Adams Oshiomhole, the All Progressives Congress (APC) national chairman, said a lot of provocative stuff last Thursday when he and the ruling party’s National Working Committee (NWC) met with Kogi State governorship aspirants.
Governor Yahaya Bello won the primary. He took a hefty 3,127 of the possible 3,596 votes, thus rendering the exercise a no-contest. The other contestants should not have bothered. For a governor roundly condemned by nearly all sections of the Kogi society, including lawmakers whose signal cowardice leads them to sneering at the governor privately, it is strange that the party’s delegates displayed a paradoxical sense of measurement and ethics in their controversial endorsement of a governor they agreed neither performed well nor showed any capacity to perform now and in the future.
Mr Bello will face Musa Wada, an engineer, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who scored a more believable 748 votes to his immediate rival’s 710 out of a delegate population of 2,388. The spread of votes and the margin of defeat and victory in the PDP primary appear more realistic than the APC’s. In fact, the immediate past PDP governor of the state, Idris Wada, and brother to the winner, took a notable but embarrassing vote of 345. It is interesting that the runner-up, Abubakar Ibrahim Idris, is the son of former governor Ibrahim Idris.
Obviously, PDP has seemed more dynastic and unable to fully democratise their political base.
But whatever the problems of the PDP are, they are nothing compared to the contradictions playing out in the APC, contradictions accentuated by the serial misspeak from the APC. It may be too early to say who will win the November governorship poll, considering that the PDP and APC primaries are either still being questioned by aspirants or litigated. It may indeed be difficult to say at the moment who would win, but it is not too difficult to say who should win.
However, no analyst is so clairvoyant in the matter as to be capable of hazarding a guess concerning how the winner would rule the state in the next four years or whether he would have any degree of success. But, if the past is anything to go by, it is far easier to side with the unknown PDP candidate, hoping faintly that his engineering qualification would have imbued him with some sense of civility and moderation in contrast to the brutishness and chaotic disposition of the incumbent, Mr Bello.
Today is not the time to determine who would or should win. The election is still more than two months away, happily enough time to weaken the sorcery of Mr Bello and counteract the vapid panegyrics of the APC chairman. Mr Oshiomhole is a candid politician, sometimes flighty, and at other times querulous, but he is often endearingly frank about those he likes and those he hates. His courage sometimes fails him, and logic has never been his forte, seeing that he relies heavily on his eloquence more than anything else, but he has been fortunate over the years that whatever failures he exhibits have never managed to attenuate both his rambunctious unionist career and his chequered political life.
He bravely took on some of the president’s governor friends in the last election, foiling their clumsy and undemocratic efforts to anoint successors. President Muhammadu Buhari showed his irritation by badly equivocating over the APC chairman’s stand, but he managed to keep his peace. And surprise of all surprises, Mr Oshiomhole triumphed. Is it that this time, having known just what he is capable of, Mr Bello’s Abuja backers have put their foot down?
In any case, even before the Kogi APC governorship primary was held, the usually boisterous Mr Oshiomhole had been strangely both quiescent and inaudible. Being unearthly silent or reduced to whispers in the face of anticipated evil is, however, one thing, but being silent or conniving when evil has manifested is another thing.
Once the Kogi APC primary had been decided in the party’s and states’ inimitably malevolent manner, the APC chairman simply endorsed Mr Bello and composed a panegyric in his honour. His predecessor, John Odigie-Oyegun, was consistent in his conservative and almost reactionary endorsement of political nitwits and acolytes, and was never known to have been incommoded by either conscience or any remonstrance. Mr Oshiomhole on the other hand has been known, perhaps with some exaggeration, as a disciplined and conscientious politician, one who abjures the obnoxious practice of ingratiation.
It was, therefore, a surprise that the APC chairman not only endorsed and embraced Mr Bello and the flawed primary that foisted him upon the party as standard-bearer, he in fact also welcomed him enthusiastically last Thursday to the party’s headquarter with a doxology composed by the party’s top hierarchy.
Determined to compare the governor’s performance, not against the benchmark of the APC, but against the obnoxious performance of past PDP administrations, Mr Oshiomhole proceeded to award the Kogi governor a pass mark. Said he: “…You will score the current governor higher if we must tell ourselves the truth.”
What does Mr Oshiomhole know about the truth? Even for so forthright and unsparing a politician, one whom this column has sometimes praised, the APC chairman handles the truth as if it were a bosomy and curvaceous maiden whose provocative strutting must compel God to excuse or forgive every sinner for their lewd gaze and secret longing. Knowing him for who he is, the party chairman was not really speaking about the truth, especially given his own famed Machiavellian ways, but about the reality and inescapability imposed upon him by the shadowy supporters of the governor safely ensconced in Abuja, far away from the depredations caused by the fumbling governor in Kogi State.
The APC crowd may hate the PDP and belittle the modest contributions its past governors had made to the development of Kogi State. But those former governors acted, spoke, related and lived far more moderately and decently than Mr Bello can ever attempt. Mr Oshiomhole should have limited himself to comparing the Kogi governor with the APC’s amorphous general benchmark. The public may mistrust the comparison, but they will be hard put to controvert it, for after all, the ruling party in many of the APC-led states, not to talk of at the federal level, has chased chimera, complained offensively loudly, confused scaffolding for the building, and has been inflated by an egregious sense of self-importance in a way that the PDP, in all their sixteen crazy years in office, must find even excessive and unbearable.
But Mr Oshiomhole was not done with his embroideries. As is his practice, once he begins his soliloquies, once the spirit seizes him, there is no restraining him, as his eloquence takes wing and soars in direct and impudent defiance of the truth. Said he again of Mr Bello’s record: “Bello did not only inherit salary arrears from his predecessors, which he had defrayed, but also inherited burdens of infrastructure, projects approved and money paid but were not executed, and the governor is doing all such projects today.”
It is hard to know who is lying the more between the chairman and the standard-bearer about salaries and pensions owed Kogi State workers. Mr Oshiomhole is full of exaggerations; and Mr Bello is full of mendacity. Between them, they are betraying the state and irreparably injuring the psyche of long-suffering workers and indigenes of the state.
The APC chairman is perhaps too busy to find out just how the governor paid the salary arrears. If he tried, he would have discovered that not all the arrears were paid, and the part which was paid was paid in fractions, fractions that humiliate the people and bastardise governance.
Much worse, Mr Oshiomhole talks of inherited abandoned projects, and that the governor was doing all of them. No lie can be so offensive. Mr Bello has no idea better than a primary schoolboy’s about projects and development. He has not done anything new which anyone should take the trouble of remembering, and every old thing he has touched has been to either destroy it or sell it.
The governor whom Mr Oshiomhole praises so fulsomely has no conception of the past, of the present, or of the future, let alone appreciate the correlation between his vaunted youthfulness and governance. And how can he do any project when most of the time he is in Abuja perfecting what it means to be a spendthrift, and lobbying anyone he can find in the national legislature, federal executive and the judiciary to pander to his whims.
To finally insult Kogites and lovers of democracy in Nigeria, Mr Oshiomhole offers the country this atrocity: “Even our party’s enemies will agree with us that Yahaya Bello has done well in the area of security. If the people are not secured, no meaningful development can take place.”
The APC chairman assumes the public can be hoodwinked with the triteness about peace and development. Shocking. Not only is the APC as a whole unconvincingly democratic, not to talk of the enforcer, Mr Bello himself, it is an infernal lie to suggest Kogi is secure. It is not. If many of the state’s criminals have migrated to other places, it is simply because the people have been so impoverished by the government that there is little or nothing left on them for anyone to steal. And as for enemies agreeing that Mr Bello had done well in security, not even the friends of the Kogi government agree that the governor has done anything well, or that he possesses any redeeming virtue.
Mr Oshiomhole and the APC are at liberty to impose anyone they wish and support their imposition with all the resources at their disposal, but they must still retain the capacity to wince at the disreputable panegyrics they compose and the brazen lies they tell. They may not care what becomes of the state, and may even attempt to force the poll in November, but surely those who are reflective among them should beware of immutable spiritual laws certain to ensnare them.
The APC, having taken the measure of the state’s rancorous politics and ignorant ethnic permutations, may also secretly hope that their candidate will profit from the confusion and darkness enveloping the state. Indeed, the state’s futile politics is such that commentators may, in exasperation, abandon indigenes of the state to their own foolish devices. But they must all know, regardless of whichever party they belong to, that four more years of Mr Bello would be sufficient to ruin the state and scar the people’s psyche so deeply as to be irredeemable.
– Idowu Akinlotan writes for The Nation Newspapers
