THE TRIUMPH OF POLITICS

The loss of Gboyega Oyetola, governor of Osun State, in the recent gubernatorial contest despite his relatively good performance, disincentivizes good governance, writes Bolaji Adebiyi

Asked for his reaction to the loss of his party, at the just concluded gubernatorial contest in Osun State, Abdullahi Adamu, the national chairman of the All Progressives Congress, feigned ignorance of the result of an election that had been officially announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission in the wee hours of the day.

“INEC is yet to inform me of the result,” he told the ARISE NEWS Channel anchors who laboured in vain to wake him from his contrived slumber. It was not that Adamu was not aware of the result of the contest, it was obvious that he was perplexed by its unpalatable outcome and was still grappling to understand how his party failed to breast the tape.

A few weeks earlier, he had told the national campaign committee headed by Babajide Sanwo-Olu, governor of Lagos State, to go win the contest by all means possible, warning it that he would not accept any excuses for failure. “Just go and win,” he said, adding, “Let the losers go to the tribunal to complain.” Not a few observers, including opposition politicians, thought this was a bit too confident, and perhaps, arrogant, suggesting that he needed to be more circumspect.

The outcome of the election, though close, has proved the observers right as it is Adamu and his APC that will now have to approach the tribunal with their complaints having been trounced by the opposing Peoples Democratic Party whose candidate, Ademola Adeleke, an immediate past senator, polled 403, 371 votes to the APC’s Gboyega Oyetola’s 375,027.

The 28,344 margin of victory garnered across 17 of the state’s 30 local councils, was sufficient for INEC to make a declaration that the contest, in which one Kehinde Atanda of an innocuous Action Democratic Party came a distant third with 10, 104 votes, had been decided against the incumbent party. From Adamu’s mien on ARISE TV that Sunday morning it was obvious that the result confounded him and that he was searching for the reasons for the defeat.

Like Adamu, hours after the announcement of the result, the APC camp was quiet and when a day or so later it found its voice, the resolve came from Osogbo, the state capital, that 50 lawyers would be assembled to take the party’s complaints to the tribunal. Some critics have, however, said this is more of a political strategy by the party to control possible haemorrhaging by keeping hope alive. For, as they put it, the leadership ought to have known that its failure to resolve its pre- and post-primary conflicts would only have an unsavoury consequence like this.

In fairness to the national chairman, he warned the warring parties to reconcile before the election but his intervention fell on deaf ears. Shortly after the narrow victory of the APC in 2018, a quarrel developed over the distribution of political patronages as Oyetola was accused of marginalising the associates of Rauf Aregbesola, the former governor who had become a minister in Abuja. The other source of the crisis was the disagreements over policies as the new governor found it necessary to review and reverse some of the policies he inherited.

Several reconciliation initiatives spearheaded by national leaders of the party associated with the political establishment in the state, including Bola Tinubu, the party’s national leader, now presidential candidate, and Bisi Akande, a former governor of the state who was also a transitional national chairman, failed as there was a hardening of positions on both sides of the divide.

This was the state of play when the state congress for the gubernatorial primary was held with the Oyetola camp routing the Aregbesola camp. Worsted, the minister returned to Abuja to lick his wound. While some of his associates left the party in anger, many more stayed back, badly wounded and brooding. Had Oyetola not been politically naïve, he would have known that having such a large number of disgruntled politicians in his corner in a contest with an opponent, who had a strong political root and formidable political machinery on the ground, was a disaster waiting to happen.

In some ways, Oyetola’s resounding trouncing of Aregbesola at the primary emboldened him to tell his foe to more or less go to hell. What he obviously did not realise was that in a contest that was bound to be that close everyone retained the minimum capacity to do damage. That point was well made by the internal opposition in APC and it resonated in the final results with the effect that the internal opponents titled the outcome in favour of the PDP in otherwise strongholds of the ruling party, including the high-voting councils of Osogbo, Olorunda, Egbedore and Ejigbo. The swing occurred at a time the opposition kept intact its own strongholds of Ede North and Ede South where it got the over 28,000 votes that made the difference.

The internal squabbles apart, Oyetola also struggled with the liabilities he inherited from Aregbesola who left a debilitating debt profile, large pension and gratuity as well salary areas of civil servants. Despite the fact that the governor offset the outstanding pension and gratuity, paid part of the salary arrears even as he was regular with the payment of the minimum wage from 2018 and reduced substantially the state’s debt, he still did not find favour with the civil service that insisted that he ought to have cleared the backlog of the half-salaries left by Aregbesola.

As it turned out, it did not matter that Oyetola cleared many of the outstanding liabilities as well as delivered on some infrastructure projects without borrowing. What mattered was his inability to manage the politics of his party and the insatiable appetite of the civil service for self-aggrandisement.

The outcome of the gubernatorial contest in Osun State has once again queried the belief that a good performance in office would aid a successful electoral outcome. Had performance been the substantive issue in that contest, Oyetola would perhaps have coasted home to victory. But the substantive issue was politics and his mismanagement of it.

This is the central theme of most of the post-mortems of the contest with many analysts contemplating the consequence of the development, particularly with respect to the public image and profile of the eventual winner who is thought to be playful and not known to be a rigorous interrogator of public policy.

It is against this background that there is serious worry about the future of the state. But don’t people get the leadership they deserve and live with the consequence?

Adebiyi, the managing editor of THISDAY Newspapers, writes from bolaji.adebiyi@thisdaylive.com