Tag: Adeseye Ogunlewe

It is often said that there is always something new out of western Nigeria. It was the first participatory democracy in this part of the world where an elected premier rather than step down honourably following his constitutional removal from office, opted to pull down the whole edifice (Akintola taku).

It was also the first democracy where, following Chief Remi Fani-Kayode’s boast that the election would be won whether the people voted or not, a regional premier was elected without the electorate. It was also from the West that a leading national opposition leader was framed up by his kinsmen and handed over to his political foes that promptly sent him to 10 years imprisonment for recommending the path to Nigeria freedom.

It was also from there that a flamboyant politician who after securing a pan-Nigeria mandate in a nationwide election in which he trounced his opposition in his Kano base, was denounced by his kinsmen who after claiming he was not the messiah Nigerian were waiting for, handed him over to his political foes who ensured he spent his four year tenure, not in a presidential palace but in prison where he died mysteriously.

Last week, from the West also came  what can be described as political socialization in reverse order with a 76-year old Senator Adeseye Ogunlewe, a veteran of Lagos politics, looking up to his son for political direction. Announcing his plan to decamp from PDP some 30 days earlier, he had said “my son is already there and he is expecting me to join him”. And that was exactly what he did last week while proclaiming “I have no regret decamping to APC”.

Political socialization thesis speaks of a process through which children acquire values and opinions that shape their political beliefs and world view, through agents of socialization starting with family, schools, media and religion inclination. The world view of children who having nothing to compare their fathers with and naturally see their fathers as the greatest in the world, is often heavily influenced by preferences and world view of their parents.

A 76-year old veteran looking up for political direction from his young son might appear bizarre but I think rather than invalidate the political socialization thesis, it only reinforces it. Since the thesis posits that people don’t join political parties by accident but often as a result of a long period of preparation and acquisition of political beliefs, it is safe to argue Moyosore Ogunlewe abandoned his father in PDP and embraced APC whose progressive ideals align with those he had acquired under his father while growing up long before his father embraced “come and chop” PDP politics of Lagos State.

Available facts show Adeseye Ogunlewe has always identified with Lagos’ progressive politics. That in fact was the reason he was elected a senator on the platform of AD in 1999. The story was that although Obasanjo was said to have won the 1999 election, he remained a political orphan having been roundly rejected by his own people. He then needed a political base at any price.

Ogunlewe’s political enemies claimed he was given an offer he could not resist. Unable to find credible argument to severe the umbilical cord between him and his progressive family members and to rationalize his defection to PDP, he had accused Bola Tinubu, the then governor of Lagos State of awarding contracts to his friends.

If any proof is needed that Ogunlewe was driven to PDP in 2003 by selfish interest, his political foes have pointed out that he is today remembered not as Obasanjo’s Minister for Works, but more for fighting Obasanjo wars like a slave. He publicly canvassed for a third term for Obasanjo.

He took a leading role in Obasanjo’s ‘mainstreaming’ agenda, designed to pacify the West and humiliate its leaders including  Pa Adesanya, the late Afenifere leader who told Obasanjo to his face in the run up to the 1999 elections that the Yoruba would not give him support since he has never identified with aspirations of the Yoruba people.

As a further proof, Ogunlewe in 2004, organized thugs in the guise of federal road traffic marshals to unleash terror on officials of the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority that Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Alliance for Democracy administration had creatively put in place to tackle the perennial Lagos State traffic problems.

While Ogunlewe was busy prosecuting Obasanjo’s ‘mainstreaming’ agenda, the state of federal roads in the country became more deplorable despite federal government allocation of billions for road rehabilitation.  Some governors including that of Lagos started rehabilitating federal roads within their territories in order to alleviate the sufferings of their people.

Ogunlewe’s July 2003 announcement that the federal government would invest about US$2.85 billion in rehabilitating and upgrading the nation’s highway network, and planned to make all roads in the country accessible by year end, remained mere promises. It was the same with his August 2004 announcement that the World Bank and the African Development Bank planned to cooperate with Nigeria to build the Trans-West African Highway from Lagos to Mauritania’s capital Nouakchott and his October 2004 declaration that the year 2005 would see faster rapid progress in road repair and construction.

Ogunlewe was dumped by Obasanjo in March 2006. His earlier services to Obasanjo did not however stop him from being questioned and detained temporarily over the death of Funsho Williams, the political opponent he was to square up with in the 2007 PDP primaries for Lagos governorship ticket. It also did not stop his indictment along with Anthony Anenih and other ministers of works for  “alleged serial malpractices” in road contracting over a 10-year period by Heineken Lokpobiri’s November 2009 Senate ad hoc committee’s report.

Ogunlewe attributed his last week decision to look up to his son for political direction to the unending crisis in Lagos PDP. Without admitting his role in destabilising the party as an intruder, he moaned: “You see, for now, there is no chairman in PDP. We don’t have leaders and you don’t expect me to stay in a party that is not stable and with people that lack focus”.

Then he went on to accuse his party members of greed and selfish interest. “What these people care about is only their selfish interests and not the interest of the party”. But he forgets that objective watchers can easily observe that when Ogunlewe points one finger at others, the remaining four are pointing at himself.  Here was a man who secured a ministerial appointment without being a foundation member of the party in Lagos State.

This also perhaps explains why Adeseye Ogunlewe, all through his sojourn at PDP, was at war with Lagos State PDP foundation members. He once called on the leadership of the party in the state to invite the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, to probe Chief Bode George over the N50 million campaign funds disbursed by Abuja for local government elections in the state.

Despite Ogunlewe’s feeling of self-worth, he and his son lost all the elections in which they participated as chieftains of PDP in Lagos State since 2003. Without electoral worth, one can hazard a guess that what drove Ogunlewe out of APC to PDP is not different from what is today driving him back to APC: Self-preservation.