Category: Sunday

WHEN Governor Olusegun Mimiko won re-election in 2012 by a sizable and incontrovertible margin, pushing the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate, Rotimi Akeredolu, to third position, the factionalised Southwest political elite was flush with excitement. The vocal and pro-Mimiko faction hailed both the election and victory as a harbinger of new politics in the region, a redefinition and recasting of the fundamentals of Yoruba leadership politics and struggle. Some analysts even went as far as suggesting that Dr Mimiko would and should be the fulcrum upon which a new Southwest leadership and politics must balance. Since the re-election battle in Ondo in 2012 was cast as either pro- or anti-Bola Ahmed Tinubu struggle, and Mr Akeredolu, a senior advocate, was his badly beaten candidate, the very large pro-Mimiko forces nurtured the impression that Southwest politics had begun to change irreversibly.
It mattered little, as this column argued at the time, that Dr Mimiko and his Labour Party (LP) received votes from just 15.8 percent of the about 1.63m registered voters, and 41.7 percent of the 624,659 who actually voted. His two main opponents received a combined but bigger support of about 17.7 percent of the registered voters and 51.1 percent of those who actually voted. Worse for everyone who carelessly attempted to extrapolate the region’s political future from the 2012 votes, voter turnout was just about 38.1 percent. This column pointed out at the time that it was unscrupulous to make dangerous extrapolations, not to talk of assigning great futuristic roles to Dr Mimiko without the relevant statistical support. Much worse was the fact that in character, intuition and charisma, not to talk of administrative skills and vision, Dr Mimiko was not what he was cracked up to be. It turned out that four more years of Dr Mimiko neither brought him nearer the approximation his supporters projected of him nor the epoch-shaping and region-defining greatness the faction of the Yoruba elite read into his election.
Now, eight years after that thunderous misjudgement, another misdirected faction of the Southwest political elite and their northern and national allies led by President Muhammadu Buhari himself are making very ambitious, if not completely misleading, extrapolations from the just concluded 2016 Ondo governorship election. Quite apart from the fact that the same Mr Akeredolu, who was rejected in 2012 on the pretext of being Asiwaju Tinubu’s lackey, has now being canonised as the freedom fighter and rebel anchor of a new Southwest political movement, even the simple statistics that should guide an understanding of the election has been mischievously ignored or downplayed. To the pugnacious faction from the Southwest and their Abuja allies, it appeared sufficient that Asiwaju Tinubu had again been rejected.
The statistics of the election, however, lends itself to a different reading and interpretation. Voter turnout was again a dismal 34.6 percent, even though the number of registered voters remains roughly the same. In 2012, the register contained 1.63m names; in 2016, it is 1.69m. Out of the 2016 registered voters, Mr Akeredolu and his APC received about 14.5 percent support, and 41.9 percent of the 584,997 people that actually voted. His main opponents, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate Eyitayo Jegede and the Alliance for Democracy candidate Olusola Oke, received a combined 16.4 percent support from the registered voters and 47.4 percent of those who actually voted. Extrapolating from the figures for voter turnout and total registered voters, Mr Akeredolu’s performance and even acceptance in Ondo are not as inspiring and seismic as the Southwest faction and its Abuja allies think.
What matters to the Southwest/Abuja alliance is that Mr Akeredolu has won, from which they are determined to make their extrapolations and project into 2019, if not 2023. With Ondo safe in the APC column, the alliance, believed to be led in part by Asiwaju Tinubu’s former protégés — Babatunde Fashola, Kayode Fayemi and the fiercely independent Ibikunle Amosun — assumes that a leadership change in the Southwest could be in the offing. This column reflected this obtuse line of thinking when President Muhammadu Buhari began assembling his cabinet. Should the president plan to run for re-election in 2019, the alliance believes that perhaps only Lagos, not even Osun, would hold out. The peculiar politics of Edo State, which had just been won by the APC under the president’s leadership, and which under ex-governor Adams Oshiomohle had lusted after the Abuja alliance more than it looked westward, indicates that the entire former Western Region column would be hard put to repel the president’s blitzkrieg.
Though the Southwest face of the alliance continues to morph considerably, at least today, the faction’s leaders are fairly well known. Their differences with Asiwaju Tinubu may, however, not lend themselves to easy analysis. For Mr Amosun, for instance, his preference for Abuja may not be unconnected with his long-standing relationship with President Buhari, begun around the time when both were top leaders of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), and his idiosyncratically fierce desire to answer to no one. Whatever relationship he had with Asiwaju Tinubu was simply electoral expediency. Mr Fashola has been scarred by the difficult and frosty co-existence he had with Asiwaju Tinubu between 2007 and 2015, a frostiness that showed itself very early in his first term and ended in 2015 on a bitter and implacable note. Dr Fayemi’s animus is even foggier, considering the distance between Ekiti and Lagos and the fewer interactions he had with Asiwaju Tinubu, and also the dynamics of his re-election fiasco. But as it is, the former Ekiti governor has been even more brazen in aligning with sides and forces opposed to the former Lagos governor.
What is more crucial to understanding the Ondo poll and its future portents is not why a faction of the Southwest political elite opposes Asiwaju Tinubu so vehemently, but the indisputable fact that the region is factionalised in an eerie replay of the politics that undid the Western Region in the First Republic, defanged its political leaders, tore to tatters the reputation of top Yoruba politicians and professionals, and ultimately doomed the country to war. If it had occurred to the three identifiable leaders of the Southwest faction of the Abuja alliance that they were playing a familiar but somewhat complex role in the unfolding political dynamics of the region, they have not shown it at all. It seemed to them that supporting Mr Akeredolu in the November 26 poll was the perfectly simple and sensible thing to do. The governor-elect is of the APC after all, and APC appears in all ramifications to be progressive. More, even Asiwaju Tinubu himself supported the Ondo politician in 2012, and the lawyer-politician appears more illustrious than ex-aspirant Olusegun Abraham, the former Lagos governor’s preference.
With the exception of Afenifere chieftains Ayo Adebanjo and the late Olaniwun Ajayi, not many Southwest politicians, and certainly not the aforementioned Southwest faction of the Abuja alliance, have attempted to get a deep understanding of the forces the Ondo election result is unleashing. President Buhari, ceteris paribus, will run in 2019. The president and his private think tank, which incidentally does not include any of the Southwest faces of the alliance, need the Southwest to strengthen his electoral hand. But they need the region on their own terms, not the galling terms they believed they succumbed to in 2014-2015 when Asiwaju Tinubu called the shots. The president and his men are not accustomed to playing second fiddle, so they needed to rejig the party and play the game from a position of strength and power. Contradistinctively, except the late sage, Obafemi Awolowo, and Asiwaju Tinubu whose mercurial politics has made them unaccustomed to grovelling or surrendering to any ethnically-inspired talk of exceptionalism, most Southwest politicians, including Messrs Amosun, Fashola and Fayemi, seem completely inured to some of the underlying nuances of politics which the northern elite instinctively grasped back in the First Republic.
Asiwaju Tinubu is not without his faults, what with the imposition of candidates he appeared to have masterminded when he called the shots in the Action Congress (AC) and later the ACN. Then consider also his forceful and sometimes impatient ways and politics that grated on the nerves of many of his protégés. But he has remained more ideological than any of his peers. He has enunciated a great vision for Nigeria surpassing those of many developed democracies, but he has voiced his frustrations with the fecklessness of many elected leaders incompetently thrown up by the political process. In fact, it is precisely his attempt to reduce the margin of error in leadership recruitment that has brought him into conflict with many of his protégés and others far afield. Yet, it is significant to know that his opponents, whether in the Southwest or Abuja, have not disagreed with him on ideological grounds. The disagreements have been limited essentially to struggles over positions and influence. Indeed, the vacuity of the ruling party today, the brittleness of its inner core, and the errancy indicated by its half-digested political and economic paradigms are a result of sidelining the one person that seems to have an obsession with and passion for the great possibilities available to the country.
Both President Buhari and Asiwaju Tinubu have been decorous in managing their disagreements over the way the APC and the country are being run. That decorum showed in their responses to the Ondo poll wherein the latter congratulated the victor, Mr Akeredolu, and the former reiterated his conviction that Asiwaju Tinubu played the right, sensible politics in the election. No one believed them, not even this column. One byproduct of the 2012 Ondo election was that the true character and capacity of Mr Akeredolu came into the open rather quickly. That character and capacity were not inspiring, a factor that made this column to endorse Mr Oke whose chances of winning were slim without the unalloyed support of other disenchanted APC aspirants. Mr Akeredolu is neither a visionary nor an administrator, nor one with the depth and capaciousness of understanding and administration to pull Ondo into the ‘first’ Nigerian world as was done with Lagos. He is not alone in this. The Southwest has witnessed a steep and terrible decline in leadership and other economic and social indicators that should worry the region’s indigenes.
Apart from the underdevelopment of the region, it is not surprising that the governors and other political leaders appear unresponsive to the complex politicking shaping out in the country. A reflection of this decline is that some former and serving governors of the region are now labelled Buhari Boys. In the past, Southwest politicians would embrace labelling only if it was based on the tested and ennobling philosophy or ideology of a leader. President Buhari has neither demonstrated unusual administrative acumen nor projected any endearing philosophy or ideology with any constancy, coherence or passion. Whether the Oyo State governor, Abiola Ajimobi, recognised this fact and spurned the label and sat gingerly on the fence is not clear. But he is not pejoratively described as one of the Buhari Boys. The Osun governor, Rauf Aregbesola, will be relieved to know he is also excluded from the label, but he has opened himself unwisely to allegations of playing religious and vacillating politics. In addition, his covert support for Mr Oke during the APC primary managed to hand the controversial victory to Mr Akeredolu. More, the close relationship between him and the wavering and slightly iconoclastic and acerbic APC National Legal Adviser, Muiz Banire, a former Tinubu protégé and now opponent, has made it difficult to place the Osun governor and his politics.
The Southwest is, in short, no longer a bastion of ideological and exemplary politics, a fact that is worsened by the region’s ossifying and destructive fractiousness. The Ondo poll, though terribly misread, is, therefore, signposting a very uncertain time for the Southwest. The region was never a united political entity, and perhaps does not even need to be, despite possessing a rich ethnographic stimulus. But it should be worried that it seems dangerously poised to re-enact the sanguinary and destabilising politics of the First Republic going by the alliances shaping up on the two main sides of the political divide. In the First Republic, the region played regicidal politics and opened itself up for humiliation and exploitation. Under the Buhari presidency, the same politics is being replayed. Chiefs Adebanjo and Ajayi saw these portents and were desperate to avert it. But few are converted to their sagely point of view.
What is even much more niggling is the politics and fate of Asiwaju Tinubu himself. Despite denials and pretences, the fact is that President Buhari and his brain trust have exploited the naivety and grudges of leading Southwest politicians to checkmate and sideline the former Lagos governor and senator. The problem is less that he is sidelined than what the consequences of that sidelining portend for the region. The Southwest politicians now aligning with President Buhari without the binding principles of ideology and philosophy, perhaps in anticipation of the post-Buhari era, will of course come to grief if the history of the Southwest is anything to go by. The region will also continue its precipitous decline in nearly all socio-economic indicators, managing in the process to produce grovelling fifth-rate governors and legislators. For Asiwaju Tinubu, his confidence in his politics of openness, which had seen him embrace, align with and nurture politicians from everywhere irrespective of their ethnicity and religion, may have been badly shaken.
Against all odds, he fought to build a political party that embraced everyone without discrimination, while also deliberately seeking out promising talents. The handshake he extended across the Niger against the protests and warnings of his region has been undermined by both the northerners he thought possessed a similar pan-Nigerian ideal with him and south-westerners he thought he had mentored into public renown. His consolation should be that though the handshake has failed, and is unlikely to be rediscovered in the foreseeable future, he has, like Chief Awolowo, kept his wits and refused to subordinate his broader and tested ideals, both philosophical and ideological, to the political parochialism of those who intrigue for dominance rather than development and unity. In the long run, such confidence and pertinacity always pays. The only pity is that it is unlikely any south-westerner will again be eager to endorse or embrace the kind of pan-Nigerian ideal necessary to build a great and egalitarian Nigeria. President Buhari is content to preside over a country skewed and stewed in narrow flavours. He cannot have his cake and eat it too, having so egregiously defined and circumscribed his presidency in such a manner that many Nigerians from the South and even the Middle Belt suspect a supremacist agenda wafting in the air.