Why APC lost Osun and the danger ahead

Saturday July 16, 2022, the loss of the Osun gubernatorial election by the All Progressives Congress to the Peoples Democratic Party was long overdue. It will take naivety or dishonesty or both not to recognize this.

It was an election the APC could have won hands down for many reasons. The first is the national weakening of the PDP. The party, alienated from power since 2015 and lacking a coherent leadership, is grossly and hopelessly adrift. It is no longer able to rally its members and command resources; many of his refuges have already been through the APC or Peter Obi's Labor Party.

Second, Osun's party is split into three factions, with three gubernatorial candidates emerging from its fold; the main candidate (who eventually won), Senator Ademola Adeleke, Dr. Akin Ogunbiyi, who carried the Accord Party flag, and Dotun Babayemi, who resigned and supported Adeleke. At one point, Babayemi briefly enjoyed ownership of the party flag, following an interlocutory concession from a court and it then appeared Adeleke was out of contention.

The third factor was the quality of the PDP candidate. Adeleke is a scion of the Adeleke dynasty in Ede. Their father, Ayoola Adeleke, was an ally of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and a senator in the Second Republic. Isiaka Adeleke, Demola's brother, was the first democratically elected sitting governor and senator of the Third Republic and Osun before his death on April 23, 2017. Demola brought nothing but his ramshackle dance moves and the endless controversy over his degree.

The last is the boost that the emergence of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu should have given to the APC candidate. It is well known that Osun is the ancestral home of the APC presidential candidate and Governor Gboyega Oyetola is his uterine relation. This should have rubbed off very well on Osun's election. Indeed, Asiwaju was in Osun a full week before the election, coordinating the campaign and mobilizing resources.

On a good day, it would have been impossible for the PDP to win against the APC, given these factors.

It is then curious how the PDP won against all rational consideration and the APC managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The first is the crisis that began shortly after Governor Oyetola's inauguration in 2018. He probably felt himself and wanted to assert his good faith about the state and its policies . But he forgot that he became governor ex nihilo and that his emergence as an APC candidate was the result of Asiwaju's influence, which nearly cost the party the election. He saw the immediate former governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, his benefactor, under whom he served as chief of staff for eight years, as a competitor. So he failed Green's first law of power which says, "Never eclipse the master". The party never overcame the crisis, entering the election, which eventually brought it in.

The incumbent's power tends to give the occupant a false sense of superiority. Oyetola and his men never lacked it. His is compounded by his blood relationship to Asiwaju. He had the false confidence that only Asiwaju would win the election for him. When the crisis in the party began, its supporters used to tell anyone who urged caution that one word from Asiwaju to Aregbesola to go and work for Oyetola's re-election was enough.

Coming into the election, he had split the party between his loyalists against the Aregbesola loyalists; as if the election was between him and the former governor. He never attempted to reconcile the two camps, being fully convinced that the other camp was inconsequential for his re-election. Aregbesola was not a member of the APC electoral council, nor was he personally invited by the governor to help him.

On the contrary, Oyetola has surrounded himself with political henchmen, especially those who left the party in 2018 to fight against him. He added the party's traditional and ideological enemies into the mix and enlisted anyone who would join him in the fight against Aregbesola. They did not disappoint him. His tenure was noticeable for the tussle with his former manager and everyone associated with him. He practically undid Aregbesola's programs one after another and stopped those he couldn't undo.

He was relentless and totally indifferent to anything else. Anti-Aregbesola became the main directive and guiding principle of governance. In this case, sycophancy was not uncommon, as government officials openly attacked Aregbesola and competed to outdo each other in this dance of death.

Things began to deteriorate when the governor unofficially banned Aregbesola from coming to the state. Whenever the minister was instructed to come to Osun for a like...