Early one Sunday morning in June, a mysterious text message flashed across Kayode Fayemi's cellphone.
"Since you continue to oppose Governor Fayose, we shall kill you," the message read, referring to the bare- knuckled incumbent at the time, Ayo Fayose. It was signed, "THE FAYOSE M SQUAD."
Fayemi, a candidate for governor in this tiny state in southwest Nigeria, tried to brush off the threat. But if there was any doubt what the M in the message stood for, it evaporated six weeks later, when another candidate for governor, a World Bank consultant, was stabbed and bludgeoned to death in his bed.
So lucrative is public office here that even in a backwater like Ekiti, a state of only 2 million people in a nation of 130 million, the statehouse and the spoils that come with it are apparently worth killing for. Of Nigeria's 36 governors, 31 are under federal investigation, mostly on suspicion of corruption, and already 5 have been impeached, including Fayose in October. He is now in hiding.
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