Abiodun Awolaja

AHEAD of the 2027 polls, the political stakes have no doubt heightened. Among the developments that shocked book-makers, this week, was the declaration by the Oyo State Governor, Mr Seyi Makinde, for president on the platform of the PDP/Allied Peoples Movement (APM) Alliance. Almost as if on cue, apologists of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) reacted sharply, demonizing the Oyo helmsman. Predictably, hirelings who have done their best to destroy the Peoples Democratic Party while serving in the ruling APC, vented their spleen on the Oyo Governor, declaring his ambition “dead on arrival.” These elements, apparently realised, albeit too late, that they do not have a monopoly on politicking. These bats, neither fully PDP nor APC, have been parading themselves as leaders of a fake faction of the PDP even while the recent Supreme Court judgment which invalidated the Ibadan Convention of the party still did not recognise their rebel faction, which has not hidden its role as an engine of destabilization in the former ruling party. Their depraved antics need not detain us in this piece.

Somehow, ignoring logic and the history that stares them in the face, supporters of the APC and President Bola Tinubu have been trying desperately to robe Makinde in the garb of a saboteur. If a Yoruba man is president and is seeking re-election, they assert, it amounts to treachery for a fellow Yoruba man to be interested in the same office. These individuals, who did not canvass any such argument when Makinde backed Tinubu’s election in 2023 despite being a PDP member, conveniently choose to ignore the facts of his-tory. During the onset of the current Fourth Republic when a Yoruba man, Olusegun Obasanjo, emerged president, a Yoruba man, incidentally the same Bola Tinubu, was his chief-est adversary. These days, though, criticizing the president or taking a different political path as a Yoruba man has been all but codified as a mortal sin. On that score, a personality like Rauf Aregbesola is consistently portrayed as a sellout and betrayer simply for making the same political realignment that Tinubu has made throughout his life. Tinubu, who was elected on the Platform of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) on the strength of the support of Afenifere leaders, jettisoned the elders and charted his own political path, which has apparently paid off today. Why is it a crime today if another politician chooses his own path?

Those intent on casting Seyi Makinde as a villain on account of his 2027 declaration should learn, as Wole Soyinka warned during the heady days when he battled the bolekaja critic Chin-weizu, to mind the thorns. Tinubu’s 2027 politics, like his politics since time immemorial, has never been about the Yoruba. In 2011 when the then ruling party, PDP, zoned the speakership of the House of Reps to the South-West, it was Tinubu and his acolytes in the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) who truncated that arrangement and enabled the ascendancy of a Fulani, Aminu Tambuwal, to a position reserved exclusively for the Yoruba. No less a personality than Adebisi Akande, pioneer chairman of the ruling APC, confirmed Tinubu/ACN’s role in that historic subversion. To now cast Makinde as an enemy of the Yoruba simply because he announced a presidential aspiration is to play ping-pong with the facts of history, especially given the fact that you cannot point to a single incident in which Makinde has fought against the interest of the Yoruba. The Yoruba believe in restructuring of the polity and Makinde has fought for restructuring with every fiber of his being.

Despite being on an opposition platform, Makinde as a PDP member banded with APC governors and they formed Amotekun through the instrumentality of DAWN.

I happen to know that Makinde played more prominent roles in the formation of Amotekun than he has been credited for, but out of respect for the blessed memory of Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu (SAN), I will say no more on this point. It suffices to say, though, that Makinde has never been found wanting wherever Yoruba interests, broadly captured in reports such as those of the 2014 National Conference, have been canvassed. He was the only South-West governor physically present during the last Obafemi Awolowo Foundation Lecture where the renowned intellectual, Wale Adebanwi, dissected some of the challenges confronting Nigeria and Yorubaland.

Besides, by endorsing a governorship aspirant with an APC background as his preferred successor in Oyo State, Makinde has shown his predilection for, as he himself would usually say, science, data, logic, capacity and competence. Against this backdrop, it amounts to chicanery, if not buffoonery, to equate his political opposition to Tinubu with opposition to Yorubaland. That is lazy, subversive logic, the kind of logic I dismissed in the past when certain people equated progressivism and the Omoluabi ethos with the membership of the defunct ACN. As I asked then, could people like Rashidi Yekini be described as non-Omoluabis simply because they were not members of the ACN?

I now turn to some of the posers posed to Makinde in the media this week by an APC journalist in the Tinubu media. They include the following: How far can he go in his bid to displace President Tinubu? Is he a household name in Nigeria? What would he tell Nigerians and what is his ideology? Does he have the structure, and, finally, will the South-West leave certainty (Tinubu’s presidency) for uncertainty? Since many of these questions require prophetic insight, we can simply reply by summoning the Yoruba saying: “Ko s’eni to m’ola.” (No one knows tomorrow). None of us knows what will happen next month or, for that matter, next week. Humility would require all of us to realize that we are mere mortals and that the future is minted only by Divinity. Between now and the January 2027, election, there is a distance of seven months. Nonetheless, it is poor analysis to suggest that whatever Makinde lacks today cannot be acquired tomorrow.

More fundamentally, to say that the South-West now has “certainty” simply because a Yoruba man is president is to play games with facts. The certainty that the Yoruba and other Nigerians have today is that of widespread insecurity and poverty. It is the certainty of buying fuel at N1,325 instead of the N198 at which Muhammadu Buhari left it. It is the reality of a cow costing more than certain categories of cars. The South-West would be willing to jettison the certainty of this horrid, horrible reality for fresh water (Omi Tuntun) which Makinde represents.