They may as well be aptly christened the “O to ge” elections. I refer to the February 23rd and March 9th, 2019, national and state executive as well as legislative polls, which are being concluded today with supplementary elections in five states. Of course, O to ge has now become part and parcel of the ever fascinating and evolving grammar of Nigerian politics. It is the quaint Yoruba expression for ‘enough is enough’, reflective of the idiomatic phraseology of the Yoruba of Kwara state extraction, in North-Central Nigeria. From east to west and north to south, the new no-nonsense O to ge mood of the Nigerian electorate has seen bloated egos deflated mercilessly and one Lilliputian political David after the other not only felling but ruthlessly decapitating overrated electoral behemoths with pleasurable relish.
Not surprisingly, Kwara, which gifted the nation the succinct and surgical O to ge sobriquet, has also been the most visible and prominent theatre for the manifestation of this near revolutionary phenomenon in contemporary Nigerian politics. The Saraki dynasty had for close to five decades been the dominant dynamo in the politics of Kwara. In the wake of the O to ge revolutionary gale, the imperious political tactician, who takes no prisoners, Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, not only lost his re-election bid to the Senate, his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stranglehold on the politics of the state was decisively broken.
Ironically, the prime victim of the O to ge blitzkrieg in Kwara, Dr. Bukola Saraki, must also be credited for, even if subconsciously, sowing the seeds that have become a veritable new Iroko in the forest of Kwara politics. Ever since this writer attained enough political consciousness to serve as a teen age polling agent of Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) in the heart land of Ilorin, (Pakata), in 1979, the late Dr. Olusola Saraki, the one and only Oloye, had maintained an unbroken suzerainty over the politics of Kwara state.
A most colourful, assured and masterly majority leader of the Senate on the platform of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the Second Republic, the Saraki patriarch bestrode the politics of Kwara like a colossus. He had a hand in the emergence, and sometimes untidy exit from office, of practically every elected governor in Kwara for over three and a half decades. These include Prince Adamu Attah, Chief Cornelius Adebayo, Mr. Mohammed Shaaba Lafiagi, and Col. Mohammed Lawal (rtd). Oloye’s crowning glory was the election of his ruthlessly ambition son, Bukola, as governor of Kwara between 2003 and 2011. But in that triumph were embedded the seeds of Oloye’s political demystification, a development that reportedly left him heartbroken till the end of his days.
Apparently convinced of the political impermeability of the political dynasty he had come to personify in Kwara, Oloye most inexplicably wanted his daughter, Gbemi Saraki, to succeed her brother as governor of the state. But Bukola, through wily tactical manouvres said no – O to ge. The younger Saraki ensured that he installed in office after him a successor of his own choosing, Mr. Abdulfattah Ahmed, the outgoing governor.
In defying and defenestrating his father, Bukola sowed the wind. If the great Oloye could be so easily dislodged and caged, many Kwarans wondered, then the seemingly invincible dynasty must have feet of clay after all. Bukola reaped the whirl wind on February 23rd and March 9th. The O to ge message in Kwara soared on the wings of the inexcusable underperformance and underdevelopment of an otherwise richly endowed state in terms of human and natural resources punching embarrassingly below her weight. The rest is history. Fast forward then, to Lagos.
On Thursday, February 28th, 2019, a group, the Free Lagos Orange Movement surfaced in Lagos ostensibly to replicate the Kwara O to ge revolution in the Centre of Excellence. Claiming that the group had no permit to organize a protest rally, the police prevented the Free Lagos Orange Movement from staging its demonstration at the Lagos Airport Hotel. However, one of the conveners of the group, a former President of the Nigeria Bar Association (NBA), Mr. Olisa Agbakoba (SAN), enunciated its aim to the press.
In his words, “The Free Lagos Orange Movement is a non-political movement that is aimed at ensuring that we have good governance in Lagos State. We feel that Tinubu has had his time as the emperor of Lagos since 1998, and we are trying to mobilize Lagosians to say no to continuity of Lagos by Tinubu”. This is indeed most astonishing. So Lagos has had one emperor presiding over its affairs since 1999 and not governors democratically elected in 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015 and now 2019?
Of course, the point that Agbakoba and the Free Lagos Orange Movement are trying to make is obvious. They seek to establish an equivalency between the Saraki and Tinubu political dominance in Kwara and Lagos, respectively, since 1999. Political influence and electoral dominance are not alien to democracy. However, every dominant political tendency will ultimately stand or fall on the basis of the verdict of the electorate on its impact on their lives, positive or native, as determined in free, fair and credible elections.
It is thus instructive that the APC in Lagos won the March 9, 2019, governorship election by a more emphatic margin than it did in 2015 – a landslide. It was a grievous error of judgement for the Free Lagos Orange Movement to have extrapolated so carelessly from the politics of Kwara to Lagos without a more rigorous analysis. In the first place, the kind of feudal-oriented and essentially backward dynastic politics foisted on Kwara by the Sarakis over the last four decades is impossible to replicate in any South-West State least of all a cosmopolitan megalopolis like Lagos.
Any dominant political tendency in Lagos can only sustain its relevance and enjoy continued popular support if it is perceived as utilizing its mandate to pursue the greatest good of the greatest number of the people.
For 16 years between 1999 and 2015, Nigeria not only stagnated but even retrogressed badly on virtually all fronts – infrastructure, security, social welfare, poverty indices etc under the PDP. That fortunately has not been the fate of Lagos. With Asiwaju Bola Tinubu laying a solid foundation for the revitalization of the state and Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) as well as Akinwunmi Ambode building admirably on this inheritance, Lagos has witnessed a steadily incremental improvement in revenue capacity, modernization and expansion of infrastructure, enhancement in the quality and affordability of social services as well as better security among others.
Equally instructive is the fact that not even the obstacles placed on the path of Lagos by a largely adversarial PDP-controlled centre between 1999 and 2015 have been able to impede the state’s progress.
It is all too easy to assume that all this occurred through happenstance or sheer magic. In reality, it is a function of careful planning, policy focus and consistency as well as continuity in visionary governance since 1999. This in turn has been made possible partly because in June 1999, the Tinubu administration transformed the previously existing Plans, Programmes and Budget Bureau (PPBB) into a full- fledged Lagos State Ministry of Economic Planning and Budget (MEPB) as the organizational fulcrum for the long term development planning of the state. It is under the aegis of the Ministry that a Master plan has been produced and systematically implemented and fine-tuned by successive administrations with the period 1999 – 2024 as its first phase.
Furthermore, Tinubu’s extraordinary ability to identify and develop talents as well as give them wings to fly on their own steam and become impactful leaders in their own right has been a key defining feature of governance in Lagos since 1999. This is of course contrary to the feudal ethos that has characterized governance in Kwara since 1999. Over the last 20 years, governance in Kwara has been plagued by policy adhocism, paucity of vision and an ascriptive rather than merit-driven mode of public appointments and elite recruitment with negative consequences for progress and development.
Could Kwara have charted an alternative development course with more positive developmental outcomes than the pathetic situation in which the state finds itself today? Most certainly. Dr. Saraki has the talent and ability to have charted a transformational path for Kwara during his eight years as governor. The opportunity was unfortunately, in my view, squandered. Those who know him, say that the outgoing Kwara State governor is a man of competence and ability. But what template of governance did he inherit? What legacy of excellence in governance did he have to inspire him to rise above the mediocre? Was he bequeathed a governance ecology that would have enabled merit to thrive? Those are some of the questions that the Free Lagos Orange Movement should have carefully interrogated before jumping into the partisan fray in Lagos.
Has Lagos then arrived at her Eldorado? Most certainly not. No polity ever does. Lagos is a work in progress. The mega city continues to experience her share of environmental, bureaucratic, ethical and several other challenges. However, Lagos remains the most successful state model of developmental democracy, economic emancipation and social progress in Nigeria over the last 20 years. That is why the O to ge movement that shook Kwara to its foundations suffered an anticlimactic meltdown in Lagos on March 9th.
It is certainly not for nothing that Lagos remains the prime destination of choice for millions of Nigerians and even beyond who throng the state daily in search of success and prosperity. Perhaps the O to ge revolution will propel Kwara to discover and begin to actualize her immense potentials as a state.
