KingSnet- Nov.26,2016
The outcome of today’s governorship election in Ondo State will bear a menacing shadow on the prospects and pattern of power in the APC in the years ahead.
The 2019 presidential election is more than two years away, but for those with their eyes set on it, the Ondo State governorship race is a staging post for their ambitions.
It is especially crucial because Ondo State is an integral part of the Southwest that was pivotal to the victory of the All Progressives Congress, APC in the 2015 presidential race.
Even more, the outcome of the election in Ondo this Saturday would help frame the mindset for upcoming political engagements in Ekiti and Osun States in 2018 when off season governorship elections in the two Southwest states are expected to hold within the space of four months.
The battle for Ondo has undoubtedly robbed the APC of the cohesion or what looked like it before it came to power. Unlike in 2015 when the party entered the national elections as a united body, the campaigns for the Ondo State governorship election has mocked the ruling party as a body greatly divided from the head down to the grassroots.
The division in the party is best reflected in the different assessment of the conduct of the governorship primaries by President Muhammadu Buhari and national party leader, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Buhari at the flag-off of the campaigns of the APC candidate, Chief Rotimi Akeredolu last Saturday, gave the conduct of the primary election a resounding endorsement.
The same primary was lampooned by Tinubu as a desecration of democratic tenets leading to the famous face-off between him and national party chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun.
It was as such not surprising that Tinubu and those closely associated with him were absent at the Akure rally where Buhari formally endorsed Akeredolu’s emergence.
Such dissonance should ordinarily worry presidential handlers with an eye to returning the president to power in 2019. But not so, given remarks by Garba Shehu, senior special assistant to the president in a statement earlier this week.
Pooh-poohing assertions that Buhari had burnt the bridges that helped him to power and would as such not be re-elected, Shehu said: “the masses are solidly behind Buhari because he is not stealing their money and their future, that the President’s enormous goodwill remains ever strong because the people are convinced the President is acting in their best interest, despite the temporary unintended consequences of reforms.
Underlying the comment is the perception that Buhari and his close handlers are constructing new bridges to help his re-election.
It is in that context that the different positions taken by the power blocs in the party are taken in perspective.
The Akeredolu project, it is widely insinuated, was conceived by some people in the presidency who hope to through him construct an alternative channel to the Southwest electorate. Ondo State it is claimed, is to be the staging post for what is expected to be the more dramatic face-off between Abuja and the outgoing governor of Ekiti State in 2018.
In that context, capturing or winning Ondo State would help to position the party to win Ekiti State and three or so months later, take the adventure up north towards finding a more pliable replacement for the Tinubu-leaning Rauf Aregbesola.
It is a plot said to have caught the imagination of those advancing the cut-Tinubu-to-size movement in a way to uproot his power base in the Southwest and make him irrelevant in determining the power equation in 2019.
Whereas the scheme is allegedly authored by some within the Presidential Villa, it is not difficult to see the discomfort of some allies of the national leader.
It is in that light that prominent politicians who have in the past associated with Tinubu find themselves in some seeming difficulty. Among them are information minister, Lai Mohammed and Dr. Kayode Fayemi, the minister of solid minerals. Both men were at the Akure rally boycotted by Tinubu.
Mohammed as a minister was politically obliged to follow the president especially as he is now primarily seen as an aide to the president.
Fayemi’s role was similarly explained. Also given Fayemi’s political experience and the political inexperience of the minister from Ondo State, Claudius Daramola who is the minister of state (Niger Delta), it has also been explained that a suave politician like Fayemi from a neighbouring state be involved in the Akeredolu project.
It is no secret that loyalists of Asiwaju Tinubu in Ondo State including Olusola Oke gravitated towards the Alliance for Democracy, AD where Oke easily assumed the governorship ticket after the controversial APC primary.
That Akeredolu came on top should not mean that the Tinubu factor has been totally vanquished given the fact that Tinubu and his supporters entered the Ondo contest as a divided house.
Governor Rauf Aregbesola was believed to have supported Oke in the primary while Tinubu himself belatedly threw his support for Dr. Olusegun Abraham and another Tinubu loyalist, Senator Ajayi Borroffice was also in the primary contest against the united ‘presidency forces’ allegedly backing Akeredolu.
The APC governorship primary was the first flashpoint for the different tendencies within the ruling party.
In the next few months as the realisation of a second term for President Buhari dawns on the patrons of the regime and its internal hecklers, more flashpoints would erupt.
Ondo State, however, remains a defining point in the life of the APC. The prospect of the Tinubu tendency picking up the gauntlet in Ekiti next year remains in the realm of speculations given the near firm hold Fayemi holds in the state.
The group could well throw up Bamidele Opeyemi to confront whatever plans Fayemi has on the 2018 governorship election.
Following that, the two tendencies will confront themselves in Osun before the ultimate showdown in 2019; that is if the APC continues to exist in the same shape and structure.
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