Fashola Fails this Time

LAGOS Governor, Babatunde Raji Fashola, made an interesting foray into column writing last Monday (June 30, 2014) on the back page of THISDAY newspaper as a guest columnist with an article entitled: “Ekiti Poll: My Take Away”.

In his revision of the recently concluded electoral exercise, he deployed gritty logic and arcane reasoning to turn out a fine, readable piece befitting of a lawyer who became a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) before he was elected in 2007. But going through it, Fashola came across as a deft political ball juggler evocative of his famous talents as a skillful footballer.

It was a thoroughbred political article created to question the popular conventional wisdom that emerged from a cross section of opinion writers and commentators describing the poll as a true reflection of the political will of the Ekiti people. He questioned the notion that incumbent Governor John Kayode Fayemi lost to former Governor Ayo Peter Fayose despite Fayemi’s performance.

He insinuated that Fayose’s vaunted connection to the grassroots owed to his use of some of the said “missing” federal funds to buy the vote. Fashola floated generally down the lane of the All Progressives Congress, APC’s, afterthought of disputing the Ekiti polls, even after the contestant himself, Governor Fayemi, had graciously conceded defeat and gained for himself overwhelming applause as a true democrat and statesman.

It was not really Fashola’s denunciation of the Ekiti vote, and his remonstration of the choice the Ekiti people made that brought me to this topic.

The truth is that Ekiti people had a credible background experience based on which they made their choice. Fayose was an elected governor of the state for nearly four years until he and his deputy were impeached by the State House of Assembly. Fayemi was also in office for nearly four years before the June 21, 2014 election. They knew what both men were capable of doing, and made their choice. They must now live with the choice they made.

I do not believe that “rice” and money decided the poll. Both sides spent money. It is futile to pretend otherwise. Every Nigerian incumbent politician does. That is what people refer to as the power of incumbency in Nigerian politics. That one party was able to manipulate their power of incumbency to win an election cannot make the loser a saint. There is no difference between the tricks that PDP marshals to win an election and the ones that other political parties, including the APC, deploy.

The truth is that the APC has so far failed on many fronts to show it is different from the PDP. The APC has not lived up to the clamour for an opposition party that is DIFFERENT and BETTER than the PDP.

The only thing we see is that the APC is sworn to use every trick at its disposal to snatch power at the federal level from the PDP and become the new dominant party. It is a legitimate aspiration, but the party has failed to adopt clear-cut strategies to portray itself as the credible alternative to the PDP. If anything, it has tended to mimic the ruling party, rather than make a difference.

For instance, the PDP’s cardinal principle of power sharing is through the zoning arrangement. Principal offices are shared among the geo-political zones of the country, starting from the office of the president. Even though zoning is not poignantly spelt out in the APC charter, it was the arrangement they adopted in the recent election of their party’s national executive.

Why did the APC fail to make a difference by, for instance, throwing the party positions open for THE MOST QUALIFIED individuals, thus putting emphasis on MERIT rather than the PDP’s QUOTA SYSTEM? It is clear that they have already decided to zone the presidency of the party to the North. Why not throw it open to the best and most electable candidate from its ranks to be different from PDP?

Also, the PDP is often known for “adoption” of candidates through “consensus”, a ploy by which the leaders impose candidates on members, which often leads disgruntled members to look for alternative platforms to pursue their ambitions.

Atiku Abubakar is a living example of this in APC ranks. Why doesn’t the APC make the difference by adopting TRUE DEMOCRACY, giving power to its members to elect candidates of their choice? Why did it use the PDP’s “consensus” method to produce the new National Chairman of the party, Chief John Oyegun? That is why Chief Tom Ikimi is disgruntled and might move over to another party.

Again, the PDP is known as the party of the Democrats, while the APC is the party of the Progressives. What, in their processes portray them respectively as such except in name only? The PDP heavily subscribes to the economic blueprint and strategies of the Bretton-Wood institutions – the International Monetary Fund, IMF and the World Bank.

They believe in the privatisation of public commercial ventures and the use of the Private, Public Participation, PPP, system of infrastructural delivery. Their economic model is primed primarily for the rich. As the economy grows, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.


A credible alternative which is Progressive should create an economic policy that will primarily benefit the masses. Is that the situation in Governor Fashola’s Lagos, the foremost APC state? Lagos is a state where roads and bridges built with public funds are exorbitantly tolled and the poor cannot afford to send their children to tertiary institutions run by the Lagos State Government under Governor Fashola. The Lagos State economic model is not only cozy for the rich, worse still, it is hostile to non-indigenes.

To become truly relevant and progressive, the APC must make a difference. It must stop mimicking the PDP that it spends so much money and energy disparaging. There must be a clear-cut difference between the party of the Democrats and that of the Progressives.