Chief Olu Falae, Afenifere big wigs, Pastor Tunde Bakare, Mr Yinka Odumakin and key members of the Awolowo family have joyfully and spontaneously congratulated Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State on his victory in last week’s governorship election. There is of course nothing wrong with that, for these eminent Yoruba sons and daughters are entitled to support anyone they like and, whether the victory in question is tainted or not, congratulate whomsoever they wish. I support their right to do whatever the law vouchsafes to every citizen. However, they also added, both before the election and after, that Mimiko’s victory would trigger the rejigging of Southwest politics to the extent of precipitating the extinction of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), a progressive political party now dominant in the region. But they offer no replacement. They also added that ACN’s progressive identity was spurious, and that even if the party had any progressive credential, it was definitely not the only party where progressive politicians could be found.
I leave the ACN to the task of defending and protecting its reputation. Instead, I will take a brief look at the October 20 poll, the question of Southwest politics said to be in need of rejigging, and the various hoaxes that swaddled the poll. I am not persuaded that the ACN has reacted to the unexpected setback it suffered in the poll with the grace and good humour it is capable of. In fact, if its leaders had patiently examined the facts of the election and the import of the results, they would have discovered there was absolutely no reason to be in a foul mood. They would even discover that the claims by both Mimiko and his eager dupes are exaggerated and wishful. However, I really suspect that Mimiko is far too clever to be duped by the fawning of the Afenifere bigwigs. He can read between the lines in his poll victory, and he knows that many of those who rallied behind him were fired up and united by their common and zealous dislike for the ACN as a party, what they say is its presumptuous claims of ideological purity and superiority, and what Bakare in one of his recent sermons described as the offensive aggressiveness and disagreeable imperiousness of the ACN leadership.
If the ACN crowd closely studied the statistics of the poll, they would come out to congratulate Mimiko and damn him with faint praise. They would have absolutely no reason to be gloomy, let alone churlish. They would forswear court action, with all the wastefulness it entails and all the distractions; for in the end, it may not serve any useful purpose. They would see the election merely as a setback and an opportunity to address many of their party’s weaknesses and contradictory internal dynamics. They would ask themselves probing questions about the wisdom or otherwise of their party’s methods of selecting or electing standard-bearers, and would do a post-mortem of their standard-bearer himself, Rotimi Akeredolu, and the kind of campaign they ran and the issues they addressed on the stump, whether those issues were appropriate or inappropriate. Surely, the party cannot claim not to have learnt anything from the Ondo setback.
A study of the poll statistics shows quite clearly that the claims of a Mimiko victory triggering change in Ondo politics, not to talk of Southwest politics, is dishonest, far-fetched and simplistic. It is of course well known that Mimiko scored 41.65 percent of the total votes cast in the election, while his two leading opponents in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and ACN collectively scored 47.94 percent. In other words, more people voted for Mimiko’s opponents than voted for him. If this is not statistically important, then it is pointless studying quantitative methods. It also meant that more Ondo people either disagreed with the credentials presented by their governor or disapproved of the way he ran the state.
If the ACN crowd had been more studious and good-humoured, they would more crucially have recognised that out of a voting population of 1,638,950, only 38.11 percent voted in the governorship poll. This is hugely significant if the aim is to find out what Ondo people really want; whether, for instance, they disapprove of Southwest integration or approve of it. It is anybody’s guess whether the non-voters were entirely absent from the state on the day of the election, were intimidated by the militarisation of the poll, would have voted for either ACN or PDP if their standard-bearers had been different, or were simply not motivated and charmed enough by the candidates on offer or the issues at stake.
Probably the most damning of the statistical inferences from the Ondo poll is the fact that out of a voting population of about 1.64 million only about 15.88 percent voted for Mimiko. This shocking fact constrains analysts to use the word landslide guardedly and less recklessly than they have done. More importantly, it becomes even more irrational to build on this very modest base of Mimiko supporters to postulate tectonic shifts in Ondo politics, let alone volcanic eruptions in Southwest politics, as Bakare and Odumakin have wishfully conjectured. If the Mimiko supporters and well-wishers are not discomfited by statistics, should they not be sensibly disquieted by the lack of strong credentials of their presumed champion, a man so vacant of the ideals, vision and character that have hallmarked leadership ascendancy in Yorubaland for centuries? Surely, the region cannot have been so impoverished by time and circumstances and even economic hardship that a group of people projecting their private animosities would seize upon a man so barren of endowments, except of wiles and shiftiness, and make him the inner core around whom to rejig the region’s ideology and worldview.
The ACN must consider itself quite fortunate at this point in time to have contested the Ondo election and suffered the humiliation of coming third behind the winning Labour Party (LP) and the PDP. It won’t be contesting any major election until 2015 when the country will be in an uproar over feverish permutations between ideologies, power blocs and vested and entrenched interests. But it will fight to retain its hold on both Ekiti State (October 2014) and Osun State (November 2014), and enemies will be plenty. The ACN has not found it easy to maintain party discipline in Edo State, but it will have the experience and outcomes of the 2015 general election to guide its behaviour towards the state and its leaders. In view of its tenuous political and ideological hold on some of the states under its control, particularly Edo and Oyo States, the party will be fully challenged to enunciate dynamic, integrated, structural and productive political processes in those two states, and indeed all states under its control, if it is not again to face the kind of apathy and hostile propaganda that humiliated it in Ondo.
It is likely the ACN may be unnerved by the Ondo setback. It may, for instance, therefore choose to react to the situation by remaining glued to its long-standing political paradigms. It should resist that temptation. The Ondo problem calls for a change of tactics, a change of party structure, a change of general paradigm, especially in terms of how the party views the electorate and the ideas and peculiarities of the individual states in which it seeks to win seats and offices. It should also resist the temptation to doubt its overall vision for the Southwest, particularly integration, which has unfortunately been wrapped in deceptive and hostile propaganda by opposing parties and spiteful individuals. Integration is the way to go, and the party must understand that Ondo people are unlikely to oppose it, as the poll statistics show. Indeed, given the mood of the Southwest, the times call for the intensification of social, political and economic integration in the culturally coterminous states under ACN’s control. The party waited for Ondo State to join its ranks, but hostile and corrupted propaganda insinuating internal colonialism made it impossible. Now is not the time for zeal to flag; now is the time to proceed diligently and enthusiastically.
After the Ondo debacle, the ACN may believe the Labour Party (LP) had given it a bloody nose, and may begin to fear that the subversive wish of Falae, Bakare, Odumakin and other sundry antagonists concerning the overthrow of the party in the region stands a chance of being fulfilled. Nonsense. That wish can only be realised if the ACN digs itself into a worse labyrinth than it is already in. First, the party must recognise that defeat is nothing but an invitation to re-examine one’s message and methods: it is not a death knell; it is a propellant for change and adaptation. After all, Winston Churchill, with approval rating of 83 percent, incredibly and unprecedentedly lost the general election of 1945 immediately after World War II, which he heroically led Britain to fight. Charles de Gaulle of France was also forced to resign in 1946 in spite of his inimitably heroic actions and leadership of his country during WWII. He was not to become leader again until 12 years later, and was even heard once to despondently remark that the ineffective government that replaced him governed France well in spite of their lack of vision.
Second, the ACN must also very importantly continue to believe in itself and its progressive credentials and vision. The party’s antagonists argue that you do not need to be in the ACN to embrace integration, and that the region does not have to be ruled by one party to implement integration. These ingenious arguments mask subterranean disdain for regional integration and resentment for ACN leadership. If they cared about integration, they would have realised that Mimiko had all the opportunities in the early part of his governorship to champion the idea, or if a natural laggard, to embrace the idea and wholeheartedly commit himself to its principles. He openly and mockingly did neither. Instead, with the help of other malevolent regional leaders, he concocted the propaganda that regional integration was a ploy at expansionism and domination. Sadly, the propaganda stuck, and a rattled and nervous ACN could find neither the wit nor the logic, nor yet the conviction, to answer that undistinguished regional malfeasance.
Third, the ACN must understand that it is characteristic of the Southwest to be polarised, often along indistinguishable lines. Apart from the region being overrated in terms of political consciousness, it is also inappropriately described as savvy and futuristic. The Yoruba are an average and quarrelsome people occasionally blessed with visionary and iron-fisted leaders who are often impatient with the disunity and disorientation of the tribe. If they were not average, they would have seen what Awolowo saw in the early 1950s and voted for his party in the 1951 elections. Instead, he had to cobble together a disingenuous political victory reeking of tribalism, an action that continues to haunt his image till today. And as Mr Ayo Opadokun reminded us a few weeks ago in his reminiscences, Awo faced implacable regional foes so strong that they hamstrung regional progress and hobbled his legacy. Those foes were unappeasable in the 1960s, could not be mollified in the 1970s, and it was only in the 1980s, after being tired of opposing the great man to no useful purpose, that they finally sought peace in 1987. But by then it was too late.
It is one of the paradoxes of history that today, and for reasons that cannot be uttered, supposedly knowledgeable and seemingly progressive Southwest leaders, including members of the Awolowo family, have set themselves in array against the dominant ethos of the region and blunted the region’s effort at achieving national advancement. Afonja was the first notable harbinger of this tendency. It is not certain that the region, in spite of its many talents, can overcome its idiosyncratic love for internal schisms and self-destruction. But if the ACN can patiently study the issues at stake and encourage itself in the region’s future goals, it may be able to rise above the recurring cataclysms that have shaped Yoruba history, subverted their destiny and dissipated the energies and resourcefulness of their children. If the ACN does not rise up to that task; another party will. But that other party will not be led or inspired by Falae, Bakare, current Afenifere leaders, or Odumakin. For if those who genuinely want the region to achieve greatness fail, it is hard to see those ossified in the hateful and divisive politics of the region’s inglorious past succeed.
