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Dr BOLAJI O. AKINYEMI, Convener, The Apostolic Roundtable (ART), in this piece, writes on how political structures affected the Edo governorship elections

Muhammadu Buhari was the most popu­lar individual candi­date in all his failed attempts at becoming the Pres­ident. He possibly would have won any of those elections had he competed with his competitors as an independent candidate.

Not until Buhari merged his structure with Bola Tinubu’s to create the political party named the All Progressives Congress (APC) was he able to ferry his am­bition to his desired destination; the presidency.

That election was won by the structure, not the party. The suc­cess of any election is determined in Nigeria by an invincible move­ment of rigging enablers called political structure. Unfortunately, our hope to build a counter struc­ture of Nation Builders who will stand their ground to spend and be spent is neither encouraged by Nigerians and Politicians.

This is what is playing out in Edo. Godwin Obaseki showed no concern to the structure that gave him his second shot at it in 2020, though some of us could look be­yond the smaller picture, because we are inspired by the larger, of building our nation. But, how do we motivate our field men to keep the game going under a govern­ment they worked for; only to lose their means of livelihood?

Community Ambassador for Peaceful Election (CAPE) was led by a woman who gave her all and contributed in no small measure to what made Obaseki the gover­nor of Edo State in 2020. She was then a Senior Admin Officer of Ekiadolor College of Education. Her influence as one-time Stu­dents Affairs Officer was deployed to our mobilisation strategy. Past and present students signed on. I came in from Lagos with a male and female team. She housed our Director of Organisations who led the female team, and got one of her former students to house me when a notorious individual came to the house of a father who was hosting me and Abayomi Agbede Daniels, who left his family in La­gos to work in Benin on the CAPE project for almost four months.

The said woman got rewarded for working for Obaseki by being thrown into the job market. Aba­yomi could not even get a thank you. It did not matter that I led our team to sit and deal with the SSG who was also the DG of his campaign.

The strength of structure over intellectualism is what is before us in Edo. The Kogi Election followed our historical political pattern. Ajaka was the best in campaign rhetoric, but Ododo was fortunate to belong not just to APC, but the structure that wanted power with­in APC and invested heavily in the same. No election has ever been won on the shores of Nigeria by a good political party with the best candidate.

Politics in Nigeria is about the structure, funding, mobilising the machinery of rigging across all the interested communities of gain, in the value chain; elector­ate, media, security agencies, the umpire and even the Judiciary.

This structure extends into the military, to create political stabil­ity. Let me amaze you, there are prophets in this next work who in days of the military were to proph­esy that there will be change of Government in the beginning of the year, just to create a soft land­ing to missions they were very much part of. Many are still in this business. Unfortunately, those who do not understand how these things run are jumping on the bandwagon. This is our reality!

A very difficult situation to overcome, because hunger is strengthened by successive governments to sus­tain the practice. We know how the only free, fair and credible election in Nigeria ended in 1993.

As we approach 2027, let us re­flect on the lesson of 2023. In no particular order, Sowore, Obi and Adewole were the best candidates in the 2023 election for us to choose from. They had political parties, great manifestos, but unfortu­nately, none of them had money to invest in building structures, nor could they oil the existing structure.

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Obi for example, was the most popular of all the candidates, but was ditched by the invincible movement at work that enables vote buying by the electorate, pub­licity shunning by mainstream media, cover from arrest of politi­cal thugs by security agencies and cooperation by the umpire and of course ultimately the currying of the judiciary to do the needful of carrying the spoils home to be shared.

Politics, someone said, is war without blood and war, he said, is politics with blood, but the defin­ing line of victory about politics is who is counting the votes and how he is counting those votes that will determine the outcome of politics. In our case, INEC is the umpire counting our votes. The question is: How are they counting it? The role of INEC is the nucleus of the structure we were told in the last election will snare the noise on the social media.

The food for thought for all of us living in hope of a better and greater Nigeria is: Are we going into the next election with INEC whose Chairman the President will soon appoint? If we must protest, then substance that will interest the international commu­nity must be on the front burner of issues for which we must pro­test. The European Union was dis­appointed with our last election. That should be the basis of calling out Nigerians to press for elector­al reform. We must particularly demand for the appointment of INEC Chairman to be reviewed for election. Truth be told, Nige­rians are not ready for either the war with blood, or the one without blood.

Tinubu remains the biggest in­vestor in politics in Nigeria and if the bigger the investment, then the greater the gain will be. The only way to beat BAT in the 2027 game is for us as a people to find the synergy to structure ourselves to make bigger investments in pol­itics for greater gain than he and his cohorts. Except this is done, we may be daydreaming of our desire to see a better and greater Nigeria.

Let me congratulate the Presi­dent for making good his promise to give the office of the Governor of Edo State to his party. I also con­gratulate a man not deserving of it, Mr Monday Okpebholo, the an­nounced winner of Edo governor­ship election by INEC. Let nobody who has not built the dynamics of influence in the judiciary waste his time by going to court.

Fadahunsi was the toast of the people in the 2015 election, win­ning with six local governments of the 10 Local Government areas and his party producing two of the three House of Reps members in the Senatorial District.

The Tribunal confirmed the election was not credible hence the deductions by their Lordships which still gave the All Progres­sives Congress (APC) the victory in which the winner lost all the four local governments in his Federal Constituency. The con­firmation of Fadahunsi as the people’s choice has reflected in his landslide victory at the polls in 2019 and 2023.

Fadahunsi led the opposition to win the governorship as the only Senator and leader of the party in 2022 after an unprecedented em­powerment programme where he distributed 200 minibuses and over 500 motorbikes among other empowerment tools to constitu­ents, which led to the fall of the APC at the polls a month later and his performance has led to Osun voting out all APC national lawmakers, replacing all Senators and Reps member with PDP candi­dates in the 10th Assembly.

People like Fadahunsi and not Wike or Makinde who were trad­ing in 2023 should be the custodian of the future of the party. He has a lesson learnt to teach PDP. Hope­fully, may they be humble enough to sit down and learn.

LP is presently a season film and I can promise you that is what it will be till 2027. If paid moles are in charge of PDP and are deliver­ing, we can be rest assured that LP is taken already.

The people alone are the hope of Nigeria as it stands, not just by trusting that protest will deliver us from our political abductors. We need to tinker with how we can free ourselves. For we the people, I would like to ask us: Have we learnt our lessons from Obaseki’s sophistication and corporate po­litical dealing?

May I congratulate APC ahead of Ondo State governorship elec­tion. That one is a walk over. I will write about my role and ex­perience in the PDP primary that produced Ajayi as the candidate of PDP and the aspirant I worked for. For us, it is a better and greater Nigeria or nothing.