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It has been three years, now going to four, since the Nigeria Police Force said they were investigating the verbal and physical election violence instigated and inspired by one Lagos roughneck, Alhaji Musiliu Akinsanya, alias MC Oluomo. About the same time, one Bayo Onanuga, warned the Igbo people of the south east of the country but who were resident in Lagos not to participate in elections in Lagos state again. Onanuga’s threat to Ndigbo in 2023 was not a one-off warning. It extended to the 2027 round of elections which are now imminent. Ostensibly, Onanuga’s warning is for eternity. There was no recollection that he was reprimanded even if jocularly for his reprehensible utterance. Indeed, he later boasted that he had no regrets for his verbal violence and incendiary statement.
There are two things, probably more, that Onanuga and Oluomo share in common. Both are friends of Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who acceded to the presidency in 2023. And, both work for Tinubu – one directly, the other indirectly. Onanuga is the president’s spokesperson and media strategist. Oluomo is in charge of ruffians and motor park touts who constitute the president’s foot soldiers, militia and hitmen, especially during elections. Whenever Tinubu spoke of ‘’all is fair in politics and in war’’, or ‘’grab, snatch, and run away’’ with election materials and results, he was clearly speaking to this category of his enablers and cronies, and enforcers. When Tinubu speaks, he signals. You may liken it to that of the American president, Donald John Trump, and his Proud Boys and Oath Keepers hit squads. Somehow, Tinubu has not been reminded in a telling manner that all could not be fair in politics and war, both of which have rules of engagement.
If motor park louts are not important why did Tinubu’s police violently crack down on some ‘’upstarts’’ who attempted to upstage Oluomo from the headship of the National Union of Road Transport Workers [‘’Up National’’] not too long ago? This was in spite of the fact that the other man had a Court of Appeal judgment that recognised him as the authentic national leader of the NURTW. All the coercive instruments of the Nigerian state were thrown at the other claimants to the NURTW leadership. They had to flee from the national secretariat of the union in Abuja which they had successfully occupied. The drama of how the police, operatives of the Directorate of State Services, civil defence corp, and a host of other security agents in the company of Oluomo’s faction of the union chased, beat up and dragged members of the rival faction played out on national television.
Tajudeen Baruwa, the factional president of the union, who claimed that both the National Industrial Court and the Court of Appeal found in his favour had to use his ‘’tongue to count his teeth’’, as we say here. He was no match for the violence unleashed on him by the agents of the Nigerian state. He obviously realised that wisdom was profitable for the prudent. Oluomo was the capone in Lagos. But when his friend and mentor, Tinubu, became president and moved to Abuja, it became imperative that he had to be crowned, contest or no contest, court or no court, as the leader of the NURTW and had to also move to Abuja. Move, he did. There’s something in proximity to power. Until Tinubu leaves Abuja after he must have been sacked as president, no prudent motor park guy would ever stake a claim to the national leadership of the road workers union unless that person is suicidal or fatalistic or both.
Oluomo moves around with intimidating security details. It’s neither unusual nor uncommon to spot armed police personnel as part of the contingent of his security guards – personnel of the same NPF that vowed to probe his utterances and activities which were alleged to have inflamed passions and stoked violence during the elections in 2023. Some prospective voters were reportedly killed, others maimed, and many more bloodied during that election. There is no indication that the elections of January and March of 2027 would not be bloodier and deadlier because there had not been consequences for bad actors in our elections.
In 2023, Oluomo reportedly said in a viral video: ‘’We have begged them [Ndigbo], if they don’t vote for us [APC], please it is not a fight. Go [referring to the foot soldiers he was addressing], and tell them ‘Iya [mama] Shukudi [Chukwudi]’, please if you don’t want to vote for us, stay at home. You understand. Listen, in the school your children attend with Igbo children, if your child and an Igbo child gets into a fight, and the governor is Igbo, if they don’t slap your child and send [the child] home to you, call me a bastard. A father goes to Alaba market [dominated by Igbo merchants] or Idumota market with his daughter, and they [Igbo traders] slap [smack] the girl’s buttocks,… and you want them to become governor? They will behead some of you for money rituals’’. Note that the reference to an governor had to do with a Yoruba governorship candidate for Lagos state whose crime was that his mother was Igbo.
In the wake of the incendiary statement, the police said that it had launched an investigation. It was a ruse and everybody knew that. The police probe for which no panel was established is still on, nearly four years after. However, in fairness to the Force, one of its spokespersons, a Chief Superintendent, Olumuyiwa Adejobi, who was the Force Public Relations Officer at the Force Headquarters in Abuja at the time, dismissed Oluomo’s incitement as ‘’a joke’’. For Oluomo there was a pretense to invoke the law. The same did not apply to Onanuga. He sternly warned the Igbo to steer clear of elections in Lagos state. The member of the APC presidential campaign council wrote on social media in the heat of the 2023 elections that ‘’Yoruba land’’ was not a ‘’No Man’s Land’’. He said ‘’let 2023 be the last time of Igbo interference in Lagos politics’’. He went further by warning that ‘’there [should] be no repeat in 2027’’. Onanuga later doubled down on his threat, saying that he owed nobody any apologies. He knew that there would be no consequences, and there were none. Onanuga may be Yoruba but he’s certainly not a Lagosian.
Before Oluomo and Onanuga, there was Oluremi Tinubu, who in 2019 was a senator representing Lagos central senatorial district. She’s now the wife of the president. During the governorship and house of assembly elections of that year, she was caught on camera speaking to a physically challenged Igbo voter identified as Charles Nnamani and some other unidentified persons in a polling unit in Lagos. She was reported to have complained about the Igbo community’s voting patterns in Lagos state. She said in a viral video that ‘’we [Yoruba though she’s not Yoruba] don’t trust you anymore. We will inherit you [which could be interpreted to mean dispossess and drive away Ndigbo from Lagos]. You are not the only tribe in this place [Lagos]… but Igbo are proving difficult’’.
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Because there had not been consequences for bad behaviours and threats of violence during elections in the past, and especially since the advent of the APC in government at the federal level in 2015, the clan of those who spew violence and inflict physical harm on the opposition has been on the increase. For the APC ‘’mmiri siri n’isi were gbaruo’’ [the fountain was polluted from the head]. In 2012 on the eve of the formation of the APC, Buhari had threatened violence if he lost the 2015 presidential election. He was the leader of the Congress for Progressive Change [CPC], one of the legacy parties of the APC.
He had contested and failed to be elected president in three consecutive elections including the election of 2011 which he lost. He said in Kaduna to a delegation of his party members that the land would be soaked in blood if he was rigged out of the presidency in 2015. According to him, ‘’if what happened in 2011 should [happen again] in 2015, by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood’’. His violent rhetoric was on the heels of post-election bloodletting which affected national youth service corp members who worked as ad hoc staff of the ‘Independent’ National Electoral Commission [INEC]. Buhari lost that 2011 election. He got away with calls for violence during elections, and indeed inspired that of 2011. He then got rewarded with the presidency in 2015. He proved that bad behaviour could be rewarding.
The propagation of violence during elections has continued with Tinubu. Even before he acceded to the presidency, he had charged his militant supporters to ‘’snatch, grab, and run’’ with election materials and results because political power was never ‘’served a la carte’’. That was in 2023. Today, Tinubu has doubled down on his fiery slogans and militancy, including saying that it was not his business even as president who is also a candidate to provide a level playing field for other contestants to the presidency, and that ‘’all is fair in politics and war’’. How do you juxtapose Tinubu’s corrupt and violence-inducing rhetoric with the position of former President Goodluck Jonathan who, ahead of the 2015 election, insisted that his reelection to office was not worth the shedding of the blood of any Nigerian.
If Tinubu is nonchalant about a violence-free election as his statements would appear to portray, then it should not come as a surprise that his party men are emboldened to threaten the opposition. And this played out last month during the governorship election in Osun state on the 15th. A senator of the APC was captured on camera directing his supporters and party members to kill their rivals of the Accord Party [the political party of the incumbent governor who was seeking reelection], and their family members. That senator was not alone. Threats of murders were being distributed like confetti. They knew that they had immunity. They knew that there would be no consequences. To pull wool over the eyes of Nigerians, the senator was said to have been invited for questioning by the Osun State Police Command which is under the control of the federal government formed by his party, the APC, in Abuja. He strolled in and strolled out of the police command headquarters in Osogbo – case closed. Not even a slap on the wrist. So he continued to dish out threats of violence.
Not making those who indulge in electoral violence to face the law and pay the price has consequences for elections, politics, governance, and democracy. Those are the likely perils we would have to confront and contend with in 2027, and beyond. Democracies do not die in the dark. Democracies do not die suddenly either unless there is a military coup or a revolution of the masses. They die gradually by our actions. And inactions. Some predictable patterns are already beginning to manifest in this APC brand of politics and governance. Hitherto casual and fringe threats of electoral violence are now wearing the toga of official campaign language because some people are beginning to treat insults, threats, intimidation as part of politics, making the line between debate and dehumanization blurry.
It’s expected to get worse though we are already at the stage where verbal attacks degenerate to intimidation and bodily harm. Groups and individuals, especially those of the ruling party, are now emboldened to act as it pleases them. Political rivals are now being made to avoid rallies, shun town halls, and fear going near voting precincts. Everybody would be minded to pull back and to stay safe. Not many people would be willing to run for political office which would have had a chilling effect on democracy.
Where there are no consequences for promoters of political violence, and especially in Nigeria under the APC where such thugs are being protected, there will be erosion of trust in institutions such as the law courts, security agencies, election officials, and the rule of law. ‘’Might makes right’’ replaces ‘’vote decides’’. The system which the APC is enthroning would breed copycats where violence will be seen as the only viable means to a political office. We are not promoting a political environment where harsh criticism, protests, and even strong rhetoric are protected while direct threats, incitement to violence, assault, and voter intimidation are deprecated, disavowed, and punished in line with the law. The danger of losing democracy under the vice grips of the APC is real. And imminent. The red flags are all over, including threats by an APC Area Council chairman in Abuja to chase away and banish indigenes and residents of Kuje area who are not supporters of the APC.
