How does one deal with a seeming lost case like the one of Olabode Ibiyinka George, military governor of old Ondo State in the lost years of the military and former deputy national chairman (South) of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), aside from being an ex-convict for sleaze?
In pristine Yoruba culture, the Elewon (prisoner, criminal or ex-convict, depending on the context of translation) is the ultimate stain. But then has come the Common Law compassion that admonishes you to hate the crime but love the criminal.
Still, how do you manoeuvre this delicate balance of compassion, faced with a grating and unrepentant ex-convict like Bode George, who appears determined to stain about every segment of honourable society with the tragic tar he brought upon himself?
In a September 21 interview George granted The Punch, he ridiculed and blamed everyone, except himself, for his present sorry state: the court that gaoled him for sleaze, the church that told him to 'go sin no more' at his post-prison release thanksgiving – and maybe even the media that dare report, based on solid evidence of trial and conviction, that Bode is indeed an ex-convict!
Bode George's attack on the court and the church is both reprehensible and cowardly. The court has done its job and moved on. If George still professes his innocence even after serving his gaol term, the least he could do is wait for the appellate court to do its job. Pray, how does insulting the lower court and maligning the judge that sat over the case help George in his appeal? Or would he be the appellant and judge in his own case?
Even the attack on the cleric that told him some bitter truth is even more brainless, made all the more sickening by the empty conceit, base vanity and rank arrogance that George exhibited. For having the temerity to tell him to change his ruinous ways and make peace with his God, George dismissed the cleric as that boy, who was in class four in secondary school, when he was already military governor in Ondo State! With George's clear emptiness, despite his elite university education as engineer and elite military training in the Navy, it is no surprise that the military era is best forgotten.
Though George claimed in the interview he would be 70 in one-and-a-half years' time, it is clear he has not outgrown the rashness that made his government present visiting Gen. Ibrahim Babangida with a life-size statue, which Babangida however rejected on religious grounds. Such recklessness also accounted for the apocryphal tale that quoted him as saying that by the time he was through as governor, Ondo State would know a Lagos boy passed through it!
George ridiculing the court and the church is cowardly, because no self-respecting judge or priest would respond in kind, by the dictates of their calling.
But perhaps the most comic, if not so tragic, of Bode George's vituperation is his self-delusion that his was a political trial. No, it was a criminal one – and fair and squarely convicted, until of course a higher court holds otherwise.
So, to comically compare his trial and conviction to those of Nelson Mandela and Obafemi Awolowo is the height of reckless hallucination. To bring in the hallowed name of Herbert Macaulay – the family he claims his mother belongs – and to claim it was family tradition to go to gaol because old man Herbert did is a monumental disservice to the memory of that nationalist icon. Macaulay did not go to gaol for graft. George did.
Bode George should take Venerable Aduloju's advice, purge himself of unbridled arrogance which gaol has so far not curbed, and seek true forgiveness from God. Otherwise, his case might be beyond redemption.
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