The governorship election in Ondo State has come but has not gone. It cannot go until all stakeholders have sunk in all that there is to be learnt from the exercise.
Some of the questions to answer and draw lessons from are: Is Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s powers or prowess waning? What made the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) lose? What made the All Progressive Congress (APC) win? Did the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) play its role dutifully?
The Ondo State context was very unique and it is necessary to present a background scenario in order to understand and answer the foregoing questions.
The PDP has got reasonable presence in Ondo State for close to 20 years now. In 1999 when the Alliance for Democracy (AD) swept the entire South West, the PDP, led by the late Dr. Olusegun Agagu showed good presence in Ondo State and even produced a member of the House of Representatives. Dr. Agagu served the Obasanjo administration in two important ministries (aviation, power and steel) and used his position to consolidate the spread of the PDP in the state. In 2003, he was elected governor.
In 2007 when Agagu sought a second term, his major opposition was from within the PDP. It was from a medical doctor known as Rahman Olusegun Mimiko. Mimiko was in the AD government led by Gov. Ade Adefarati (of blessed memory). He decamped from AD three weeks to the election to join Agagu’s campaign train. Agagu won and made Mimiko the Secretary to State Government. The new administration was fledgling when Agagu found that Mimiko had an ambition to be governor. He therefore quarantined Mimiko politically. His job as Secretary to the State Government was deliberately made negligible all in an effort to shut out his powerful political wings.
President Obasanjo needed to fill an Ondo State quota in his federal cabinet. Two nominees by Agagu for the position had failed in controversial circumstances (one could not recite the national anthem and the National Assembly screened him out). Against Agagu’s counsel, Obasanjo made Mimiko minister of housing. Mimiko quickly used the position to build his political fortress just as Agagu did.
As widely predicted or expected, Agagu won the PDP primaries for a second term. Mimiko decamped from the PDP less than five months to the election to the Labour Party (LP). Agagu was declared winner by the INEC, but Mimiko won in the courts and he went on to serve two terms as the governor of the State – the first person to enjoy such privilege in the history of the state.
The performance of Mimiko in government was far below the people’s expectations. He was a Greek Gift for the hitherto unknown LP and there he called the shots. Whatever he thought was OK became the party’s programmes. Soon, Governor Mimiko became very powerful as he attempted to ward off opposition. He became enstranged from many of his lieutenants who fought Agagu to install him. Otunba Oyewole Fasawe (believed to have been instrumental to his ministerial appointment), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu (who Mimiko publicly admitted helped him to win in the courts), even Obasanjo who made him minister all became enstranged to the deft politician.
His opponents waited in the wings for the 2012 elections, hoping to nail Mimiko’s political coffin. Mimiko had superior tactics. He made friends with President Goodluck Jonathan, promising to come back the PDP to strengthen the party in contribution to Jonathan’s controversial second term bid. But the bait he offered was for Jonathan to help him win second term first.
Jonathan was believed to have worked against his own party’s candidate in the 2012 elections (Chief Olusola Oke). Oke came second in that election and Mr. Rotimi Akeredolu (now governor-elect) came a distant third in the election as ACN candidate. Both Akeredolu and Oke truly lived to fight another day, indeed as weeks ago they contested against Mimiko’s anointed successor, Mr. Eyitayo Jegede, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Mimiko’s attorney-general, the PDP candidate. Jegede was fostered more or less as the sole candidate of the PDP, the way Agagu was fostered ten years back.
Where does Jimoh Ibrahim stand in this background? Right in the middle! The lawyer-turned-businessman contested for the governorship election which produced Agagu as governor under the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP). He came third behind Agagu and Adefarati. It is instructive to note that he developed closeness with Senator Ali Modu-Sheriff during his ANPP sojourn during which he was also member representing Ondo State on the Board of Trustees of the party. Soon, after the elections, Ibrahim mended fences with Agagu and formally declared for the PDP. When the courts sacked Agagu, Ibrahim became a major financier of the party. When Mimiko signified his intention to re-join the PDP, Ibrahim saw a major threat and tried to block him before President Jonathan (a common friend to both of them).
The two political warlords battled to convince President Jonathan on who should be his point man in Ondo politics. Mimiko succeeded in convincing Jonathan that his coming to the party would be a great blessing. But as events have shown, things went the exact opposite. Mimiko, in an attempt to consolidate his political hold on the party got the existing Executive Committees of the PDP at state and local governments dissolved as soon as he had decampted to the PDP. Jimoh kicked and went to court, and that litigation gave birth to the famous Abang judgment in June this year. The Mimiko camp did not see the judgment as a threat and therefore ignored it. When the national leadership of PDP split and his old friend Modu-Sheriff was the leader one of the factions, Ibrahim saw an opportunity to pay Mimiko back, and perhaps fulfilled his ambition to become governor. He went to Abang again, who naturally would not dissent from his earlier judgment on a very similar case. The INEC expectedly complied with the court ruling until it was quashed by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court 24 hours to the election.
The Lessons to Learn
Before we run over the lessons to learn from the recent governorship election in Ondo State (which is the critical thing) let answer the three basic questions proposed earlier in this piece:
Is Tinubu’s powers or prowess waning?
Going back the string of failures he had suffered serially now in the tussle for Ekiti governorship, Senate Presidency, Speaker of House of Representatives, Kogi Governorship and Ondo governorship, one is tempted to assert that Tinubu is losing political grip, even in the South-West. But astute political analysts would readily assert that this is not the case. Those who believe Tinubu is not waning in political power say so because they know that the Jagaban’s political strength is ironically his footsoldiers who are still strong in the battle front.
Tinubu’s style is dictatorial largely. But this is ironically his greatest strength as a grassroot politician. Just as his followers are loyal to him, Tinubu is very loyal to his loyal troop commanders and once he makes promises to these loyal troop commanders, he stands by his promise (even against reason from other party members). I can give countless examples of this but let illustrate with the Ondo State scenario as reference point.
In 2012, Tinubu’s friend, Olusegun Abraham wanted to be governor under the APC. Tinubu preferred Akeredolu. Against the counsel of many party leaders, the Jagaban insisted on Akeredolu and funded his campaign, telling Abraham that his time would come. In 2016, many party leaders counselled Tinubu that Akeredolu has matured and was best to fly the flag of the APC, Tinubu disagreed and supported Abraham in the primaries (which Oke, now a member of t he APC) also contested with Akeredolu. Akeredolu won the primaries somehow after openly predicting that he would floor Tinubu.
The political events in Ondo State only showed that Tinubu need to rethink his political style, which seems not to be working. The losses by those Tinubuhad supported resulted from his commitment to his loyalists. They did not come from the people’s disenchantment with Tinubu the person. In fact, the way Tinubu holds political power in the South West is not the way ObafemiAwolowo did. Awo was an ideologue. His name spinned votes.Tinubu controls power by empowering regional and local foot-soldiers and putting performers in government as leaders.
What has been happening was that some of his foot-soldiers were asking for a level-playing ground among themselves before the GeneralTinubu. This is an appeal Tinubu would surely grant in the light of the recent turn of events and he will bounce back to his winning ways. Anyone who thinks or says the Jagaban’s power is waning is completely ignorant of the dynamics of his political prowess.
What made the PDP lose Ondo State?
Let’s go beyond academic analysis; the reasons PDP lost Ondo State are: Mimiko’s below average performance (or let’s say below expectations performance); Mimiko’s political high-handedness; Mimiko’s penchant to dump those who made him; and poor political tactics by the PDP. What made Mimiko very popular among youths in Ondo State especially was his plain-folk populist style of politics. Ondo State people did not have problems with Agagu in the area of performance. Till date, he is arguably the best governor to administer the state. He cleared all debts by his predecessor, including arrears of salaries; he built massive infrastrucuture across the state and left N38billlion in the coffers of the state whe he handed over to Mimiko. Agagu was never popular among politicians, including those in his own PDP. He would not allow the politicians to get their ‘rewards’…”Agagu build roads but forgot to build the most important road – the one that leads to the stomach” to put it exactly the way most PDP youths described him. Mimiko had presented himself as “one of the gang” leader. He was not elitist. He would drink garri with his followers and pick calls from complete strangers. This personality resonated better than Agagu’s blunt (perhaps arrogant) and elitist style. When Mimiko became governor, his style changed and almost all the people who heralded him to power became enstranged to him.
But aside Mimiko 360 degree political altercations, the PDP leadership exercised very poor political tactics. The second coming of Mimiko to the party was poorly managed. Instead of seeing Jimoh Ibrahim as a renegade, the leadership should have found a way to accommodate his stance. They might have hated Ibrahim the person but should not have ignored his legitimate argument that integration of LP to PDP could and should have been seamless. Good political leaders always try to avoid factions, no matter how small. As Yoruba people say: “when you cut a snake into two, both parts are poisonous”. In facing the electorate, it was tactically right to pick a highly-responsible technocrat in mould of Jegede, but was a big blunder to pick him from Akure, 20 kilometres from Ondo town, Mimiko’s home town (both in the same Senatorial District). It meant that after having the sole privilege of governing the state for eight years, Mimiko would instal a surrogate and become a governor-general. What has he done in terms of performance to deserve that? Finally, on PDP’s very wrong tactics: it was over-assumptuous to push Jegede into the race despite the political blows he had suffered through Jimoh Ibrahim’s controversial litigations. The better tactic was to have allowed Ibrahim to fly the ticket of the PDP and then go to the courts to retrieve the mandate from him.
Thinking Ibrahim would not win the election would make you suffer the Trump-effect. Of course, he had a good chance to win and the events proved he could have won.. Ibrahim’s strategic plan was this: “Don’t waste your time campaigning. That was my mistake in 2003. What will determine the winner would be money. Anyone who scores 300,000 votes would win. But I will vote money for 500,000 voters leaving 200,000 to take my money and not vote for me. I will give 5,000 to each vote that is just N1.5billion. Spend N500million on campaigns and I am in Government House”. One of his political leaders told me that Ibrahim got intelligence that a contestant was planning to spend N5,000 per voter and he (Ibrahim) had planned to move the stake to N10,000 per voter.” With an ally in Mimiko who also knows the art of using money for electioneering, PDP would have won. But the Mimiko group perhaps felt that it might have been difficult unseating Ibrahim if he became governor. That was a wrong tactic, as far as I am concerned.
What made the APC to win in Ondo State?
The factors that made PDP lose were not the major factors that made the APC win. The major reason APC won was the party’s superior political tactics. The party capitalized on the political quagmire in the PDP to but winning strategies. There are three categories of voters in Ondo State: the loyal partymembers (this category wouldn’t trade their votes for any amount of money); the undecided voters (this category is neither here not there for various reasons); and the swing voters (those who like to vote for the highest bidders). Over 150,000 of Akeredolu’s 245,000 votes came from undecided and swing voters. It was pure strategy. All the parties induced voters with money, but APC did it better, having read the scenario very well. The APC read the political atmosphere very well. To block Oke’s clean sweep of Ondo South, they picked Agboola Ajayi a strong grassroot politician and former House of Representatives member of the PDP from Ese-Odo. Ese-Odo and Ilaje have been in some political rivalry for a long time.Kogi governor came with loads of ‘logistics” for the votes of Ebiras and other Kogi indigenes resident in Ondo State; GovsLalong and Okorocha made similar political pilgrimage. The APC was just hungry for every votes. Theirstrategists plotted exactly where their votes would come from and it really worked at it. Their doors were open and they kept persuading swingers to come on board.
Lessons from the elections.
Now let us come down to the lessons from the Ondo polls:
1. People vote for both political parties and personalities. The Supreme Court will have to review its ruling that people vote for parties not candidates. It is strange ruling and absurd in the political clime and Ondo State has proved just that. Or are we saying Jegede, Ibrahim, Akeredolu and Oke were not factors in the poll? I can bet AD would have scored less than 1,000 votes across the state but for Oke who flew the party’s ticket. For lower elections such as state assembly or event House of Representatives, one might agree that people vote for parties; certainly not for governorship elections or the presidential elections. With all the hundreds of billions spent to make Goodluck Jonathan win against a rather poor Buhari, how can right-thinking human beings say Nigerians did not vote for Buhari but for a political party. That one lesson from the Ondo guber election.
2. The principle of zoning is a factor in most elections in Nigeria. Even a councillorship and local government levels, the principle of zoning is very dominant in Ondo politics. It may not be critical in other states; not Ondo State. Mimiko went too far in picking someone from a neigbhouring town in the same senatorial district in the last elections.
3. Now that the votes are counting, performance matters. It is possible to owe seven months salary and still election but certainly not the way GovMimiko went about it. Perhaps he could have offered more plausible explanations, or manage to pay much of the salaries before the election . In the first place, he should not have presented himself as someone trying to appoint a successor. Poor governance made thousands of people join the army of ‘swingers’, not poverty.
4. Politics is money. Let us not run away from reality. An analyst said if the election was postponed for another week, the PDP would have increased monetary inducement but that it was not possible to mobilize matching huge funds within 24 hours after the court verdict. The way to address the issue of monetary inducement is not to be utopian about it. Even in the United States, huge money is spent on electioneering. At our level of development, the primary objective for the votes to count – we can work later on motives. American politicians spend billions on media infrastructure, here we spend millions on stomach infrastructure. What should concern us for now, is the source of funds, not where the money goesto. If you don’t have the money, don’t join politics. If these monies are raised legitimately form commoners and reputable institutions who want certain legitimate policies and programmes in place, why not? Why deceive ourselves in this terrible poverty around. Finally on money, political canvassers do spend money genuinely to get votes. I carried two voters from Lagos to my village in Ondo State to vote. Unfortunately, they could not return with me as I had to undertake a detour. Even at home, home voters registered in farmstead many kilometres away from the town. The unit canvassers have to ensure that the logistics are in place. It cost money. One aged woman bluntly refused to leave her house to vote giving hunger as excuse. The canvasser had to organize a breakfast for her and that was different from voting money.
5. When elections are free and fair, so-called political chieftains are demystified. In Ondo state, the voting unit is where the action is. The real chieftains are the ward canvassers…if the elections are free and fair. But is manipulation of votes is what counts, then you need the party chieftains. Most voters in the state are independent-minded. It is only family heads (like husbands), or benefactors (e.g. a performing elected official) or exceptional cases of primordial ethnic sentiments (e.g. Owo people and Akeredolu/ Ilaje and Ikale people for Oke) that you tend to have huge block votes.
6. What goes up or goes around…the Law of Karma works in politics of Ondo State. Mimiko sacked Agagu through the courts in controversial circumstances. Mimiko’s political extension was sacked by the courts more or less in controversial circumstances. Mimiko decamped to LP allegedly because Agagu prevented him from running the primaries of the PDP. The imposition of Jegede was a major reason many chieftains moved from PDP to APC and AD, which ultimately proved costly for the PDP. Tinubu turned against the likes of Pa Abraham Adesanya to establish his political dynasty. People are turning against Tinubu but we do not know yet if they can create a sustainable dynasty for themselves.
The biggest lesson from Ondo State is that 2019 might be very messy if politicians do not exercise a lot of restraint. Governance will suffer too much if at this morning time the air is so thick of intense politics and politricks.
Folayan holds PhD in Mass Communication and is a strategic communication specialist.
