To be sure, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is not in the race for the June 2022 governorship in Ekiti State. This is because its preparedness to upstage the applecart of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has been deliberately weakened to dislodge the ruling party’s behemoth in the Government House in Ado-Ekiti. Also, there is a potent litigation challenging the party’s shambolic primary election by some members. Governor Kayode Fayemi is the Goliath the PDP wants to take on in Ekiti.
And the PDP does not have a David who can confidently decapitate him politically in a bruising humiliating electoral battle. It was not because the PDP did not have an aspirant with the strength of David before its January 26 shambolic primary election, but it was pathetically because some forces had conspired to hold him back from stepping out. And this has thrown the camp of the APC into a celebratory mood – partying all through the night of the PDP primary, which produced the party’s weakest candidate since 1999.
For a politically desperate outgoing Governor Fayemi, who knows how to use the APC power at the centre to accomplish his political agenda, just like his successor, Ayodele Fayose used the PDP power at the centre to dislodge him from office in 2014, the contest, as it were, is a roller coaster, made even more so by Fayose who had acquiesced in a predetermined plot to sell the PDP on a platter to Fayemi and render the party impotent in the forthcoming governorship poll.
Even though the incumbent still enjoys the support of the Federal Government in its vast flourish, Fayemi had decided to go beyond the game plan it deployed in the battle against the PDP, about four years ago at the twilight of Fayose’s second term, to consummate his plan to hold onto Ekiti in the race to 2023 presidency.
Apparently, Fayemi had succeeded in deploying some considerations in getting Fayose to collaborate with him in the greatest political scam ever to crystallise in Ekiti State. Granted that about four years ago, as governor of the state, Fayose could not withstand Fayemi’s onslaught that was inspired by the Federal Government, and thus failed to install his anointed successor, Professor Olusola Eleka, his then deputy, who was the party’s standard-bearer in the election, this time round, Fayemi would not want any political stress at all in Ekiti from the PDP family. According to sources, Fayose’s terms, aside from pecuniary gains, included getting Fayemi to use his APC’s influence to protect him from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
The claim, and it sounds very logical, in political circles in Ekiti and outside the State is that if Fayose could not install a successor in 2019 as an incumbent governor, he certainly would not be able to defeat Fayemi and his anointed candidate in the June governorship election through his proxy candidate, Bisi Kolawole, who has just emerged as the candidate of the PDP from a fundamentally flawed primary election. It is, therefore, clear and conclusive that the emergence of Kolawole has marked PDP’s Nunc dimittis even before the conduct of the Ekiti guber poll.
The consensus of many indigenes of Ekiti, who crave better governance for the state, is that the PDP has lost a significant opportunity to redefine its leadership eon by putting forward a weak candidate. They insist that the PDP should have presented a former governor of the State, Chief Olusegun Oni, whose popularity and cult-like following are writ-large. Having put forward Bisi Kolawole as its candidate, PDP has thus discounted itself, amounting to nothing in the governorship calculations and the ultimate contest.
Whereas, Segun Oni would have made the task of dislodging the APC much simpler, drawing from his pedigree as a former governor who performed excellently and touched the vast majority of the people and communities with the magnitude of his administration’s infrastructure development agenda, the national leadership of the PDP allowed the primary to be brazenly hijacked and subjected to unconscionable manipulation by Fayose’s rigging machine.
I am not a prophet, let alone the kind that relishes in doomsday prophecies. As a watcher of political developments around the country, deploying actualities on the ground to attempt prognoses of what to expect in different contexts, I very well know that with a Bisi Kolawole’s candidature, the PDP has nothing on ground to build on. This is in pari materia with the legal logic enshrined in the doctrine or principle of nemo dat, which exemplifies the truism that one cannot build something on nothing and expects it to stand. What about the optic that further betrayed this conspiracy?
On December 25, 2021, Fayemi was reported to have driven himself to meet with Fayose privately. Lere Olayinka, Fayose’s media aide, had dismissed political insinuations around the visit that there was nothing wrong in a sitting governor coming to see a former governor. But after the PDP’s primary election on January 26, 2022, Fayose’s first place of call was Fayemi’s abode in the government house. To what end?
Bisi Kolawole was not expected by his sponsor, Fayose, to win the June 2022 election. He is just a pawn in Fayose’s chess game in the PDP. I had expected the national leadership of the PDP to weigh into the Ekiti PDP matter to ensure that the party presented its best candidate for the governorship election. That it failed to do so is indicative of the sloppiness, from the outset, in its preparations to take over power from the APC at the centre in 2023. Indeed, an opportunity to win Ekiti has slipped through its fingers. Now that it has messed up in Ekiti, will it get it right in Osun? We keep our fingers crossed.
Whereas the exercise of putting its best foot forward was well cut-out for the PDP and its national leadership, they pandered to the characteristic pugnaciousness of Fayose, his unremitting political shenanigans and elemental verbosity about his leadership of the PDP, initially in the Southwest in spite of the existence of a sitting governor of Oyo State, Mr Seyi Makinde, until he was beaten back into the Ekiti cocoon, and second, in Ekiti, where he unleashed himself on the party like a conquistador, with his claim to leadership of the PDP in the State, that is at best tenuous and tentative.
Agreed that Fayose did not hide his intention to hold the Ekiti PDP structure in his grips and turn it into a platform of negotiations in the fashion of transactional leaders – to further his political agenda post the governorship election and in preparation for the 2023 presidential contest and the attendant bazaar. Without a governor in place, Fayose is inclined to posture as the ultimate leader of the PDP in Ekiti and transform into some kind of “tax collector” (apologies to Gov Nyesom Wike). He has already shown the extent he is ready to go to use and abuse the PDP platform with the way he negotiated away a potentially strong candidate and PDP platform for a vulnerably weak Bisi Kolawole’s candidature.
To perfect the grand manipulation of the process on the D-Day, he had the support of his friend, Governor Udom Emmanuel of Akwa Ibom State, whom he got the NWC to post to Ekiti as the head of the electoral team for the governorship primary election. The corollary of Fayose and Udom Emmanuel’s coup de grace in Ekiti would appear to be the impending triumph of Fayemi and the death of the PDP for which Fayose has, willy-nilly, become an undertaker. Udom also came on a vendetta mission after his absence in the nullified Ad-Hoc election led to widespread criticism. His aides reportedly harassed party members who tried to raise concerns at the accreditation venue and “brutalised” a woman leader. Udom himself also, according to witnesses, embarrassed Segun Oni and Olusola Eleka at the venue.
That Segun Oni did not emerge as the governorship candidate of the PDP has not discounted the magnitude of his political pedigree, avuncular disposition, incorruptible nature, prudence in the management of public finance, fairness in the distribution of infrastructure development projects and other programmes of citizens’ empowerment, especially while in the saddle as governor between 2007 and 2010. These are his Unique Selling Points among others. My summative appraisal is that Oni remains the best governor in the fourth republic that Ekiti has had. In office, he was an Omoluabi (thoroughbred) who showed respect to the royalty, elite and the hoi-polloi. It is not on record anywhere that he was accused of stealing government’s funds.
When Fayemi took over from him in 2010 via the Court of Appeal verdict delivered in Ilorin, he could not find any paper trail to accuse or indict Oni of any financial wrongdoing, despite being in opposing political parties and given their gritty electoral disputations. It is a great accomplishment for a public officer’s hands not to be caught in the cookie jar of crime when subjected to the strictest investigation and scrutiny. Oni, like Caesar’s wife, was above reproach.
He did not hide money abroad; he did not build houses in Abuja or Lagos as governor. He lives in a rented apartment in Abuja, unlike his colleagues who plundered public coffers and the commonwealth of the State in furtherance of personal aggrandisement.
Oni, at 67, is still the man that Ekiti people need to provide them with the right kind of leadership. It is gratifying to hear that he has dumped the PDP and has offered to fly the flag of another party.
▪ Mr Ojeifo contributed this piece from Abuja via ojwonderngr@yahoo.com
