By Palladium
Last week was a momentous time in the political career of Rauf Aregbesola, a former Osun State governor on the platform of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and Interior minister. His group, the Omoluabi Progressives, sensing impending expulsion from the All Progressives Congress (APC), had resolved last Sunday to exit the party. News of their exit was published on Monday. Three days later, the APC wielded the big stick, disregarded the voluntary exit of the Aregbesola group, and expelled them. Whether voluntary or compelled, Mr Aregbesola is now in limbo. Soon, however, he and his group are expected to berth in another political party, for he is still determined to have the last laugh over his opponents whom he has continued to excoriate.
Mr Aregbesola occupied a commanding height in the Bola Ahmed Tinubu political family for about 15 years, seemingly unable to put a foot wrong in the eyes of his political mentor. There was of course no foundation to his prominence, not ideological, though he pretends to some amorphous form of socialism, and not even private or public principles, for he was incapable of both. But he was mildly charismatic, voluble, self-absorbed, and capable anytime of promising more than he could ever deliver. His mentor, however, trusted him and canonised him. For eight years between 1999 and 2007 he was a commissioner in Lagos State, and worked quite well under supervision. But as governor of Osun, again for eight years between 2010 and 2018, he floundered badly, subjecting the state to all kinds of sophomoric Cuban-style regimentation, and strewing the state with half-baked social organisation experiments.
If his mentor and party began to doubt his administrative capacity and temperament, they did not betray their suspicion. But the boisterousness of his youth and his appointment as Interior minister for eight years soon led him to the idiosyncratic overreach that plagued his past, revealing the speciousness of his philosophy, the indiscipline that permeated his governorship and politics, and the wild assumptions that persistently undermined his judgement. In 2018, he was determined to impose a successor as Osun governor, but failed for a number of reasons that were not beyond his feeble ability to manage had he possessed the right temperament and judgement. In 2022 he also aligned his political group with the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to prove the point that he was a force to be reckoned with in the state. But his characteristic impatience made his victory Pyrrhic.
By 2022, his fate was sealed. There was little he did in the past, including his contributions to the APC presidential election victory in 2015, that was capable of sustaining his self-confessed prodigious talents for political mobilisation. But circumstances propelled him forward and upward until he climbed the dizzying height from which he has now plunged to earth precipitately. Believing he had an unbreakable hold on his political group, and assuming that his popularity in Osun had not waned as much as his enemies imagined, he took on his mentor with the thunderous blather about how God abases the proud. Said Mr Aregbesola with inflated pomposity: “As it was in Lagos yesterday, so shall it be in Osun today. What is good for the goose is also good for the gander. Only God can terrify us, not man. Go and tell them wherever they are, we own this party. We own this Afenifere group. We own this people-loving group started by our patriarchs, Obafemi Awolowo and Bola Ige. This was Elder Akande’s group before he temporarily left us. That was how it was in Lagos at a time; a governor derailed and the party members unseated him using the ballot boxes. We exalted him beyond his status and he turned himself to a god over us and we had sworn to ridicule anyone who compares himself to God. God has no competitor; He is enough to be God.”
The problem was not that he disagreed with his party or his mentor, or that he insulted everybody who did not kowtow to him. The problem was not also that he felt genuinely aggrieved that he was stripped of any significance in Osun, and castrated in Lagos Alimosho local government politics. The problem was not even that it was despicable that he looked his mentor and party in the face and imperiously cautioned them about their political choices. Mr Aregbesola’s problems are two-fold: his impatience borne out of his hubris, and his poor judgement borne out of his lack of depth, contrary to the impressions he had created since 2010 when the courts validated his election as Osun governor in place of the usually somnolent former governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola. Regarding his feistiness and impatience, they were intrinsic to his mental constitution. No surgery could help him, and no shrink could mollify his moods. As for his superficiality, he needed it to bamboozle the impressionable youths of the Osun backwater. He made casual allusions to Marxism and Fidel Castro’s Cuba to which he was unquenchably besotted, but without contextualising his beliefs within the global pushback which that ideology was experiencing. And to worsen his plight, he menaced the state and everyone with his closet fanaticism, leading the state’s intelligentsia to feel wearied by his propensities.
Having fallen from his Olympian heights, and disdaining wise counsel to stop struggling when trapped in quicksand, Mr Aregbesola must now ponder his future. He could not conceivably jump into the PDP, for that major opposition party is itself engaged in a titanic struggle to stay afloat and remain politically relevant following the schisms that have skewered its administrative organs. The former governor had helped the party take Osun to prove a point, and would be tempted to cavort in it for the coming 2026 governorship election; but he cannot seriously see a pathway to any continuing relevance in the state through the PDP. Not only that, the PDP governor in the state, Ademola Adeleke, apart from being fundamentally incapable of ruling anything, has formed the atrocious habit of elevating trivia into a governing art and dancing the day away in the heat of competition among Nigeria’s governors. Osun has always been regicidal, but it is hard to imagine that they are also impervious to the national ridicule they are been subjected to on account of their governor.
Mr Aregbesola is not endowed with significant administrative acumen. To opt for the PDP despite that party’s troubles is to believe he possesses the magic wand capable of affecting the fortunes of the party positively or bathing and salving its wounds. As large as his hubris is, it is unlikely the former governor can be so optimistic. Worse, PDP leaders, though temporarily distracted by in-fighting and sloppy politicking, are unlikely to see a largely diminished Mr Aregbesola as an asset. To join the PDP would also mean adopting the frolicking Governor Adeleke as his party leader in Osun, a prospect so galling to even a fake communist that he has probably never contemplated it beyond using the party as a tool to exact revenge on the APC. Some media reports suggest that the former governor and his group, knowing full well that they must berth somewhere, might be considering an association with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) led by Shehu Gabam. Indications are that some key PDP leaders, including former vice president Atiku Abubakar, disaffected Labour Party (LP) leaders such as Peter Obi, and even New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) leader, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, might be eyeing the SDP if reconciliations in their parties proved intractable. But the fringe party also harbours a few acolytes of the late Gen Sani Abacha.
The choices facing key opposition leaders regarding how to proceed politically in 2025 and 2026 are obnoxious. For Mr Aregbesola, they are horrendous. Not only would he go into the SDP, if it came to that, a very diminished man without party and shorn of reputation, the other party leaders who might saunter into the party would keep a wary eye on him and cast furtive glances at him. They would wonder whether he could be trusted, considering how close he was to President Tinubu but did not bat an eyelid in denouncing him violently and persistently. Unfortunately, once a politician acquires the reputation of a betrayer, rightly or wrongly, fairly or otherwise, it is hard to reignite confidence in him. Every step Mr Aregbesola takes will be dogged by his now sullied reputation. His new party may relish his role as an attack dog, especially against the president, but as reckless and ruthless and boastful as he has become, he would feel demeaned being turned into a feral beast. He would like to be rated fairly and highly, but there is nothing in him or about him to indicate that his new party leaders and associates would not prefer to see him through their own cautious lenses.
What is certain about Mr Aregbesola is that he does not have a political party at the moment. It is inevitable he must find one very soon, where he can probably feel comfortable. But he is condemned to joining other aggrieved politicians united by their common animosity towards the APC, and perhaps by their common detestation of President Tinubu. With his long years of unprincipled politicking, Alhaji Atiku is now fated to be lumped together with other waspish firebrands like the inconsiderate Rotimi Amaechi, the intransigent Mr Kwankwaso, the stormy petrel el-Rufai, and the immoderate Mr Aregbesola. There are some associations in which one must never be found, and ideas one must never be associated with. It is the humiliating irony of life that all these eminent men started out well in their political career, but, given their famous lack of prudence, are now condemned to joining a motley crowd of jaded politicians united for the common cause of taking the presidency in 2027.
Culled from The Nation
