The result of the September 21 governorship election in Edo state came through early Monday morning. INEC said the All People’s Congress (APC) candidate Monday Okpebholo won with over 291,667 votes. People’s Democratic Party’s Asue Ighodalo came a close second with 247,274 votes. And farther back came Labour Party’s Olumide Akpata with a meagre 22,763. Not letting the dust settle, the PDP said the election umpire robbed it of victory. We are back, it seems, to the Garden of Eden, where the blame game started and has continued to spread ever since.
Eden. Edo. The alliteration is at once attractive. God created the beautiful garden of Eden and put man, whom He created in His “own image”, in control. But man failed the one test God set for him and when God asked why he didn’t do as instructed, Adam blamed his wife and Eve blamed the snake (Satan). Failure to take responsibility. In his piece “Blaming Somebody Else”, Floyd O.Rittenhouse said people who try to blame others “live in (a) make-believe world.” He wrote, “In politics the governor blames the legislature and the legislators blame the voters. … In the school the students blame the teachers, the teachers blame the principal and the principal blames the board. In the home the children blame one another and the parents blame each other. It is a familiar merry-go-round. … Few indeed are willing to stand up manfully and accept responsibility for their acts when things go wrong and their plans fail.”
Here we come to Edo. Many believed penultimate Saturday’s election was the PDP’s to lose. It had everything, almost, going for it including the power of incumbency. The party controlled the government, was in charge of security and state resources. These are key to winning elections in, not only Edo but Nigeria generally. However, it appeared the PDP was bent on losing the September 21 election. In an election year, the PDP governor Godwin Obaseki, ill-advisedly, parted ways with his deputy governor Phillip Shaibu and even engineered his removal by getting the state’s House of Assembly to impeach him. So, instead of mobilizing for his party to retain power, Obaseki, whose tenure ends this November, chose to waste time and money on an ego fight. But the courts said Shaibu couldn’t be removed just that way and he clawed his way back to office though unwelcome. His supporters got the message. Without saying so, they voted with their feet out of the PDP and into the APC. Sensing defeat in the air, a frightened Obaseki tried to storm the INEC vote collation centre but was stopped in his track. The damage was already done. Said Shaibu, “The game-changer was his refusal to share his program with us, thinking he could be an autocrat, a dictator and enforce his will. He feels he now has the money which he didn’t have in 2016 to use to buy his way through.” In that he failed.
The surprise was that the national leadership of the party failed to pull Obaseki’s ears, to warn him not to jeopardize the party’s bright chances in the election. They allowed him to pursue his vendetta war with Shaibu. By their silence, they let victory slip through their fingers as they watched. So the PDP worked very hard for its defeat by the APC from which it wrestled power in 2020 by default. In this year’s election, it can be said the PDP defeated PDP. The result that the INEC announced gave the APC 11 of the state’s 18 local governments and the PDP seven. It took Edo Central senatorial district, which alone has 5 local governments. A close race. Better housekeeping would have flipped the outcome in the PDP’s direction but they bungled it through one man’s headiness. Still the party would not accept responsibility for its loss and is blaming INEC for “robbing Peter to pay Paul”. The party’s interim national chairman, Umar Damagun, while addressing a press conference Monday in Abuja, said the party didn’t accept what INEC put out as the result of the poll. He believed the PDP candidate won the election and asked Nigerians to “support our rejection” of the outcome. He didn’t say what the party planned to do next but the electoral law provides for election petitions to be filed in courts. That is the way to go, not the streets.
