Legal luminary Chief Afe Babalola, SAN, on Thursday , said politics has eroded the values of his home state Ekiti. Babalola said this on Thursday at the maiden edition of Ekitipanupo Colloquium on Development, which held at Agidingbi, Ikeja, Lagos.The theme of the colloquium was, “Restoring Ekiti Enterprise Values and Defining the Pathway to Lasting Socio-Economic Development.” Babalola said, “It is on record that apart from Gombe State, Ekiti State receives the least allocation from the monthly Federal Government allocation to states. It will interest you that Ekiti land was contributing 44 per cent of the total revenue of the old Western Region through the instrumentality of agricultural produce.
“But all that would appear to have disappeared, no thanks to the advent of oil which drew people away from their otherwise lucrative pastime of farming, which used to fetch them handsome income in the days of yore. Unfortunately, this is a country where newly-elected political office-holders don’t see the need to build on the foundation laid by their predecessors because they find it difficult to distinguish between politics and governance.
“This, in many cases, has led people taking over the reins of government from their predecessors to always abandon the projects of their predecessors and start their own particularly when such predecessors are not from the same party with the new helmsman and in almost all of such cases to the disadvantage of the generality of the people. Today, it can be safely asserted that politics has destroyed Ekiti State because our age-long value, mores and ethos of respect for the elders would appear to have been bastardised, desecrated and destroyed and gone with the winds.”
