In the beginning, they sang with one voice and swept the political landscape with a single broom; the symbol of their party. But suddenly, the house of opposition is being filled with strange voices in Kwara State as leaders of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) engage in a political scuffle many fear will reduce the impact and strength of the party as stakeholders seek to take the front seats for the 2015 election show. Pieces of the broom, once held together by the bond of unity, is appearing in solitary places, seeking to do what was once the job of a collective. From Ilorin, BIODUN OYELEYE reports.

Of course, if everything goes as planned, there won’t be an ACN logo on the ballot on Election Day, 2015. What will be there will be the symbol of the All Progressive Congress (APC), if the merger arrangement eventually scales through all hurdles on its way. The APC is expected to be a big party, made up of the ACN, All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP),Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and a faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA. As such, there will be a lot of enhanced status for its leaders. Many also believe that its candidates will have a better chance of being elected.

This scenario is behind the current crisis within the ACN in Kwara which in the last one week, has seen the removal of its chairman, Mr. Kayode Olawepo by a faction and his immediate “reinstatement” by another group within the party. Olawepo, according to findings, belongs to the faction of the party that believes that the gubernatorial ticket in 2015 must be thrown open to all interested parties within the merger. 

Mr. Dele Belgore, a senior advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and gubernatorial candidate of the ACN in the last general election on the other hand is reported to argue along with his supporters that having demonstrated a strong capacity to contest as evident in his 2011 showings, he should be allowed to try again. To do this, the allegation is that he wants an alliance with the other parties instead of a merger. Belgore’s camp, however, describes this allegation as ridiculous, given the closeness of Belgore to the top leaders of the ACN and major brains behind the merger arrangement. 

But whether true or not, what can no longer be denied is that things have fallen apart between Belgore and the man he once fondly called ‘my chairman’. Olawepo has been accused of fraternising with the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a most heinous political crime in this season, while at another time he has been presented to the public as following after a leader of the CPC in the state with hope of coming out eventually as chairman of the APC when the merger is finalised.  The CPC leader, it is being argued, will be the preferred gubernatorial candidate. 

Although, it is being denied, there are many ready to bet their meal tickets that the face-off between Olawepo and Belgore is actually a battle of wits between the SAN and  Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party’s National Publicity Secretary and a former gubernatorial candidate in the state and that it is all about who emerges as gubernatorial candidate of the APC in 2015.

Olawepo, it was believed, has been doing the biddings of Mohammed as the latter allegedly prepares the ground for his return to the soap box in 2015.  Indeed, Olawepo is considered as very close to Mohammed. They are even from the same senatorial district and he is said to have been operating from Mohammed’s Campaign office since his ouster by the ACN Stakeholders Forum. But there are those who argue that given his age and current national exposure and commitment, Mohammed will not want to pick the gubernatorial ticket.  

As at the time of compiling this report, there were insinuations that Mohammed might have dropped his ambition.  Yet, those who support his return to the race said he ran one of the most daring gubernatorial races in the 2003 election when he came third behind Bukola Saraki and Gbenga Olawepo and should be encouraged to contest again. Being from Kwara south, it is believed that he will be able to give the incumbent Governor, Alhaji AbdulFattah  Ahmed, a good run in the region  unlike what happened in the 2011 race when Belgore was not able to  make serious impact in the southern senatorial district. But Belgore’s team would want to know what role Mohammed played in that race, particularly in the south, where he is supposed to be a strong tower for his party.

Supporters of Mohammed want him completely isolated from the crisis. “It is a simple fight between Belgore and Olawepo”, one of them told our reporter in reaction to media report insinuating that the crack could be traced to perceived face-off between Belgore and Mohammed.  But he agreed that the crisis is actually a jostling for the APC front row once the merger is finalised. The source repeated the now popular allegation against Belgore; of wanting to be the candidate in the 2015 race.

As it were, the crisis has exposed a critical underbelly of the ACN in the north-central state.  The truth, according to a source, was that things had never been smooth between Belgore and Olawepo. When Olawepo emerged as Chairman, Caretaker Committee, it was, by convention, meant to be a short-term affair to be concretised through proper congress. But several months down the line, the situation had not changed. This was the purported lacuna that the Belgore group latched onto in the bid to unseat the chairman.

"By constitution or convention, caretaker for any office should occupy the positions within six months and in this case, the caretaker executive council of the party had over lived and that led to their dissolution", said Dr. Saad Omoiya, leader of the Stakeholders Forum, the day they were to send Olawepo packing. He added that the dissolution had led to the formation of the forum as a step to salvage the party from the brinks of collapse and reposition it for future success.

In his address at the Forum’s meeting, Omoiya said since the ACN put up a good show in the last general election, it must be allowed to produce and retain Belgore. He too, alleged plots by some leaders of the party to bring a candidate from outside the fold of the party but insisted such would not be allowed.

His words:  “ACN in the last governorship election in Kwara polled over 152,000, Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) polled 75,000 and All Nigerian Peoples Party(ANPP) polled 2,000. With this outcome of the last governorship election results in Kwara, the ACN should be a party to present governorship candidate under the banner of the APC if eventually the merger worked at the end.

“We learnt from appropriate quarters that, some members within the ACN had been collaborating with our leaders at the top to bring new governorship candidate from outside ACN so as to realise the goal and this will not be accepted. We will not accept the alleged plan because our governorship candidate during the last governorship election in the state, Mr. Mohammed Dele Belgore(SAN) had performed well and should be given a chance to take the governorship banner under the newly formed APC in the forthcoming election in the state so as to make the party to perform well.”

Omoiya’s reference to ‘meetings between some members within the ACN and the party’s leaders at the top to bring new governorship candidate from outside ACN’ is considered as subtle reference to unconfirmed but widespread rumours that Mohammed has been romancing with a CPC bigwig in the state with a view to making the said CPC man the candidate in 2015. If it is true, it will indeed put Belgore’s ambition in jeopardy.

But Olawepo’s group has also accused Omoiya, and his supporters, of romancing with the PDP.  The day the Omoiya group announced their decision on Olawepo, the embattled chairman got support from his colleagues in the CPC and ANPP to denounce his former political kinsmen in the ACN, calling them political ‘hijackers’.

In a  three-page statement  signed by Alhaji Suleiman Buhari (CPC), Alhaji Taiwo Eleja (ANPP) and Olawepo for the ACN, they  alleged that the ‘hijackers’  were  “a few compromised members of our parties” given the task of promoting and sponsoring “ hitherto unknown to black market political forums and food-is-ready Non Government Orgnisations (NGOs), etc, that are now masquerading as political counterforce and the public messiah”.

They said further:  “As a party, we will not pretend to be unaware of the fact that the perfidy and treachery being played out by a bunch of self-seeking anarchists in our midst is at the prompting of the ruling elite. The good news is that these political cancers are already being identified. These pseudo progressives are reputed for using a pre-prepared template to go about destabilising and hijacking any political platform that is unfortunate to embrace them. 

“Not only do they have a shameful and promiscuous history of jumping ship wherever their bread is no longer buttered, but also have a record of attempting to hijack the machinery of the unsuspecting party to pave way for their ultimate goal of using it as a bargain chip. Although we have been keeping a dossier on the clandestine moves of a few reneges in our midst lately, trusting, albeit naively, that their scheming would not be more than the usual self-seeking permutations of professional politicians in the state, their recently uncovered dangerous pandering to the ruling elite's heinous idea of a forceful hijack of the APC structure truly threw us off guard. 

“What has however continued to baffle us is on what basis these hawks can claim a high moral ground to properly represent the interest of the people of Kwara State. These are people that have severally failed the state and betrayed the people's trust. Rather than judiciously and faithfully serving the people and improving their standards of living with their huge resources, they have, more often than not, recklessly pursued an agenda of ethnic provincialism, manufactured controversy, ideological messianism, and political influence-buying while masquerading as exemplars of liberty and democracy. The plans of these charlatans have been exposed. Therefore, party members and our national body should discountenance their flawed antics and frolics.”

Not yet done with the Omoiya group, the CPC and ANPP issued a separate statement insisting, that the race must be left open for all aspirants. They also rubbished claims by the Omoiya group as to the successes of the ACN in the last election. Buhari and Eleja signed the statement.           

Their words: “Our coming together under the single platform of the APC is unconditional. Therefore, since we have mutually resolved to work together as a team without preconditions, we make bold to say that any rumour, suggestions or innuendoes that might be consciously or unconsciously promoted to mean that a particular former aspirant from any of the merging parties has a leverage over and above the rest is bound to fall flat in the faces of its initiator. The essence of this brand new arrangement is to bury the ugly past where ego prevailed over reason in our previous attempts to forge a joint political front. We all must therefore be ready to bury the past with all its debilitating relics.

“So, the idea of who becomes what does not arise now, and when it eventually does, it must be mutually agreed by all. We hasten to add that much as we pledged to make sacrifices with a view to making the merger become fruition, we will nonetheless vehemently oppose any scheme that has the slightest element of relegating or whittling down the equal standing of any of the merging parties to the background, on the basis of any concocted ‘sharing formula’. 

“As long as there is yet no official communication of the scheme of re-alignment from our national leadership, any bogus assertion from any quarters now, no matter how highly placed, is of no moment. But assuming without conceding that there was actually a scheme of engagement, the peculiarity of the Kwara political configuration does not give room for any political subjugation of any of the other merging partners over and above the other by a so-called senior partner. 

“Thus, the grandstanding of a certain section in the merger coalition, whereby the unsubstantiated and unsustainable kite of a purported past electoral victory is being flown is not only immoral but capable of derailing us in our avowed bid. Our goal now is to be guided not by the vestige of the past but by the reality of the present while holding tenaciously to what the future holds for all of us.

Therefore, exhuming past relics that have effectively been overtaken by obvious political events is downright unacceptable to us. Even at that, as it might be fairly strategic to concede to a party that posted a fair showing in the previous elections, so shall it smacks of a downright political miscalculation if the post-electoral fortune of the respective parties is not equally taken into consideration in arriving at a just and equitable scheme that will be acceptable to all. 

“We assert that we have come a long way, and as parties committed to the merger, we will not allow fifth columnists to pull any upset at this critical time. We must make sure that first thing comes first. We all should be more concerned about making the merger a reality rather than fighting dirty over spoils of offices. It is blatantly disingenuous to put the cart of party slots before the horse of the all-important merger. Writing the glossary and footnotes of the merger history now while jettisoning even the preface is way off the cuff.”  

The crisis had also attracted the attention of the critical community. For instance, a group, Kwara Change Initiative (KCI) in its online posting on the crisis lampooned Belgore for what it described as his perceived hard-line posture on the issue of who becomes the candidate in 2015. Said the group,“Olawepo incurred the wrath of Mr. Belgore when it was clear he had been relating with ANPP and CPC leadership in Kwara to domesticate merger plans which Mr. Belgore considered unrealistic and rather prefer an alliance so that he becomes the gubernatorial candidate in 2015.

Who is Belgore dreading? Belgore, we gathered, became jittery over the influx of aspirants such as the oil magnate Alh Abdulraham Rasaq, of a noble and progressive family, who gave him hell during the last primaries in 2011, before he left when ACN imposed Belgore among other formidable forces.  It appears too that Mr. Belgore is not cut out for Kwara politics going by the way he is seeking party nomination. For  instance, he wants to be anointed ahead of 2015, even when in 2011 he didn’t campaign in Ifelodun Local Government Area of the state, the largest and base of his arch rival. 

“His deputy, Mr. Adeyinka, failed to make any impact in that LGA when he grudgingly won his polling booth with just 4 votes. Belgore was also consumed by the PDP machinery when he failed to defend the honourable seat in his one LGA constituency of Ilorin South predominantly habited by non indigenes and sympathisers of ACN. Now that the party has been fragmented what becomes of Mr. Belgore?”

It however appears as if Olawepo is having the upper hand in the battle of wits. Few hours after his removal, leaders of the party from the 16 local government areas of the state met and passed a vote of confidence on him. So also were some members of the Caretaker Committee from where he was purportedly sacked. So also were some members of the youth wing of the party. 

Many believe the crisis will affect the party negatively. But there are those who argue that it is a normal process in the growth of democracy.  For instance, on online commentator, KwaraWhistleblower said enemies of ACN should not yet rejoice over the crisis because it won’t go the way they expect.

His argument is as follows:  “I have no business commenting on the internal affairs of the party since I am not a member. But I will say a few things. My views are for a few reasons: a Sarakite sought my opinion, obviously reflecting the jubilation in their camp. Indeed, like other Kwarans I have followed the development with keen interest because of its implications for our people’s thirst for change. 

“I have a shocker: there is really no big deal about Kwara ACN crisis. It’s a feature of any growing democracy. PDP/CPC faces similar thing. Beyond bickering being a feature of emerging democracy, it is in fact a permanent feature of any human society as it evolves.
“But crisis management is another thing entirely and this is where the ‘combatants’ in the Kwara ACN crisis got it wrong; resulting in media war. Since neither Lai Mohammed nor Belgore SAN appears belligerent towards each other, methinks the Kwara ACN crisis is fuelled by overzealous followers. If my thinking is right, the suspension of Olawepo was almost self-inflicted. For me, he’s shown no tact with his outbursts. Neither did Dr. Omoiya and co show any maturity too in their media exposure.

“But funny enough, Kwara ACN crisis is not entirely bad. For the avoidance of doubt, the attention Kwara ACN crisis generated is a confirmation of its strength, contrary to the self-delusion of Sarakites. The attention Kwara ACN crisis got among Kwarans worldwide disproves claims that there is no virile opposition in Kwara. The Kwara ACN crisis shows the existence of different tendencies with strong voices. I prefer a party that allows dissent than one with an emperor.”