Barring any legal upset, Kogi State will be electing its next governor in November. The choice is between the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Idris Wada, who is the current governor, and the All Progressives Congress (APC) Abubakar Audu, who was twice governor on the platforms of the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) between 1990 and 2003 and the defunct National Republican Convention (NRC) between 1992 and 1993 under the Gen Ibrahim Babangida transition programme. Mr Wada is a retired pilot, and Prince Audu a banker and accountant. Both will lock horns brutally and fiercely in about two months from now to determine who will run the affairs of the largely silent and bucolic state for the next four years.
There is some idle chatter that the election will be close and the outcome uncertain for two simple reasons: first, that Prince Audu is proud and insufferable, and Mr Wada lethargic and clueless; and second, that the latter is an incumbent determined to deploy the power of incumbency remorselessly, and the former has taken a Lagos-based Kogite with uncertain electoral value as running mate. Those who make such permutations are obsessed with the leisure of theorisation. Not only will the electoral outcome be clear and unambiguous, it will not be close, no matter what partisans wish. Though it is not clear who Mr Wada will pick as his running mate — whether the same Yomi Awoniyi, currently the deputy governor, or someone else — whoever he picks is unlikely to add value to his ticket in excess of his own personal failings and liabilities.
Neither Kogites nor the APC, nor yet the rest of the country, should be anxious about the November poll. It will proceed with clockwork precision once it begins, and end in unassailable victory for Prince Audu and his APC. In the last Kogi governorship poll, this column had reluctantly endorsed Prince Audu and predicted his victory. Sources close to the theatre of action in the last poll swore that Prince Audu won, but had his victory upturned through one of the boldest and craziest electoral subterfuge ever. This column also reluctantly endorsed Muhammadu Buhari for the presidency and predicted the APC candidate’s victory. The Buhari victory was undisputable, notwithstanding the damnable scheme by Godsday Orubebe to ruffle feathers and upset the apple cart. Endorsing candidates and foretelling victories based on confident analysis and factual projections are the forte of Palladium. Kogi 2015 will not be different. APC will win not because this column is partisan, but because the objective conditions on the ground are so plain that the indications of victory are unmistakable.
Prince Audu has his drawbacks, liabilities that were exposed in this place when this columnist first endorsed him in 2011. In his first coming as governor in 1999 under the Fourth Republic, Prince Audu was so imperious that when he sat on a chair, everyone around him in the fiefdom he had turned Kogi into sat on the floor. And his brocades were so starched that not a few people hazarded, perhaps with a hint of exaggeration, that they were capable of lacerating the skin of the unwary and audacious politician or aide who flailed an arm near him. Prince Audu, in those days, was evidently proud, disdainful and annoyingly condescending. Has a long time in the political wilderness sobered and tempered him enough to earn him electoral recall and win this column’s endorsement? Prince Audu has changed, it must be admitted, though it is uncertain whether he has changed enough to earn a quieter, more dignifying sobriquet.
Both in 1992 and 1999, Prince Audu was an innovative and hard working governor, full of programmes and brimful of modernising projects, with superior taste, paradoxically cultured outlook, and a productively restless and boisterous disposition. He initiated the Kogi State University, Anyigba and laid a fascinating architectural master plan for it, making it a beautiful campus. He built roads, housing estates, hospitals and schools, and had he undergirded these achievements with a lofty futuristic vision, he might have earned a top spot in the state’s Hall of Fame. What probably elevated his achievements and attenuated his weaknesses was the simple fact that both his successors, the untalented and insular hotelier, Ibrahim Idris, and the excessively do-nothing Idris Wada, a former pilot of questionable judgement, stultified the state’s development almost to the point of rigor mortis.
One-on-one, Prince Audu will beat Mr Wada in their Kogi East senatorial district, their birth place — as indeed he beat him even in the last poll — where the latter lost both his polling booth and ward. Elsewhere, especially in Kogi West where the Okun people come from, and where the Ekinrin-Adde native and APC governorship running mate Hon. Biodun Faleke hails from, Prince Audu will run away with clear dominance, even if Mr Wada were to stick to Mr Awoniyi, also from Kogi West, as his running mate. It is argued that Hon. Faleke is a foreigner to Kogi politics because of his long-standing involvement in Lagos politics, and that both the Okun people and other Kogites might reject him. Any thought of rejection collapsed last week as Hon. Faleke, a member of the House of Representatives, received what some observers described as indescribably large turnout of Okun people in Kabba when they welcomed him a few days ago into the fray. With his exposure and pedigree in progressives politics in Lagos where he had won many elections, and the clear support he receives from the APC national leadership, having been Lagos coordinator of the Buhari/Osinbajo campaign, he is bringing to the ticket unmatched advantage.
In Kogi Central, the votes may not even be divided as some are speculating. The reason, again, is simple. Kogi abhors being in the cold. In 2003, it turned PDP-ward from ANPP for obvious reasons, and has appeared so far to stick to that unprofitable option. APC is the ruling party in Abuja, and nearly all of the North, minus Gombe and Taraba, have berthed in APC. In November, Kogi will enter the mainstream willy-nilly, especially because Mr Wada, like his predecessor, Ibrahim Idris, has been one of the worst disappointments among Nigerian governors. He is generally judged as incompetent, slow, quiet in a sepulchral manner, and averse to hard work and visioning. There is indeed no trail of him anywhere, not even in Lokoja, the state capital, where he has not built one world-class road or facility. He is as anonymous in Lokoja as he is unknown in all of Kogi West, Kogi Central and to some extent, Kogi East, where he is impervious to their yearnings. As certain as day follows night, Kogi will turn APC in November and vote in Messrs Audu and Faleke. The last presidential poll in which President Buhari was voted in was Kogi’s harbinger of change. That change will be consummated in two months.
Bookmakers think former president Goodluck Jonathan may draw sympathy votes for Governor Seriake Dickson in the December Bayelsa governorship poll, but in Kogi, neither Mr Wada’s Igala people nor anyone of substance for that matter will draw any sympathy votes for the governor. He is alone, stripped bare, unaided by the radically morphing politics of Kogi and the spirit of the times. Kogites may sniff at talk of Prince Audu’s behavioural conversion to urbaneness, but voting in November, they will remember all he did between 1992 and 1993, and between 1999 and 2003, and hold their noses gingerly and vote for him with a little foreboding, but nonetheless enthusiastically. The same voters will concede that Mr Wada is not nearly as insufferable as Prince Audu, but they will gnash their teeth that in almost four years he folded his arms and snoozed away the lazy days as the state went slam bang downhill. They will keep everything open —their noses, eyes, ears, etc. — and elbow him out viciously, remorselessly and joyously.
Mr Wada may have led Kogi State to collect over N50bn bailout fund from the Central Bank when he is owing only August salary, prompting many to speculate to what end he planned to put the money, whether developmental or political. Local governments are owed about a year’s salary, and pensioners more than eight months. But N50bn is a lot of money, in fact the highest bailout any state is billed to collect. Whatever chicanery Mr Wada may be up to, the November poll will not be about money or soapbox theatrics. It will be about legacy, one thing Mr Wada does not have even a modicum of, and about liberation, which his enervated policies cannot stop.
