The carefully packaged untruths that vividly characterised the campaigns of the Peoples Democratic Party in the August 9 governorship election in Osun State are yet to find obscurity. Anyone who thought the blow of defeat dealt this bumbling and blustering behemoth at the polls was all that would be required to exorcise the goblins of its spectacular misrepresentations was surely mistaken.
The largely discredited candidate of the party, himself a sworn enemy of truth, Senator Iyiola Omisore, is now before the Governorship Election Petition Tribunal with a tome of conjured claims. Any conscious observer of happenings within the Osun PDP will readily agree that beginning from the time Senator Omisore indicated interest in flying the flag of the party as its governorship candidate, all through to the time the questionable primary in which he emerged winner was held, one fact remained constant – this Ife prince and his claque were always tinkering with the narrative of fact. Odourising every corner with the sweet fragrance of slush fund, they confected and sustained a misleading narrative of their general acceptability and popularity.
Take a look at the Osun PDP: virtually all the big guns with electoral value who observed that Omisore’s candidacy would circumscribe the fortunes of the party were either shoved out of the party or intimidated into silence. In his various horse-trading with Aso Rock and the Wadata House, Omisore dazzled them with the false narrative of his wide-spread acceptability and solid popularity. Not knowing any better themselves, or hamstrung by their own 2015 goal, the presidency and the national leadership of the party accepted the fictitious narrative of the devious candidate, believing unquestioningly his meretricious claim that he is resplendently attired as against the glaring fact of his nakedness. With some contrived chutzpa, he swanked that he alone could bottle the genie that is the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola.
Thenceforth, Omisore and those who have always subscribed to the Churchillian worldview that the Princess of truth is so delicate that she requires a bodyguard of wounding lies went out on the hustings in a blaze of fantastic untruths. As it was in their party during the horse-trading, the thrust of their campaign was an invented narrative of non-performance, corruption, religious crisis, et cetera, against Ogbeni Aregbesola. Boondoggles of wicked and unsupportable claims against the governor were blazed across the state and all over acquiescent media platforms. Everywhere the disorderly campaign train of Omisore went to in the State, they ensured that Aregbesola’s widely acclaimed performance was discredited – not with verifiable facts and arresting logic but with an ostentatious chronicle of belittling dishonesties. Listening to their hopeless sound bites and the overconfidence they projected, you would be forgiven if you thought PDP would rout APC. Their narrative projected the false image of a widely beloved candidate.
It requires no special expertise to be convinced that the PDP-Omisore campaign for the Abere seat was deeply rooted in and inflexibly sustained by depressing falsehood, deceitful promises, and mind-boggling denial of the truth and credible narrative of development that each household in Osun now benefits from and bears eloquent testimony to. In a bid to totally mislead the electorate, the Omisore crowd plumbed a new depth in infamy. Not having any useful connection with the ordinary people, Omisore’s minders put their paymaster on the stage for a farcical show that further foregrounded their falsehearted posturing.
On a particular day he rode on a bike to craftily prove that he is of the ordinary people (famously known as Okada); on another day he tortured his innards with popcorns; and on yet another day a full-scale assault was directed at his insides with those two corns he masticated with the ferocity of a baddie. Do the ordinary people he deigned to identify with eat two corns at the same time on each hand? For the discerning folks, the image of a would-be governor eating with both hands was graphically telling. The electorate noted that, learnt from it, and rejected him with their votes.
The Election Day was not without its bizarre share of the grand artifice that Omisore is comfortably habituated to. It is generally known that the Election Day particularly was one hell of a day for many members and supporters of the APC. They were not only callously disenfranchised; a number of them were harried and grievously inconvenienced. But not one PDP fellow was in any way known to suffer the same invidious fate. Strangely today, the grandiose narrative of the Omisore in-group and his out-of-luck hack writers is that it was their members who were horribly treated on Election Day by the same security agents their Abuja leaders lent to unprofessional uses. This, they noise about in their hoary voices, negatively affected their ‘bright’ chances at the polls. In their devious mouths is a new narrative that now projects them as the wronged – the hapless victim, the modern doppelganger of the Shakespearean Shylock, more sinned against than sinning.
It is this same lie-suffused narrative that still defines their post-election actions. They have submitted a bulky petition of contrived truths and imagined grievances before the Election Petition Tribunal. They want to retrieve, according to them, their ‘stolen mandate’.
This party of questionable minds is even incapable of truthfully reporting the fact of its operations. It has six lawyers who are Senior Advocate of Nigeria in its legal team, yet it tells the public, matter-of-factly, that it has nine. When it filed a motion for inspection of electoral materials, it went to town to say it has filed a case. So engrossed are the Osun PDP in their new narrative of lies and victimhood that they cannot even feign virtue. All of the evils that they perpetrated against the APC and the people of Osun generally before and during the election are the claims that form the fundaments of their petition before the Election Petition Tribunal.
Similarly, the story of the two INEC Electoral Officers (EOs) that the PDP blazed all over the media is in furtherance of their morbid projection of their new narrative that favourably depicts them as the victim of the ‘wrongful conducts’ of the APC. The fact of the matter is that the two EOs for Obokun and Osogbo LGAs were acting in cahoots with the PDP, which suddenly left them in the lurch. Seeing that the hatchet job they commissioned the two EOs to do in their favour on Election Day had suffered irreversible setback, they flipped the case against them, mendaciously saying that the EOs sought to rig for the APC. The PDP spawned a new narrative of it being the one at the receiving end of the unlawful behaviours of the EOs.
The now-suspended Osogbo EO had before the Election Day been acting the script of the PDP without disguising his partisanship. For example, he was known to have refused many registered voters their Permanent Voter Card (PVC) once he suspects they have sympathy for APC. He would tell them to come another day. This sabotage was checked through the intervention of some APC leaders who reported him to his seniors. He was also the same officer who refused to give the APC agents their identification tags on Friday, the day slated for the collection. When he would release the tags, it was on Election Day and he only gave out 67 instead of 227. Again, some APC leaders had to report him to his superiors before he let go of the cards. The icing on the cake of his illegal behaviour was when he refused to produce the Form EC8C meant for recording the results from the wards in Osogbo LGA. It would take a complaint from the APC and a query from his superior before the EO unwillingly produced the Form.
The fact is that this EO was doing the bid of the PDP leaders who had bought his conscience and had instructed him to use a different Form EC8C, which would contain different results showing high votes for the PDP. If any party complained and supported their grouse against the criminal actions of the EO with concrete evidence, it was the APC. Not the PDP. Yet, it is the same PDP which never had any complaints against the EO that is now about town with an improbable narrative stating that the EO worked to rig for the APC.
By the same token, the PDP was in an unholy alliance with the Obokun LGA EO. On the Friday preceding the Election Day, some observant APC youths intercepted a Hilux van loaded with ballot papers. In company with another man whose name was given as Ismaila Taofik, the two were handed over to policemen who took them to the State CID at Osogbo. Curiously, it was to a PDP arrowhead from Ile-Ife, Prof Oladipo Oladapo, that the two men were released. No charges were registered against them; those who released them said they acted on ‘order from above’. But then the APC petitioned INEC on the matter, asking for thorough investigation.
That EO and his companion were simply taking the ballot papers to the house of a PDP bigwig before they were discovered. It is assaulting, therefore, to hear the clangour of the PDP disowning this EO and claiming he, like his Osogbo counterpart, aided the APC in rigging the election they (the PDP) were sure to win.
The indisputable point remains that the blatantly false, extremely provocative, and utterly preposterous narrative of the PDP is meant to serve as a cover for the devilish blitzkrieg it is hoping to carry out with its lie-riddled petition before the Tribunal. It will not argue its case with facts and logic. The party will twist facts. The narrative of untruth it is fervently circulating is its only logic. For the record, the Osun PDP is not a victim of any wrongdoings. It fielded an unsellable candidate. It ran a lie-based campaign. The majority of the electorate found its claims to be illusory. And so the PDP and its discredited candidate were soundly rejected. Another round of rejection awaits them at the Election Petition Tribunal where they are now staging a new farce.
Oyelami writes from Gbongan, Osun State.
