Demola Rewaju: Jimi Agbaje, Koro and the PDP Lagos albatross (Y! Politico)

by Demola Rewaju

Demola-Thomas-Olarewaju1

While Agbaje has a more television friendly mien and urban organisational acumen, Koro inspires greater loyalty from people and has always managed to put himself in pride of place at the national level

Flowing from Tunde Leye’s Friday Thoughts where he accurately postulated that the APC is badly positioned to maintain his stronghold on Lagos [READ HERE], I think it is necessary to appraise the alternatives to the ruling party as far as Lagos state is concerned. While one would prefer that political punditry be left to those of us who have sold our writing pens to stuff like that for a long time(lol), I cannot add a jot to what TL wrote on the subject already. The hallmark of great political analysis (or any form of literature) for me is when I wish I wrote it instead so please do well to read that piece before continuing with this one.

I came back on Friday, 11 July from the Lagos PDP Rally for Gov-elect of Ekiti State, Ayo Fayose fuming at what was obviously a lack of coordination for a rally of not up to ten thousand people. I alerted my editor on this platform that I would like to send in my article a bit early until Ayokunle Odekunle (Oddy) reminded me that my column here comes up bi-weekly. A full week after that rally, my strong feelings on the Lagos PDP are yet unchanged but one crucial permutation has come into the picture: Jimi Agbaje has come out to say that he has been a registered member of the PDP for about two years now and he will be attempting to run for governor on the party platform in Lagos.

The platform one runs on is as important as the personality of the candidate. Ayo Fayose may be a strong grassroots mobiliser but he was unable to win the senatorial seat of Ekiti Central Senatorial District in 2011 because he ran on the platform of a Labour Party that had no structures. By ‘structures’ we mean the network of loyal party men and women who can mobilise for the party, regardless of whether they like the candidate or not. Elections in the final analysis will be broken down to polling unit by polling unit and ward by ward. If a party does not have strong leaders at the polling unit level who can influence voters on the queue or influence them to come out and vote, that party is as good as dead. Strong leaders at the polling unit will ensure the other party does not rig, they will not be bribed to compromise their party’s votes and they will be experienced enough to know how to recognise when things are not going in their favour and what to do about it.

(I must warn here that this is not a discourse on politics at the ideal level where many of us wish it were but at the real level of how it is played in Nigeria. This does not however mean one approves of the methods of course…).

By the time the defeated senatorial candidate Ayo Fayose found himself back in PDP Ekiti, a party he’d helped build in the state, he was home and victory over the incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi was possible. Those who say Fayose would have won regardless of whichever party he used as a platform have failed to understand how important structural organisation is in politics.

These thoughts lead us to asking how strong the PDP structure in Lagos is – and my candid answer is that it is a terribly compromised, weakened and unambitious party structure – and I know what I am saying. I participated in the last PDP primaries as a coordinator for Babatunde Gbadamosi (who’s in the race again this time) and what I saw in Lagos PDP of 2011 convinced me that not only was this party incapable of winning the Alausa elections but also totally and firmly uninterested in winning it for PDP. The Lagos PDP rally was a display of absolute lack of internal organisation of how to organise a political rally. For a programme scheduled to start by 10am to drag on until about 3pm because the organisers had little sense of timing is absolutely a bad omen. By the time Ayo Fayose came in with Buruji Kashamu, the Minister of State for Defence had left. Party aspirants were allowed to address the crowd and all but one, Babatunde Gbadamosi was able to rally the party base with a strong analytical speech on the proven strength of PDP so far in Lagos state.

There are two and a half factions in PDP Lagos: with one led by Bode George, the other by Seye Ogunlewe and Musiliu Obanikoro leading a smaller group. Bode George’s faction controls the party at the state executive with one or two nominees from the other factions; Ogunlewe operates from the Ikorodu arm, Koro has loyalists everywhere as do several other party chieftains who oscillate between the two and a half factions. The factionalisation of the party started after the gruesome killing of Funso Williams and the attempt by Bode George to impose the late politician’s wife on the party (a half-baked idea that will justify an assertion I will make shortly). It took the intervention of Tony Anenih in a re-run primaries to fix Sen. Musiliu Obanikoro as the PDP candidate. Koro managed to win 389,688 votes against Raji Fashola’s roughly 848, 424  votes in 2007. By 2011, Ade Dosunmu barely managed to get 300,450 votes against Fashola’s 1,509,113. Presenting a candidate who must never address a crowd of more than four individuals of whom two of them must be under the age of 18 is a sign that a party is unserious. I came close to shedding tears as I watched Raji Fashola batter him in the 2011 gubernatorial debates. I saw him speak again last week at the PDP Lagos Rally and I honestly felt like borrowing him anything from Charisma to oratory – not that I have those in large supplies but it was that bad. Dosunmu is a product of the Bode George faction whose wife Roli Bode-George at the 2011 primaries sat under a colourful umbrella to ensure the will of her imprisoned husband was done. The Ogunlewe faction is dogged with allegations of working for the ruling APC and is firmly allied with the Jimi Agbaje candidacy this time around. Presently, the party maintains a shaky alliance of all factions with representation in the exco led by Rtd. Capt. Tunji Shelle who was the Lagos PDP secretary while Koeshedo was the chairman. Both are products of the George faction.

One factor that will help Jimi Agbaje as Lagos PDP’s candidate for governor is that he has a solid organisation outside the party structure comprised of professionals who can organise basic things such as campaign rallies, exciting jingles, creative adverts and such other things as necessary to win elections in a state like Lagos. From reliable sources, I first heard of the Jimi Agbaje 2015 agenda in the middle of last year. While PDP has the structures across the local government, those structures must be balanced with an outside and better organised structure that can prevent collusion with APC partymen at the polling units. This is where Agbaje’s Eko Initiative may prove crucial.

Does that rule Obanikoro out? I doubt it. Having successfully confronted the Bode George machinery within the party and defeated it in 2007, Koro remains one of the strongest hopes of the party, especially with his ministerial appointment which gives him the ability to dispense political patronage. Koro’s son – Ibrahim Babajide – successfully contested for chairmanship in Tinubu’s LGA and some would insist that he won but the elections were compromised at some point. In the middle of the night while the controversy raged at the LASIEC office and Koro’s life was under threat of attack from ACN thugs, Bode George came to stand by him – a sign that perhaps a truce can be reached between them.

While Agbaje has a more television friendly mien and urban organisational acumen, Koro inspires greater loyalty from people and has always managed to put himself in pride of place at the national level – from a senatorial seat with AD in 2003 to becoming Obasanjo’s preferred candidate for Lagos in 2007 to an ambassadorial position under Yar’Adua and now a Minister of State, one cannot but help having a feeling that Koro is perpetually destined for high offices and glory.

Since both Koro and Agbaje participated in that 2007 elections and Koro scored higher votes, Koro appears to be the more marketable candidate. That factor may however be put down to the party platform on which Koro ran. Agbaje almost singlehandedly built the DPA into a formidable election machine along with other Afenifere elders in Lagos. Either of both candidates can be successfully packaged and put forth to the electorate with huge results but there’s yet another factor affecting the PDP in Lagos which is that perhaps many of the leaders do not want to win the gubernatorial elections.

Politics requires patronage of some sorts to be sustained and the PDP in Lagos is often as adrift as a lost child. Having never held power in the state since 1999, Lagos PDP has never held power in Lagos for one day and patronage via appointments from Abuja are usually not enough to go round. In the absence of a state governor or even a former governor, everyone can claim to be the leader of the party in Lagos state and this works well for all those who lay claim to this position. Bode George, Seye Ogunlewe, Bode Oyedele and other party elders all lay claim to being leaders of Lagos PDP and are never really serious about winning elections since they cannot become governors themselves. A Lagos PDP governor will weaken their own negotiating hand, that is why a Bode George will prefer a Dosunmu or Mrs Williams who cannot win LG elections and even if does become governor by a miracle, he or she will be pliable to Bode George.

And there are some PDP Lagos ‘leaders’ who are on the payroll of the state government directly by cash payments and indirectly by contracts award. Another set of PDP leaders at the lower levels receive their patronage directly from Bola Tinubu, the APC godfather. This is why during the election cycles in 2007 and 2011, several PDP leaders defected to the APC. In 2007, it was Enoch Ajiboso, Ademola Adeniji-Adele, Tunde Williams, Princess Adenrele Adeniran-Ogunsanya and Tunde Braimah who all decamped to the then Action Congress. In 2011, it was the turn of Olorunfunmi Bashorun in Ikorodu, to Demola Seriki (a whole former Minister!), Wale Ahmed, Tunde Salau and Lanre Razaq who defected to the Action Congress of Nigeria. The easy truce between PDP and APC in Lagos has come to a point where the governor’s seat goes to APC and the presidential elections go to PDP as seen in 2003, 2007 and 2011.

Facing a potentially weakened APC in 2015 and a distracted Bola Tinubu looking for national relevance, PDP’s best chance since Funso Williams polled roughly 700,000 votes to Tinubu’s 900,000 in 2003 may well be here. The advantage of presidential backing and a heavy financial war chest are why the PDP platform is so attractive but it must come with a caveat: all factions must unite behind a candidate that must emerge through a free and fair primaries.

Lagos PDP in 2015 will be unable to win the Lagos elections because there is a palpable lack of organisation. Lagos PDP in 2015 will be unwilling to win the Lagos elections because its leaders are either compromised into not wanting to rock Tinubu’s boat or selfishly holding on to power as ‘leader of Lagos. It is one thing to be willing but unable, another thing to be unwilling but able yet the worst must be to be both unwilling and unable – that is like being in a state of political delirium or ‘highness’, like floating on the clouds without a shred of care. Lagos PDP as presently constituted is both unwilling and unable to win Lagos state. All talks of victory for now are mere talk. The Ogunlewe faction is said to have adopted the Jimi Agbaje candidacy. The next move is up to Obanikoro or Bode George.

 

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Demola Rewaju is a writer with a background in Nigeria’s political history, party tendencies and ideological activism developed during his days as a Students’ Union leader in the University of Ado Ekiti. He tweets from  @DemolaRewaju on twitter and leans heavily towards the Peoples’ Democratic Party. He is also a real estate consultant in Lagos.

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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