The Ondo state election has come and gone. It is time to clear the gore on the political battle field. Snooper congratulates the declared winner, Dr Olusegun Rahman Mimiko. It was a tough and hard won victory. There were many fronts and many proxy battles. It was a close run thing. Snooper has never seen Mimiko so rattled and frazzled in his political life. Statistically, it was the political equivalent of a dead heat. But it is a good thing that the ACN has decided to put the election behind it. Democracy is about simple majority, and you cannot win all the time. It is time to retool and refocus.
It was not a perfect election. But you cannot blame a river for being sluggish in midstream without looking at its source. As the late Dr Abel Goubadia famously noted, it is impossible to have a perfect election in a country where there is no proper record of birth and death; where there is no proper identification of citizens; where there is no valid census; and where public utility bills smack of elaborate forgery and outlandish fiction.
Whether we like Attahiru Jega or not, the national outfit he leads is also a victim of systemic dysfunction. In the circumstances, one should congratulate Jega and his team for making the best of an impossible situation. It will be grossly partisan and unfair to dismiss the efforts the nation has made to heave away from the electoral chaos of the immediate past.
In retrospect, the ACN made some strategic and tactical blunders. It allowed itself to be tricked into fighting the wrong battle and probably with the wrong choice of offensive weapons. It was unwise to have allowed the struggle to have been framed or perceived by the public as a contest of political titans. The Yoruba love their political heroes. But they also have profound empathy for the proverbial underdog.
Better still, then, the heroic underdog. Once Mimiko was allowed to wear the garb of the heroic underdog fighting off the armada from Lagos and fictional imperialists and conquistadors from the metropole, the ACN had its back to the wall. By so doing, he was able to rally the sub-ethnic brotherhood. And by so allowing, the ACN was hoisted on the petard of its most potent weapon.
There is a subtle dynamics to this politics of identity which goes to the heart of Yoruba character and which is deserving of more scholarly scrutiny. The Yoruba are Republican monarchists if ever there is such a contradiction or paradoxical formulation. They love their kings for the order and stability they bring to society. But they turn swiftly against them once they become overbearing and overreaching.
For over 300 years, the Yoruba people have been engaged in a war of will and wits with their kings, sometimes reining them in and sometimes deposing or decapitating them. In the same breast, conservative and radical tendencies cohabit and coexist. When the ACN, spearheaded by the then Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu , were embroiled in political warfare with the PDP and the federal might as implacably represented by General Obasanjo, the Yoruba people supported them as heroic underdogs.
They like the message of hope and redemption they brought. But when they believed they could sniff another hegemony in the making, they gave them an electoral black eye. Only political illiterates would construe this reversal of electoral fortunes as the swan song or the beginning of the end for ACN.
Political dominance is not a football match to be won and lost overnight. Once the right lessons have been learnt and the right conclusion drawn, the ACN retains the balance of power in the old region. This is even more so in so far as the issues of a misbegotten federalism and a lop-sided structure remain on the top burner.
This is why the post-election hysteria and alleluia, the shrill denunciation and unremitting demonisation of individuals, remain unhelpful. Rather than a solid analysis of the way forward, what has been on display is vindictive vitriol and crass defamation. Probably unknown to their vendors, these hate-surfeit castigations say more about the character and psychological state of their purveyors than the object of their hatred and fearful loathing.
But if one can understand the caterwauling of the unenlightened, the ranting of those who have taken up permanent combat position on the social media and their fellow internet interns and internees of cyber caves, what can one say about otherwise respectable intellectuals who also indulge in the habit of fanning the embers of hatred and hostility?
Surely if their aim is to capture power or to dislodge the ACN party from its regional stronghold, they must know that it takes more than surly diatribe and spiritual grandstanding to found an authentic party. It takes clarity of vision, psychological stamina, organisational discipline and a certain generosity of spirit which conduces to the surrender of self and ego to the collective self-interest.
No one is saying that either the ACN or its leadership is a collection of saints. There are no saints in politics. In contemporary Nigeria, that will be the shortest suicide note in history. It was not for nothing that Charles de Gaulle described certain exceptional historical figures as “sacred monsters” Yet as we have noted, some of the current imperfections of party formations in Nigeria are traceable to the provenance of the Fourth Republic in military autocracy.
In 1998 at the onset of party campaigns, General Obasanjo famously transported loyal delegates to the Jos Convention of the PDP all the way from Abeokuta in a sealed train. Appropriately, the wily military strategist bivouacked his democratic troops outside the tin city from whence he established contacts with the forward units of storm troopers already engaged in preliminary skirmishes.
In a classic textbook military operation, the original founders and owners of the party were muscled out. They fled one by one and sometimes two by two. In an even more historic riposte, Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi, upon noticing that the retired senior military officers with whom he had founded the original APP were rapidly absconding, famously asked them whether their new “posting” was out. It was the beginning and end of the PDP as a truly democratic party. Till date, Shinkafi himself remains in a political sanatorium.
It was these “shock and awe” tactics that the old Afenifere and the AD succumbed to. After mopping up stragglers from his party, the general turned his friendly bearish hug to the AD/Afenifere and the APP. Neither survived. In order not to court summary extinction, the ACN appears to have understudied and mastered the battle order of the PDP while perfecting its own grand initiative.
In the process, it was almost inevitable that ascendant party in Yoruba land would pick the same virus that has infected its much loathed bete noire. The symptoms include militarisation, monetisation, regimentation, the use of camouflage and deception and the tight leash on party internal democratic procedure in order to ward off infiltration and mole-planting. Ironically, it was the last two that would prove fatal to the party’s aspiration in Ondo. As internal and external pressures for genuine democracy grow, as the PDP is forced by failure to relax its vice-like grip on the nation, the other parties will also find themselves forcibly democratising and liberalising their internal procedures.
Once again, and in as much as one regrets the political demise of revered elders, it is the old Afenifere that appears set to become the principal casualty of the unfurling dynamics. Perhaps this is just as well since there is time for everything. You cannot continue to invoke the name and sacred memory of a man in whose political ideals you know longer believe in. It is not what you say that matters, but what you do and are seen and perceived to be doing. Politics is too serious a business to be left in the hands of clergy men and retired bishops.
Unable to grasp and comprehend the strange irrational dynamics of new political developments, fighting a new war with old weapons, the Afenifere has in the last decade been outsmarted twice from opposite ends of the political spectrum. First by Obasanjo and the PDP which infiltrated and destroyed their party, and then by the better-organised and better focused ACN that stole their ideological thunder.
Now in a political development that will put their political twilight in acute jeopardy, they are set, bound and trussed, to deliver themselves as political hostages to the same reactionary forces they have heroically battled all their life. Snooper is personally aware that not all the old men are in tune with the retrogressive antics of their old comrades. But they cannot break ranks publicly.
God forbid, if any of these great men were to answer the last call at this moment, will it be governor Mimiko’s lot to serve as the solitary pall bearer? Mimiko himself is too wily and wary a politician to serve as lone chief mourner in turbulent and adversarial circumstances. This is the major danger of the Masada complex, of fighting to the last man. There will be no one left to serve as a mourner.
If it is not impudent and impolitic to advise our political patriarchs, the way forward is not to further alienate the ACN and its leadership. With five core Yoruba states under its control, ACN looms large in the old region. Politics of bitterness and hatred only compound and aggravate errors of judgement. The Afenifere grandees should seek out leading luminaries in the old region who still admire them but who also have leverage with the ACN leadership to broker a truce between them and their estranged younger comrades. As the late Chief S.O Gbadamosi famously rued at Ile-Ife during the June !2 crisis, what will they tell the late sage when they finally meet up?
