Now that APC Wants To Show Oshio The Gate… -By Festus Adedayo

Whenever, if ever, the All Progressives Congress (APC) decides to do a critical stocktaking of its electoral and political fare, especially in the 2019 general elections, it will find out, to its chagrin, that its choice of Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole as chairman of the party in June, 2018 was its most fatal decision ever. Suave and slippery like an eel, Oshiomhole has the capacity to mouth-crush his adversary without the other party knowing. Possessing scant academic certificates, he is however endowed with an oratory skill that a demagogue will envy. In his eel capacity, Oshio can meander into the stoniest of hearts in a jiffy, penetrating all the erected barricades therein without giving notice to the janitor of the heart. This, as well as his gift of the garb, apparently got him this far. When Oshiomhole the unionist stood on the dais, his fist clenched like in an Amandla salute and his stony demeanor like that of Sango, the Yoruba god of thunder, Oshiomhole approximates the resolve of a labour leader who was ready to confront governmental rascality headlong. Rumour had it that Oshio, by so doing, wore the apparel of a hard kernel to crack for governments in the day but at nocturnes, removed this veil and wore his real apparel of the infamous biblical Gehazi.

The gift of the garb that Oshiomhole is remarkable with is however his most striking albatross. In approximately one year of his being the APC party chairman, he has used that same gift to tear the party asunder in a way that it may never recover from.  The blows of Oshiomhole’s perfunctory mouth recklessness have rendered the party fabrics with gaping holes. In virtually all the states where the APC needlessly lost senatorial, gubernatorial elections in the last elections, Oshiomhole’s unenviable imprints loom large. It was either he threw his most luminous ego at the issues bedeviling the party or he constructed an artificial pipe that linked his insatiable appetite with the problem in the state. Even as labour leader, Oshiomhole built a wondrous mansion in his Iyamho home which, in a country that lays store by scrutiny, should naturally lead to questions.

The problem isn’t strictly Oshiomhole’s but that of a political party like the APC which doesn’t conduct its affairs according to the dictates of science. Scientific politicking demands that no step is taken in a political party administration without first examining it critically. While concluding that John Odigie-Oyegun, erstwhile APC chairman, would be shown the gate, APC subjected itself to an artificial tidal wave in the party that was borne of someone’s irritable disgust with Odigie-Oyegun, more than his incapacity. Odigie-Oyegun was deboned, sliced, garnished, roasted and packaged for the trash can uncritically and his replacement was also uncritically determined, in a manner that will later haunt the party. It is murmured  that Oshiomhole cleverly and serpentinely wired the marionette that danced as Odigie-Oyegun was shoved out of office.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the man who would be Nigerian President in 2023 – pardon the pun – simply hated the guts of Odigie-Oyegun, a man with whom he was in the trenches in the NADECO jungle where the bone-crushing lions of the Sani Abacha government roared menacingly, seeking whom to devour. This writer, as a reporter, covered Tinubu, Odigie-Oyegun and others’ arrival in Nigeria one Sunday afternoon in Frank Kokori’s Lagos home in 1998. At that meeting was also Dan Suleiman, Bolaji Akinyemi, Tokunbo Afikuyomi and a few others. Everybody shared the bottles of groundnuts that Kokori could offer the new arrivals. Why did that bond, forged at the smithy of dedication to a cause, not strong enough to continue to wedge Odigie-Oyegun to Tinubu, but was jettisoned by a latter-day romance with Oshiomhole, the sleek unionist?

If APC were critical, scientific and purposeful in the choice of a replacement for Odigie-Oyegun in 2018, it would have discovered that Oshiomhole was not an able replacement. Oshiomhole lacks the political temperament, capacity for self-restraint and the taciturnity needed by a leader of a party that is in government. From Imo to Oyo,  Ondo to Ogun, to Zamfara, Kwara to Bauchi, Adamawa to Benue and Sokoto to Gombe, even though in many of these states, APC candidates won elections, the political enmity, division and divisiveness that Oshiomhole’s flippant tongue left in the party in those states make the victories pyrrhic. Opposition parties only need to harvest the flakes of anger left on the trail of elections in those states, put their houses in order and the badly placed stacks  of cards that Oshiomhole’s National Working Committee (NWC) erected will fall yakata.

There is said to be a push for Oshiomhole’s removal among a caucus of the APC. The push is founded on the gross losses recorded by the party under the tip of the nose of Oshiomhole within the last one year of his administration. Aside his incapacity to string two jolly ropes together, Oshiomhole is consumed of an incandescent temperament that can upset an apple-cart and untwine two jointly tied ropes. Already, his huge ego, bottomless appetite and dictatorial inclinations have set him on a collision course with his anointed son and current governor of his Edo State home, Obaseki. He has set spineless emissaries out who vowed to give the governor the Lagos Akinwunmi Ambode at the next polls. If you add this to his tempestuous administration of Edo for eight years, his unfeeling quip at the woman on the streets of Benin City to “go and die!” and his well-known capacity to dissemble, APC had no business with Adams in the first place.

Whether or not the APC wakes up from its slumber and shows Oshiomhole the gate is its own kettle of fish, as the ancient cliché says. What APC is not permitted to do however is to continue to set the country on periodic political fire each time its faulty decisions lead to the natural encore of mutual recriminations, animosities and anger within the party.