Based on media reports on the build-up to the 2012 gubernatorial election in Edo State, as well as reports on the poll underway at the time, I was almost swamped by that sinking feeling summed up by the expression, “Here we go again.”
Or, to borrow from the vast repertory of legendary Yankees baseball player and manger Yogi Berra’s felicitous locutions, “It is déjà vu all over again.”
First, the build-up.
In the heat of a rancorous campaign, the Federal Government, which had a vested interest in the outcome, flooded the state with soldiers in numbers not seen in the killing fields of Jos, nor in vast swathes of territory in Borno, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe, Kaduna and Kano that Boko Haram had turned into no-go areas.
For whose benefit was the atmosphere of fear and intimidation being confected?
The resident police commissioner was replaced by an officer from another command, ostensibly to create a more level playing field, in case he had developed some sympathy for the incumbent governor. But that high-minded precaution was neutralised by the possibility that the new man could just as well be coming in with his own marching orders.
The election umpire INEC was of course not obliged to grant accreditation to all seeking election observer status. Still, it should be able to explain clearly and convincingly why it granted some applications and denied others. It couldn’t.
Most worrisome, there were reports of fake voters’ cards all over the place, a development that had been brought to the attention of the INEC chair. Would INEC, or more likely the courts, have to decide the outcome on the basis of forensic evidence again, as was the case in the Osun and Ekiti gubernatorial elections?
Then, the field reports on Election Day.
Of election materials arriving late in many precincts, delaying accreditation, reducing the window for voting, and generally exacerbating anxieties.
Of the incumbent, Governor Adams Oshiomhole, who should by rights be looking forward to the outcome with confidence, fretful instead, charging that INEC had failed on the threshold to conduct a free election.
In contrast, his opponent, the PDP candidate Charles Airhiavbere, was jaunty, saying that reports reaching him from “his people” indicated that the voting has been largely favourable, and that “corrections” would be made where the voting had not gone his way.
Then, rather ominously, the man on whom I had bestowed the accolade of “The Fixer” (someone who is skilled at arranging for things to happen, especially dishonestly. managing and organising; not to be confused with Mr Fixit, denoting a person who characteristically tinkers with or repairs things) during the presidential election debacle of June 1993, started playing coy, saying that it was too early to pick a winner.
That was not the Tony Anenih we knew, the canny political operator who had declared shortly after the purported election in 2007 of his candidate Oserhiemen Osunbor — subsequently voided by the courts – not merely that Osunbor would win the next gubernatorial election due in four years, but had already won it.
The new diffidence hardly became the sure-footed operative who had declared at the time former President Umaru Yar’Adua was barely four months in office that there would be no vacancy in Aso Rock, come the next election cycle.
He was wrong, but no matter.
When the man who bargained away the victory of his party’s candidate in the 1993 presidential election for a misbegotten “interim national government” and declared the day that treacherous bargain was struck the happiest day of his life – when that man was saying that it was too early to predict the outcome of an election on which he was staking his well-earned notoriety, you had to pinch yourself just to be sure you were still conscious.
It was not for nothing, then, that in the weeks leading up to the 2012 gubernatorial election, it often seemed as if the contest was between Governor Oshiomhole and Tony “The Fixer” Anenih, who had made a career and a vast fortune out of turning winners into losers and losers into winners. When these proclivities were backed by the Federal Might, those against whom they were deployed could hardly be blamed for getting jittery.
The Oshiomhole Campaign, propelled by the awesome political machine of the ACN, seemed to have anticipated this, and more. That much was clear from their newspaper advertisement declaring categorically that its publicity machine would end all electioneering at the time stipulated by law and disavowing any campaign material published in its name after that hour.
They must have remembered how Chief John Odigie-Oyegun’s election as SDP governor of Edo State was nearly torpedoed by one claim, among others, that he had continued to campaign right up to the poll.
True, a tribunal had upheld the election, ruling that a candidate could not be held liable for material put out by a third party on polling day. Still, why take a chance, especially when, in these matters, precedent counts for little, as the Opposition had learned at great cost?
Even in the Department of Dirty Tricks, those who had vowed to “re-capture” Edo State were not found wanting. They plastered one of the precincts in the PDP’s candidate’s constituency with pictures purporting to show Oshiomhole in a compromising posture with a teenage girl — the very picture that had been doing tawdry rounds weeks before the election, and in respect of which Oshiomhole had filed defamation lawsuit.
And then, there was the alarming report that, weeks before the poll, the results had already been collated, showing – no prizes for making the right pick – the PDP candidate, whoever he was, the runaway winner.
So, could the report that the result of the Edo gubernatorial poll was already signed and sealed and only waiting to be delivered be more revelation than rumour? Was this déjà vu all over again? Would The Fixer show that he was still on top of his game despite some recent setbacks, or would The Comrade take The Fixer out of political reckoning in Edo once and for all?
The result was a rout.
The Fixer could not even fix his own ward, much less that of his candidate. While the outcome did not signal the end of election fixing, it more than presaged the twilight of the career of the most fearsome practitioner of perhaps the darkest of political arts. He never fixed another election.
Fittingly, his lucrative career ended in the Edo country, where it had begun in the run-up to the 1983 General Elections.
Just as he could not fix the nation’s decrepit road network when he was President Obasanjo’s Minister of Works, he could not fix the Nigeria Ports Authority, a task he was given as a consolation prize.
When Anenih turned 82 three years ago, former military head of state General Abdulsalami Abubakar raised grave doubts about own political judgement and moral standing when, in a full-page newspaper advertisement, he eulogised the former chairman of the PDP’s Board of Trustees as “a national icon” and “keeper of the peace of the nation. . . a mentor to the upcoming generation.”
Withal, a personage who had lived a life of “total commitment to the higher principles of unalloyed loyalty to the national cause,” and one whose life was “an eloquent testimony to a life of discipline spent in sacrifice and sincere devotion to a nation . . .”
And when Anenih died three weeks ago, aged 85, Obasanjo memorialised him in identical terms. Anenih’s death, he said, marked the end of an “inspiring chapter of Nigeria’s history.” Anenih’s life, he continued, was an “archetypal lesson in public service and leadership at its best.” In the course of a lifetime of “remarkable contributions to the political sector of the nation, Obasanjo declared, Anenih became “a national icon and authentic role model.”
A man of great personal charm the Iyasele of Esanland may well have been in some of his private relationships, and a person of great personal kindness to boot.
But a “national icon?” An authentic role model? “A patriot” who, according to House Speaker Yakubu Dogara, “gave his all for the unity” of Nigeria?
Any wonder, then, that Nigeria is in a morass?