Following the disenchantment of most of the aspirants who participated in the April 20 governorship primaries of the Ondo State Chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) with the outcome of the exercise in which governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa was declared winner and their rejection of what they perceived as a flawed verdict, the national leadership of the party moved swiftly to assuage bruised egos and massage frayed nerves. Governor Usman Ododo of Kogi State as Chairman of the Governorship Primary Election Committee had declared Aiyedatiwa winner with 48,569 votes with Mr. Mayowa Akinfolarin coming a distant second with 15,343 votes. Incidentally, Akinfolarin had reportedly collapsed his structures into that of Aiyedatiwa before the primary. Most of the aspirants including Senator Jimoh Ibrahim, Mr. Olusola Oke (SAN), Mr. Wale Akinterinwa, Mr. Olugbenga Edema, Dayo Faduyile and Jimi Odunayo among others dismissed the exercise as farcical.
A former Speaker of the Ondo State House of Assembly, Hon. Bamidele Oloyeloogun, described the conduct of the primary as a ‘fraud’ against the party and its members in Ondo State. In his words, “It is on record including that of the INEC that there was no ward out of the 203 wards in the state that election was held, they just manufactured figures. The evidence is that today, our members are not jubilating because the process that led to the announcement and declaration of the winner was a fraud perpetrated against them”. At least five aspirants have reportedly forwarded their petitions to the Governorship Appeal Committee headed by former Bauchi State governor, Mohammed Abubakar, seeking for a cancellation of the primary and the conduct of a fresh exercise. At a meeting to reconcile all participants in the primary, the APC National Chairman, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje, appealed to aggrieved aspirants to sheathe their swords and rally round the winner to guarantee the party’s victory in the November 16 governorship election in the state.
According to Ganduje at the peace parley, “The purpose of this dialogue is to appeal to you. This dialogue is not to dwell on what has happened, or what did not happen, what is correct and what is not correct during the primary. If we dwell on that, it can lead to what we call too much analysis, which will lead to paralysis. Our own is to appeal to you. The party belongs to you and only you. Our prayer is that our party should be the ruling party in Ondo State. It is already a ruling party. Our prayer is for it to continue to be a ruling party in Ondo State.” To achieve this objective of the APC continuity in governance in Ondo State, Ganduje obviously realizes that the party must contest the November 16 election as a cohesive whole. It was thus resolved at the reconciliation meeting that Aiyedatiwa should constitute an all-inclusive government by making sure that the interests of all aggrieved aspirants are accommodated. In the same vein, all shades of opinion and diverse interests will be catered for in the constitution by the governor of local government caretaker committees.
Interestingly, before this reconciliation meeting, Governor Aiyedatiwa seemed to have adopted a triumphal stance as his victory parade through the streets of Akure, the state capital, following his declaration as winner of the primaries indicated. Incidentally, from the visuals that I saw, there was not much excitement on the streets as his convoy drove through suggesting that not too many residents were interested in the spectacle. Given the circumstances that enabled his ascension to the office of governor following the transition of his boss, the late governor Rotimi Akeredolu, one would have thought that Aiyedatiwa would adopt a soberer mien in his carriage and demeanor. It would appear that he has a ruthless Machiavellian streak and it will be interesting to see how far this takes him in the complex political and cultural matrix of Ondo State and Yorubaland in general.
It is understandable that Ganduje wants whatever lapses that characterized the Ondo State governorship primaries to be glossed over and that the aspirants should close ranks to ensure the party’s continuity at the control of the levers of governmental power in the state. That is logical. But the political analyst has the duty to interrogate the deficiencies in organizing and conducting intra-party primaries which has become one of the most serious challenges confronting the polity today and indeed a continuous source of political instability. Lack of integrity in intra-party polls, which is a malaise that cuts across parties, is partly responsible for the apathy that has been witnessed in general elections during which, in a vast majority of cases, only a microscopic percentage of the electorate turn out to cast their votes. Free, fair and credible general elections must be rooted in transparent primaries in which the candidates that emerge genuinely reflect the will of a majority of the rank and file of party members.
While political parties are given a cardinal role in the operation of the political system in the extant 1999 Constitution, no provision is made for them to have formal organic and functional institutional structures. Thus, the leaders of the executive – president and vice president; governor and deputy governor – are elected on the platform of political parties. Members of the legislature can also not contest as independent candidates. They must pursue their ambitions as members of political parties. The concept of independent candidacy is alien to the constitution. This means that the mechanism of the party choosing its candidates for executive and legislative elections is the most critical aspect of the electoral process. Yet, this process is currently conducted in a most unstructured and informal manner. That is why, in the absence of proper institutionalization of structures for the conduct of primaries, parties appoint ad hoc committees headed by otherwise busy state governors to oversee the process.
The lack of proper institutionalization of party structures played critical roles in the failure of Nigeria’s first and second republics. The collapse of the first republic was catalyzed largely by the fissure within the Action Group (AG) in the Western Region and the attempt of the breakaway faction led by the Premier, Chief Ladoke Akintola, who formed his own party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), to hold on to power at all costs against the will of the people who backed Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s AG. Popular and violent uprising in the West against the massive rigging of the 1965 regional elections by Akintola’s NNDP with the backing of Ahmadu Bello’s Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) in control at the centre led directly to the January 17, 1966, coup that torpedoed the first republic.
In a similar vein, intra-party crises particularly within the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) mostly arising from grievances over the picking of candidates in states like Oyo and Ondo in particular for the 1983 governorship elections compounded the general instability that led to the collapse of the second republic on December 31, 1983. The ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) had capitalized on the cracks within the UPN to massively rig the elections in Oyo and Ondo states again with ultimately disastrous consequences for the stability of the polity and the sustainability of democracy. At that time, Mr. Akin Omoboriowo, erstwhile Deputy Governor to governor Adekunle Ajasin of the UPN in Ondo State had defected to the NPN because of his rejection of the decision of the party that its incumbent governors be given automatic second term tickets for the 1983 elections. Omoboriowo contested for governor against his former boss on the platform of the NPN and was declared winner by the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) in a massively rigged poll which was later reversed by the courts.
With the declaration of Omoboriowo as winner of the election, the streets of Akure and other major towns in the old Ondo State erupted in an orgy of flames, tears and blood and a fleeing Omoboriowo surfaced at the studios of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) in Lagos hours later claiming he was the winner of the election. I can vividly remember an obviously mischievous Frank Olize asking the flustered supposedly victorious NPN gubernatorial candidate on national television what he was doing in Lagos when he should be celebrating with his teeming supporters in Akure! Interestingly, it was the military president, General Ibrahim Babangida’s transition programme that tried meaningfully to address the problem of properly institutionalizing political party structures. Its prescription was the formation of two government-created parties, the National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP) a little to the right and left of the ideological spectrum respectively. These parties had functional ward, local government, state and national secretariats with an emergent party administrative bureaucracy. Although critics dismissed the NRC and SDP as government parastatals, the truth is that the politicians took ownership of the structures and there is no way, for instance, that an MKO Abiola would ever have emerged as presidential candidate of a major party but for that unorthodox arrangement under IBB.
To sanitize party primaries in Nigeria today and consolidate the gains of our ongoing democratic evolution, we must urgently adopt the proposal for the formation of an Independent Political Parties Administration Commission to be organized and run along the lines of INEC. It will be responsible for the registration, monitoring, supervising and auditing of political parties including conducting party primaries. That way the present situation where hegemonic cliques seize control of party structures and turn intra-party polls into cynical farcical exercises will become with time a thing of the past. Right now, with the systematically expanding institutional autonomy of INEC and the automation through technology of the electoral processes of general elections, the latter is far ahead of the standard of intra-party polls. Efforts must be made to concretely bridge the gap.
