he ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ondo State conducted its governorship primary two Saturdays ago and made a mess of it. It was ironically the much maligned and supposedly divided and demoralised opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that conducted a more democratic, far fairer, and more inspiring primary. It is, however, too early to speculate whether the APC by its levity and incompetence will win the November governorship election, or whether the PDP can translate its orderliness and fair play into electoral victory seven months down the line. The PDP, using indirect primary method, elected by a compelling margin Agboola Ajayi, a former deputy governor to the late Rotimi Akeredolu, as its standard-bearer. On the other side of the aisle, incumbent APC governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa seized the governorship ticket by all means possible and will be hoisting his party’s flag in November. If he wins, it will simply be due to the same political dynamics that undeservedly gave him the ticket: incumbency, patronage, ruthlessness, and a shambolic APC organisation unperturbed by principles and morality.
Mr Aiyedatiwa took the ticket by an unbridgeable margin that saw him outscoring his closest competitors combined. He was scored 48,569 votes. He will hope that in November those votes, assuming they all turn out and are added to those of his competitors to give a total of some 89,613 votes, would gift him an unassailable lead right from the outset. It usually doesn’t work out that way, but it helps to recall that in the 2020 governorship poll, Mr Akeredolu won with a vote tally of 292,830 out of 572,745 valid votes cast. The remaining votes were cast in favour of Eyitayo Jegede (195,791, PDP) and Agboola Ajayi (97,039, Zenith Labour Party), both of whom are now in the PDP. In November, the PDP will hope that discontent in the ruling party will be strong and relentless enough to swing the pendulum in favour of the opposition. But the APC expects that the incumbency factor and the control of the federal administration might convince the voters to hold the fort. The expectation of an electoral fait accompli in November might have led the APC in the state into organising probably one of the worst primary elections the state has ever known.
Everything indicated right from the beginning that the APC would make a hash of its primary. Firstly, there was the Mr Aiyedatiwa factor himself. Destitute of principles and sound judgement, and given completely to opening his mouth and putting his foot into it repeatedly, he was decidedly unkeen on ensuring fair play. A number of factors explain his predilection for realpolitik. One is that he knew he was seen as an outsider, and two is that he was, in addition, unable to trust even his own judgement in picking fights, most of them needless. But he desperately wanted to win every fight, whether he chose the fight or the fight chose him. So far, as his first name suggests, he has been lucky in winning even the unlikeliest of battles. Not too long after he was picked as deputy governor, his benefactor fell ill, and despite his churlishness and atrocious disregard for human feelings, his calculations that Mr Akeredolu would die before the APC would need to pick a standard-bearer were accurate. Ensconced in the State House thereafter, nothing he has said or done has prevented jobholders and vote herders from swarming around him. In such circumstances, fair or unfair, a primary election victory was a foregone conclusion.
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Secondly, since the forced exit of Adams Oshiomhole as national chairman, the APC has been poorly and controversially led. Discipline has been maintained with extreme difficulty. In fact, in most cases, there has been no regard for discipline at all. The current chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje, is a little lethargic and hobbled by enemies back in Kano, his home state, who are snapping at his heels. They will not give him rest. He may be somewhat an intellectual and a little didactic, but he seems curiously unable to bring those talents to bear on a huge, combative and ideological party which had just managed to retain the federal administration against the run of play. The party has smothered internal rage fairly successfully, but it is, however, unable to placate the ethnic and ideological divisions simmering below the surface. Worse, not been quite as disciplined and ethical as the party demands and probably deserves, Dr Ganduje has been unable to give what he does not have, and was perhaps chary of imposing any kind of order and finesse upon Ondo APC whose leader, Mr Aiyedatiwa, may be the most unaware of APC governors in the Southwest, if not the country.
Thirdly, by the strangest and most bizarre of party administration actions, the national APC appointed Kogi State governor Usman Ododo as head of the primary election committee. But Mr Ododo is a rookie governor shackled by legal disputes and weighed down by the troubles of his predecessor, the importuning Yahaya Bello. The restless governor has not shown that he knows much of anything, and has so far not settled down long enough for anyone, let alone himself, to develop the administrative or ideological confidence that is an imperative for sound judgement and governance. To worsen a bad choice, Mr Ododo arrived in Akure, Ondo State, on the Saturday morning of the primary election. What could he do in hours before the poll? But unfazed by the complexity of managing a direct primary election, and unused to party members having and exercising real choices, he probably assumed that since party primary was a family and internal affair, it really didn’t matter whether it was done as spectacularly inept as the one Mr Bello deployed in foisting him on Kogi APC. Could Dr Ganduje pretend not to know these limitations?
Unfortunately, days after the abysmal APC primary, and months after the party nearly botched the Edo State APC governorship primary, Dr Ganduje has met with party stakeholders to stitch a new cloth on an old garment. He appealed for unity and asked them to rally behind Mr Aiyedatiwa so that APC would retain Ondo. It helps the Bola Tinubu administration for the APC to retain control of Ondo, because it takes a whole lot of scheming, funding and organising to win new states. But if the party knew this, should they not have tried to organise a great primary which the governor would have probably won anyway? Now they want peace anchored on both unfairness and grave injury to the soul and fabric of the party. They have given the party a bad and appalling name, ignoring the fact that if the cheated party members rebuff their pleadings, it could spell disaster in November. They cannot pretend not to know the consequences of their action; they simply don’t care about the consequences of allotting votes as their whims dictated.
The vacillating Dr Ganduje may be the party’s national chairman, and the contumelious Mr Aiyedatiwa the state’s party leader, but President Tinubu is the APC national leader. The president must, therefore, consider that these infractions and machinations were done in his name, for which he bears ultimate responsibility. He must ask himself what kind of party he wants to lead and bequeath to future generations: one led by Dr Ganduje and which produces governors who have nothing substantial to teach or give, or one which he as president inspires into embracing the tenets of democracy and greatness, a disciplined party that demonstrates utmost fidelity to the law and constitution. There is no room to straddle. The last Ondo APC primary was irredeemably fraudulent. It should be redone.
Like everything else about the former Kogi State governor, Yahaya Bello, life is nothing more than drama, childish drama. Unreflective and artificial, Mr Bello has managed out of office to enact a long-running saga in which he and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) star. The anti-graft agency is the hunter, and he the hunted. Had he given himself up immediately the EFCC summoned him, he would have retained whatever little dignity nature grudgingly gave him at birth, and after a few appearances in court, he would be out on bail, free to pontificate on a narrow range of simple subjects his grandiosity would permit. But Mr Bello has a knack for complicating the simplest of matters. Undeservingly gifted the governorship of Kogi State after an election he largely did not participate in, and inheriting a mantle he did his worst to fight and undermine, which fell off the pompous shoulders of the late Abubakar Audu, he proceeded to govern the state for eight years a heartless dictator. As an aside, it is fitting that those who conspired to impose him on Kogi, south-westerners and northerners alike, though they feigned to be democrats, are meeting even crueler fates.
The EFCC had been on to Mr Bello while he was still governor. His alleged financial malfeasance had become so brazen as to come, in unsightly details, under the anti-graft agency radar. He is alleged to have embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars and tens of billions of naira, perhaps over N80bn, in addition to buying up everything, including houses within and outside Nigeria, that caught his fancy. And though the agency has not yet made it public, he is also alleged to have financially induced and corrupted a large number of public and private officials, including judges, actors and actresses, presidency officials in the last dispensation, and a host of other eager dupes, great and small, willing to be bought and happy to sell their dignity. To service this wide-ranging act of public hideousness, Mr Bello allegedly locked his snout on the state’s treasury and callously sucked the sinews out of the poor state, leaving mendicant workers pushed tragically to the edge of suicide and insanity. He brutalised everyone that crossed his path, discriminated against parts of the state which questioned his buffoonery, and certain that he had bought all the support he would ever need in and out of office, frittered away his little goodwill and lent his profligate youth to the services of the basest form of governance. But he miscalculated.
His hunters cornered him in Abuja on April 17, but his poodles helped him lift the siege and have kept him incommunicado at the State House in Lokoja. They can’t keep him for long, and they can’t ferry him out of Nigeria. Some commentators suggest that the EFCC chairman, Olanipekun Olukoyede, had become too voluble on this and a few other cases. They would like him to speak less, and to assume the character of someone of dignified restraint. Perhaps that would serve him better. But so far, notwithstanding his superfluous threat to resign if he could not bring Mr Bello to trial, and despite exuding needless emotion when he addressed the media last week on the matter, Mr Olukoyede has not done anything unlawful in his pursuit of the former Kogi governor. Mr Bello is on the run and will do anything and take any measure to continue to shield himself from prosecution. In short, he dares the state, represented by the EFCC, and affronts every civilised value, which he clearly treats with his accustomed contempt. But next to being on death row, being declared a fugitive is both deeply demeaning and truly harrowing. Mr Bello can only become more frantic as his legal options shrink or recede.
Kogi indigenes are exultant that even before his trial Mr Bello is getting his just desserts. They had been at the receiving end of his cruelty for eight years, the first four-year term the outcome of a bastardised electoral process, and the second term stolen through brutal electoral thievery. Workers were not paid full salaries, pensions came in fits and starts, and gratuities became a luxury. Dissent was viciously put down, and everyone who opposed him, including some harried judges, spoke and probably thought in whispers. Under Mr Bello, the state routinely mocked the constitution while Abuja only managed to look askance as their best form of disapproval. He flattered party bigwigs and grovelled before the past federal administration, and turned his full wrath at the state judiciary and civil service. The same man that enacted those horrendous and oppressive actions against a state he was unworthy to govern has suddenly turned yellow and is fleeing the law.
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Kogites have no sympathy for Mr Bello. They encourage the EFCC to be relentless in pursuing him to the farthest corners of the state, dragging him, if possible, humiliated before the courts. They encourage the anti-graft agency to ignore the feeble and comical protests of civil society groups whose origins are shrouded in mystery and who lack any regard for truth and common decency. In any case, the EFCC needs little encouragement; having been made a fool of once, docking the former governor has become their obsession. Mr Bello is of course trying to fight back using Kogi courts, the same courts he denigrated and subjugated. But his efforts will end disastrously, hopefully before he infects the entire system with his unseemly ways. If the Chief Justice of Nigeria and the National Judicial Council will not rein in their errant judges messing up the judiciary on a straightforward case, perhaps the Bola Tinubu administration will give Governor Usman Ododo’s unconstitutional postulations short shrift and get him to give up the fugitive. The situation will not resolve itself, and doing nothing is not an option.