Last Saturday, the 21st of September, 2024, the voters of Edo State headed for the polls and at the end, Senator Monday Okpebholo, alias Akpakomiza, of the APC came out as the winner with 291,667 followed by Asue Ighodalo of the PDP scoring 247,274 and thirdly, Olumide Akpata of LP scoring a total of 22,763 votes. As usual, there has been well-orchestrated denunciations of the results as released by INEC.
The whole thing began in earnest with the rancorous and extremely contentious nominations processes and procedures that produced the various candidates through their various primaries, developments which have clearly vindicated the saying that the product of any effort is a direct function of the input: garbage in, garbage out.
Again, the mixed post-election reactions so far, have demonstrated certain fundamental misperceptions in our electoral democracy which I have continually pointed out over the years. It is the simple fact that in evaluating elections and their outcomes in Nigeria, we tend to only focus on the unpalatable divergences between usually baseless expectations and the actual results while we willfully prefer to ignore the corrupt and horrible primary processes through which these so-called “candidates” emerged.
Another major misperception is the inordinate confliction of the urban oligarchic and elitist expectations with those of the common people of Nigeria who have been largely excluded from both the national economy and its political contestation deliverables thereby making them vulnerable to routine manipulations by those with raw cash willy-nilly because of their dehumanizing poverty.
After studying the crooked methods often utilized by political actors to impose candidates on their political party and then fraudulently present same to the general electorate at the polls on election days, I published a summary of a research work on this page about four years ago thus: “It has been said that elections can take place in the absence of democracy but democracy, per se, cannot exist without elections. Elections under a democracy are conducted with a view to electing leaders that would best carry out whatever the electorate requires of them for reasons of good governance.
“The expectation is always that through such a selection process, it is possible to bring forth the most suitable people with the requisite leadership qualities. Unfortunately, the democratic process in practice is routinely contaminated by fraud and injustice as we cannot have true representative government without electoral fairness.
Ighodalo, Okpebholo and Akpata
“The outcome of an election is most likely to be regarded as legitimate if the procedures adopted in selecting the candidate presented by political the party reflects the actual choice of the voters/delegates who he seeks to represent. If the procedures are ‘fair’ and ‘just,’ then, we can say there is electoral justice but whenever it is corrupted, then there is a problem.”
If we apply the postulation above to what happened in Edo State at the party’s primary level much earlier, it becomes quite clear to us that the results as finally released by INEC on Sunday, the 22nd of September, are reasonably consistent with the logic of the processes adopted by the various parties, ab initio.
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The three major candidates, Asue Ighodalo, Monday Okpebholo and Olumide Akpata for the PDP, APC and LP respectively, who emerged as “candidates” cannot claim complete ignorance or even innocence to these perfidious transactions.
If we take the case of Ighodalo of the PDP as an example, we shall see that although he was a very competent, articulate and idea-rich candidate, the mere fact that Governor Obaseki played the obnoxious role of a ruthless bulldozing godfather for him became an immovable albatross for his otherwise very bright electoral path to victory. To all numerous enemies of Obaseki, this was the best and last time for a vicarious payback.
Unless we deceive ourselves, Godwin Obaseki was the only reason that Asue did not win that election because Obaseki’s political enemies were just too many and powerful. It was to be expected that anyone who has the misfortune of being associated with him would be frustrated out and that was exactly what happened on Saturday in spite of PDP’s very aggressive campaign strategy.
When we started hearing loaded campaign innuendos like “Edo no be Lagos,” people started wondering if Obaseki has the political wherewithal to withstand the avoidable tsunami that he was inviting onto himself when it was already the case that he has badly alienated all those who once helped him to become what he is today. After his famously acrimonious fallout with his benefactor, the mercurial Senator Adams Oshiomhole and many others, he became a political loner, stranded and loathed. It was inside that violent political vortex that the gentleman Ighodalo was enlisted into fighting like the famous “Buffalo soldiers”, Black slaves drafted into the US civil war by their White oppressors.
Okpebholo on the other hand, barely survived an Oshiomhole fired torpedo by the timely intervention of Aso Rock which saw through the latent injustice for denying Edo Central Senatorial District of Esan people who have endured cycles of power shifts eluding them for almost 20 years. Otherwise, Oshiomhole was initially bent on scuttling the long-expressed expectations of Esan people as well-articulated by Esan Okpa Initiative, a non-partisan group of Esan enlightened opinion leaders to which I also belong which is ably led by Barr Matthew Egbadon, a former two-time Speaker of the Edo State House of Assembly and many other concerned Esan groups whose agitations became commonly aggregated as the “Esan Agenda.”
The declared results by INEC, in spite of the observed shortcomings as enumerated by the independent election observers, cannot be seriously questioned as none of the contending political parties is without blame. They all played several observable shenanigans which were courageously summed up by the candidate of the Labour Party, Olumide Akpata, when he said that the Edo election was a game of the “highest bidder” or better still, of the highest rigger. Nigerians are already used to baseless election denialism even by political non-starters and this one is not different. So, he who must come to equity must come with a clean hand. None of them can claim minimal innocence, no kidding.
It has remained my candid view that “since the return of democracy in 1999, there have been debates about the best way to conduct party primaries. In some absurd instances, the right to pick candi¬dates by party electors/delegates were undemocrat¬ically ceded to powerful individuals, political pred¬ators and election entrepreneurs with obvious un¬democratic motives. Under this arrange¬ment, the primaries become shams and farcical processes because the choice of candidates have already been arbitrarily made by anti-democratic party chieftains.”
The key lessons for us here are that: (a) electoral justice starts with the way the primaries are conducted. A party whose primary election was fraught with corruption and intimidation should not expect a seat at the rendezvous of victory whether at the polls or inside the courtrooms. (b) Elections are not won through social media, neither can suborned sweet-talking TV hosts and their biased spin doctors and the so-called “online influencers” change the voting dispositions as rationally or irrationally determined by the voters themselves and, (c) democracy does not really care much about individual eloquence and brilliance as it cares about who is behind the particular candidate.
At the demographical level, the outcome has substantially assuaged the injustice that would have been perpetuated if someone outside of Esanland was to have been elected again this time around, a fact which made Akpata’s, “Olu D” meritocratic argument a non-starter within the framework of electoral equity and justice in Edo State, as encased in the logic of rotation.
I hereby congratulate the governor-elect, Monday Okpebholo and candidly advise him to remain humble and quickly extend his genuine hands of fellowship to all his co-contestants who were no less worthy opponents. It was a good fight; the campaigns were lively and entertaining until the “do-or-die” poisonous misspeak raised the tension to a frightening level. Up Edo State!
