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Beyond Olusola Oke’s victory in the November 26, 2016 Gubernatorial election in Ondo State, Nigeria, is the recurring question of the truth in Nigeria’s Federalism. As it currently is, all of Nigeria’s political parties are mandated to exhibit presence in all of Nigeria’s 36 states with their headquarters in Abuja, the capital city. Flowing from this is the centralizing influence in all elections throughout the country where even party primaries are superintended by party officials outside areas where elections are to be held and witnessed and authenticated by INEC, the Independent National Electoral Commission. This has created a situation where forces outside the main areas of electoral contest determine the fortunes of aspirants based on criteria solely determined by such forces which usually run against the tide of prevailing local interests and which often result in aspirants seeking their objectives outside their preferred party formations in the expectation that the will of the people will prevail but which is not always so.
The situation is further compounded by making INEC the sole umpire in these elections while relegating state electoral commissions to only local government elections. The argument behind this lies in the supposition that a country-wide electoral umpire will reduce chances of electoral manipulations. This argument does not hold water as the essence of elections, in the first instance, is for the manifestation of the power and value of the people which had now been taken away by their inability to choose their own referees. And this is the story of Nigeria since 1966.

Political and economic independence presupposes the necessity of the formerly oppressed to articulate and practicalize their God-given ability to run their societies the best way possible for the greatest number of her people, otherwise independence has no meaning. Besides, when a segment of the country, in this instance, the military, assumes the role of the soul of the country, questions will arise as to the nature of such a military and the methodologies of its assumptions, which were not freely given by the people but forced on them.

Nigeria’s military, being a product of its colonial origins, has been unable to shake off this domineering consciousness leading to attempts to define Nigeria in its image thereby reinforcing the foundational basis for colonization and racism by denying the capacity and capability of the Peoples of Nigeria as masters of their destiny. The military completely embraced these racist and colonial rationalizations for its own existence hence cannot establish a procedure aimed at the independence of the People as managers of their own affairs. This resulted in the imposition of the unitarist Constitution under a false “We the People” premise. To make matters worse, the Constitution, being almost a carbon copy of the United States Constitution, denied for Nigeria, the existence of the social, cultural and economic circumstances which brought about the formation of the United States in spite of the glaring obviousness.
The United States Constitution was a product of the willingness of the colonies/States to create a “more perfect Union” which led to the creation of the United States as a sovereign entity. The opposite is the case with Nigeria, where it was assumed by the military that, because it exists as an institution, therefore a Nigeria exists; whereas the Nationalities that make up the geo-political space can be likened to the colonies/States that ended up as the United States of America.
Nigeria’s Independence Constitution recognized these differences which allowed the establishment of a “true” Union such that Regional elections were the functions of the Regions in spite of the fact that some political parties existed outside their own particular Regions while some didn’t bother to exist beyond their immediate locality. This is as it should be, since no Region was exclusionary; in other words, peoples from all over Nigeria(not to mention beyond) are to be found in all of the Regions making their living; more so in Yorubaland where they were not molested for any reason but were and are welcomed as fellow citizens not only of the same country but essentially of the same continent. Thus, when the 1964 Federal elections held, the people of the Western Region paid no particular attention to it essentially because of the then prevailing political animus orchestrated by the central authorities against the then dominant political party in the Region; whereas the opposite was the case when the Regional elections were held in 1965 and the people rose up to the occasion when it became obvious that the then ruling party attempted to rig itself into power.
The long and short of this is that the Federal or central government should not be concerned with any elections since these can be left to the purview of the Constituent Units. This becomes imperative because one of those appointed to a federal Committee on Constitutional and Electoral Reforms is the former APC National Legal Adviser who played an ignominious role in the Ondo State electoral brouhaha that led to Olusola Oke’s leaving the party to seek his mandate under the AD.
Muiz Banire, the former National Legal Adviser was said to have provided the legal opinion that allowed the manipulation of the state primaries in favor of interests outside Ondo State; an opinion which eventually formed the basis for a national mathematical formulation of five greater than six that allowed their preferred candidate to fly the party’s flag.
The question now is whether Muiz Banire will use his membership of this committee to acquiesce to continuous meddling of the center in the affairs of the Constituents or not. Of course, reasons would be found for this continuity but it must be borne in mind that, as noted earlier, all political parties are, by definition, national. The natural delineation of Nigeria mandates it to be so. Political parties, regardless of ideological leanings, reflect their natural ethno-national origins and constituencies and these are to be found all over Nigeria hence there is no need for a bureaucratized “nationalization” of political parties.
This “nationalization” allowed an Igbo Governor, from Imo State, to come to Ondo, a Yoruba state purposely to canvass for, according to him, the turn out of Igbo votes in order to ensure victory for his party’s candidate as Governor, which by itself, negates the principle of a pan-Nigerian, countrywide electoral process but which was at the same time, a reflection of Nigeria’s political reality. While it may arguably be said that transcending such a reality is a necessity, it must also be borne in mind that such transcendence cannot be achieved on the platform of negating the “other” but in directly recognizing the mutuality in their existence which no bureaucratization of electoral process has resolved or can ever resolve.
Transcendence in this context, therefore, must lie in the recognition of the rights and abilities of the Constituents to manage their own internal affairs and not be subjected to some irrational central objectives.
This is more so when a historical trajectory exist to show that the action of this Igbo Governor was following a tendency that can be traced back to 1948, when Nnamidi Azikwe claimed that the Igbo had been ordained by the “god of Africa” to liberate the rest of us from the barbarism of the ages; just as another Igbo, Mr. Onyeama said that it is only a matter of time before the Igbo take over the rest of Nigeria; likewise Azikiwe claiming that his party won the 1951 Western Regional elections all the way to their 2015 claims of being the majority in Lagos, not to mention the attempt to create an Igbo monarchy in Ondo State in parallel with existing Yoruba Monarchy and now to making an attempt at “installing” the Ondo Governor.
Similarly for the “north”; aside from permanently staking claims to political leadership of Nigeria based on its perception as the successor to the British colonial state, its praxis had been anchored on its control of all central establishments, notably the military and other security services, right from the First Republic up till the present, reinforced by flawed censuses and outright illegalities as experienced during the illegal declaration of the State of Emergency in the Western Region up till now where the President acclaimed Ondo Governorship primary election as “ transparent, credible, free and fair”.
The battle thus seems to be focused on the political neutralization of Yorubaland by both the “north” and the “east” as a foundation for their continued dominance of Nigeria (leaving aside the minorities for the moment, for they are also victims of this battle), such that Yorubaland becomes a prize for whoever becomes victorious between them or in the alternative, their coalition will continue to run Nigeria as it pleases as had happened during the First and Second Republics. That the “north” would, since 1999, resort to recruiting myopic and opportunist politicians among the Yoruba to try to neutralize our expectations proves the truism of this scenario.
What then would an Olusola Oke victory portend for Yorubaland in particular and Nigeria in general? It will be a victory over unnecessary and unwelcome central interference in our local affairs; it will show those Yoruba who have mortgaged their conscience that the attempt at imposing an unwanted political paradigm will be vigorously resisted; above all, that history is on our side and the necessity for real Constitutional and Electoral Reforms cannot be entrusted to those who attained committee membership as a compensation from those opposed to Yoruba expectations.