Osun gubernatorial election was held on the 16th day of July, 2022. In the early hours of 17th of July, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Senator Ademola “Jackson” Nurudeen Adeleke of the Peoples Democratic Party, having fulfilled the requirements of the law and scored the highest number of votes, the winner of the election and returned him elected. Pundits have hailed the election as relatively peaceful, free, fair and credible and postulated that this might be a pointer to how the 2023 general election will be. Every party to the election: political parties, candidates, security agencies and INEC seemed to be at their physical, behavioural and psychological best. A new Nigeria is possible. We simply need to change our attitude. This is victory for democracy. The greatest beauty of democracy is in its offer of hope. The possibility that if you fail today, you can try in the next four years, keeps hope alive and gives you the fortitude to bear any temporary loss with equanimity. And as the scriptures say, “hope maketh not ashamed”. Senator Ademola Adeleke lost in controversial circumstances four years ago to the incumbent Governor, Gboyega Oyetola, after a run off election, in which a lot of his voters were brutally and violently denied access to the polling booths to vote. He won the first round of the election but lost the second round with less than 400 votes. He was to lose the court case at the Supreme Court in split decisions which ran up from the trial tribunal to the apex court.
From the mouth of the Returning Officer in the Osun gubernatorial election, the foundation for a successful election will always be the law; “having fulfilled the requirements of the law”. It then means that if the law, which is the foundation, is flawed, there’s nothing even the righteous can do to bring about genuine results. To underscore the seriousness of good laws for acceptable electoral outcome, Senator Adeleke, while praising the new Electoral Act, 2022 said, “I would’ve lost if Buhari had not signed amended Electoral Act”. This simply implies that he would have been successfully rigged out again from the election if he had contested under the Electoral Act, 2010. His fears are not unfounded. In the Electoral Act, 2010, the card reader and the use of technology were not legalised. Anyone could stuff the ballot box with fake ballot papers and insist that they should be counted and as long as the result was not more than the number of voters in the manual voters register, INEC was bound to accept and announce the result. Over voting was not calculated based on the number of accredited voters but based on the number of voters in the manual register and this was absurd because ordinarily, there’s no way the number of votes will be more than the number of the people who actually came out to vote. But this was what was obtainable with the 2010 Electoral Act and the courts were bound to give the law its ordinary meaning.
Thank goodness because in the 2022 Electoral Act, the card reader has been legalised and over voting is now calculated based on the number of accredited voters. I watched with satisfaction when some polling units results were cancelled in Osun because the result exceeded the number of accredited voters by about two votes. Deployment of technology is now approved in our elections and INEC has the unfettered right to yield to prevailing innovations in the conduct of its elections. BIVAS is the latest invention for identification. You are not entitled to vote if not properly identified by the machines. In 2010 Electoral Act, INEC was a toothless bulldog which could not act against perpetrators of criminal acts against the law. The Electoral umpire couldn’t even reject a candidate submitted to it even where the political party held no primaries. But in the 2022 Electoral Act, INEC is empowxered to accept only candidates that emerged from validly conducted primaries. Manual collation of results with its attendant consequence of human interventions that often led to inflated results has been permanently dislodged by the enactment of electronic transfer of results in this new Act. The polling unit result is secured and transparently released to the whole world before the demons of election manipulation gets hold of them. So Electoral Act, 2022 is a world different from the Act of 2010 and every well meaning Nigerian must commend the President and the National Assembly for enacting the new Electoral Act. Osun election clearly showed that the difference between the 2010 Act and 2022 Act is the difference between riggable and unriggable election. It is therefore a pointer to a possible free and fair election in 2023. The winner of the election said, “So, Buhari is trying to leave a legacy. If he had not signed the Electoral Act, there would have been room for rigging because they did that to me in 2018”.
Osun election is a pointer that incumbency will not be of great assistance to any candidate in 2023. As a matter of fact, incumbency only assists where the incumbent’s performance is outstanding or where the incumbent’s opponents are terrible. Above all, where elections are not free and fair, incumbents are undefeatable. In Osun, the performance of the incumbent was not top notch, the opponent was splendid, and the election was free and fair. The incumbent was summarily defeated. Hear the winner, “I campaigned so hard that the economy is so bad, the roads are bad, the state capital needs to be given a facelift, and that I can do better”. He indeed did better in the election and the incumbent became history. In 2023, at the presidential level, there will not be any incumbent candidate because the incumbent will be finishing his second term. But there will be an incumbent party. It is this incumbent party, All Progressives Congress (APC), that was trounced in Osun. If the performance of the APC at the National Level is anything to go by, in addition to the unconstitutional imposition of Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket on APC members, the fate of the presidential election of APC looks more grim than that of Osun.
Osun election reveals that unity among the political party members is vitally important to win elections. Osun parades one of the most prominent members of APC. It is said that Osun is the ancestral home of the leader and presidential candidate of APC, Bola Tinubu and the first interim National Chairman of APC, Bisi Akande. Home of the incumbent Governor, Oyetola, and Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbe, Former Minister, Fani Kayode, present Special Adviser on Media to the President, Femi Adesina and so on, yet they lost woefully in the gubernatorial election of Osun. The current National Chairman of APC, Senator Adamu confessed publicly that his party lost on the altar of disunity among the major APC political gladiators in Osun. The incumbent Governor has been having an unnecessary and ill-advised running battle with his predecessor and current Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola. This is despite the fact that he was the former Chief of Staff to Rauf. It was reported that Oyetola has always believed from 2018 that Rauf never supported him and that was why Adeleke defeated him in the first round of election in 2018 and Rauf has always believed that Oyetola was not the right choice to lead Osun after him. This disagreement lingered for more than five years and ended up killing the second term ambition of Gov Oyetola. The arrogance of the incumbent in thinking that he can bulldoze his way through and win without the support of the prominent leaders of his party robbed Oyetola of the victory as the neglected APC members worked with PDP to defeat APC.
If this is a pointer to 2023 then the two major political parties are in jeopardy. The Presidential candidate of the APC, Bola Tinubu, fired the first shot that people who contested with him have no place in his tenure if he wins the election right from his acceptance speech after his presidential primary victory at the Eagle’s Square. He pointedly told the President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan, that he will lick his wounds for daring to contest the ticket with him. In fairness to BAT, Ahmed Lawan has been licking his wounds since then. He is not sure of returning even to the Senate next year. Despite the wish of the 14 serving Governors and Christians that the VP should be one of them, the candidate disregarded them and went somewhere else. The candidate, obviously did not consult with the current Vice-President of Nigeria before picking his running mate because he considers him a rebel for contesting against him and a political feather weight that can do nothing if neglected in the choice of a voice in whom the VP candidate ought to be. There’s no way Yemi Osinbajo would have supported a Muslim-Muslim ticket when he knew that he emerged as VP to avoid a Muslim-Muslim ticket in the past. BAT believes he can single handedly win the presidential election as he openly boasted that he single handedly made Buhari President. APC is in turmoil now.
PDP is even worse in this regard. After the presidential primary election, Governor Wike came second, meaning he commanded the greatest loyalty of party members apart from the winner, Atiku Abubakar. Gov Ortom persuaded Wike to consider accepting to be running mate to Atiku and ensured that he scored 14 out of 17 votes to clinch the Vice- Presidential slot. Yet Wike was disrespectfully and disgracefully rigged out of the process without even the courtesy of informing him by the Presidential candidate that the result of the committee will not be respected. Some of Atiku’s lieutenants like Former Gov Babangida Aliyu revealed that Wike was rejected by Atiku because he was unfit to be Vice-President because of his penchant to insult everybody. Of course Wike rejected both and the Presidential candidate is contemplating meeting Wike because he is uncomfortable with the number of Governors willing to defend Wike. Wike is unfit to be Vice-President but fit to be a beast of burden to be used to campaign for the PDP presidential candidate and be later abandoned. Wike needs to see the insults heaped on Former Governor Fayose by Atiku loyalists, because he is no longer an incumbent with huge purse, to know what will befall him if PDP wins the Presidency. If Osun election is anything to go by, these two major political parties should be dead by now on account of internal disunity among their members. However, this can only succeed if the opposition to these two parties, their neglected members as in Osun and Nigerians come together and vote them out because Nigeria deserves a new beginning.