From the moment Donald Trump walked into the White House, a strange thought kept flickering in my head: he sounds, acts, and governs like a Nigerian who just discovered a microphone and decided to use it as a drum. Brute, raw, allergic to decorum, addicted to headlines. And the timing felt uncanny, because back home the loudest, funniest, most headline-hungry politics was coming out of Ekiti under Ayodele Fayose. I remember telling friends, half-joking and half-serious, that America had accidentally become Nigeria, and that Nigeria had been previewing Trump for years in the person of Ayo Fayose.
The parallel hardened in 2014. Fayose, the loud grassroots champion who could turn a town hall into a comedy night, toppled the urbane Dr. Kayode Fayemi, a PhD technocrat with a reputation for order and spreadsheets. It felt less like a normal election and more like a cultural revolt. Years later Trump would do something eerily similar, beating the polished, conventional Hillary Clinton, and later Kamala Harris, in contests that political scientists still call puzzles wrapped in grievance. In both cases the establishment lost not because it lacked competence, but because it lacked theater. Voters did not just choose policy, they chose a vibe.
That is where the Fayose-Trump comparison stops being a joke and starts looking like political theory. Scholars of populism, like Cas Mudde, describe populism as a thin ideology that pits “the pure people” against “the corrupt elite.” Both men mastered that script. They spoke in plain, provocative language, they courted controversy as fuel, and they turned every attack into proof that the system feared them. Fayose did not just insult opponents. He was alleged to have slapped a judge, he danced through scandals, and he coined a phrase that may yet migrate into global English: “stomach infrastructure.” While policy wonks debated roads and bridges, Fayose argued that rice, chickens, and cash at the right moment were infrastructure too, because hunger votes louder than asphalt. Critics called it vote-buying. Supporters called it survival. Either way, it worked.
To understand Fayose you have to separate noise from record, because his career is a masterclass in how allegations, investigations, and court decisions get collapsed into one story in public memory. His first big fall came in 2006 when 24 of 26 Ekiti lawmakers impeached him and his deputy over claims of mismanagement, including the Ekiti Poultry Project. Investigators alleged money was diverted to build a house in Ibadan and buy a Mercedes for his mother. There were also allegations of political violence swirling around a fiercely factionalized state. Afterward Fayose vanished from view, with rumors placing him abroad, in Lagos, or in hiding. Former Abia governor Orji Uzor Kalu later said Fayose spent about 90 days at his Lagos home, a claim Fayose disputed. What is settled, however, is that the Supreme Court later declared the 2006 impeachment invalid, which means legally it cannot stand as a finding of guilt.
His comeback in 2014 was even louder and more national. He beat Fayemi 203,090 to 120,433, and almost immediately the election was swallowed by “Ekitigate” after Captain Sagir Koli leaked a recording alleging discussions about manipulating the poll. A former campaign official, Temitope Aluko, added claims about the role of security agencies. During his second term the EFCC tied him to the broader arms-funds scandal, alleging that about N4.75 billion was diverted from the Office of the National Security Adviser and that roughly N1.2 billion was traced to him. The Commission also alleged he received $5 million in cash from former Minister of State for Defence Musiliu Obanikoro in ways that breached money-laundering laws, and Obanikoro later testified to that effect. In 2016 the EFCC froze accounts linked to Fayose, his company Spotless Investment Ltd., and associate Abiodun Agbele. After leaving office in October 2018 he reported to the EFCC and was detained, calling it persecution while the agency called it due process. In the middle of the trial a video of him dancing on a cruise ship after medical travel permission went viral, and the internet decided his health was miraculous.
Then came the legal punctuation. On 16 July 2025 the Federal High Court in Lagos discharged and acquitted Fayose in the N6.9 billion money-laundering case, upholding a no-case submission and ruling the EFCC had not made out a prima facie case. The prosecution had alleged N1.219 billion was used for his 2014 campaign, that $5 million was taken in cash, and that hundreds of millions moved through Spotless Investment. The judgment does not mean the allegations were trivial, it means they were not proven to the court’s standard. So the fair framing is three separate tracks that must not be merged: controversial political conduct, serious allegations that were investigated and tried, and court outcomes that, in both the 2006 impeachment and the 2025 trial, did not end in conviction.
That distinction matters because Fayose’s power has never really come from policy papers. It comes from presence. And presence is exactly what he brought to his newest job as Chairman of the Rural Electrification Agency (REA). The appointment itself sparked debate. His brother Isaac and other critics suggested he was “above” the role, even urging him to hand it to his son. Yet if experience and political reach matter, a former governor who understands how power is actually felt in villages might be precisely who you want in charge of an agency meant to light places the grid forgot. Electricity is not just about megawatts. It is about unemployment, factory closures, digital access, and rural drift. The irony is that Fayose had earlier said he would not take any appointment from President Bola Tinubu, not even as minister. The U-turn fits the pattern. For a politician built on unpredictability, consistency would be the real scandal.
And then he spoke. Hours after his inauguration in Abuja, a video from ARISE News captured the line that broke the internet: darkness after 7pm, he said, leaves rural people with no alternative attraction, so “everybody is engaging their wives” and the population doubles. His argument was blunt. Give villages light and you get nightlife, recreation outside the home, and fewer early bedtimes. It was crude, it was funny, and it was also revealing.
Fayose is not the first Nigerian leader to explain power failure in ways that make engineers wince. Over the decades the conversation has drifted from technical reports into folklore. In 2012 then Minister of Power Prof. Barth Nnaji spoke about sabotage and the belief in some communities that spiritual forces opposed progress. The media distilled it into “witches and wizards,” and the phrase stuck even though he never literally blamed spirits for a blackout.
In 2007 President Olusegun Obasanjo, after $16 billion spent with little to show, asked “what happened to the power money” and described sector players as a “cabal” frustrating reform to protect generator profits. To many Nigerians that word sounded almost supernatural, an invisible hand keeping the lights off. In other seasons clerics and politicians framed outages as a divine test, saying Nigeria was being tried for corruption and would not see light until repentance came. In 2016 a senior TCN official was quoted off record saying the national grid was “old and tired” and sometimes “just decides to rest,” which instantly became memes about “the gods of the grid.” In parts of the North and Niger Delta, vandalized transformers were blamed on “ritualists” stealing cables for charms, a story a Kaduna traditional ruler repeated in 2014 before police confirmed ordinary metal theft. As generators became the real national grid, pastors and imams began holding “prayers for generators” and “anointing fuel,” a coping ritual born from state failure. And in 2019 a DISCO cited “extreme heat affecting equipment,” which Nigerians promptly translated as “now the sun is fighting us too.”
Why do these explanations survive? Scholars offer a frame. Prof. Wale Adebanwi and Dr. Ebenezer Obadare have written about “absurd attributions” in Nigerian public life, the tendency to reach for spiritual, conspiratorial, or moral explanations when the state fails to deliver basic services for decades. Technical language feels hollow without results, so people fill the gap with stories. Psychologists call it attributional bias: when we cannot control an outcome, we blame witches, cabals, or God rather than sit with uncertainty. Sociologist James Scott might call it a hidden transcript, a way ordinary people make sense of power they cannot touch. The reality remains stubbornly technical, gas supply, transmission capacity, sector debt, vandalism, and poor maintenance, but in public memory the “witches and wizards” line and the “cabal” line endure because they captured frustration better than any audit report.
Which brings us back to Fayose and Trump. Their strength does not lie in conventional insight or in speeches that win approval from editorial boards. Their strength lies in exposure. They expose the other side of democracy, the part that rewards quantity of followers over quality of argument, that treats politics as entertainment, and that punishes boring competence with boredom. Both men turned controversy into a communications strategy, turned the elite’s disdain into proof of authenticity, and turned everyday problems into stories people could repeat at beer parlors.
Fayose’s “darkness after 7pm” comment will be mocked, memed, and dissected. It will also be remembered, not because it is a policy proposal, but because it named a lived experience in language no technocrat would dare use. In a country where light is still a luxury, the joke lands because the problem is real. And in that space between laughter and bewilderment, between allegation and acquittal, between stomach infrastructure and national infrastructure, the Fayose story keeps running. It is messy, it is theatrical, and it is, for better or worse, a very Nigerian way of doing politics out loud.
Bagudu Mohammed is the Founder, Alternative Perspectives.
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
