Akin Osuntokun: Why APC can no longer win as the ‘Yoruba party’

by Akin Osuntokun

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With a whiff of imperial hauteur, the Osun State Governor, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, publicly belittled his Ondo State counterpart, Mimiko, and charged ‘he (Mimiko) knows I’m committed to removing him from his seat and by God’s grace I will remove him’!

The McPherson Constitution was introduced to Nigeria in 1950 and served the harbinger of the constitutional order of regional autonomy in 1951. The regional governments that were elected in the comprising regions of East, West and the North set the tone of the monopolistic political dominance of the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa Fulani in the corresponding regions. The three main political parties, the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), the Action Group (AG) and the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) were matched with the predominant ethno-regional nationalities in each region. Well, not quite.

The trend was briefly baulked in the Western region. Whilst the NPC and NCNC clearly won the 1951 regional elections in the Northern and Eastern regions, there was no clear winner between the NCNC and AG in the Western region. The winner had to be decided by the preference of six (house of assembly) members-elect who were elected as independent candidates and members of the Ibadan Peoples party. In the end, they all cast their lot with the AG and thereby ended the stalemate in favour of the designated Yoruba party.

The AG faltered again in the 1954 House of Representatives election in the Western region which it lost to the NCNC. Thereafter, the party and its reincarnations had remained largely uncontested in its one party supremacy over residual Western region-which now corresponds to the South-west zone.

The factional feud of 1962 which culminated in the imprisonment of Chief Obafemi Awolowo the following year — on charges of treasonable felony — turned out a blessing and ultimately served to strengthen the stranglehold of the Awolowo personified AG on the West. The crisis cast Awolowo in the mold of a Yoruba martyr; his political opponents as anti-hero and political opposition to him as subversive of Yoruba corporate interest. Thus entered the era of the canonisation of Awolowo as the Pope of Yoruba politics complete with the sacred attribute of papal infallibility.

With little modifications, the Second Republic started as a replay of the First. The National Party of Nigeria (NPN) emerged as NPC writ large. After a momentary hesitation, the embodiment of the NCNC, Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe led the Nigeria Peoples Party (NPP) and successfully laid claim to a diminished Eastern region that had been divested of its Eastern minorities’ component. In the states won by the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) Awolowo recreated the Western region as it was before the excision of the Mid-West in 1963.

The full measure of the charismatic power of Awolowo was in conspicuous display in the magical potency of his name to get the most obscured and inconsequential political aspirant elected to whichever position across the length and breadth of Yoruba land. Awolowo did not live long enough to witness the commencement of the Third Republic and the novel political engineering directed at dissolving the reign of all ethno-regional political platforms in the two nationally inclusive parties (Social Democratic Party, SDP and the National Republican Convention, NRC) — that were decreed into existence by military President Ibrahim Babangida in 1989. To a considerable extent, the formula worked as prescribed.

The two prior stronger political platforms in the South-west, the Peoples Solidarity Party (PSP) and the Peoples Front (PF) found common purpose in the SDP. No individual or region could lay claim to the ownership of SDP, but in so far as any party could claim the allegiance of the preponderance of the Yoruba people, SDP was the party.

The chain of events set in motion by the annulment of the presidential election victory won by Chief Moshood Abiola on the platform of the SDP led to the resurgence of Yoruba nationalism and the reincarnation of a designated Yoruba party in the formation of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) in 1999. The politics of the compensatory concession of the Nigerian presidency to the Yoruba and the emergence therefrom of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo as president in 1999 deflated the Yoruba nationalism platform of the AD and rendered it vulnerable to defeat by the Obasanjo-led Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2003 elections.

The attempt to recreate the AD in the formation of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) did not quite gain traction until 2010 when controversial judicial pronouncements ruled the candidates of the party as the winners of the 2007 governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun States. The subsequent marginal victories of the ACN in the governorship elections in Oyo and Ogun States in 2011 boosted the prospects of the party in its aspiration to be consecrated as the Yoruba-designated party.

This aspiration was successfully challenged by the Olusegun Mimiko-led Labour Party (LP) in the Ondo State governorship election held in October 2012 and cast a question mark on the authenticity and credibility of the ACN in its quest to be seen as the heir apparent to the crown last worn by the AD in 1999 to 2003. The question mark does not lie in the mere fact of being defeated, more telling was the magnitude of the defeat as it lagged behind the LP and the PDP, in a three-cornered race on which it loudly and arrogantly staked its credibility.

With a whiff of imperial hauteur, the Osun State Governor, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, publicly belittled his Ondo State counterpart, Mimiko, and charged ‘he (Mimiko) knows I’m committed to removing him from his seat and by God’s grace I will remove him’! It took all of two years for the ACN to live down the demystification it suffered in Ondo State and find out whether it had the capacity to preserve itself let alone removing other governors.

The outcome of the Ekiti State governorship election held in June this year was a rejection (of the APC) that borders on repulsion. The total and categorical defeat of the party was a shocking eye opener to the enormous gap between the myth and reality of the true status of the ACN in Ekiti State. And in view of the penchant of the party to project itself as the persecuted popular martyr repeatedly victimised by the villainous act of election rigging by the PDP and the federal government, it is apposite to draw inference from the rejection and repudiation that attended its participation in the two elections — in its supposed regional stronghold.

First is the observation that the party tends to perform poorly in credible, free and fair elections. The corollary of this observation is that (contrary to all grandstanding and in view of its absurd complaints and claims on the conduct of the Ekiti State governorship election) the party somehow has a vested interest in contentious and malpractices-suffused elections.

Further inference is that it is now no more the Yoruba party than the PDP and LP. This inference (of a non-ethnically defined party) is good for the development of the political party system in Nigeria in its capacity to facilitate national integration and render Nigeria politics less prone to the depredations of the cleavages of religion, ethnicity and regionalism.

In the First, Second and Third Republics, there was always the orchestrated tendency egging on Nigeria towards the two-party ideal. The tragic irony here is that what is good for Nigeria may translate into decline in the fortunes of the ACN which recently metamorphosed to become the South-west faction of the All Progressives Congress (APC). We are thus confronted with a major conflict and contradiction between national and local politics.

The APC merger has deprived its South-west faction of recourse to the utility of Yoruba nationalism to lay claim to popular support and in the same breadth de-legitimise and demonise its opponents as Yoruba outcasts. National attention is dramatically drawn to the removal of this life support by the political theatre playing out at the national conference.

The utility of the conference primarily lies in the opportunity it provided for regional stakeholders to set out the terms under which they will voluntarily swear citizen allegiance and loyalty to Nigeria. Now it has been so revealed at the national conference that incompatible regional aspirations has pitted the core North against the South-west with apparently no prospects of a middle course.

The discord is better put in the illumination provided by a prominent member of the conference Senator Femi Okunronmu: “If the attitude of the core-North delegates could be translated into an agenda, that agenda will have the following components, namely: frustrate regionalism, frustrate the reduction of presidential powers, resist the call for a referendum, frustrate the emergence of a new… So, the conference has mostly been a clash of the South-west against the core North. While the South-west pushed forcefully for the realisation of all the elements of their agenda, they found themselves almost in every case pitted against the core North.”

The import of this revelation is to call to question the Yoruba nationalist credentials of the South-west politicians who merged with the dominant core North politicians to form the APC. The fact that these politicians nurtured their political careers on the fertile soil of Yoruba nationalism makes a bad case worse and there is political cost to this ‘apostasy’. They can no longer employ the instrumentality of Yoruba nationalism to put political opponents on the defensive. With the loss of Ondo and Ekiti States to other parties, the South-west has become a toss-up between the APC and the PDP. If the former ends up losing Osun State in tomorrow’s governorship election then the dinner party is over for them.

 

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

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