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In more ways than one, the titanic contest for the governor’s mansion in Osun State in the South West geopolitical zone of the country last weekend provided a window for perceptive political partisans to look into 2027 in terms of the pivotal elections in January and February, especially the presidential election tentatively scheduled for January 16. You may ask why ‘’tentative’’ when the so-called Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] had already fixed that date for the polls.
Well, in our country nothing is really fixed, nothing is cast in stone. For these elections next year the Commission had originally fixed Saturday, February 20, for the presidential and National Assembly [NASS] elections and Saturday, March 6, for the governorship and state Houses of Assembly elections. INEC had said at the time that its guidelines and dates for the elections were informed by the provisions of the Electoral Act, 2022.
But soon after the Commission fixed the original 2027 election dates, the NASS moved to use the powers conferred on it to rig the electoral act. It went further in the process to attempt to overthrow the 1999 Constitution [as amended] by inserting strange provisions into what came to be known as the Electoral Act, 2026. One of such provision was that forgery should no longer be entertained by election tribunals in post election litigations. The new Act also abridged the time allowed for campaigns ostensibly because, as alleged by keen observers, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the incumbent and candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC], does not have the stamina for a vigorous, rigorous, potentially stressful, and extended campaign. A court of law has since struck out portions of the Electoral Act, 2026.
In the wake of the NASS fiddling with the electoral act, INEC found a ground to change the dates of the 2027 elections. But before the new electoral act, Muslims had been up in arms demanding that the February date for the presidential election be scrapped because it was likely to clash with one of its religious rites. That could actually be the reason for dropping the original election dates. INEC then unilaterally brought the presidential election date forward to January 16, 2027, a date when many of the Igbo people may not have returned from their annual pilgrimage to their South East homeland, back to their their places of residence. No doubt, the resort to January 16, for holding the presidential election was a deliberate and coldly calculated ploy to disenfranchise Ndigbo who have staked their claim to the presidency of the country in 2027. Their voting units are in their places of permanent abode. Now some Igbo who would not be back to Lagos, Abuja, Kaduna, Sokoto, etc. before January 16, are struggling to relocate their polling booths to the East. The relocations come with real risks including the process not being completed on time and neatly, and the possibility of their going to cast their votes in their new polling units, only to discover too late and to their shock that their names are not on the voter roll. The rigging of the 2027 election has since been in full swing. It appears the Igbo do not have the voice and the organisation to compel the removal of this stumbling block on the path of their voting block. In this case the Igbo can be likened to vice president, Mohammed Kashim Shettima, who has been an orphan in the Yoruba [YoruBAT really] presidency since 2023. This man once described vice president Yemi Osinbajo as best suited as an ice cream vendor. His own situation has turned out to be worse. Unlike Osinbajo, Shettima had to grovel and beg to be retained on Tinubu’s ticket.
We have almost been taken off the track. This intervention is really about the weekend governorship election in Osun State, the events preceding it, and the window they provided for partisans and patriots alike to take a peek into 2027 and its elections. The outcome of the Osun election which returned the incumbent, Governor Ademola Adeleke of the opposition party, Accord Party, to office. Adeleke was of the erstwhile main opposition party, the People’s Democratic Party [PDP], the party that held sway at the centre between 1999-2015. The PDP bred the virus that ate it up from the inside in the run up to the 2015 elections which it lost badly. Nysome Wike, a supposed PDP chieftain, a former two-term governor of Rivers State on the platform of that party, and now a super minister of the federal capital territory [FCT] in the opposition federal government of the APC [a party he once described as suffering from Stage 4 Cancer], and his vengeance-seeking gang dealt the final blow on the PDP ahead of the 2023 elections.
It would amount to laziness to blame the death of the PDP solely on Wike and his marauding gang because the party had not covered itself in glory in the many years it was in power in Abuja, and at one time in more than 30 states of the country as governors. It failed in many areas of governance and Nigerians knew it. However, since the advent of the APC, the PDP years have come to be regarded as the ‘’good old days [years]’. APC’s President, Muhammadu Buhari [2015-2023], was a disaster and Tinubu is verging on being a greater calamity, if he’s not one already. The self-inflicted crisis in the PDP forced Adeleke to seek refuge in a minor political party for what at the weekend turned out to be a successful reelection bid. It was a bruising election from which lessons are supposed to be learnt.
Fear and courage were two dominant words that pervaded the Osun State election. Fear that the Federal Might might be deployed to steal the election for the candidate of the APC. And courage that the governor, his closely knit extended and wealthy family, and Osun indigenes and residents would summon and display remarkable courage to resist the onslaught. Both, fear and courage, played out. And courage won handily. We casually asked a question online whether ‘fear can trigger courage’. The response was interesting and instructive. We will reproduce parts of the response here.
‘’Yes, fear can trigger courage. Fear acts as the necessary contrast and the raw material for courage. Without fear, an action is just routine or recklessness; courage only exists when fear is present and actively faced. Fear signals that something of value or a real threat is at stake, which prompts the mind to decide whether to run or stand. The rush of adrenaline and high alert caused by fear provides the physical energy needed to act, which can be channeled into a brave response. Facing small fears builds mental habits that rewrite [rewire] the brain, turning panic into steady confidence over time’’. It then defined fear as an automatic, hardwired survival response to a perceived and real danger while courage is a conscious deliberate choice to move forward and take action in spite of that fear.
Fear and courage and how they were combined by the weaker party, Adeleke and co. certainly played critical role in the outcome of the weekend election which returned the incumbent to office. Of course, the policies of the federal government of the APC which have thrown more people into poverty; the alleged imposition of the APC guber candidate by a former governor of Osun state who’s now a minister and nephew of the president; the freezing of the Osun state bank account by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission [EFCC] in the week leading to Saturday’s election; the continued withholding of Osun state local governments’ statutory federal financial allocations for about one year; viral videos of APC apparatchiks going about directing their supporters to kill Accord party supporters and their families; the invasion of Osun state by APC governors from parts of the country-some reports say 16 governors, others say six. The number would not matter.
If other APC governors went about whatever was their business in an election in a subnational that was not being governed by them, the moronic and imbecilic governor of Edo state and his supporters did not. They were loud. The thugs of that governor, who frequently acts like a buffoon, went about parts of the state on the eve of the election threatening to unleash violence on the state and to remove the governor. Of course, the gang had the cover of fearsome security personnel and assets funded with tax payers money. Monday Okpebholo, has consistently proven to be a bad advertisement for APC, and indeed Nigerian governors. It was the same man that had promised Tinubu more votes from his state in 2027 than the number of registered voters, and also declared a prominent opposition figure, Mr. Peter Obi, who’s the presidential candidate of the Nigerian Democratic Congress [NDC] in the 2027 election, a persona non grata in Edo state. How much more pathetic can that man be?
The processes before the Osun guber election and the outcome will be handy for the main opposition parties – NDC, African Democratic Congress [ADC], Social Democrartic Party [SDP], and Labour Party [LP], on the one hand, and the ruling APC, on the other hand, as learning points ahead of the 2027 general elections. For the opposition, it has become obvious that despite Tinubu’s desperation for reelection, he is vulnerable and could be defeated. But the opposition has its work cut out for it. They must explore consolidation of their platforms before the election. A single political party, say NDC or ADC, can easily defeat Tinubu given his across board acute unpopularity. He is presiding over the destruction of this country economically, politically, and socially. He has deepened poverty and weaponised same. He has, in just three years and three months, torched whatever remained of the social fabric holding the country together. He behaves like an arsonist who wants to be seen as a firefighter. Tinubu has promoted nepotism to a level never seen before in Nigeria, not even under the presidency of an insular and sectarian Buhari. Corruption has blossomed in his regime. He has demonstrated that the requisite qualification to be appointed or installed in any sensitive and high office is to be tainted. He has scant regard for national budgets, preferring instead discretionary spending. Multilateral financial institutions and the American government have had cause to point at the opaque financial transactions of the federal government. So, yes a single political party could defeat Tinubu and the APC next year, but the need for consolidation is to have sufficient foot soldiers to police polling booths, secure ballot papers, guard collation centres, and monitor the whole gamut of the chain that leads to the declaration of election results. In spite of his braggadocio Tinubu is extremely insecure, vulnerable and ready for the picking. He’s the most insecure person to occupy the presidency since 1999. But for removal to be quickly and neatly effected, the opposition must raise their game. The best time to do this was yesterday. The next best time is today.
For Tinubu and the APC, they may just have sold a dummy to the opposition and the rest of Nigerians by allowing Adeleke to be returned as Osun state governor. The plot could be to lure people to let down their guard by creating the impression that they [Tinubu’s henchmen] would allow votes to count. That’s not the make up of Tinubu who has vowed that all is fair in politics, and that he has no business providing a level playing field for his rivals to the presidency in 2027. Was Tinubu not the same man who in 2023 directed his militia to grab, snatch, and run away with election results? He has not changed. He has only gotten worse. The same man who attacked Roman Catholic bishops for telling him that poverty and hopelessness were ravaging the land. He was joined in the savaging of the bishops by his battery of spokespersons. But they have gone mute since a Muslim cleric made an inciting comment about Christians, and the ownership of Nigeria by Muslims. Tinubu cannot be even-handed. He doesn’t have the capacity nor the appetite for that. One thing and one thing only drives him – political power and the quest for reelection. He won’t say anything that could be regarded as an attack on one misguided Muslim cleric for fear of bleeding more votes from the north. It’s too late. The horse has bolted from the stable. He’s held responsible for growing poverty in the north, and also the pervasive insecurity in that part of Nigeria.
Tinubu does not really care about the APC governorship candidate in the weekend Osun state election which APC lost, pending the outcome of a possible court challenge. He has enough governors in his camp, some of whom were forced to defect to the APC by inducement, intimidation, and potential indictment on corruption charges by the witch-hunt agencies called anti-graft bodies – EFCC and the Independent Corrupt Practices [and other related offences] Commission [ICPC]. Their number is somewhere between 30 and 32 as at the last count, out of the 36 state governors of the country. In spite of the armada of governors in his camp, Tinubu still, and rightly so, does not feel safe. He knows that the election in 2027 would be a referendum on him by hungry and deprived Nigerians. He has a formidable opposition in the people that his policies have pauperised and treated with contempt. He would need to direct his security goons and agencies, most of which are headed by his Yoruba kinsmen, to turn this country into a killing field to retain the presidency. He would need to procure his INEC hatchmen to trigger multiple computer glitches during the presidential election to hold on to power. Ultimately, in spite of the manifest corruption in his judiciary in which he single-handedly appointed about 50% of the 21 justices of the Supreme [Cult] Court, Tinubu may still not be on the ballot on January 16, 2027. That would be good riddance to a bad rubbish of a man whose trust is in his horses and chariots. He may yet be caught by the traps he has been setting for his rivals.
