The clumsy pretext latched on to by a few leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to overthrow Adams Oshiomhole, chairman of the party, is mainly his inflexibility. Stretched a little further, the pretext is his refusal to be malleable to certain interests. Having lost their common enemies personified by Senator Bukola Saraki and company, party leaders have proved to everyone that while adversity drove them to frantic animosity, peace will in fact reinforce their grudges and poison their relationships. It is now clear that more separate them than unite them. So, the long knives are out, and the party is at daggers drawn; and it will not matter what Mr Oshiomhole has done or not done. His enemies want him out before 2023 because they cannot guarantee his neutrality; and if they can get rid of him now, it will be a bonus. But they are simply being juvenile and tactless.
The animosity between Mr Oshiomhole and his enemies came to a head last week when, using the illegal and atrocious template deployed to unseat former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Walter Onnoghen, some party leaders waltzed into an Abuja High Court to, incredibly, secure a misused and misapplied injunction against him at the interlocutory stage without hearing from him. Ordered to stop parading himself as chairman of the party, he was immediately barred from having access to the party headquarters because the police had been primed to barricade the party’s offices. It was a synchronised plot by a party that is evidently headless. Cut to the chase, Mr Oshiomhole’s enemies, led by Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State, are not interested in the legality or otherwise of their actions and court processes. They want the party chairman out; they will not be dissuaded by any law or process.
Most APC governors either support their chairman or are indifferent. Only a few are unalterably opposed to him. With Dr Fayemi as the arrowhead of the plot, and ably supported by Kebbi State governor, Abubakar Atiku-Bagudu, and egged on by the fulminating Edo State governor, Godwin Obaseki, the plotters hope to railroad a decision against Mr Oshiomhole and make his exit sure and irreversible. While the president dithers, the plotters will do their utmost to delay the Court of Appeal decision on the matter — a decision expected to favour the party chairman — and stampede the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) into finally unhorsing Mr Oshiomhole. Neither the plotters nor the party can lawfully accomplish their goals in the short run. They will, therefore, make a recourse to illegality, and damn the consequences. There is no question that the Abuja High Court judge who granted the prayers of the complainants against the APC chairman misapplied the law. The only question that remains is whether the appellate court will do justice on time.
Should Mr Oshiomhole survive this plot, his enemies will not relent. They have been too indulged by the party and its leaders to care a hoot what shenanigans they concoct, and have been somewhat encouraged by the vacillation, detachment and spinelessness of the presidency. What is, therefore, not guaranteed is whether after surviving this latest putsch Mr Oshiomhole will become more conciliatory or intransigent. The APC chairman, despite his bullishness and lack of tact, is a better politician than his enemies. He rants and raves, and can sometimes be unsparing, but he is infinitely more gregarious, more accessible, more affable, and more politically ethical than the Machiavellians who have brought out the long knives against him. Inordinate pressure is being brought to bear on the president to abandon Mr Oshiomhole. Sometimes the president seems to buckle, and at other times, unsure of tomorrow, he snaps out of his lethargy and hesitantly backs the chairman. Had the president been as resolute as Dr Fayemi and his co-rebels have been openly rebellious against the principles of natural justice and the guidelines of the party, there would be no question what fate awaited Mr Oshiomhole.
Nothing is sure for the APC chairman. A few plotters within his party have instigated the judiciary and the police against him. So far, neither he nor anyone who has observed the APC can be sure how the intrigues will play out or which way the cat jumps. His face, never previously rosy or chubby, now looks drawn, and the didactic expression that often suffused his visage has yielded to abject melancholy. He has not lost his sense of humour or the regular but eclectic resort to the sophomoric theology of his youth, but he has become increasingly desperate, beleaguered and a little disoriented. He still has support, in fact more support within the party than his enemies, but he is becoming inexpert at sizing up that support, and has often exaggerated the number of his opponents. He knows instinctively that he has largely done what is right by the party, much more than his enemies, but he has become cavalier about the ethics to which he and his party have subscribed, and has lost the arithmetical candour that had before now made him accomplished in gauging his support base.
No one can immediately tell how long it will be before the APC finally implodes, as this column has repeatedly warned. But there is hardly anyone who does not understand the elements of the misunderstanding tearing the party apart. Put simply, the problem of the APC is the fight between some governors who seek to have the chairman at their beck and call, and others in the party who simply want a firm, sensible and fairly ideological chairman. The politics of 2023 is merely tangential, despite its seeming centrality. Former party chairman John Odigie-Oyegun was the darling of many of the party’s governors, but he was too malleable to be of any use in imposing discipline on the party, and too embarrassingly eager to please his sponsors. Mr Oshiomhole, on the other hand, met an almost disused and sundered party, and has struggled valiantly, sometimes presumptuously, to rebuild the party’s foundations and system. To his enemies within the party, he seems to have embarked on needless revanchism. Nothing was lost, and no political territories were surrendered to the opposition, moaned the nostalgic governors. The battle line was, therefore, drawn, with one side looking to the past, and the other looking to the future.
Edo, Kebbi, Kaduna and Ekiti APC may cast their lot with the plotters to unhorse Mr Oshiomhole, but the rest of the APC states seem to be wary of the fanaticism of their colleagues, and are thus unsure how to proceed. But while his preferences remain clear, Kaduna’s Nasir el-Rufai has surprisingly been more muted than Ekiti’s Dr Fayemi. The plotters have numbered Ondo’s Rotimi Akeredolu among themselves, insisting that Mr Oshiomhole was his enemy, but he has pussyfooted considerably, sometimes running with the hare and hunting with the hound. Edo’s Mr Obaseki is embittered, having felt humiliated by the APC chairman. But the Edo governor is at bottom an anti-democrat himself, and possesses the natural instinct of a tyrant. It is no tribute to Mr Oshiomhole that he backed him without a deep assessment of his character and democratic leaning. It is now impossible to reconcile Mr Obaseki with Mr Oshiomhole. Indeed, there should be no reconciliation; not because malice has inexplicably become a virtue, but because it is abundantly clear that opposition and enmity have brought out the true colour and personality of Mr Obaseki. And both that colour and personality are obnoxious.
No one knows exactly why Dr Fayemi has become the arrowhead of the revolt against the APC chairman. Is it because of the rumoured interest of the governor in the 2023 presidential election, in which it is said he would want to run on a joint ticket with Mallam el-Rufai? Or is it simply one of political pragmatism in which he is ideologically and in principle opposed to the manner Mr Oshiomhole runs the party? There may be elements of both factors in his struggle against the APC chairman. But unknown to many in his party, among the governors, and even in the presidency, Dr Fayemi does not need an antagonistic object to help coalesce his fratricidal and regicidal tendencies. He is a true and gifted Machiavellian. Moments after he won the Ekiti governorship in his first term, he struck an isolationist path, alienated those who voted for him or backed him, and reposed all his hopes and ambitions on his boundless energy and gifted intellect, believing that both would handsomely fetch him his goals. He of course miscalculated.
In understanding and explaining the turmoil in the APC, it is insufficient to focus only on Mr Oshiomhole’s weaknesses, as obvious and as grating as they are. Due attention must be paid much more to Dr Fayemi’s proclivities and countervailing actions. The Ekiti governor is the most ardent exponent of realpolitik in Nigeria today. No one practices it as avidly as he does. He has almost completely emptied his politics of the restraining influence of scruples and the ethics and humanity that give form and substance to leadership and relationships. The ‘equanimity’ with which he resigned himself to the disgraceful judicial victory of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the Ekiti South senatorial tussle has left many watchers of Ekiti politics befuddled, not to say the victim himself, Dayo Adeyeye. It must baffle many that the same votes discounted for Sen Adeyeye were counted for the other elections in that district. Nigerians have focused excessively on the feisty and voluble Mallam el-Rufai, describing him as a tyrant. But he is at least not a closet Machiavellian. Nigerians have now seen Mr Obaseki as unworthy of the throne he is sitting on, because they recognise that he is completely destitute of any democratic instinct, not just because he opposed Mr Oshiomhole. Ekiti people know Dr Fayemi, and showed it in their votes for him, repudiating him once in favour of the unfit Ayo Fayose, and giving him a worrying victory in his second term. Many people find Dr Fayemi inscrutable, particularly because of his realpolitik and his incredible capacity to be politically cold-blooded. They have chosen to focus on his oratorical skills and admirable intellect, not to say the curious manner he has deployed his iconoclasm in reflection of his Yoruba worldview of bowing to no idol.
If the Court of Appeal does not pussyfoot as it did during the presidency’s infamous and immoral battle against Justice Onnoghen, and APC NEC manages against all expectations to develop cold feet, Mr Oshiomhole might get a reprieve and go on to neutralise his enemies’ plots. But if the APC NEC moves with indecent haste and the courts connive at the ongoing heresy, the battle would be lost and a new regime could be enthroned in APC sooner than anyone imagined. But win or lose, both sides in the APC war know that victory will come only when one side is truly vanquished. If that victory comes without the party imploding, then, perhaps the gods have smiled on the party. But that rosy outcome is unlikely, for the gods are themselves unpredictable and their fearsome reputation for rage did not come by happenstance.
By Idowu Akinlotan