Afenifere: A Catalogue of Catastrophes
By Dauda S. Dauda, M.D.
Ternopol, Ukraine
May 8, 2003
Vice President Atiku Abubakar and his boss have one common, albeit unenviable, character trait – that of making insensitive, even potentially suicidal statements in the public domain which often lead perceptive observers to wonder to what, if any, use they have been putting the numerous advisers on retainer at the presidency.
If his choice of words could have been excused, the venue and timing of the call by the VP to the Yoruba to be wary of “fake Awoists” who use Awolowo’s name for selfish political gains could not have been more inappropriate and insensitive. For the Turakin Adamawa dropped the shocker while being hosted on a visit to Ibadan by Oyo State ‘Chief-Awoist’, Governor Lam Adesina sometime in June last year.
It would be safe to assume that he might have had others in mind when he made his observations, for it is not on record that Atiku had mentioned any specific names. Nevertheless, the Afenifere and its obsequious AD appendage took it upon itself to react to what they considered to be a challenge.
In a communiqué issued at the end of its National Executive Council meeting in Abuja on June 26, 2002, the Alliance for Democracy described the VP’s statements as aspersions on the person of Adesina and a “desecration of the Yoruba race (sic) and heritage”. Coupled with their then held belief that the PDP-controlled government had masterminded Ige’s assassination in December 2001 in order to destabilize the AD and were hence dragging their feet in unmasking his killers, the communiqué further directed the governors of the 6 states under the party’s control not to honour the President or his VP with state receptions whenever they may happen to be on a visit!
The severity of this ‘sentence’ passed on the nation’s numbers one and two citizens makes one to arrive at the conclusion that the VP must have struck a very sensitive nerve and raised a few questions. What is this ‘Awoism’ that they so much want to be identified with and who would qualify as an ‘Awoist’? Or is the VP right when he warned that there are indeed some people whose only claim to credibility rests on the use of Awolowo’s legacy in the South-West?
The April 2003 election results particularly in the South-West stronghold of AD/Afenifere should provide a lesson or two for these ad hominem politicians, a class which we most certainly would be better off without. The crushing and humiliating defeat of the AD at the hands of the PDP can only be described as good riddance to bad rubbish.
Since one is not holding brief for the PDP, or any other party for that matter, the reader would expect that such sweeping political statements as the ones just made should be based on a solid, objective assessment. Thus an attempt shall be made, in what follows, to present the arguments that have led to such conclusions.
Perhaps it would be impossible to put the whole issue of the AD/Afenifere’s waterloo at the 2003 polls in its proper perspective without going back to the very beginning. It all began with the grouping of Awolowo’s political faithful in what came to be known as ‘Afenifere’ in 1993. Along with the G34, NADECO and other such groupings, the group played a visible role in the campaign against the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections and providing opposition to the subsequent Abacha junta. With the lifting of the ban on party politics by the Abubakar regime some observers were quick in hailing the Afenifere decision to join with the G34 in the PDP.
Whatever promise this alliance would have held was quickly punctured by the subsequent actions of the Afenifere chieftains. They never hid the fact that their ultimate aim was power at the centre and their actions proved that they were willing to do anything in realisation of this goal. So it came to pass that within the spate of one week (!) the Afenifere moved from the PDP to the APP and finally settled in what they termed an “Alliance for Democracy” with their “credibility” still intact. Even then, an objective analysis of events makes it evident that the arguments they gave for such acrobatics held no water.
They left the PDP alleging that the party was not committed to the ‘power shift’ vogue of the day. Furthermore, they alleged that there were people therein who were “anti-June 12”. They then must have forgotten their thinking caps (and possibly their glasses) at home on the day they decided to join the APP, for it was only on closer examination that they discovered that the preponderant elements there were what they then termed “Abacha people”. Quite naturally they could not be seen associating with such characters, at least not with the monopoly they thought they held on “credibility”, “June 12”, “democracy” and other such appealing concepts.
The real motives behind this whole encamping-decamping circus were clear – the fact was that in both parties, the Afenifere gerontocrats knew that they would not be in a position to call the shots as usual. Their ‘anti-Abacha’, ‘pro-June 12’ and other “democratic” credentials notwithstanding, it would be hard to imagine the big-wigs at the PDP or APP acquiescing to the imposition of candidates after a hotel-room rendezvous of a handful of kingmakers. This is probably why each stage of their journey of ‘self-discovery’ resulted in their losing some of their followers. Till date this ‘we-know-what’s-best’ stance accounts for the majority of defections from their ranks.
It would probably be an understatement to state that General Abdulsalami Abubakar’s INEC bent the rules a little in giving recognition and subsequently registering the AD after the local government elections of 1998, for it was evident that the party had no substantial spread or following beyond its South-West stronghold. They knew that if they were to gain some sort of relevance in national politics, something had to be done. So what did they do? They went back to ally with the same “Abacha peoples’ party”! With Nigeria being what it is, virtually no eyebrows were raised.
The D’Rovans Hotel “primaries” in which a handful of ethnic chauvinists decided who, in their opinion, should be the next president of a country of over a hundred million should have set alarm bells ringing, but it did not. Undoubtedly, the fact that a whole section of the country could support such an arrangement gave rise to a certain sense of political invincibility which was later to prove their undoing.
The outcome of the 1999 presidential elections was not hard to predict. What surprised many was the ease and eagerness with which the Afenifere deputy head, Chief Bola Ige and Adesanya’s own daughter, Modupe Adelaja, jumped on the band-wagon of the PDP government when the invitation came, as one of Obasanjo’s ministers aptly put it, “to come and chop”. This “chopping” proved to be so good that Ige was telling anyone who cared to listen, to the ire of Solomon Lar and other PDP big-wigs who had other notions, that the Obasanjo government was in fact implementing an Afenifere/AD agenda!
As is their tradition, the Afenifere/AD could not make up their minds where exactly they stood throughout Obasanjo’s 1999-2003 tenure. One day they would be the quintessential opposition party complete with the attendant appropriate noises. Yet the very next day you could swear they were in cahoots with Obasanjo judging by the ardour of the defence they would put up especially if the criticism was coming from other quarters.
Thus when Obasanjo’s Man Friday, Tony Anenih led a delegation of sycophants a là Daniel Kanu’s YEAA to persuade Mr. President to run in 2003, Adesanya condemned the act. He rightly observed that these events showed that Nigerians have not learnt from past mistakes and correctly pointed out that the people behind them were the same set that had been mounting pressure on Abacha to run. Nwike, the AD scribe went further to add that the party would not endorse Obasanjo’s second term as they had a credible, marketable candidate for the 2003 elections.
Somewhere along the line both Adesanya’s vigilant conscience and the credible, marketable candidate we were promised disappeared into thin air. As the Kikuyu will tell you, you can bathe a billy goat as much as you please, but this will not make its odour any less offensive. Hence in the heat of the attempt by the National Assembly to impeach the president, AD members of both houses were directed not to support the moves.
Oyo State governor Lam Adesina even held a press conference in Ibadan to disclose that lawmakers in the Lower House were hobnobbing with military officers and instigating them to take over the government. The House then directed the security agencies to invite Alhaji Adesina to substantiate these allegations. As serious as the issue would have seemed, we do not have any confirmation as to whether this was done and if so, the results of the investigations.
The fact that Lam Adesina is not much of a national figure perhaps explains why not much attention has been paid to his occasional slips of tongue and sometimes downright amusing public statements. Adlai E. Stevenson, one-time US Vice President, might never have heard of Nigeria, but you could forgive one for surmising that he was referring to the actors on our stage when he observed that “a politician is a man who approaches every question with an open mouth." If Anenih is Mr. ‘Fix-it’, Adesina has to be Mr. ‘Running-mouth’ or maybe Alhaji ‘Double-speak’.
We recall Adesina alongside his Osun and Lagos state counterparts being amongst the first to congratulate Obasanjo after his “victory” at the PDP primaries in January. At the same time, he went on record as stating that it would be difficult for Afenifere (and hence AD) to endorse Obasanjo’s candidature. The reason, in his own words, “is because Afenifere is Alliance for Democracy and AD is Afenifere”. There you have it, just in case anyone was entertaining any illusions.
Throughout its existence, the Alliance for Democracy had painstakingly tried to give the impression of being a national as opposed to the ethnic organisation perceptive observers had always held it to be. Wittingly or unwittingly, nothing tells the story like it really is as the blatant braggadocio displayed by some of the AD’s chieftains. And the story they tell is no fairy tale. It is that of a bunch of sly washed-up old men who have continuously conspired to hold their people hostage by playing the ethnic card, and whose only ticket to political relevance is based not on their achievements or on the ideas they have of moving their people forward, but on the legend of one man.
No doubt, Chief Obafemi Awolowo achieved a lot for his people and will rightly remain fondly remembered and respected. The opportunists currently parading themselves as ‘Awoists’ know that his trademark is their meal-ticket and that if their people were to come to this conclusion, their game will be over. No wonder they foam at the mouth whenever anyone dares suggest the existence of ‘fake Awoists’ even without mentioning any names.
At the launching of the book ‘Unbreakable Heritage: The Story of Wole Awolowo’, in November 2002, Governor Adesina was his good old self when he declared that he and his colleagues in the six AD-controlled states were not entertaining any fears over their re-election in the 2003 gubernatorial polls. This, according to him, was due to the fact that “the good name of Chief Obafemi Awolowo will ensure success for AD governors", that “the voting pattern has not changed in the South-west. The people will still vote for Awolowo's men", therefore “all you need to do is to mention Awolowo”. He then declared that since AD governors were not ashamed to use Awolowo's name to win elections in 1999, they would do the same in 2003. Hear him: "whether anybody likes it or not, we will continue to mention and use Awolowo's name, people don't ask us for money they just tell us to carry go.”
Thus the South-West was taken for granted. The pseudo-Awoists were even contemplating in-roads into other regions by adopting dead-end incumbents Kachallah of Borno and Mbadinuju of Anambra - someone the PDP itself had discredited and discarded! As Labour Congress boss Comrade Adams Oshiomhole put it, "Awolowo will tumbled (sic) in his grave that a party founded in his name and ideals gave ticket (sic) to Mbadinuju”.
Obviously the “Awoists” thought they could take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night and wake up on a clean bed. Consequently, they appeared more concerned with the promise of federal appointments by Obasanjo’s PDP in return for their support in the presidential polls. Indeed the PDP carrot appeared so juicy that they failed to see the stick. Thus the AD-PDP “alliance” (if you can call it that) ended up in the AD losing virtually all its significant holdings to the ruling PDP. It seems that over the deafening roar of their actions, the people of the South-West were finding it increasingly difficult to hear the double-speak emanating from Afenifere.
The only AD governor to narrowly survive the PDP onslaught was the cat with nine lives from Chicago. At the outset, it seemed that if any AD governor’s position was in jeopardy, it was Tinubu’s. His term as governor is arguably one of the most turbulent of all. Ironically, what appears to have saved him this time around was his local conflict with Ganiyu Dawodu and resultant distance from Afenifere, which even led to Adesanya’s threat in late February to drop him as a candidate on the platform of the AD.
Some observers have been quick in hailing Afenifere/AD’s humiliation at the April 19 polls as the beginning of the end of the kind of tribal politics they stand for. However, whilst one is willing to admit the Afenifere bloc may have been edged out of relevance, the end of the phenomenon of ethnocentric politicking is not in sight, at least not at the moment.
Baring some unforeseen circumstance (like Obasanjo securing a constitutional amendment for a third term from the PDP dominated National Assembly – God save us!), the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE), which seems set to wrestle the control of South-West political clout from the Afenifere, will predictably see to it that their people flock back under the umbrella of the AD or any other party that will then be seen to be defending the exclusive interests of their “race”. I would be glad if this prediction proves widely off-mark, but old habits die hard.
In doing what they would ultimately be forced to, the YCE will just be following the well-trodden path of similar predecessors. In the words of British writer Douglas Adams, “human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
The April polls have come and gone. Lessons have been learnt the hard way. Indeed had our “Awoists” cared to listen, any of the marijuana-smoking area boys in their backyards would have rightly pointed it out to them that whilst you can fool some of the people some of the time, you cannot fool all the people all of the time. Only time will tell whether the lessons will prove enduring. Meanwhile, as the ‘Cicero of Esa-Oke’ once advised in the heyday of another circus, all we can do is to “siddon look”.
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