Tag: Ondo poll

There was no denying the fact that the decision of Dr. Olusegun Abraham, who came second in the Saturday, September 3, 2016 APC governorship primary election in Ondo State to quickly congratulate Mr. Rotimi Akeredolu (Aketi)——the declared winner with a mere 34 delegate votes——had much to do with what Abraham (and almost everyone in his campaign machinery—including myself) believed then to be an almost flawless primary that never happened in the representative democratic history of the state. As one of his media operatives, I had opined after it became apparent that Akeredolu was the winner, despite the very small margin of victory that a congratulatory message from Dr. Abraham by way of a press conference was of utmost importance. My opinion was predicated on the need to not only put to shame those cunning detractors mostly from the Aketi campaign camp who got more mileage with their mischievous shouting of imposition after the APC National Leader Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu endorsed Abraham’s aspiration from among other aspirants, but that it would also demonstrate good sportsmanship after a contest. More importantly, I also thought (and he agreed) that congratulating the presumed winner would further affirm his loyalty to the party which has really never been in doubt since the beginning of the Fourth Republic in 1999 as well as it would make it clear that he’s never desperate to become the governor. He’s already a fulfilled man in every sense of the word and beyond measure. So, with that press conference less than 12 hours after his emergence as the APC’s presumed candidate, Abraham became the first of the major aspirants to wish Akeredolu well despite that we knew his victory may not have happened if the injunction placed on the delegates from Owo, which, ironically, was initiated by none other than Akeredolu, had been observed. All the delegates from Owo voted for Aketi in breach of his own court injunction.

Just when you thought that the All Progressives Congress (APC) is irrevocably determined to get rid of rigging and all its attendant atrocities from the political activities under its purview, as the nation had witnessed through the nationally televised Ondo State primary election came—first and foremost—hints of egregious rigging by stealth by not only some of the aspirants, but the primary election committee in order to arrive at a pre-determined outcome of making Akeredolu the party’s candidate. Thus, with the torrents of defective architecture of the primary electoral process that started coming in from different angles, what was thought to be a near perfect primary cascaded within 48-hours of its conclusion like a pack of cards.

It’s no longer news how the list of delegates had transmuted into several forms on arrival at the Abuja secretariat of APC from Akure. Nigerians now know how the list changed its form again on arrival at the office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation. On its return trip from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to the state where it would be utilized, the list was alleged to have been ‘doctored’ yet again at midnight——the eve of the primary election——with more fake delegates that ‘delegates padding’ has now found its way to our national lexicon. Yet, all this sounded too good to be true until people who never knew the meaning of “delegate”, let alone its import in a political contest suddenly appeared on national television from the woodwork that they were corralled into waiting buses from their various businesses, given delegate tags and asked to vote for Akeredolu with some impressive cash for their ‘trouble’. From that point on, the Humpty Dumpty primary election had been broken and can never be restored. It had to be completely discarded and replaced.

Certain things that are considered to be minor occurrences do happen during some special situations or events unfolding before our very eyes that we seldom give much thought to, if any, even though they’re subtle clues that something eerily foreboding could have been prevented if those clues had raised some eyebrows in the first instance. Because they were thought to be very insignificant then, nobody paid any attention to them until something else would have triggered a scandal or an embarrassment which, in retrospect, would have now reminded us that if we had paid some attention the scandal or embarrassment would have been prevented. It would have been to the eternal credit of the Ondo State primary election committee chairman Alhaji Badaru Abubakar and his team if Akeredolu had emerged in a free and fair electoral contest, but why, now in retrospect, the entire architecture of the primary process was heavily compromised under his watch is still beyond belief. Although it might be seen as inconsequential to the integrity of the primary election, why Governor Badaru chose Olusegun Mimiko’s (whose party the APC is attempting to unhorse from power) Government House as his temporary place of shelter during the entire period of the primary in the name of protocol beggars belief. It was like an army general asking to rest for a few days in the house of his enemy colleague in order to plan his war strategies on the way to the battlefront because he felt that both of them are bound by esprit de corps. Political naiveté cannot get any more annoying than that.

It was bad enough that the APC primary election met a disastrous end in one of the two remaining Southwest states in a geo-political region considered to be the nation’s bastion of progressive politics. It was even more nauseatingly irritating that more illegalities were committed by the party in an attempt to redress a previous illegality with the unilateral decision of Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, APC’s National Chairman who overruled a simple majority of the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) that had voted for the cancelation of the primary election as suggested by the 3-man appeal committee due to the glaring and indefensible fake delegates list, among other things. It doesn’t get any more bizarre than that. Did Chief Oyegun realise that his audacious dictatorial finality on the process had put paid the chances of the APC winning the governorship election in November? What was his motive in this unilateral, if not illegal decision? Did the chairman not see that to have overruled the six members of the NWC that favoured a fresh primary from the five that opposed a rerun effectively amounted to the imposition of Akeredolu in a primary that virtually all the major aspirants and party supporters agreed had been tainted and corrupted beyond redemption? Why did Chief Oyegun cast his vote when there was clearly no tie? Why does the national chairman seem delighted in encouraging recklessness and impunity—the twin anomalies that combined to become the death knell of the PDP—to rear their ugly heads in a fragile ruling party that is yet to complete a full term in governance? Why is Chief Oyegun willing to cut off the party’s nose to spite its face in Ondo State? What would have been the rational for this? While one may never find answers to these questions, what’s almost certain is that the national chairman’s ‘dagger’ had massacred Akeredolu’s chances of winning the governorship election in November.

The high wire political treachery and hypocrisy of some of the players both at the party’s national level now obviously spearheaded by Chief Oyegun and at the state branch with the trio of Mr. Rotimi Akeredolu, Dr. Tunji Abayomi and Sen. Tayo Alasoadura should have now become apparent even to the ardent doubting Thomas. It should be recalled that the duo of Akeredolu and Abayomi who cried ‘blue murder’ with the mere endorsement of Olusegun Abraham by Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu did not see anything wrong with the egregious, patently illegal and morally reprehensible insertion of fake delegates who did not vote for anyone else but the senior lawyer. Akeredolu couldn’t find his much cherished “courage” and Abayomi had suddenly become too weak to engage in another political activism through his “open letters” to condemn the mother of all illegalities that had just been perpetrated by Chief Oyegun with his new mathematical formula in which 5 is now greater than 6. We now know why Akeredolu predicted weeks before the primary election that its outcome “would shock everyone” and that “nothing could prevent him being the APC candidate” in the November governorship poll. His prediction had indeed come to pass. Akeredolu has also predicted that he’s poised to become the governor in the state’s next political dispensation. For someone so cantankerous, easily and needlessly provocative and lacking the temperament to hold a public office and has succeeded in alienating so many people in the party in the state, talk not of casting aspersions on the National Leader, from whom his thrust into the political limelight in both his state and the national level, it remains to be seen how he will emerge victorious at the poll. This is the other leg of his twin predictions that everyone is waiting on with bated breath. With Chief Oyegun’s magic wand that has now made Akeredolu the party’s candidate in the face of the most flagrant abuse of the democratic process, he may well pull out the rabbit from the gubernatorial hat on the day of election on November 26th. One may never know.

• Odere is a media practitioner. He can be reached at femiodere@gmail.com