An Open Letter To Dr. Olatunji Abayomi -By Femi Odere

Dr Tunji Abayomi

Dear Dr. Abayomi:

You will not be wrong if, after reading this letter, you wonder why I should be concerned about responding to a letter that was addressed not to me but to your bosom friend of many years Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu, the National Leader of the All Progressives Party (APC). You described in the letter how your friendship with Asiwaju is far from a fleeting relationship but a togetherness anchored on deep personal affinity for each other as well as a time-tested progressive political philosophy that the rabidly urbane political colossus can locate your birthplace of Okeagbe in Ondo State in the map with his eyes closed, having visited the rural community just for your sake.

Unlike your friend Asiwaju whom you may have broken breads with on several occasions not to talk of the life-threatening struggle you both engaged in for the entrenchment of democracy in Nigeria, I am willing to admit that I do not have anything in common with you except that we’re both from Ondo State. As a lawyer of repute, you occupy a comfortable place in one of the prominent ‘avenues’ in the Third Estate of the Realm while I am just an ordinary resident in the Fourth Estate. Therefore, our worlds are very far apart. Even in the state that gives us our only shared commonality, Akure is still quite a distance from Okeagbe. I am sure you never met me. But due to your twin vocations as a politician and an activist that constantly puts you on the spotlight, my familiarity with you was only made possible by the nation’s newspapers except on a couple of occasions when I saw you in close proximity because I happened to be present in the same public space with you in Ibadan where your presence was announced.

It occurred to me to also write this letter to you after reading your letter to Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu which jumped at my face on SaharaReporters, that hard-to-ignore news portal on a bright Saturday, August 13, 2016. There was no doubt that you’re obviously incensed and sufficiently riled by Asiwaju’s audacity to endorse an aspirant in the Saturday, August 27, 2016 APC primary election in Ondo State in which you’re also a very interested aspirant in the election. I wouldn’t have been bothered if this letter had been written by some fly-by-night neophyte in politics such as one Niran Sule who was reported to have ‘re-defected’ to PDP probably because he had spent the nomination fees given to him by his PDP master in the state on other pressing needs. But you indeed have a track record and a special place as a committed progressive who have never wavered to see a just and equitable society more so in our state of Ondo, which probably has been your driving force in running for the state’s highest political office since the advent of the Fourth Republic as far as I can remember.

Sir, as a faithful of the progressive party, I see your letter to Asiwaju as very disturbing in more ways than one. On the one hand, the premise on which your letter was based was patently faulty that an erudite lawyer like you could not see its emptiness. On the other hand, I felt disheartened that the letter was issued from a personage of high intellectual pedigree who should ordinarily have known that political endorsement is a legitimate instrument that is integral to politics in democracies the world over. More worrisome to me was also your inability—with all due respect—to think about the damage that your letter was capable of doing to party cohesion which is of utmost importance going not only into the primary election process but also the governorship election slated for November 26. You seem to have taken your political activism way too far with that letter. I also hope that your letter was not indicative of some emotional instability or a mischievous mind that seems bent on destabilizing the entire primary process for the All Progressives Party, if not trying to deliberately truncate the party’s robust chances in the governorship election.

Much of what was said in the letter was a display of temper tantrum and a logically inconsistent academic exercise that has no bearing whatsoever. Pray sir, since when an endorsement has become a clog on “the right of the people to choose their leaders through and unduly influenced free and fair primary electoral process” that close to 3,000 independent-minded adults who will vote as delegates will be involved. How would Asiwaju’s endorsement—who’s just one among equals in the APC Southwest leadership—have given the entire votes on the day of the primary election to his endorsee when there’re other members in the leadership who also have their preferred aspirants they believe should clinch the APC ticket? Did you not see this as insulting to the collective sensibilities of not only the APC leadership, but also the delegates who may have been fully convinced by now without being goaded who among the aspirants is more likely to better steer the ship of the state should APC win the governorship election? Would you have protested that Asiwaju should retrieve his endorsement if you had been the one endorsed? I doubt seriously if you would have taken your activism that far in repudiating your own endorsement.

Based on the deep relationship you obviously have with the National Leader, I would have thought that his endorsement of someone else should have given you reason to pause and reflect on whether there’re some leadership attributes that the astute head hunter is looking for that you may have lacked, and that he might have seen in copious amounts in his alleged choice. And I sincerely hope that there’s no iota of truth in the rumour making the rounds in and around Bourdillon that some monies allegedly given to you by the National Leader to seek a legal redress in a case were diverted which, if true, may have given your bosom friend a second thought in giving you his endorsement. I also hope that your serial running for the highest political seat in our state has not affected your clarity of thought in which everyone else around you has become suspects in another imminent loss at the primary election rather than to scrupulously look at what you may be doing wrong that makes the trophy to pass you by every four years. By crying wolf where there’s absolutely none, you may have inadvertently conferred on Asiwaju the power he does not have.

As a veteran player of politics who may have actively participated in running for political office probably far more than you have attempted, if you ever did, to become the president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), I expect you to have a significant level of familiarity with international politics. If you have been conversant with how politics is played in advanced democracies you most likely wouldn’t have written that letter. Please permit me to contribute to your knowledge of politics by citing a couple cases of endorsements in advanced democracies most specifically the United States, since it is the country from where we did much of the cut and paste of our own constitution. Two weeks before the 2008 US presidential election, Gen. Colin Powell, then one of that nation’s most prominent and highly-regarded Republicans announced that he would be supporting the Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama. Sen. John McCain, Obama’s Republican rival never questioned Powel’s right to endorse whomever it pleased him to support. The Republican candidate never for once believed that—although as much as he would have loved to get the general’s endorsement—Americans would be so gullible to unilaterally sway their votes to his Democratic rival just because of one man’s endorsement. Most importantly, McCain never doubted the general’s loyalty to the GOP and neither his fidelity to the electoral process. In the recently concluded US primaries, Senator Bernard “Bernie” Sanders is, by all accounts, a veteran in the Democratic Party far more than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. But President Obama pitched his political tent with Mrs. Clinton with his endorsement. Yet, Sanders was never bothered by the president’s endorsement of his arch Democratic rival. He did not accuse the president that his endorsement would unduly influence the primary electoral process.

Despite his endorsement of an aspirant, the primary election will take place on Saturday, August 27, 2016 and it will not only be free, fair, credible and transparent, but will be seen to be so. I find it difficult to see how Asiwaju will “be diminished” because he did not “wrong democratic ideals and due expectations.” His place in history is already assured as not only one of the few greatest gifts to our country Nigeria, but also a pathfinder in our Southwest geo-political region that without him, what would happened to us as a people is better imagined.

Sir, I respectfully submit to you that you’ll be the diminished one, in case you already have not been reduced in status with that unfortunate letter. You will be irredeemably diminished and history will not be kind to you if it subsequently turned out that your letter was responsible for the disaffection in the party that aided the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) to hold on to power in our state for further subjugation and oppression of the common and ordinary people whose plight probably drove you into politics in the first place so that you can be part of the “change agents” they sorely need in the state.

I send you greetings!

Best Regards,

Femi Odere
Femiodere@gmail.com