It’s a draw

Sam Omatseye

Shall we say, we had a miracle, we have love, we have a free and fair election, and we have reached the land of peace and promise? We cannot say so even if the All Progressives Congress (APC) rejoices over its victory and the virtue of the Osun masses exult in vindication.

I warned last week that the election was neither about Otunba Iyiola Omisore nor Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, neither was it about the APC nor the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). It was a Nigerian vote and I warned the president and his party to beware of turning a ritual of democracy into a rite of blood. The president though deserves praise for not pushing the tension over the brink. Also the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for bowing to an inevitable mass will. We peered the precipice, but peace prevailed.

Some lessons were not learned. Prior to the election, we saw a repeat of the Ekiti impunity. Some party apparatchiks of the APC were hounded into detention. Exit town crier Lai Mohammed. Exit Sunday Dare, etc. One prominent lawmaker hid in the bush. The charges? Still unclear. Ambiguity. Impunity. Fear. In Ife, gunshots tore through the dust motes of the ancient city. Hooded men, sometimes identified as hoodlums, sometimes as government troops, sent terror by their sartorial ill grace. Hoods, doubtful uniforms, guns. Democracy as enchanted battlefield.

The virtue of the people spoke. They defied the gun and the minatory ferocity of their presences. On some occasions, reports had it that while shots rang to the heavens, denizens of the state hailed them in irony. The weapons of the weak: satire. The guns lost their bullets of fatality in the mockery of the folks.

But victory came, not because of the innocence of INEC, or because of the willful integrity of the party at the centre. It came because of the vigilance and tenacity of the people. As playwright Maxim Gorky said, the only people who deserve freedom are those ready to fight for it everyday.

The masses are not always innocent. Stalin once derided Lenin for putting too much trust in the proletariat, and it failed him. That was why he retraced his steps from Marxian dictatorship of the proletariat to what became an elite-driven New Economic Policy.

After the Ekiti poll, I noted that the masses vote according to the template and issues presented by the elite. The competing elite battle for the mind of the common man. Who wins won the argument. It does not mean the winner had the truth. The masses have many times had remorse when they voted for a particular idea and got another thing later. The French and British had voter remorse when they voted back Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill. That is the omen that may await the Ekiti electorate if Ayodele Fayose turns out to have turned a folksy image to con votes out of a suspecting electorate. Are the Nigerian masses an excellent sheep, obedient even unto death? Time shall tell.

But in the case of Osun, Ogbeni had from the beginning held the issues in his palm. Whether it was his tablet of knowledge, school feeding programme, jobs and uniforms, or the issue of whether his priestly beard should anchor his being or cause rancour in his detractors.

Most importantly, his signature project was education. His reclassification agenda, for all its beauty and promise, became a matter his detractors wanted to take from him. They turned it away from an educational agenda, to make schools accessible and cheap and raise standards. They turned it into a fight between the two heavens, that of Jesus and Mohammed. It became the defining controversy of his first term.

Even prior to the election, in spite of the soothing voices of notable Christian clerics about his good intentions, speculations still danced about the Osun horizon. Some said a sort of block votes from some Christian bodies would tilt the scale against him. Some people were gazing skywards even though the rain had stopped falling. Their heads dry, they did not know their feet were wet. The matter was not in heaven but here on earth. It was politics as religious vanity, as pious manipulation.

The Ogbeni did not have any qualms fighting back, reconciling here and there, and pushing the integrity of the message. The result shows he did not quilt and he won the virtue of the people to his side. He will have to continue this message, with fervour and with deliberate interaction with that part of the society.

But this election has proved that programmes are important. Those who hail the hailstorms of stomach infrastructure did not get this from Ogbeni. But politics is not always about programmes. It is about connection, and if you want to see that, go to any rally where Aregbesola is a speaker. By my account, in my life time, I have never seen anybody who can beat him in working a crowd. His is at once the ultimate impresario as folk and folk as impresario. He walks on the stage like a teenager, the broom twirling like a thousand strands of light. With his beard as lead, his feet stamping in rhythm, his waist wiggling in a half-erotic dance, his tiny body waxes like an apparition hiding a larger frame. That tiny speck of a body explodes into a voice that seems to come from a big, muscular cousin. His diction, his dances, his songs work the crowd out of a political reverie. It could have been a religious fiesta, a new year party or a festival. The crowd loses itself in the ecstasy of the man. Some have said he is not gubernatorial when he is on stage. I disagree. He is never less gubernatorial. He bows in order to soar. He is folksy for the vote.

That is Aregbesola’s virtue. That is Osun virtue, and that is why he earned their votes last weekend.

It is also an APC victory, but it is no time to gloat. The PDP was not crushed. With over 292,000 votes, Omisore showed a strong foothold on the state. It shows that the PDP is not yet a pushover in the Southwest. With Ekiti to PDP, and Osun to APC, it is in sports language, 1-1. A draw. It is time to go back to the drawing board. Last week’s victory is more an Ogbeni victory than an APC swagger. The Southwest folks want to be convinced. They have said, they are not for the taking. That is why the battle for the APC in Oyo and Ogun states must not be taken with the same sense of accomplishment as the one in Osun. There is a lot of work to be done.

We can do road, we can do schools, we can do hospitals, but we should do the heart. Loyalty to a cause often transcends the loyalty to material gains. Money is good. Stomachs will rumble. But the grumble of the humble come more from a sense of understanding, a belief that you feel my pain and you are not here to con me.

If the APC wants to build on this momentum, it has to follow the Ogbeni style. Not all of it. But his sense of folksy virtue, his animal enthusiasm for work. The other governor that shows an open animal joy for work is a PDP man, the Akwa Ibom governor, Godswill Akpabio, who speaks about his work as though an amorous affair. But he has evidence to prove his doings, in massive infrastructure, especially.

When he became governor, Ogbeni promised an unusual reign. He delivered in the way he performed and in the way he won last week. It should not be different in the next four years.


 In Touch, The Nation newspaper, 11/08/2014