In the run-up to the 2019 presidential election, Chief Oluyemisi Falae, national chairman of the Social Democratic Party (PDP), bows out. But why does his quitting echo that famous quip: that every political career ends in failure?
Don’t get Hardball wrong: Baba Falae, 80, is no failure, in any sense of the word. A seasoned banker, and an accomplished civil servant, who peaked as secretary to the Babangida Federal Military Government (SMG), cannot be deemed a failure.
Yet, he has seen better times. Thanks to June 12’s revalidation activism, Chief Falae somewhat escaped harsh censure, as Babangida’s “Mr. SAP”, the gung-ho doctrinaire-in-chief of the Structural Adjustment Programme, which eventually ended a fiasco.
By the start of the 4th Republic in 1999, he had garnered enough public esteem to clinch the Alliance for Democracy (AD) presidential ticket, ahead of the late Chief Bola Ige, whose progressive credentials were much more solid.
Yet, some 20 years later, the old man is quitting under cloudy circumstances. His SDP just junked its own warring claimants to a sole ticket, Prof. Jerry Gana and former Cross River State Governor, Donald Duke, and endorsed President Muhammadu Buhari, not exactly a Falae favourite. So, it wasn’t surprising, when the old man said he wasn’t party to that decision.
But Prof. Tunde Adeniran, the acting SDP national chair, being the next highest party hierarch, in Falae’s zone, countered that PMB’s adoption was unanimous; thus showing some party isolation of the old man, in his winter years. Conclusive proof? Falae made public his secret retirement — perhaps to underscore his protest?
Still, the terrible chink in Falae’s armour happened in 2015, with the infamous Jonathan pre-election “obtainment” scandal. With that Chief Falae’s stock didn’t exactly soar in public estimation, particularly in the black-or-white stark universe, of his native South West.
It all started as a push, to pass Falae and fellow Afenifere grandees’ partisan preference, for a pan-Yoruba positive referendum, for the then President Goodluck Jonathan. The 2015 election results settled that question with a Buhari win. But the campaign funding support scandal broke on the run-up to that election.
Post-2015, Falae and his group had harped on “restructuring” as their Buhari post-victory rally. Although restructuring has been an age-old Yoruba campaign, Afenifere cleverly turned it into their own post-2015 defeat survivalist strategies, entering into “agreements” with other groups, but claiming a “Yoruba” mandate which they didn’t have, though restructuring always resonates in the Yoruba mind.
But in playing this new game, “restructuring” morphed into rabid Yoruba nationalism (against some Hausa-Fulani “enemies”, real or imagined); then Yoruba irredentism and finally, crass demonization of anyone who doesn’t share this new ultra-nationalist sentiments — read the South West All Progressives Congress (APC). Afenifere baited them to no end, challenging them to deliver on “restructuring” or remain bastards — at least by implication — to the Yoruba cause.
That led to the Baba Adebanjo faction of Afenifere endorsing PDP Candidate, Atiku Abubakar. But in response, the Baba Fasanmi faction, which claimed the Afenifere majority, counter-endorsed APC candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, in a ceremony at Ibadan, with Vice President Yemi Osinbajo in-situ.
You could then imagine Baba Falee’s angst when his very own PDP junked their own official candidate and endorsed PMB!
It’s certainly not the best of times for Chief Falae, bowing out rather on the low. But then, that is politics. It’s a pre-election retirement that bodes rather ill for his political clan.
But then, the old man has tried his best and he is entitled to his rest.
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