South West’s Fatal Leap -By Festus Adedayo

As it became clear that former Vice President of Nigeria and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate in the just-concluded election, Atiku Abubakar, was kissing the electoral canvass, Reno Omokri, the combative spokesman to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, made a submission on the voting trend of the election, his thumbs gleefully held high for the South West of Nigeria.  As I will submit presently, Omokri’s commendatory dissection of voters’ performance in the election was premature and a very peremptory reading of the calamitous political footpath the South West region trod in the said election.

Omokri had said: “Yorubas proved again that they are the most sophisticated voters in Nigeria. … Notice how Yoruba voters gave their votes to PDP even though APC has a Yoruba VP. I doff my hat to the Yoruba nation…The voting pattern of the Yoruba in this election shows that merit is more important to them than ethnicity. Other regions have to learn from them. In terms of political maturity and tolerance, they are light years ahead of other regions,” he had said.

As usual, Omokri had unflattering strictures for the All Progressives Party, (APC) Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and ultimately, President Muhammadu Buhari. The election results showed that the PDP won in Oyo, erstwhile capital of the Western region, in Ondo, home of Awolowo’s successor to Yoruba leadership, Adekunle Ajasin, with APC managing a win by the whiskers in Lagos, Osun and winning only convincingly in Ekiti and Ogun State, the latter where Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and the APC establishment had been up in arms against the man who swung the votes for the party, Ibikunle Amosun. In fact, the total number of winning votes that the region gave the APC was scarcely higher than the votes Ebonyi State gave the party.

Before venturing into the voting trend and its calamitous implications, it is very apposite here to begin with the attitude of voters in the said election. Of course, the people have not woken from their bewilderment at the huge number of electors credited to the northern part of Nigeria. It began right from the first national election in Nigeria, down to the 1959 elections. In the latter election, immortal Obafemi Awolowo, had introduced some glitz into campaign through penetrating the nooks and crannies of the North with an helicopter. By doing that, he literally forced Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, to wake up from his political lethargy and campaign round the whole of the region. He arrived one day with the whole of his face covered in soot and spitting out dust-sauced phlegm, vowing he would never forgive Awo for subjecting him to such stress. Right from then, the northern voting trend had always been in issue. This particular election was no exception. Kano and Katsina, for instance, had electors totaling about 3.5 million, while in the whole of Lagos, about a million turned out to vote. It was the same sorry tale in virtually all the South West states.

If you went round many of the South West states during the election, the apathy, the I-don’t-care attitude that permeated the region was legendary. Apart from a benumbing, far between statistics of those who exercised their franchise, many of the youth, women and particularly the elite in the region, saw the day as a day of rest from the hustle and bustle of their various engagements. They sat back at home, watching the latest movies. On many streets, youth of voting age converted the tarred roads into football pitches and struggled to clone Ronaldo with the whole of their grits. Those who confronted them on why they declined to exercise their franchise were shell-shocked. What is our business with the election? Most of them thundered off-handedly. Conversely however, reports said that most of the electors in the north trooped out to vote as early as 6am.

This is why the so-called South West elders and political parties in the region deserve huge sjambok on their buttocks. Apparently convinced that they would rig the elections, the leaders spent less time to educate the huge population in the region on the crucifix which abstaining from the polling booths symptomized. And they are at home with the vain braggadocio and self-adulation of being “the most sophisticated electors” in Nigeria. Absolute nonsense. The north is the sophisticated elector. Watch your neighbourhood; the malam selling petty groceries, your shoe shiner and the ones selling cucumber and water melon disappeared from view a few days before the election. They all travelled home to exercise their franchise. South West’s own voting majority sat at home, watching the latest African Magic offering on television. Yet they expected magic at the polls. And they cry blue murder that the North posted an unbelievably huge population of voters.

The maisuya by the roadside has a transistor radio by his side, listening to VOA Hausa, Radio France and the BBC. He is well informed about what is happening, not only in Nigeria but all over the world – delivered in his native Hausa. His sophistication is strengthened by a thirst to participate in the electoral exercise. And yet the West as a zone revels itself in the vacuous inanity of sophistication. Yoruba’s pseudo leaders were at peace with themselves, gallivanting in an old glory which the Awolowos bequeathed to the race. Their own bequeathals are the legacy of bullion vans parked by the frontage of their home and the self-peacocking boast that a state doesn’t have their kind of personal ill-gotten wealth. Yet, parodying Americans, we see the bucks but we can’t see the shop.

I may be wrong but whoever has closeness with those parading themselves as South West leaders should warn them that there is, as the Yoruba say, danger in Longe’s farmland. Not only is the danger present in the dwindling epitome of their political relevance, it is also present in the withering place of the Yoruba people in the general construct. If there is anything that was glaring in that election, it is that the highly shouted relevance of Asiwaju and his alleged invincible electoral machine were totally absent from it like Baal, the god of the Siddonians. A new set of Turks seems to be commanding the heights of their people’s destiny. Kayode Fayemi shellacked PDP renegades in Ekiti without Tinubu’s interference. Perhaps the most outstanding was Ogun’s Amosun. Harangued on all fronts by the Acheullian impudence and arrogance of Adams Oshiomhole and Tinubu’s underground destructive machinery, Amosun not only posted an impressive win for himself, he single-handedly got Buhari victory in his state. Tinubu’s crew in Ogun – Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (who lost in his Lagos polling booth), Segun Osoba and even Dapo Abiodun who till now hasn’t told the world where his degree certificate is marooned, all couldn’t withstand Ibikunle’s apparent massive electoral machinery and sagacity. He talks less but wangles his political machine past his traducers with a comprehensive finish.

What the presidential election result means for the West is that it cannot claim acquaintance with, nor wholeheartedly dance to the victory song of the presidential election. Perhaps the words attributed to Buhari on Friday where he was said to have asked his ministers where they would have been if he had lost the election, should have been directed at Tinubu and his band of impostors in the West. The so-called West’s son, Osinbajo, it is apparent, would be enjoying a presidency which his people contributed little or nothing to. Asiwaju’s usual gallivant to the Villa would be decidedly curtailed by this apparent lackluster performance. Any arrant northerner can easily tell him to shut his traps if he waves an entitlement. If the region is given Minister of Toilet Matters, it has passable locus to complain and Buhari has the latitude to pick virtually all his team from Daura, Kano or even succumb to the temptation of going overboard to appoint as his minister one of those governors from Niger Republic present at his campaign.

Asiwaju is the architect of this destructive political dissonance in the West today and should be held culpable for its dwindling lot. He sowed the seed of this discord right there in Ondo State in the 2016 gubernatorial election. Glaringly, he subverted all known norms of party politics by financing Olusola Oke under the banner of the Alliance for Democracy to vie for the election, basing this political faux pas on his tiff with Rotimi Akeredolu. He was abetted by the alagabagebe (hypocrisy) exponent, Rauf Aregbesola, who himself is the greatest alagabagebe today in Yoruba politics. The Osun alagabagebe donated one of his aides as Oke’s deputy. Asiwaju tried same in Ekiti and failed. With this, those who saw through this agabagebe politics got lionized. They thus conversely attempted to give him a dose of his medicine in Osun.  

Now the Fulani and the North in general will show Asiwaju that he doesn’t know the colour of politics. By not seeking the resolution of West’s crisis from its teething stage, his rump has been exposed to the whole world. The disgraceful loss of the APC in the West and the neither-cold-nor-hot voting trends for the two big political parties at the presidential election will constitute the West’s nemesis. South East went through a single filing, which is great. Collaterally, the West will suffer from this. It cannot lay claim to the same juices of government appointments it held on to between 2015 and now.

Lagos’ votes may well be symptomatic of the autumn of the Asiwaju’s political influence and political relevance. For Asiwaju’s APC to have purportedly defeated the PDP in Lagos with about 132,810 votes is a cry similar to that of the day of Armageddon. That is with alleged burning and stealing of ballot boxes in Igbo people-dominated places where the PDP was allegedly leading. The PDP claims that, rather than that result posted by INEC, the behemoths at the electoral commission actually connived with the vultures in APC to have 100,000 added to APC’s figures and 100,000 deducted from its.  

If I were Asiwaju, Fayemi and Amosun will be two persons I will seek out of the heap this moment. Amosun has shown that in spite of the gang-ups of the Ananias and Saphirras of this world in the APC, he is a master-tactician and a political colossus, single-handedly winning the most unexpected quantum of votes for Buhari in the region. No wonder Buhari is clinging to him. Conversely, Asiwaju’s poster boys in the South West, Senator Abiola Ajimobi in Oyo State and Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, former governor of Osun State, lost their respective senatorial districts to the PDP. For the Jagaban, good home training forbids one from predicting a political nunc dimittis. Or is it?