Chief Akin Osuntokun, 63, former political adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo; director of the Presidential Campaign of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP in 2011; and director-general of the Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign Council of the Labour Party, LP in 2023, in this interview, shares his thoughts among others on socio-political happenings and permutations ahead of the 2027 polls, and avers that without a united opposition, President Bola Tinubu would be re-elected.

The polity is witnessing defections across party lines. Won?t it hurt the 2027 elections?

That is a platitude. Any trend towards one-party dictatorship is not good, especially for an inherently pluralistic country. The reason for this is rooted in what we call ?zero-sum politics? where the winner takes all and the loser loses all. It prioritizes patronage and consumption politics over a positive correlation between reward and productivity.

The major facilitator of this culture is the prevailing quasi-unitary casino economy. The embodiment of this insidious system is the over-centralization of power in the executive, otherwise known as the presidency. If you have a president as we currently have (and the one before him) who is prepared to test the dysfunctional limits of the constitution, what you get is a leviathan, and what follows is the phenomenon of state capture. In other words, all the other organs of government, the legislature and the judiciary, are subordinated to the president.

It certainly impoverishes the political party system because it is a precursor of one-party dictatorship. These defections are also a reflection of total loss of faith and confidence in the capacity of the electoral agency and the judiciary. If these two bodies have integrity and credibility, no complainant would feel compelled to be in the good books of the president to get justice.

At the other end, there are the unpopular candidates who would require the president?s support to get them into office. The other name of this state capture is one-party dictatorship. It is the logic of this trend that is playing out in the anomie of political leaders absconding from their parties to grovel at the feet of the president.

This is bad behaviour, quite alright but it is realistic and practical. The president, as it were, has an arsenal of powers to promote, thwart and frustrate the political aspirations of any other player. The president is like Father Christmas who is invested with all the goodies to share as he wills. And he is a magnet for all manners of economic supplicants, especially the greedy ones. This is why the race to clinch the presidency is akin to a mad stampede, in the pursuit of which aspirants would take no prisoners. This is why it is the most destabilising factor of Nigerian politics

What is the root cause of the Labour Party crisis?

The roots of the crisis lie in the divergence of aspirations between the illegal Abure national party executive and the Peter Obi writ large army called the Obidients. The former is the rough and ready mercenary with the mission to exploit the party for filthy lucre while the other largely consists of reform-minded young progressive Nigerians.

Ultimately, the crisis hacks back to the reality that Nigeria is bereft of a viable political party system. What we call parties are no more than special purpose vehicles, SPV, for contesting elections. They are ideologically indistinguishable and that is why their boundaries are so porous such that upwards of 60 percent of those who founded the APC were PDP functionaries. With specific regards to the Labour Party, the Abure national executive has effectively become the agent

Do you think the LP stands a chance in the 2027 elections?

There is nothing like a viable Labour Party without Peter Obi. So maybe you need to rephrase your question as, is Obi a viable candidate in the 2027 presidential election? The answer, of course, is a conditional yes. Now, you know that there is a difference between winning elections and being declared as winning the election in Nigeria. The viability of his aspiration is conditional on such other factors as the vulnerability of a fractious opposition. If the opposition parties can pool together to present Obi as their presidential candidate, then Tinubu may be on his way out of the Aso Rock villa.

It is, however, a different ball game altogether for the president to accept defeat. I can?t see through the thick fog of a scenario in which he would accept any result other than his declaration as a winner.

What is your take on the state of the nation?

Nothing captures contemporary Nigeria more than (a state of) anomie and political dysfunction. In the short term to mid-term, the one-size-fits-all all prescribed cure (deregulation of the downstream oil sector and floating of the forex market) had stabilized the economy literally at the expense of unbearable immiseration of the vast majority of Nigerians. For them, it is a cure worse than the disease.

Please get me right, there is nothing peculiar in the experience of socio-economic crisis. Every individual and society are routinely confronted with economic and other standard of living challenges. It is how you grapple with the challenges that matters. It is the extent to which there is closure of the gap between what you say and what you do, that matters. If you are splurging hard- earned Nigeria income on the criminal opulence of the power elite while compelling Nigerians to live on less than one dollar a day, you are increasingly pushing the country to the tipping point.

When you preach the sermon of salvation while indulging in wanton hedonism, the result is the stress and distress written all over the faces of the under-privileged; the permanence of massive security breakdown of law and order with emphasis on the Middle-Belt region. The late Professor Sam Aluko once characterized it as ?the rich cannot get to sleep because the poor are hungry and angry.? Unfathomable and profuse nation bleeding corruption has become normalized.

Most hopeless of it all is that rather than agree on requisite constitutional reforms, factions of the rogue elite are deadpan and unyielding, waiting impatiently for their turn at ceasing and bleeding Nigeria by the jugular. The tragic reality stares us all in the face, and its depredations are worse than fiction.

What is your take on the coalition-backed ADC?

Coalition-backed ADC? Well, the ADC emerged from a political movement floated by President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2018 called the Coalition of Nigeria Movement. At its transition from a pressure group to a political party, the former president withdrew his participation to preserve his non-partisan statesmanship. He, however, made the exception of the governorship race in Ogun State in 2019, where he backed the aspiration of Nosiru Isiaka.

So this is the history of ADC until it became the beautiful bride of leading opposition figures like Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, Rotimi Amaechi, and others in this electoral cycle. If these personalities successfully band together and stand behind one of them, then they are in business. It may be reminiscent of the intervention of the APC in 2015.

Do you think the coalition can stop APC and Tinubu in the 2027 general election?

This will depend on a number of intervening variables. One is that the economy continues to nosedive with all it connotes for the vast majority of Nigerians. Remember Bob Marley reminded us that a hungry man is an angry man. The other is the difference between former President Goodluck Jonathan and the incumbent president. As Jonathan conceded defeat, you could see a sigh of relief in his mien. He radiated the kind of serenity that bordered on inner joy. It was not just because he had a recessive personality; it was also because his political career is a study in effortless grace.

He did not exert himself to become deputy governor, governor, vice-president, and finally president. The manifestation of this grace was so conspicuous as to make Christiane Amanpour of the Cable Network News, CNN, ask him whether it was down to his unique first name, Goodluck, that had been at play in his rise to the presidency. To the contrary, Tinubu got to his present office by sheer grit and mastery of the political jungle culture of survival of the fittest. He was prepared to realize his objective through means, fair, and foul. Remember the proponent of the political philosophy of ?snatch it, grab it and run with it?power is not served a la carte.?

What is your assessment of President Bola Tinubu on insecurity, infrastructure, and good governance?

First, I think we need to establish the volume of the debt that has been contracted and the income derived from oil-pursuant to expenditure on capital projects, and what the financial gatekeepers tag cost-benefit analysis. If you borrow ten million dollars to execute a project of one million dollars, this is infrastructure development, but how would you characterize such an expenditure? There is also the question of priorities. Given our huge infrastructure deficit, I do not understand the logic, for instance, of the prioritization of the thirteen billion dollars Lagos-Calabar coastal highway. It makes sense only if its utility is to serve as a conduit for misappropriation of public funds.

Nonetheless, one has to acknowledge the effectiveness of the deregulation of the forex market and the companion downstream sector of the oil economy.

There is however a lot of credibility in the pervasive speculations of massive corruption being perpetuated in the public sector. If morning shows the day, the daylight robbery of gifting one of the most expensive SUVs to national legislators is a marker. My friend and brother, the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, is doing his level best, but our security crisis has become a basket case, this inherited crisis is of a magnitude that would readily overwhelm anyone relatively new to that office.

The crisis will likely remain unresponsive to the best of efforts until the security architecture is deconstructed and decentralised. Over and above these assessments is the fact that Nigeria is afflicted with systemic failure.

The meaning of this failure is that no aspect can be successfully isolated for remedial attention. Such is the logic of circularity. There is an integrated linkage between the security aspect and the economic downturn. There is a linkage between infrastructure collapse and the prevailing economic recession and vice versa. Nigeria only stands the chance to succeed in overcoming these challenges when the nature of this national crisis is comprehended as a circular systemic failure-in need of a shock therapy intervention. The kind of therapeutic intervention that compels itself is a constitutional overhaul that gives Nigeria the opportunity for a sociopolitical renewal. There is, of course, the option of a revolutionary intervention with the potential collateral damage of a violent upheaval. There is the inevitability of Jack Kennedy?s admonition that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent ones inevitable.

Some say that Nigeria is now more divided than ever before. What is your view?

This has become a clich?, but it is substantially true. There are micro-subnational identity crises sprouting all over the place, including the intriguing political decoupling of Hausa-Fulani identification. The Hausa, we are told, are now engaged in a nationalist reawakening against Fulani imperialism. We are told that this is particularly the case with the enduring anarchy in Zamfara state.

Will the agreement to do one term make Atiku or Obi more likely to beat Tinubu?

I?m very sceptical about this kind of political bargaining. In the case of Atiku (a very generous father figure), other than physical debility (he is over 80 years), I have no basis to believe he would stick by any such commitment. If he could repeatedly defy the principle of North/South power rotation, why would a personality of this pedigree stick to any such unenforceable commitment?

With the present political trend, no region, especially the Islamic North, will agree to any such agreement once their man secures the throne.

In my reckoning, the North/South rotation subsists until 2031. Given this notion, the pledge of Obi to restrain himself to a single term is more believable and enforceable. Coincidentally, the putative aspiration by former President Jonathan fits the bill squarely. Even if he is inclined to renege on such a pledge, the constitution completely rules him out of a second term. Besides, I doubt he has the stomach for the ?roforofo? fight inherent in Nigeria political power play.

What is the way forward for the country?

I have earlier reiterated constitutional reform as the way forward in the short, mid, and long-term. I can see no other peaceful options. If we agree in principle for a new constitution, the details will follow in quick order. If only wishes are horses. Given the deep division within, I hope, rather than expect this option to become a reality any time soon. President Tinubu should be the last bus stop on this nightmarish journey to an unknown destination. (Vanguard)

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