As the wave of defection from sinking parties and upended dugouts approached the scale of a furious tsunami, there is a feeling that the APC has arrived at its apotheosis, a moment of divine beautification when everything seems possible, when a political party carries all before it, and when every potential opposition appears to have crumbled. Its leading lights are wearing a smirk of self-satisfaction. They are justified. Never in the history of the nation has a party capitalized so mercilessly and benefited so profitably from the structural and ideological debilities of its rivals. And never has a single party become so dominant that it looms so large in the horizon. The only remote comparison one can think of is the PDP at the height of its glory when the party became a Leviathan sweeping all before it and brooking no opposition in the ordinary sense of that word. Its hierarchs boasted of a sixty-year Reich during which it would rule the roost uninterrupted and unchallenged.
As things stand, the APC has bested its most formidable rival in all its hegemonic possibilities. The entire country has been reeling with shock and surprise. It is purely uncharted territory. Never in the history of the country have the citizens had to contend with a one-party state. As if to underscore the scary portents, a group of leading civil rights campaigners came out during the week, vowing to oppose every inch of the way any attempt to foist a one-party state on the nation because of its multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious polarities. It was like drawing a line in the sand. Dear readers, there are moments when the analyst feels that history repeats itself with such a wounding acuity and that truly the more things change the more they remain the same.
Exactly ten years ago after its historic triumph over the PDP, this column issued a travel advisory to the APC asking it to immediately put certain things in place if it were to avoid the dismal fate of its most formidable rival. This is what we are republishing this morning and even to the writer himself, it reads chillingly like the chronicle of an overreaching boa constrictor foretold, with the horns of an impala it had ingested sticking out of its own ruptured abdomen. But before we go, it is appropriate to leave with a delightful vignette from the nation’s history.
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After a historic rally in a notorious enemy territory, the late premier of the old Western region, the urbane, witty, mentally alert and most perspicacious Samuel Ladoke Akintola was hailed by many as having achieved an impossible political feat. A leading pro-government columnist of the time called it the apotheosis of SLA and his party the NNDP as the liberator of the Yoruba race. When his confidant, personal assistant and troubleshooter Adewale Kassim, an Ijesha prince who was later to become a notable sovereign in his rural idyllic domain, drew Akintola’s attention to this and signposted it as a sign of a major shift in political fortune, the master word-juggler and exemplary verbal duelist chuckled and then noted with wry cynicism: “ ‘Dewale, apotheosis ko, apoti osi ni.”
