After many months of pussyfooting, Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State has finally defected from the Labour Party (LP) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), putting himself out of his self-created misery. He was received into the ruling party on Thursday by, among others, Vice President Namadi Sambo, who is himself struggling to stay on the President Goodluck Jonathan ticket for the 2015 race, and Senate President David Mark, who increasingly sees and leads the Senate as an arm, not of government, but of the Executive branch. Last month, the chairman of LP, Dan Nwanyanwu, had indicated his desire to step down from the party’s top post, pretending to be fatigued by years of leadership. He probably took the decision because of Dr Mimiko’s defection.
With the exit of Dr Mimiko from LP, the supposedly working class party will struggle to stay alive. It never operated as a left-of-centre party, nor was it even really ideological. It was at best pragmatic, and its policies and politics either ultra conservative or instinctive. In its truest essence, the party had no soul and was nothing but a vehicle in the hands of politicians equally ideologically and philosophically vacuous. From all indications, LP’s long foretold death will not entitle it to even a perfunctory requiem mass.
Defections in Nigeria show neither rhyme nor reason. Dr Mimiko’s defection is, therefore, unlikely to raise any moral question. He has the freedom to take his affections anywhere, just as others have exercised theirs across party lines, and sometimes back and forth the same parties. Had Dr Mimiko not been helped by the progressives, he would not have become governor. But that hardly matters now. What is important is that he has returned home to the PDP, as the vice president says. Those who lured him back to the PDP expected he would help swing votes in favour of Dr Jonathan’s second bid to govern Nigeria. And as Senator Mark also suggested, with Dr Mimiko leading the charge, the PDP would make progress in its quest to pacify the Southwest and make it politically amenable to the PDP.
As they received the Ondo governor, PDP chiefs were both upbeat and expectant, especially because they also have Ekiti in their bag. They perhaps do not expect to take the whole of the Southwest in the coming poll, but they are now confident they will make a huge impact, far beyond their expectations.
After all, Dr Mimiko himself has said the real reason he is defecting to the PDP is to help Dr Jonathan win the presidency a second time. He has the right to support whomever he wishes, considering he has never really being motivated by any principled desire to cause a major social change in Nigeria or to contribute meaningfully to the restructuring and redefinition of Nigerian politics.
But by far the most important effect of Dr Mimiko’s defection is the collapse of the consensus built around him by a faction of the Yoruba socio-political and cultural pressure group, Afenifere. The group had conceived him a new champion of the Yoruba, a champion around whom a new political force for the ‘liberation’ of the Southwest was expected to coalesce. That consensus was never really substantial even from the very beginning, nor was it ever imbued with any nobility. Now, it is all but doomed, for Dr Mimiko and others like him will now be lost in the Jonathan crowd, their expectations and hopes forfeited to the political subterfuge and constitutional chicaneries of the president. Dr Jonathan has no cause he is fighting, no principle so priceless he would die for, and no precept so sublime by which he wants to be ennobled. Neither does Dr Mimiko. It is perhaps fitting that both gentlemen have found each other, and have joined forces.
It is clear that in their calculations for 2015 and their assumptions of the political behaviour and values of the Southwest, Vice President Sambo, Senator Mark and other PDP leaders appear to understand that the region is also suffering from a lack of philosophical core. Like the rest of Nigeria, a faction of the Southwest elite takes decisions and makes judgement that negate the zone’s historical antecedents. For them, it is no longer important that a president or governor is either underperforming or not performing at all. In fact, it is no longer important that the political leader they support should stand for anything.
In defecting, Dr Mimiko had described Dr Jonathan as “…a President that is as focused as he is patriotic, (and heads) a team that has demonstrated so much promise in its commitment to democracy.” He could not be describing Dr Jonathan. In any case such dubieties have become commonplace in the Southwest, and the perversion of principles and ideas will obviously continue for some time to come in that apostate region and elsewhere.
