Abiodun Awolaja writes on the judicial and electoral fortunes of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in the South-West in recent times, looking at the implication for the region.WITH the results of Wednesdays gubernatorial and House of Assembly elections, it can be said without challenge that the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) is now effectively in control of the South-West.The party swept the South-West, peopled predominantly by the Yoruba ethnic group, with its trademark broom. It uprooted the remnant Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)-led governments in Oyo and Ogun States, and had a landslide in the House of Assembly/ House of Representative elections in Lagos, Ekiti and Osun states. However, Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State has refused to yield ground, as the Labour Party (LP) had a clean sweep of the elections in the state. Still, the ACN and the LP seem to enjoy a kind of political affinity, as they are beneficiaries of the PDPs misfortunes.The ACN, a party formed to float the presidential ambition of former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar in 2006, was formerly known as the Action Congress (AC). The AC itself was formed by a splinter faction of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) led by Chief Bola Tinubu, former Lagos State governor, who survived the political tsunami engineered in 2003 by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who had reportedly tricked the then AD governors (Bisi Akande, Olusegun Osoba, Adebayo Adefarati, Lam Adesina and Niyi Adebayo) into backing his return bid to Aso Rock at the time.Obasanjo, who had attained the Nigerian presidency in 1999 during the return to civil rule without the backing of his Yoruba ethnic nationality, was said to have felt pained that he was a politician without home base support, and was said to have promised the AD governors that they would retain their positions despite adopting him as their presidential candidate in the 2003 presidential election. The rest is history.Profile of the ACNUnlike the PDP, the ACN currently does not boast of a sufficient national spread to aim at the presidency. In the build up to the presidential election, the partys national chairman, Chief Bisi Akande, who was one of the victims of Obasanjos 2003 tsunami, once said that it was not compulsory for the party to win the presidency. Rather, it seems that the party aims to maintain its hold in the South-West while making aggressive push for other states across the country.In this push, the party has been associated with alleged judicial manipulation. The Court of Appeal judgements which removed former Governors Segun Oni and Olagunsoye Oyinlola of Ekiti and Osun states are still being probed by the National Judicial Commission (NJC). Revelations from the sittings of the five-man panel investigating the President of the Court of Appeal (PCA), Justice Isa Ayo Salami and the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, have been as unsettling as they have been monumental.It does not yet appear that the full story of the processes that threw Oni and Oyinlola out of office and began the political misfortunes of the PDP in the South-West has been told, but it appears that there are sufficient grounds for believing that there are unpalatable days ahead for Salami and the group of nine (G9) judges that he said were his trusted men out of the 62 judges that are said to be under his jurisdiction. This is because, among others, Salami is reported to have confessed that the judgements that ousted the two former governors leaked before they were delivered.Again, on an ideological plane, the ACN also suffers a credibility crisis. For instance, the insistence by members of the party that they are following the footsteps of the sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, has often been questioned by critical analysts because, among others, the sage was not, at any time in his political career, associated with blind opposition politics. For the large part of his life, the sage sought alignments with political groupings across the country so that he could take over power at the centre.Indeed, part of the causes of the friction in the early 1960s between Awolowo and Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, former Premier of the Western Region, was Akintolas preference for the Action Group (AG) to consolidate its hold on the South-West rather than seek to gain power at the centre.Further, Awo, as he is still fondly called, presided over a region that was economically buoyant and operated within the framework of a fairly fiscal federalism. In the 1950s, the three regions in the country, namely the Northern, Western and Eastern regions, had the opportunity of developing at their own pace, and were in firm control of their economies in a more federal arrangement than is currently available in the country.In terms of internal democracy, the ACN also has the notorious fame of organising the most infamous primaries in the current democratic dispensation. The majority of the partys candidates said to have won the various elections were allegedly imposed on party faithful, with many aggrieved candidates seeking refuge in the courts.Thus, if the court cases which trailed the 2007 elections nationwide are any indication, it would seem to be the case that many of those declared winners still have to contend with tough legal battles in the years ahead, particularly now that electoral disputes will go as far as the Supreme Court.In other words, while the conduct of the present elections has been generally acknowledged to be free and fair, and relatively devoid of rancour, the processes that threw up the various ACN candidates for election are likely to form the basis for electoral litigations. This is not, however, an assurance that the PDP candidates will not be challenging their ACN counterparts in court in the months ahead.Yet another albatross of the ACN is the Tinubu factor, as the former governor is widely believed to be the sole proprietor of the party in view of his imposition of candidates on the party and his alleged domineering hold on the Lagos-based media, which is often criticised for adopting the Tinubu agenda as its political gospel.Some factors responsible for the ACNs ascentThe ACNs current electoral standing in the South-West is a product of many factors, but perhaps the greatest boost for the party was the judicial victories of Governors Kayode Fayemi and Rauf Aregbesola in the Court of Appeal. As a result of the judgements, thousands of members of the PDP teamed up with the new ACN governments and effectively signalled the decay of the PDP in the region.Again, the ACN was helped by internal rancour within the PDP. Indeed, results from the present elections would seem to indicate that the ACN would have posed no threat to the PDP in Oyo State had former Governor Rashidi Ladoja not pulled out of the party to join the Accord Party (AP).Similarly, internal rancour within the Ogun State PDP effectively gave the state away to the ACNs Ibikunle Amosun. Indeed, the Ogun case presents a very interesting dimension because the Peoples Party of Nigeria (PPN,) founded by Governor Gbenga Daniel, proved to be the albatross for the PDP in the state.The PPN was formed by Daniel when he and members of his faction could not reach an amicable settlement with the Obasanjo faction of the PDP. While neither Daniel nor Obasanjo is blameless in the Ogun PDP saga, the Yewa/Awori ethnic section of the state has been the victim of the disagreement between the duo. This is despite the fact that Daniel was the architect and strongest supporter of the idea of a Yewa/Awori governor succeeding him on May 29, 2011, based on the principles of zoning, ethnic balancing and equity.Which way for the South-WestWhile the question of how the South-West will fare under the ACN in the next four years is still encrusted in the realm of conjecture, perspectives may be raised on the workability or otherwise of opposition politics in the nations current unitary arrangement.Observers are looking at how the six states in the region, minus Ondo which has openly associated with the Federal Government, will harness the regions resources for its overall development in the context of their current non-ideological and business-oriented politics.Sadly, if the ACN conducts the business of government like it did its primaries, the South-West may be in for a very hard time in the next four years. But perhaps it is still too early in the day to say which way the pendulum will swing.
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