Opinion
By Tope Temokun
AROUND 4:30pm of this day, Friday, the 13th of December, 2024, we stepped out of the Correctional Service (prison) in Afao road, Ado Ekiti, where we were with Dele Farotimi.
He speaks calmly but with loud message. He is unambiguous about it, that all he wrote in his book is the truth.
One thing is clear from this visit and hours long talk, that Dele Farotimi knows things that the crowd does not know. He declared too that while he could not control whom Peter Obi would visit in Ekiti, he never sent anyone to Are Afe Babalola and he had warned those who had visited him, including Peter Obi, never to visit anyone to plead for his release.
He wants this matter to travel the natural route. He disowned in categorical terms, any move by anybody to beg anyone on his behalf or as a condition for his release.
He assertively, vibrantly and untiringly posited that if he had added a single lie to his claims in his book, he would lose heavily in this battle. But if his weapon remains all truth, he will have the last laugh.
Those who postulated that Dele Farotimi is reckless in his writings and documentations, should rather demand a fair play and a level play ground so that we could hear the other side. Citizens should be interested to know what he knows as proof.
But Farotimi is kept in prison while his opponents are tooling up in law suits in Ibadan, Abuja and Rivers seeminly poised for a fight and funnily serving all these court processes on a man in his prison cell in Ekiti where he cannot readily make his defence.
A question that should bother all is that this book has been out for some time and WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG TO FILE ALL THESE LAW SUITS? •WHY DID THEY HAVE TO WAIT TILL HIS ARREST? •WHY DID THEY HAVE TO WAIT TILL HIS REMAND? WHY DID THEY HAVE TO WAIT TO KEEP HIM OUT OF CIRCULATION AND HIS VOICE CUT OFF BEFORE RAISING THESE DUSTS? •WHY DID THEY HAVE TO WAIT TILL NOW? •WHY?
Is this how jurisprudence works?
Is this how history works? Has the Jurisprudence developed this way?
A man who is held up in cuffs and in gallows and some of us, in defence of the orthodoxy, are accusing a man in prison of blasphemy instead of demanding for justice for both parties, they are convicting and crucifying Farotimi unheard and at the home city of the Pilate.
This rain rains in torrents but it shall not rain for long. It shall be temporary. Soon things will unravel. The ground will be dry again. The truth will win.
A.I
Dec. 14, 2024
Tags: Dele Farotimi. Tope Temokun
