GOVERNOR Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State found comfort before the state’s governorship primary election in describing the unprecedented challenge to his second term bid as orchestrated by a group of conspirators who paid scant attention to his capacity or accomplishments. It seemed also sensible, given his peculiar political circumstances, that he embraced scaremongering to warn his party of impending electoral defeat should his aspiration for a second term be truncated by party elders. His supporters, despite their fewness, valiantly reiterated his arguments through social media belligerence considered hysterical and apocalyptic by many analysts. Even the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which should quietly wish Mr Ambode’s All Progressives Congress (APC) to make false and costly moves, were darkly warning of electoral forebodings should the governor be repudiated in the Lagos governorship primary election. Indeed, it suited many watchers of the Lagos political scene to remove their focus from the governor in explaining the endorsement crisis he faced before that fateful Tuesday direct primary election.
Unfortunately for his supporters and other observers who never really fancied the APC for a number of reasons, Mr Ambode lost the election by a staggering margin, indicating quite dizzyingly the scale of repudiation suffered by the governor and the terrible undercurrents he had stirred against himself. The rejection was not only total, notwithstanding his enormous work in such a short time, it was a rejection the party was unapologetically eager and exuberant to make him suffer. Gradually, even those who at first argued that Mr Ambode’s rejection was stage-managed by godfathers are, on proper and deeper interrogation of the governor’s style and administration, grudgingly beginning to reconcile themselves with the fact that the APC simply repaid the governor in his own coin. His alienation of the party was reportedly total; their own alienation of him was no less absolute. It is inconceivable anywhere that an elected official, whether under presidentialism or parliamentarianism, could lose the confidence of his party and still sit pretty atop it.
So far, Mr Ambode and his sympathisers have not proffered explanations why he mishandled his relationship with his party. He has not joined many others in castigating the APC or ridiculing its importance as an electoral vehicle for its officials. But, as party leaders and rank and file in Lagos have argued, the governor’s body language, not to say policies, indicated quite clearly the severity of his contempt for the party, almost as if he had another vehicle by which he hoped to actualise his goals in subsequent elections. A few weeks to the primary, it shocked many Lagosians, including those sympathetic to him and those properly described as neutrals, that the governor neither had a fail-safe option nor set great store by any option whatsoever. The brinkmanship was total and mindboggling. But perhaps the governor’s calculations were much simpler than the complex political and electoral ratiocinations Nigerians were conversant with.
It is not unlikely that the governor, having worked assiduously in the first two years or so to build roads and bridges and a number of other telling and impactful projects, felt that these projects were enough to force the hands of party elders and rank and file in the contest for relevance and dominance. Lagosians were likely to be dazed by his record, he probably surmised, and the party would be fearful to repudiate him without attracting opprobrium. In his fateful and ultimately defining world press conference last Sunday, he in fact alluded to that fatal logic in dark silhouettes. However, with each passing day, as more facts snake out from Alausa, the seat of Lagos power, and as more Lagos officials openly defy and mock the governor’s injured feelings, many people are shocked by the deep loathing he educed in about three years in office. Indeed, it has turned out that those who at first interceded on his behalf did so because they feared some kind of electoral backlash. Now, in the face of more revelations and total defiance, that fear has virtually receded into nothingness. Lagos, it is increasingly certain, will move on, undoubtedly shaken by the obscenity of what has happened, but no less grounded and assured in their hopes for the future. After all, what was shaken is their complacency, not their élan, nor their confident ability to keep producing a slew of competent builders.
There was at first some attempt to reduce Mr Ambode’s rejection to a contest between the governor and a supposedly venal ruling party. It was argued that his successful effort to curb waste and plunder masterminded by his party infuriated the party elders and turned officials against him. The primary election, the argument goes, was payback time. This is a misreading of the situation. The party rank and file were not opposed to the great projects; they were instead opposed to being excluded and, in some instances, replaced, as the waste management operations indicated. They were not opposed to the governor’s individualism, as corrosive as it appeared to them, but they resented the concomitant aloofness that saw him erect a gulf between him and them. By all means let him savour his caviar with all the politeness privilege can give, but let him not pour contempt on their own bush meat or ice fish. In any case, the party rank and file that took Mr Ambode to Golgotha on Tuesday were so determined to crush him that it was impossible for any force to stop them, not even their revered leaders. And except it can be proved that they are not entitled to their views or are not Lagosians, then it must be conceded to them to justifiably feel the pains they stomached for years.
Some commentators and the PDP also implausibly argued that the rejection of Mr Ambode was at the irrational and selfish instance of godfathers. It is perhaps possible for one man to evoke crazy emotions in thousands of party supporters, but to whip millions into a frenzy against a governor visibly judged to be working will require more than the gift of Rasputin or the telekinetic wizardry of a political hypnotist. The fact on the ground in Lagos is that the APC was incensed at the governor, and party elders, long accustomed to the wisdom of sailing with the wind rather than against the wind, listened to their followers and championed their cause. The governor on the other hand attempted to sail against the wind and shipwrecked; party leaders instead sailed with the wind and are safely berthed. It may suit the politics and interests of some people in Lagos, particularly the PDP, to frame the Ambode debacle in terms of his struggle with party leaders, but as the chastened governor must have now learnt about leadership, it requires guile, humility, character and brilliance to find the proper balance between the yearnings of party members, despite the indeterminateness of their aspirations, and the more nuanced and esoteric ambition of the larger society.
In 2015, the PDP lost Lagos by less than 200,000 votes. At that time, they were strong and the campaign of prising Lagos loose from the grips of godfathers resonated with many young rebels. In 2018, they are sticking to the same campaign, and will obviously keep at it till the 2019 elections. As they did then, they will also continue to frame the implacable hold of the APC and the progressives on Lagos as in fact the hold, not of a party, but that of a man; and they will continue to frame that hold as evil, an evil that positions Lagosians for urgent liberation. Jimi Agbaje has again received the ticket of the PDP, as he did for the 2015 poll. But the party he will be leading into battle in 2019 is considerably weakened by defections and by dispiritedness at the national level. Their equating APC control of Lagos with orchestrated evil or slavery is in many ways also a difficult proposition to sustain. The state has profited from a disciplined control for many years, and as the lessons of the Arab Spring have shown, not to say the nostalgic regionalism that many now advocate in Nigeria, development and progress can sometimes be endangered by the casual approach to politics being suggested by the opposition vexed by the deposition of Mr Ambode. Moreover, as many Asian countries are showing positively, and as many Nigerian states are demonstrating negatively, there are many other approaches to development and politics.
Until the politics of the primary election in Lagos exploded, many Lagosians were ignorant of Mr Ambode’s troubles with his party. Indeed, until he yielded to desperation and addressed that needless world press conference where his unbridled acerbity was demonstrated in bad light, few knew he was capable of the gloomy temper he showed. He not only misspoke, he slandered, threatened his party, and gave indication he was willing to join hands with any person to pull the whole house down. No one was sure what came over him. It was certainly not just desperation. He knew there were a number of people out there who always described Lagos as being enslaved; and he probably fancied himself as the champion of their cause, their liberator. A little later, however, as stories began to filter out, it became clear that Mr Ambode had not run the most open, inclusive and considerate administration. This was why his deputy openly repudiated him, most of his commissioners abandoned him, and the civil service, almost to the last man, turned against him. It was not about graft; it was about misplaced and unpopular policies like the land use charge, near total abandonment of his predecessor’s impactful projects, poor human relations with his colleagues and others, deep character flaws, and lack of charisma.
Furthermore, it was not until Mr Ambode’s total rejection that it became known that the governor had also lost the confidence of most of Lagos’ traditional, leadership and political elite. Only a few of them attempted half-heartedly to intercede on his behalf, that is even if the rebellious rank and file were willing to listen. What inspired the misdiagnosis of the Ambode debacle was the suddenness of his rejection, not whether evil was inherent in the APC stranglehold. If the PDP were to take Lagos today, contrary to what its leaders say, it will make political sense for them to also inspire an implacable hold on the state, a hold likely to be inspired by, say, a Bode George, or any other panjandrum they might canonise.
In the light of the debacle, could APC still win Lagos in 2019, especially when some individuals are inspiring coalitions against the ruling party and its leaders in the state? The elections are some four or five months away. Forming coalitions takes time and, to some extent, money, as ex-president Olsuegun Obasanjo has just found out. To energise coalitions, even when they are successfully formed, would require that no subterranean hints of religious and ethnic agenda underpinned them. That would be difficult to pull through in Nigeria, unfortunately. In addition, the PDP which tried to put together a coalition of ethnicities in 2015 will find it more difficult this time to deploy the same tactics, especially in view of its weakened state and lack of focus. It had Aso Villa backing in 2015, and much money, and yet failed. It is unlikely to be availed the same capital in the next poll. The battle for Lagos will consequently remain a two-horse race, with little or no room for a third force. Despite Mr Ambode’s unsettling hints, the APC has not lost the moral argument. If they can energise their base for a substantial turnout, they should be able to weather the social media campaign that riles them, keep Lagos as a bastion of progressivism, warts and all, and retain their hold on office for another four years.