Dialogue With Nigeria By AKIN OSUNTOKUN
Going into reelection campaigns, incumbents are commonly burdened with propaganda deficit. Primarily, it has to do with the fact that opponents are the aspirational candidates running on the promises of meeting all public expectations. Whereas incumbents run on their records in office which are invariably a mixed bag of good and bad deeds, the effective and the ineffective policy initiatives. The non-incumbents of today are the incumbents of tomorrow who tend to fall short, some outlandishly so, of campaign bags of goodies, and come to terms with the reality and limitations of policy and day to day governance.
Few incumbents have been burdened with the fallout of this tendency than President Ahmed Bola Tinubu and the media is inevitably awashed with the exposure of the gaps between what he promised and what he has been able to accomplish.This is a worldwide trend and it is the duty of critics to draw attention to the lapses and the gainful opportunity of opponents to magnify them. But there are providential exceptions to the rule of incumbents being encumbered with propaganda deficits. Those exceptions consist of those rare instances where they inadvertently stumble on spectacular propaganda coups like when President George Bush was gifted the 9/11 by Osama Bin Laden.
There is also the logic that the tougher the challenge, the more bountiful the attendant rewards Think of the applause and plaudits that will attend a Nigerian President who actualises the potential of non-stop generation of electricity in Nigeria. A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of being preceded by Cardinal Francis Onaiyekan as a guest of the gifted Arise TV anchor, Charles Aniagolu on his prime time show. Charles was at his objective best and one line of his engagement particularly resonated with me. Onaiyekan and the Catholic Church bishopric had an audience with the President earlier in the day where he expressed displeasure at the drift of Nigeria towards a one party state for which he held Tinubu responsible.
The cardinal probably had it in mind that at the last count, from the baseline figure of twenty state governors, additional eleven state governors had decamped to the President’s party, the All Progressives Congress, APC, bringing the sum total to thirty one out of the total number of thirty sixty governors. In defence, Tinubu effectively countered that it was not his remit to do the work of the opposition parties for them and should thereby not be held accountable for their inadequacies.
On the face of it, he was correct. Where he had questions to answer were the not so subtle subterranean pressures of power politics where he stands the undisputed king. But it takes two to tango. This would not be the case, were those governors not readily disposed to compromise their freedom at the altar of desperation, through means fair and foul, to win their bid for reelection.
In the fullness of the logic of Nigerian federalism, the displeasure of Onaiyekan is better addressed at the Nigerian constitution which has invested near totalitarian powers on whosoever manages to secure the Presidency of Nigeria. The display of such powers by any Nigerian President is a symptom not the cause of this malaise. With an increasing lopsided empowerment of the federal government and corresponding disempowerment of the subnational units (states) Nigeria is dangerously prone to the politics of winner takes all and the loser loses all. No pragmatic governor in this situation would not want to vicariously belong in the orbit of the political sovereign.
This brings us to the topical issue of the day. How did Governor Ademola Adeleke win reelection in the governorship election in Osun state?. We must understand that winning has a peculiar Nigerian connotation of who is ultimately declared the winner by INEC. There can be a disparity between the actual votes cast and who gets declared as the winner of the polls. The accountable factors of Adeleke’s victory are as follows. More than any other factor he won because he was a charismatic figure who was uniquely relatable to the grassroots. Take his signature dancing impulse for instance. That is a demystication of his high office which symbolically brings him down to the level of his grassroots audience and forges a psychological bond between him and the commoner. He was averagely effective in governance especially in road infrastructure. And he was surprisingly articulate at the Town Hall Meeting we had for the governorship candidates.
This was complemented by the benign disposition of the President towards him. In truth and realistic appreciation of prevalent Nigerian power politics context, grapevine had it, he offered to join the APC but the local Osun state chapter of the party personified by the President’s cousin and minister of the blue and marine economy, Gboyega Oyetola took umbrage and spurned the willingness of Tinubu to welcome Adeleke to the party. Wherein the latter laid down the law that Oyetola was on his own and would have to prove himself without an inkling of the intimidation of so called federal might and that was precisely what happened which ultimately translated into a credible election.
The President must be commended for not succumbing to the seductive logic of power hawks within his political party, the All Progressives Congress, APC, who vented the seductive calculation that the loss of Osun state to the Accord party (a proxy for Adeleke’s effectively independent candidacy) would bolster the resolve of opposition parties. In the first instance, Adeleke was not hostile to the idea of truly supporting the President for reelection in or out of APC. Symbolically, the Presidential candidate of the Accord party, Hashim Olawepo, had withdrawn from participation in the Presidential election.
Apart from his overt actions such as overriding the partisan initiative of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Tinubu had read the riot act to the security agencies to desist from their hitherto aggressively partisan position in the cuase of the APC intimidation of Adeleke and his supporters. He probably realised that at the end of the day, it is better to have the enthusiastic support of a happy popular governor than the bitterness of a subverted governor and Osun state electorate.
Presidents are at their most vulnerable (to the point of paranoia) when they are seeking reelection hence the inclination to want to overdetermine the outcome of the election. The President may or may not have taken the admonition of Onaiyekan into account, but his attitude towards the recent governorship election is commendable. I did not need to be physically present in Osun state to be conscious of the predatory political engagement of the APC, in the run up to the election. Driving through the state, the vandalisation of the campaign billboards of the Accord party was a common sight while the police looked the other way.
Four days to the election, the Arise TV, where I now serve as Director of politics, hosted the candidates contesting in the elections to a town hall meeting. Prior to our departure for the state I raised misgivings with a close friend who doubles as a confidant of the President that with all the goings on in Osun state culminating in the tendentious intervention by the EFCC, it will be difficult to exonerate Tinubu from the abuse of federal power in the state. I was pleasantly surprised the following day when he overruled the EFCC with the admonition that ‘Osun State is only a few days away from its gubernatorial election. Therefore, nothing ought to be done to give an impression that the EFCC or indeed any other agency of the federal government is being used to interfere with the election’.
Still I remained skeptical until the election unfolded in real time to the rating of a free and fair exercise. A grateful re-elected Adeleke wasted no time in reaffirming his support for the President and set the ball rolling. ‘Asked whether he would support Tinubu “all out” in the 2027 presidential election, Adeleke enthused, “Big time, I will.” Whenever Mr President, when it’s time for him to campaign and all that, whatever way he wants me to come in, I will do it,”. I hereby join Tinubu in wishing my friend, Adeleke, great success as he prepares to lead the state for the next four years. Now that he has won, Governor Adeleke must unite the people of Osun State and rally them for growth, stability, and social and economic progress, regardless of the political choices they made at the election
Whatever reservations there are about the Tinubu Presidency, I cannot help but see the Osun state election as a sustenance of the momentum generated by the governance win he recorded with the accomplishment of the wholesome retrieval of the Orire kidnapped victims on the terms of the security forces, not ceding an inch to the calculations of the terrorists. More so, as it appears that the government has turned the corner and seized the initiative in taking the battle back to the renegades. Which is why, I feel compelled to revisit the sticky incredible dimension introduced by the incontinence of Oyo state governor, Mr Seyi Makinde, dealing in the abject conspiracy theory of somehow insinuating Tinubu’s collusion in the Orire kidnapping incident-’calling on the appropriate international human rights and accountability mechanisms, including those within the United Nations system, to closely examine the facts surrounding this abduction and the circumstances which are sufficiently grave and unusual to warrant independent scrutiny”.
Hell indeed hath no fury than a woman spurned. If there was any government intervention in recent times that met the bar of transparency and accountability, it was the Orire school kidnap incident- which practically unfolded in real time in the public glare.The governor should learn that there can be virtue in silence and living to fight another day. I was aghast the other day when he was venting on the tragic wetie episode of the first republic as analogous of his experience in Oyo state. If he is not clueless he should know that it is those who buck regional consensus that tend to become the targets.