@Michaelorodare: Goodbye to @APCNigeria in #Lagos (Y! Politico)

by Michael Orodare

Sitting in the corner of my office with a peep into 2015 with my political binocular firmly in my hands, I look into the Centre of Excellence, “blepo” (the Greek word for ‘I see’) change, hovering over the city where the ‘Lion of Bourdillon’ proudly sits atop as the Commander-in-Chief of the South-West politics who ruminates on how to prove wrong predictions of imminent loss of APC in Lagos.

I used to think that APC cannot lose Lagos, bearing in mind that Lagos remains the only state in the South-West that has been ruled by one political party since the return to democratic rule in 1999. 16-years of continuity! Even when the PDP hurricane swept through the South-West in 2003, it met a brick wall of restriction in Lagos.

Not even the ongoing hurricane of defection hitting states across the country, has been able to break even into Lagos. So far, no case of defection has been recorded in Lagos, good for them. Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ekiti and Ondo have all been hit by the defection storm. Truly, it is not that politicians in Lagos APC don’t have enough reasons to dump the party, but the fear of ‘Baba’ is surely the beginning of wisdom. Decamp and you’ll be politically excommunicated. Hardly will you find 10 Lagos politicians who have left Tinubu and still remained relevant without going back to him, maybe Musiliu Obanikoro and Jimi Agbaje, who else? If Aminu Tambuwal were to have defected from the APC to an opposition party, he would have lost his seat as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, under 24-hours without any hullabaloo, and everybody would have commended the party for taking the right step, but that’s a topic for another day anyway.

Election in Lagos in 2015 is not dependent on the defectors but all about the electorates. The okada riders are not smiling and still deeply ruminating on the feeling of betrayal they suffered in the hands of the Lagos state government which ordered them out of major highways in the state.

Many of the market men and women are boiling and patiently waiting for 2015 to come because they believe the present administration does not have them included in its master plan. There is no doubt a love lost between the APC-led government and those in the rural areas; Ayobo, Ipaja, Oshodi, Alimosho and other Lagos suburbs where majority of the votes come from have not had their fair share of the ‘transformation’ of Lagos. The government is busy building the Islands, at the detriment of other suburbs.

LASU students are jittery, despite the reduction in their exorbitant tuition fee, they still don’t trust the ruling government, giving the party’s candidate their mandate in 2015 may spell another doom as experienced shortly after the 2011 polls, when LASU school fee sky-rocketed to an unimaginable height.

These people are the real voters and are patiently waiting for February 2015 when they shall speak and make their grievances known with their votes. Some of the immediate past local government chairmen didn’t help matter, they were nothing but a fiasco, do-nothing council heads, who looted their LG treasury dry under 3-years with little or nothing to show for their stay in office and a typical example is the Chairman of Oshodi local government, Muse Ariyoh, young but a typical example of cluelessness.

Lagos 2015, promises to be an epic battle and a different game entirely. It’s never going to be business as usual for the ruling APC because the road to February 2015, is thorny, rough and stormy. Their media managers and  gullible followers should open the eyes of their mind to the fact that propaganda and media hype don’t win elections again. Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti had more than enough of that in his arsenal, but  lost woefully.

For those still living in the past, let’s take a sojourn back into 2011, while ACN was still basking in the euphoria of its landslide victory at the polls, where its gubernatorial candidate polled over a million votes and swept all state and national assembly seats in the state, shortly after the general elections in April 2011, the party conducted local government elections, in October 2011, just 6-months after its landslide victory, the result of that poll was a shocker, PDP won some councillorship seats, the tribunal also declared PDP candidates winner in some LCDAs, with the most interesting among those results being the Ikoyi/Obalende LCDA chairmanship election result, where Babajide Obanikoro was declared winner of that election by the tribunal at Tinubu’s stronghold.  It was a terrible blow, they never saw coming and the young man must have been underrated. Though the tribunal ruling was overturned by a Lagos High court, we don’t need the renowned British fingerprint expert, late Adrian Forty to prove to us that Babajide truly won the election, but the rest is now history.

This further puts a question mark on the credibility of those painting the PDP as a rigging party, yet could not conduct a credible poll at the lowest level of government in their backyard. If you give them power at the top, they will misbehave and run all men of goodwill out of town.

There is surely no better time to set Lagos free from the power buccaneers than now. Is the PDP ready? Only time will tell, this is definitely not another time for bickering and rancour among the PDP leadership in Lagos if it is truly serious about winning Lagos. Expect some spoilers from the APC who will protest and walk away after ‘Baba’s’ stooge must have emerged as the gubernatorial candidate, but with what I am reading on my radar, it seems the PDP has put its house in order and look set for the Lagos victory.

Let the players continue working and let the neophytes who always claim to know more than what they are fed with on the social media continue, February 2015 will surely put a disparity to the farm of the lazy and the hard-working.

Let the game continue!

———————-

Michael Olanrewaju Orodare has worked in the Office of the Chief Press Secretary to the Ondo State Governor as a Media Assistant. He has garnered experience writing in the The Nation Newspaper working with the paper’s Sunday Desk. He leans towards the Labour Party. He blogs at www.michaelorodare.blogspot.com and tweets from @MichaelOrodare

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cool good eh love2 cute confused notgood numb disgusting fail