After hesitating for many months, the Olusegun Osoba camp in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ogun State has decided to defect to the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Though Chief Osoba himself has not made a formal announcement, the long-standing turmoil in Governor Ibikunle Amosun’s government all but made the defection virtually inevitable. Governor Amosun’s deputy, Segun Adesegun, who belongs to the Osoba camp, had a little over a week ago publicised his deep-seated grudges against the governor, much of it revolving around mistreatment, disrespect and inadequate funding. In the letter, the deputy governor sounded pessimistic the disagreements could be resolved. He may be right.
The Osoba camp is believed to comprise some leading politicians in the state, including all the state’s three senators and six House of Representatives members. No matter what veneer of optimism the Amosun camp want to spread on the split, the Osoba camp is as formidable out of government as the Amosun camp remains formidable in government. If the two camps stay together, they will be even more formidable and stand a decent chance of defeating the resurgent and obviously well-financed opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state. As far as optimism goes in politics, both camps imagine they are so formidable separately that they can win the next governorship poll based on their individual merits, political integrity and grassroots mobilisation.
Chief Osoba entertains the chimera that he has with him the state’s top national lawmakers and perhaps a plethora of other state and local government elected representatives. He probably thinks his camp is impregnable. But as some states have shown since 1999, it may take just one election for a grumpy and testy electorate to sweep a whole coterie of lawmakers away. Governor Amosun also imagines that his infrastructural renewal programme, the like of which has probably never been witnessed in the state before, may stand him in good stead with Ogun’s longsuffering voters. He will be misreading the times to think performance is a sufficient condition for re-election. In fact, in reality, apart from their befuddling incompetence in assessing candidates, Nigerian voters may have become unfathomably venal, irritable and impatient. They punish well-meaning candidates for little slights, and reward malevolent candidates for massive deceptions.
The trouble in Ogun APC appears on the surface irreconcilable. But that is because APC leaders’ attention is riveted, perhaps inadvertently, on the wrong things. They seek ways of mollifying Chief Osoba, who seems in the opinion of many to be desirous of carving a liberal fiefdom for himself in a state where he can exert a powerful pull on the politics and bureaucracy of the state consistent with his national standing, age and political associations; and where he can erect a panoply of political and electoral frameworks to dispense equity and fairness according to his own peculiar understanding of justice and ideology. But it so happens that in the same Ogun State lives and governs someone like Mr Amosun, a man fiercely independent and unwilling to subordinate himself to man or angel, or to Lagos or Ogun, but a man who was nonetheless probably the party’s best choice to win the governorship in 2011.
The party’s pragmatic leaders, especially in Lagos, recognised this seemingly contradictory fact and prioritised their preferences. If their major desire was to win in 2011, they were willing to ignore Mr Amosun’s idiosyncratic irreverence. Chief Osoba, it seems, never quite reconciled himself to either Mr Amosun’s candidature or his independence for many reasons dating back to the 2003 governorship election. Every small disagreement has therefore loomed larger than necessary, and the governor’s sometimes complex realpolitik has seemed to the Osoba camp despicable and intolerable arrogance. Making a choice between who to support for a House of Representatives seat, such as the one the party had to make between Lekan Abiola (MKO”s son) and Olumide Osoba, became red rag to two raging bulls.
Party leaders in and out of Ogun are miffed and bewildered by how quickly a small misunderstanding turns tectonic. They are expending energy to settle acrimonious party congresses, determine who should be supported for elective and appointive positions as well as party executive offices, pacify incensed party men elbowed out of the governor’s tight inner loop, and other long if not interminable list of grievances. I am not sure to what extent party leaders can procure peace by continuing to focus on the long list of grievances from both sides. With every resolution, a new grievance emerges. I even suspect that judging by the severity of the rupture between the Amosun and Osoba camps, party leaders may now focus on how to ensure a tentative peace so that the party can unite for the 2015 polls. If they succeed, it will be because Mr Amosun realizes the inadvisability of relying on his good works to give him electoral victory, and because Chief Osoba appreciates that even if Mr Amosun is vanquished, it would be pyrrhic victory so devastating to procure that even he would be unable to gain from it.
Nevertheless, party leaders must wade into the fray not by looking at the long list of grievances or setting out broad principles for redress, but by examining holistically the bane of politics in the Southwest, and helping party leaders, both elected and appointed, to have a better and deeper understanding of the complicated nuances of contemporary political undercurrents. The region is gradually moving away from the patrician and paternalistic forms of politics and governance. Unknown to Chief Osoba, APC’s national leaders have had to quickly reconcile themselves to the fact that whether Ekiti under Kayode Fayemi, or Oyo under Abiola Ajimobi, or Lagos under Babatunde Fashola, the governors often and ineluctably resist any attempt by anyone to exercise control over them. Lagos and Osun, however, present an interesting study.
While Mr Fashola chafes at any outside control, not being a politician dyed-in-the-wool however, he has been unable to summon the ingenuity to take over the state’s political structure. Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State, in spite of his well-known fondness for boisterous politicking, seems to be the most successful in the Southwest in balancing his independence with the need to accommodate his party’s national leaders. He has done it with effortless ease, due in large part to the easy-going nature of former Governor Bisi Akande and the ideological affinity he shares with former Lagos Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu. If restiveness in Ogun is to be pacified, party leaders in and out of the state will have to look closely at the Aregbesola formula, a formula I think, by the way, is more intuitively practical than rational or designed. It will be pointless blaming Chief Osoba or lambasting Mr Amosun. Blame game will only lead into a labyrinth.
Mr Amosun has obviously not been wise enough in managing his relationship with Chief Osoba’s camp, considering how he has tried to win every battle, overt or covert. He wants to dominate the state and wholly determine its direction in accordance with the constitutional powers vested in him. If his party’s national leaders gave him breathing room, a number of reasons accounted for that pacifying change. But in his battles with Governor Amosun, Chief Osoba consistently makes reference to his age and association with the late sage, Obafemi Awolowo, at whose feet he said he learnt politics. Even then, Chief Osoba has not demonstrated the flexibility and restraint that come with the qualities he has ascribed to himself. Southwest history is replete with examples of party divisions preceding heavy electoral defeats. Why does Chief Osoba think Ogun can defy the odds in 2015?
Chief Osoba may be a great politician and leader, but he is not ideological, notwithstanding the Southwest and APC’s progressive orientation. Indeed, most Nigerian politicians, the Southwest included, are not ideological. Mr Amosun is also ideologically blank, though his infrastructural renewal programme is exemplary. The common ideological causes and lofty visions for a great welfare society that should animate and bind the two political leaders together are thus inexistent. Until APC national leaders can help the two find a common cause, they will continue to undermine each other. Elsewhere, in Oyo, Mr Ajimobi is also not ideological, and he has found it difficult to conceptualise the inspiring common causes that have differentiated Lagos from other states, in spite of Mr Fashola’s lack of ideological affinity with Asiwaju Tinubu — the isolationist governor versus his expansionist and internationalist predecessor. If Mr Ajimobi had had a politician like Chief Osoba to discomfit him, say an aggressive Lam Adesina, Oyo would also obviously be in turmoil.
The revolution begun in the Southwest some years back is stalling for much the same reasons the Ogun APC conflict is festering. It is uncertain how that conflict will be resolved, both in Ogun and the Southwest. Dr Fayemi has been dethroned, Mr Ajimobi is under enormous pressure and faces an uncertain electoral future, Ondo never really cottoned on to the revolution, Lagos quivers with uncertainty and is dithering, and Ogun now looks set to unravel spectacularly. A gargantuan conflict between idealism and populism is in fact underway in the region, between the so-called stomach infrastructure of grassroots governance and the futurism and inventiveness that epitomised the high points of the region’s development in the First Republic. Neither Chief Osoba nor Mr Amosun is persuaded by the transcendental quality of the causes they should be fighting for, causes that should concentrate their energies in the right direction and diminish the political self-aggrandizement that now propels their politics — a self-aggrandizement that irrationally drives politics in the Southwest and sets APC leaders against one another in Lagos, Oyo and Ekiti.
