One dance step, one vote
This weekend was the first time in Nigeria’s history that ability to dance is suspected to have been a major factor in an election victory. Osun State Governor Ademola Nurudeen Jackson Adeleke is already recognized to possess one of this country’s best dancing steps, with adroit feet movements, sharp body wiggles, smartly flailing arms and exquisite sideways throwing of head, whether in suit or in flowing native agbada, always with a forked cap to match.
All election candidates in Nigeria must at some rallies undertake dance steps in response to singing by supporters and drumming by praise singers. Some do it very well; some do it clumsily; while a few others are excused because they sport an unfriendly mien, disguised as seriousness. Almost no one thought of Adeleke as a great dancer; he has one of the bulkiest frames of Nigerian governors, so the bet was on more trim governors and ministers to shine as dancers, but Adeleke topped them all. It was even calculated that the number of votes cast for him in weekend’s election roughly equaled the number of dance steps he did since 2022, when he was elected governor. That is, one dance step, one vote.
On Sunday, August 16, INEC’s Returning Professor, Professor Joshua Ogunwole, declared Adeleke, candidate of Accord Party, winner of the previous day’s Osun State off-season governorship election having secured 511,067 votes. After a see-saw race all afternoon and evening, he defeated the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate Bola Oyebamiji who polled 444,815 votes. Coming in a distant third was African Democratic Congress (ADC) candidate Dr. Najeem Salaam, who got only 17,180 votes, despite the support of former state governor and ADC national secretary Rauf Aregbesola.
What role did Adeleke’s adroit dancing play in his victory? We would never know for sure, since we do not have reliable exit polls in this country, where voters will tell us exactly how and why they voted the way they did. Defeating APC in Osun State was a milestone achievement, for many reasons. One, it is in the heart of Yorubaland, home turf of President Bola Tinubu. Osun is thought to be his original home state before he shifted base to Lagos. Leading APC in the state is the President’s nephew, former state governor and current Minister of Marine and Blue Economy Gbenga Oyetola, who reportedly backed Oyebamiji to the hilt right from the party primaries. Besides, Oyetola has a big axe to grind with Adeleke, who denied him a second governorship term by defeating him in the 2022 elections.
APC sent ten state governors, led by the Senate President, to Osun to back Oyebamiji, a show of political force and colour that no other party in the country can match since the heydays of PDP rule. Given that the average Nigerian state governor moves with a motorcade of twenty vehicles, led by a siren car, surrounded by security vehicles and gun totting Mopols and bodyguards, with Senate President Akpabio’s motorcade being twice as long, that’s enough vehicles to overwhelm all the roads that Adeleke ceremoniously commissioned in the heat of the campaign.
It was not even the huge APC support entourage that frightened Adeleke. We did not hear him complain about that; in fact, I am sure he had to accommodate them, as protocol demands. He was more scared of the 15,000 policemen, 1,500 Civil Defence corpsmen and thirty Police Commissioners [Compols] led by a Deputy Inspector General [DIG] that descended on the state, ostensibly to ensure election security. Osun has thirty local government areas, meaning each LGA had a full Compol who displaced the DPO and took charge. IGP Tunde Disu, when we vote in presidential elections in January, when citizens in every state and FCT will vote on the same day, will you have a total of 1,110 Compols and 37 DIGs to deploy? Otherwise, is this a useful test run, when it cannot be replicated in the general election? Osun is not even regarded as one of the politically volatile states in Nigeria. There are at least ten other states that, from political antecedents, will require a Compol or even an AIG in every LGA when they hold elections. Oga Disu will have to recall the army of retired Compols, AIGs and DIGs in Nigeria to make up for the shortfall.
But let’s give it to the policemen; their orders were not to return an APC victory by hook or by crook. It reminds me of the story of an American filmmaker in the 1930s who was shooting a film about top Mafia gangster Al Capone. He named the film “Scarface,” which was Capone’s alias. For security reasons he hired a whole hotel floor in Los Angeles and posted several guards. Still, as he was working in the night, he heard a knock on the door and four heavily armed Mafiosi walked in and interrogated him. He denied that the film was about Al Capone. To his surprise, they said, “Should we tell Al that?” and they left him unharmed. Obviously, their orders were not to kill him, despite the menacing presence. obviously. The Cops in Osun had no orders to demolish Adeleke.
But we can understand the governor’s fear because, on election eve, Senator Francis Fadahunsi, who represents Osun East in the Senate, said something to the effect that Adeleke’s Accord Party supporters should be killed. He subsequently clarified that he meant to be killed in the ballot box, but it was an unfortunate choice of words, akin to when President Obasanjo described the 2007 election in nearby Ondo State as a “do or die,” or when a Kaduna State APC chieftain urged supporters at a rally to shave and bring Senator Shehu Sani’s Afro hair.
The cops’ apparent neutrality had earlier been soiled by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s [EFCC] move, on the eve of the election, to freeze Osun State government accounts in order, it was claimed, to forestall vote buying. President Tinubu himself declared the move to be an embarrassment and publicly ordered EFCC to roll it back. Which one is vote buying? State governments, and the Federal Government too, do all sorts of things when elections approach, from clearing leave grants and pension benefits to sponsoring pilgrimages and mass weddings, all as backhand vote buying.
It is not the few naira notes handed to voters near the polling station that make all the difference; that one is usually meant to offset their transport costs, otherwise they will sit at home and say they cannot afford taxi fare [due, allegedly, to withdrawal of petrol subsidy]. Nor is it a new problem; on the eve of the 1992 National Assembly elections, I interviewed for Citizen magazine the NRC Chairman of Ondo Local Government outside NRC National Headquarters in Abuja, and he said, “My supporters will say, why should I take my money and join vehicle just because I want to vote for somebody?” So, when we hold general elections in January, EFCC should better freeze the accounts of all 36 state governments, of the Federal Capital Territory, of all 774 local governments and FCT area councils, and of the Federal Government as well, in order to forestall open and disguised vote buying.
In the wake of Adeleke’s victory, the opposition African Democratic Congress [ADC] leaders were understandably ecstatic, saying in a congratulatory statement that it signposts what is about to happen next year. Well, it might and it might not. This is not the first time that a Federal ruling party lost a governorship election under its very nose. In 1983, despite its “landslide victory” in the presidential and most other elections, NPN’s candidate Adamu Attah was defeated in Kwara State by UPN’s Josiah Sunday Olawoyin. Of course it was the doing of NPN kingmaker Oloye Sola Saraki, who fell out with his former protégé Attah.
When PDP reigned supreme in Nigeria, it still lost governorship elections at various times in Kano, Jigawa, Borno, Yobe, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Bauchi, Nasarawa, Lagos, Ondo, Ekiti, Anambra, Imo, Abia and Edo. That was even before the party’s wholesale collapse in 2015. So, Adeleke’s win might signpost electoral trouble for APC next year, but then, it was hardly cheering news from ADC either, whose candidate performed woefully in Osun. One observer said at the weekend that ADC supporters actually teamed up with Accord and voted for Adeleke. If so, their leader Aregbesola did not say so, the way former state governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola publicly endorsed the APC candidate but ended up losing his own polling unit to Accord.
Oga Adeleke, what is the best way to celebrate this great victory? Is it to dance all the way from Ede to Ife to Oshogbo to Lagos and all the way to London, to great lyrics hastily composed by your nephew Davido, who is just back from the World Cup? The official campaign season for 2027 will soon start. I suspect that governorship aspirants all over the country will learn from Adeleke’s success and will soon turn every campaign podium into a dance arena.