Political Networks: Sowore and Ezekwesili

Thanks for reading. A Jar of Clay, Part 1: Made in Nigeria is available here

I am saying the obvious: neither Sowore nor Ezekwesili will win the next election because votes in Nigeria are delivered through a series of strong men. Nigeria is fundamentally different from countries of North America and Western Europe in that regard.  Later in this post, using Osun state as an example, I will try to illustrate this point.  So, the likes of Sowore and Ezekwesili should pull their resources into challenging the existing status quo. By the way, changing how things work currently will not be an easy task.

According to  an article on Allfrica.com website, there are 47 candidates vying to become the President of Nigeria in 2019! In the recently concluded governorship election in Osun state, there were 48 candidates. If the likes of Sowore and Ezekwesili are truly progressive as they like to tell us, they should put together a progressive platform and work together. Nigerians are tired of PDP and APC. However, dividing the challenge of PDP and APC into forty five parties makes the challenge weak and ineffective.

Somebody responded to my recent post on the politics of the least awful. In fairness to him, he was very complimentary, but frustrated that I did not even mention Sowore at all in the post.

I don’t think either of Sowore or Ezekwesili has any chance at all. Where under the sun will Sowore or Ezekwesili have a chance to be President/Prime Minister? I can’t think of such a place. The only place a tiny ray of light will exists for candidates like Sowore and Ezekwesili is in America, with its Presidential primaries.  Having said that, it would have to be done the Trump way: go through an established party, connect with a sizeable proportion of the party members and hijack the party’s program.

Sowore and Ezekwesili won’t have any chance in the United Kingdom. To have a chance of becoming Prime Minister in the UK, you will need to join either the Labour or the Conservative Party. You can’t just wake up two years before the election and manufacture a political movement from the thin air. This is not campus politics. Only Labour or the Conservative Party have the network to deliver a Prime Minister in the UK.

In the same vein, to win an election in Nigeria, you need a national political network. In 1979, none of the parties was truly national. However, when you combined both the NPP (Zik, South East) and NPN (North) together, you had a coalition that covered a wide breadth of the land. In the same vein, when you added UPN (Awo, South West + former Mid Western State) , PRP (Aminu Kano) and GNPP (Waziri, North East) you had another coalition with national reach.  The existing parties can be traced back to political networks that have existed before Nigeria became independent. Over the years, these networks were broken down and recombined.

At the beginning of the third republic, the PDP was a truly national party. Had it ran the nation in the interest of the people,  rather than its own interest, it would have won elections in Nigeria “forever”.  The APC’s achievement four years ago was how regional parties like CPC and AC buried their differences, came together to form a party that was truly national and in so doing, defeated PDP.

The clearest evidence that “independents” or those trying to cobble together a political movement in Nigeria would always struggle to win an election can be seen by comparing the Governorship election in Osun State 2014, to the same event in 2018. Politics in Nigeria is a “grass root” event and things often revolve around a few grass root politicians in key places at different levels.

In 2014, the APC had on its side formidable grass root politicians. The former governor of Osun state, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola is the main man in Odo Otin local government. The late Isiaka Adeleke (aka Serubawon), was the strongman of Ede local government. There are other individuals across the whole state who play similar roles, with ability to deliver a ward, constituency or local government.

In 2018, an Adeleke wanted to be governor in another party, PDP. Furthermore, Oyinlola decided to go back to the PDP.  The votes from Odo Otin and Ede switched from the APC to the PDP: votes tend to follow these political godfathers. There is really no great mystery to why the APC struggled in Osun in August. Just take the PDP votes in Ede and Odo Otin and add them to the APC’s, and the outcome will be different. And we have not even talked about the impact of mini political god fathers who left the APC because of the dissatisfaction with the outcome of the governorship primaries.

Until the likes of Sowore and Ezekwesili build a serious political network that can rival the existing one, they won’t be taken seriously. They will have a better chance of building such a network if they come together with like minded people.