destinies of teenage children. The world is traditionally cold to orphans, and predictably unfaithful to the vulnerable. To the orphaned, there will always be promises and pledges of help and of shoulders to lean on. But, the Yoruba have always understood the fragility of promises made in the heat of grief. I will be your mother rarely survives the test of time. I will be your father often forgets itself midway. Sympathy is cheap; post-sympathy continuity is costly.
Makinde’s condolence message on Mrs Ayoola’s death in 2021 acknowledged this truth: that the mother died “at a time when her two sons and the entire family needed her the most.” It was not a ceremonial lamentation; it was a clear-eyed recognition of orphanhood, of a vacuum that flowers and fine speeches could not fill and would never fill.
In less than ten months apart, the Ayoola boys lost both parents. And that was before their flowers could bud. But they survived because friendship did not die with their parents. Makinde, their father’s friend, and his wife, stepped into the breach which society often leaves unattended. They moved the teenage survivors into their home and got them adjusted and properly integrated. Then, they lifted the boys from here to that space where first-world education awaited them. Makinde performed fatherhood and proclaimed guardianship; he provided structure, scaffolding: education, stability, direction.
The Yoruba say: Eni t’ó s’ojú ò seé, bí eni tó s’èyìn de ni. How do I translate that? Closely, I say those who stand by the dead are more faithful than those who stood beside the living. Or I say: true loyalty is measured not by who stood with you in life, but by who stood firm when you were gone. I may even go with the philosopher and add that it is not who walked with you that counts, but the one who refused to walk away after you were gone.
Mikael Rostila and Jan M. Saarela in 2011 wrote ‘Time Does Not Heal All Wounds: Mortality Following the Death of a Parent.’ They say the death of a parent, especially a mother, is not merely an emotional tragedy; it is a public-health event, one that can cast a long shadow across a child’s entire life. That is how bad the loss of a parent could be. Now, imagine losing both. Henry Longfellow once wrote that “great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.” For children, however, the harder art is surviving what should never have begun so early – in this case, it is orphanhood.
Ernest Hemingway in ‘A Farewell to Arms’ says “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” It is a prophecy for the Ayoola family. Today, the boys have father and mother again; they are in universities abroad. Their fate is a living proof that while death may rupture tendons and threaten plans, kindness can step in and stitch the torn. In a world where people forget faces and pledges once the dirges fade, this story offers a metric of applause.
In my few years of existence, I have seen performative friendship contrasted with tested loyalty. The latter is what I salute here. Friendship is what endures after death, and it is never proven by eloquence. It is revealed in catastrophe, in who you choose to lift from the rubble when the world caves in. Our friend, Kehinde Ayoola, was a very good man. Thank you Mr and Mrs Seyi Makinde. Eni t’ó s’ojú ò seé, bí eni tó s’èyìn de ni.
**********
