You thought the treason bugaboo chorused some two weeks ago by the Buhari presidency against the likes of Omoyele Sowore was new? How quaintly you forget recent history, for Less than a decade ago, when the lure of democracy still captivated Nigerians, the inimitable Goodluck Jonathan and his government in fact screamed treason against a fairly trite remark made by ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar. Nigeria seems incapable of changing. Do you also think the Southwest’s political culture has morphed considerably since the Jonathan vacillations gave way to the Buhari rigidity? Think again, as you regale yourself with this 2010 piece.
After the giddy excitement of reclaiming a significant part of territory lost to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the Southwest has cooled somewhat, the region’s progressives will have the onerous and frustrating task of determining what to do with domestic opposition. Apart from being strident, the opposition has become amorphous, violent, difficult to predict and place, and often recklessly coercive and subversive.
As every fighter knows, the unmethodical opponent is usually the more difficult, though not impossible, to beat. At the ideological level, for instance, the PDP opposition in the Southwest is not easy to classify. Are they simply conservative, as they are sometimes inappropriately described, or are they acutely reactionary, as it seems more fitting to call them, though pejoratively? It must be noted that neither they nor the progressives in the region have agreed on how to describe the opposition PDP. You could fight a conservative or progressive by holding him to his belief and ideology, no matter how nuanced; but how do you fight someone so formless as to be nothing in its something?
This amorphousness benefits only the opposition, particularly in the testy short run. Ignore the Ikorodu Constituency II upset in which the PDP trounced the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate. It neither typifies the nature of politics in the state, let alone in the region, nor does it conform to the lofty but unsupportable expectations of the PDP that a major shift in Southwest politics was afoot. If anything, it shows clearly the difficulty the progressives will encounter more frequently in the coming months and years as they interface with a formless opposition.
Southwest politics is sometimes regarded as the most sophisticated in Nigeria. I do not know where this erroneous generalisation comes from, but I suspect it has to do with the progressivism of the region and the uncritical classification of progressivism as morally superior to conservatism. The Ikorodu upset indicates a general lack of sophistication in Nigerian and regional politics, which progressives must come to terms with very quickly rather than dismiss as inconsequential or aberrant. True, protest votes overcame party loyalty by a small margin to elect the PDP candidate, but much more than the imposition of candidate that led to the upset is the fact that two tendencies fought for recognition within the ACN, and the party leadership was unable to read the signs of the times.
The Southwest may be generally progressive, and its champions may justifiably bask in the knowledge that they represent a superior moral argument, but the region culturally and historically has an underlying antinomian tendency that breaks out periodically with such a force as to alter political equations significantly. It was demonstrated in both the First and Second Republics in a manner that surprised the leaders of the progressive movement who had taken for granted the dichotomy between the two tendencies in the region. Indeed, they were more shocked by the fluidity of movement by key politicians particularly from the progressive camp to the other side.
A keener study of Southwest politics is, however, in fact beginning to show that what appears to be a generally progressive region is nothing but an unimpressive mask for a few dominant progressive personalities. This is as true for the Awolowo era as it is true of the Tinubu era. This previously unknown fact partly explains why the region is often so vulnerable to the machinations of reactionary politics and politicians as well as the shifting values and ideas of the time. It must be acknowledged by leaders of the progressives that at any point in time those who really believe in progressivism, even in a seemingly progressive region, will be few in fact very few. Those few will triumph only when they can muster the implacable will to dominate the polity, though this is not often, for, as the life of Awolowo showed, the cards are often stacked against those few.
But the Ikorodu upset, which many Nigerians and even Lagosians probably missed, is just an infinitesimal fraction of the trouble which leaders of the progressives will have to contend with in the coming years. Unlike in the First and Second Republics when bruised, battered and defeated conservative or reactionary politicians retreated into their shells sometimes for a whole generation, today they have acquired the chutzpah of putting their chins up in defeat. They are unfazed by the immorality of their positions and arguments.
Even much worse, they have learnt to argue vociferously that established vices are interchangeable with established virtues. This moral confusion is the most pressing danger to the body politic of the Southwest, one which will certainly complicate the struggle between progressives and the opposition. Thus it is quite easy for a Senator Iyiola Omisore, with all the liabilities of being swallowed in the controversy over the death of Chief Bola Ige, to sign a document alleging that the judiciary rigged the Osun election in favour of the ACN. This dangerous argument was first heard after the PDP lost Ekiti. At the time, Mr Segun Oni, who illegally occupied the governor’s office for more than three years, wailed that he lost the seat because the judiciary was compromised or because the ACN propaganda machinery was more effective. This moral turpitude, in the face of overwhelming evidence of electoral crimes, is unexampled anywhere.
The new-found confidence to project terrible wrongs will become more entrenched in Southwest politics as the years go by. Naturally, it will make the job of progressive leaders harder, for they will be fighting on two fronts — against the mass of the people whose attitude to progressivism is take-it-or-leave-it, and against leaders of reactionary politics whose moral compass is malfunctioning. The sad and worrisome reality is that whether in Ekiti, Osun, Ogun or elsewhere, the likes of Omisore, Oni and Gbenga Daniel truly believe that PDP lost not to the ACN but to the judiciary.
When a criminal caught red-handed continues to assert his innocence as he is marched into prison, then it is time to be wary. What this tendency portends for the Southwest is that violence is more likely to be embraced to settle the problem of blurred moral compasses. The North, notwithstanding the arguments of monolithic versus decentralised, is less likely to erupt in the kind of political violence we have become used to, for that region is fairly uniformly conservative. At any rate, its leadership, whether religious or traditional, is generally conservative, despite many pockets of progressivism. In such a climate it is not too difficult to moderate political and even social conflicts.
In the east of the Niger, the dividing line between ideologies is less perceptible, even as cross-border movements across the divides go on smoothly and effortlessly. Going by the politics of the First, Second and Fourth Republics, the entire region does not seem to be as pretentiously ideological as the Southwest. The kind of conflict shaping up in the Southwest is less likely to crystallise in the East. However, whatever conflicts break out there can always be smothered by appeals to the ties that bind their people.
In the Southwest, the Obasanjos, Omisores, Onis, Daniels, Oyinlolas and others are spawning a brood of unrepentant reactionary politicians proud of their beliefs, confident in their power, and ready to trade tackles. They will continue to get new converts, and the kind of defections expected from the PDP by progressives may either never materialise on the scale hoped for or they may take much longer in coming. If there would be an outbreak of violence on a scale that could threaten national stability, it is more likely to come from the Southwest rather than the East or North. Perhaps if a closer study of Southwest politics had been undertaken in the 1950s, it should not have been difficult to predict where the troubles that would sunder Nigeria would come from.
Like Awolowo, the new progressives in the Southwest must understand that at any time only a few of them would be relevant. They can dominate the polity by the force of their ideology, for the region is more receptive to it than any other region, but they must never imagine that among those claiming to be leaders of the progressives the ideology is universally embraced.
They must also reconcile themselves to the plain fact that the region will continue to fluctuate in its embrace of progressivism and conservatism/reaction. Other distracting variables and personalities will seasonally emerge to precipitate conflicts, reaction, conservatism and even anarchism. The kind of sophisticated politicking Awolowo and his likes envisaged can only emerge after strong institutions to mediate political conflicts are set up and begin to flourish. More and more, the kind of universal progressivism that was experienced in the Second Republic will become rarer and rarer.
- First published December 26, 2010
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