Akin Osuntokun was the Director General of the Labour Party Presidential Campaign Council in the 2023 general election. In this interview, he speaks on the crisis rocking the Labour Party, crisis in the Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, among other issues. JOY ANIGBOGU brings the excerpt:
How did the Labour Party get to this point where it has many factions and there is so much confusion in the media and the Julius Abure faction mentioned your name that you are involved in a N600 million scam…?
First and foremost, it is wrong for people to say that the young generation was rooting for the Labour Party during the 2023 general elections. It was Peter Obi who activated them and caught their imagination, so let’s get that straight from the word go. All along, I have always believed that the Constitution should have room for independent candidates. Obi essentially was an independent candidate because a substantial part of those who voted for him were the Obidents. The Obidents are not Labour Party people and that was the group that made Peter Obi. The thing is that the leadership of the Labour Party has a hostile vested interest. If I were in the All Progressives Congress (APC) for instance, I would probably invest in subverting the Labour Party because it is a potential opponent. After all, as long as you have buyers, you will get sellers.
But you don’t have proof of this allegation?
This guy who spoke on behalf of the Labour Party, Abayomi Arabambi for instance was the same person who was attacking Abure to the point of coming at the sitting of the Court of Appeal to disrupt the section with Lamidi Apapa. At that time it was Apapa and Arabambi faction. The publicity secretary of Abure’s faction is Obvious Ifoh not Arabambi. So, Mr Arabambi woke up one day and addressed a press conference from Abeokuta, so I can choose
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the party to be calling a press conference in Ado-Ekiti. You immediately see that these are people you don’t take seriously because there is something fishy about them. When you talk about factions or no factions, as I have said it is a question of legitimacy. Even legally speaking I don’t have a lot of regard for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) but it is the approving authority for political parties in Nigeria. If INEC says today that it does not recognize you as a party, then you are not a party. For you to have a convention, in which you are going to elect a chairman and other members of the executive, you would need the presence of INEC to certify it. So, on that score alone, Abure is gone as the National Chairman of the party. As regards the N600 million, initially I didn’t want to get into it but for the sake of Chief Ayo Adebanjo who is a bit indisposed now, dragging that kind of person, who spent 90 years serving Nigeria to just drag his name in the mud like that. He said N600 million but the total amount that was spent on the campaign was earlier given by Aisha Yesufu. Aisha Yesufu and Itua Ighodalo were the signatories to the campaign account. Days before Arabambi spoke, she gave an account of the total money in the account. According to her, it was about N1.3 billion. So, does it make sense that from that N1.3 billion, somebody will take N600 million and give it to myself and Ayo Adebanjo, does that make sense? Take note, anytime you’re going to see Arabambi in the press, it is to smear somebody. You can do a content analysis of his media engagement on every occasion, it’s to smear somebody.
Labour Party with so many factions and infighting is starting to look like a special purpose vehicle (SPV) butcanthepartyeverevolvebeyondbeing an SPV?
Of course, the person who transformed it from just being an SPV to a political party in the real sense of it was Peter Obi. That is the honest truth. If a party produces the president, he is automatically the leader of the party. With regard to the Labour Party, if you want to apply the same logic, the presidential candidate is the leader of the party. The only governor and the highest official elected on the platform of the Labour Party is Governor Alex Oti of Abia State. Those people have better legitimacy to claim to have a vested interest in the party. So, it is not a question of faction or no faction because it would have been irresponsible for them to see things deteriorate and keep quiet. At one time or the other, their intervention is needed. If Abure is still interested in being a member of the party and wants to contest for the chairmanship of the party, he has to go through the process. The process through which he has been appointed as the Labour Party chairman is fraud and as I said the approving authority, whose consent is needed to say whether you are a party or not is INEC. And INEC has said they don’t recognize him. So, essentially what we are left with is what should be the party itself beginning from where Obi is. Arabambi and Apapa were a faction for more than one year, beyond the two of them when they were claiming to be the chairman and publicity secretary of the party, there was no other member in support of them. They are the ones creating problems for themselves, it is just that it doesn’t look good on paper that this is happening but this is precisely what they want. Anybody interested in the stability and functionality of the Labour Party will not behave the way they are behaving.
Do you think that some people are using Arabambi and his allegations against you?
In law he who alleges is the one who should prove and I’m going to sue him for defamation. Of the two signatories to Afenifere accounts, one is the deputy leader, Oladipo Olaitan. He came out some days again to open up the books of Afenifere so that you can see whether there is N100 million or N200 million there. There was nothing.
With all the confusion in the Labour Party, is it not time for Peter Obi to leave the party?
You are not taking into consideration the first statement that I made that it is not the Labour Party that people voted for. So, don’t subsume Peter Obi with those who are parading themselves as Labour Party. As far as I’m concerned up to date I still have my recommendations. First is the constitutional amendment to allow for an independent candidacy because this causes problems when you force people to join a political party before they can contest for any election. Obi is a very conservative person in making decisions, I understand that he likes to make use of possible avenues for resolving this crisis. If I stand up tomorrow and call somebody and say that I’m now the chairman of the Labour Party and this man is secretary, what should you do and would you take me as the Labour Party? There was nobody who elected Apapa as the chairman of the party and Arabambi as the publicity secretary, otherwise there would have been no Abure.
There is another matter, we have been talking about the Labour Party but you wear another cap as an Afenifere Chieftain, is Afenifere a social-cultural group or is it an aspiring political party?
Afenifere is a social-political group. It is the other faction that calls itself social-cultural group. All these crises emanated from trying to make a distinction between the two. In 1963 for instance, Chief Obafemi Awolowo had to come out that anybody who equates Afenifere with the Yoruba is a traitor. For him the founder, Afenifere was a political party and the Yoruba arm of the Action Group (AG). Whenever there is no functioning political system, the group remains a social-political pressure group. So, it has existed all along through the military regime. Secondly, whenever there is a Yoruba person as president of Nigeria that Yoruba person has the capacity if he is so willing to sow the kind of confusion that is going on within the group. They will tell you that the man there is a Yoruba man why are you bothering him? The little that I know and on which some rational basis can be determined is that Chief Fasoranti without any pressure from anybody some years ago wrote a letter handing over the leadership of the group to Chief Ayo Adebanjo. On that score alone, you should be able to make a distinction between the authentic by Afenifere’s principles from the one that is not legitimate. So, it is a social-political group and the reason why the emphasis has to be laid on that if you call yourself social-cultural that means that it embraces all Yoruba people and that you have no ideology because the ideology is my son right or wrong. So, this is the difference. Ours is a social-political group and the man who founded it was his position.
