SANWO-OLU, ENILOLOBO AND POLITICS OF FENCE MENDING IN ALIMOSHO: WAY OF HE OF PMB OR OBJ AS YET A PARTY LEADERSHIP CHOICE

By Razaq Adedeji Jimoh

Just a couple of days earlier, the Lagos chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) celebrated it catch of the elusive peace with a purported burial of ubiquitous and state wide factional rancour rocking it innards. Reports of eye witness accounts converged on the submission that it was a success story across Alimosho Federal Constituency. But a mix of contrasting reports from a latter official visit of the State Governor, Mr Babajide Olushola Sanwo-Olu, would seem to have, again, stired up the troubled water that was just getting under control – albeit as contrived in perception by some members of the party. The issue in context bordered around an allegation that the Governor came to town to “declare” Alhaji Abdullahi Ayinde Enilolobo as the “Apex Leader” of Alimosho Progressives at the commissioning of a newly constructed bridge linking the Southern Alimosho to its Western corridor through Idowu Egba – the Western extremity of Egbe-Idimu LCDA. Upon further personal fact-checking, a contrasting report that Governor Sanwo-Olu “never” mentioned any phrase of “Apex Leader” in his speech confronted this writer. It was nevertheless confirmed that the reference to Alhaji Enilolobo as Apex Leader made an issue at the event.

It therefore behoves on this writer to make a discretionally responsive missive that will take to account the understanding of ‘Politicians Cave’ as a haven of disingenuous conducts from which anything immoral could emanate as a game of politicking in the name of politics. That lies could have been fabricated against the Governor is thus a possibility. This piece is therefore coming as a balance of cautionary advice for the generality of party leadership across partisan divides and a factual advice for the Alimosho APC faithful to henceforth do away with needless apprehensions at any reference to Enilolobo as apex leader. In other words, it does not flow from indictment of Mr. Governor for being so alleged.

To make it clearer thence, whether Alhaji Enilolobo is the apex leader or not is not what this writer intends to make the business of this passage because it is an issue that is neither here nor there. As such, the portentous tendency of anyone to indulge his hubris with the affirmation anywhere at any time could not have been the informing cause of this piece. It is rather an agenda setting in altruism of impactful peace making from utterances of a leader. It is only helpful that it would come on the flip side of a shindig that emanated from the perception of undisguised partisanship of Mr. Governor in favour of Alhaji Enilolobo and what it could mean correlatively in threat to the last harmonious LGA and Ward meetings Alimosho was able to achieve after several years of rancorous disunity among her progressives’ factional camps.

As a review of the meetings, convergence of perspective reports trailing them was a note of mutually beneficial satisfaction of the warring factions with the found peace. This was, first, because all the offices of the LGA Working Committee were activated and made to function under the responsibility of the personnel attached – irrespective of their caucus leaning. Being the pioneer reunion gathering, the State Vice Chairman of APC for Lagos West, Chief Sunday Aboyade, attended the Egbe-Idimu LCDA corridor of the Federal Constituency wide simultaneous meeting. Unarguably this was to add the desirable motivation and scenery of glamour to give it the spirit of state presence. As a matter of fact, his presence veritably underscored the significance of the day because it was the first time he would be attending the LGA party meeting after about three years of his official inauguration as a state officer, lasting the rancorous epic.

Of course, Aboyade in his remarks acknowledged even the leadership of pioneer Apex Leader in this republic in person of Ogbeni Rauf Adesoji Aregbesola. Way down that path, he referenced the leadership of Her Excellency, Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire (OFR) in her capacity as member of the prestigious Governance Advisory Council (GAC). He went ahead to acknowledge the leadership of Alhaji Abdullahi Enilolobo, which he nevertheless underscored with emphasis on the role Enilolobo played to facilitate the needful cohesion for success of the meeting. This acknowledgement of his role could as well infer the significance of influence Enilolobo still wields in spite of his travails largely occasioned by a collateral damage from his primary leadership allegiance.

While all that Aboyade said – perceptively inferred or implied – raised no contentious issue, the dust of angst and apprehension raised in some quarters to the purported Governor’s reference to Enilolobo as Alimosho Apex Leader could as well be understandable, going by the implied intent one could read rightly to it. The fear could as well take its premise from the Governor’s intrigue of 2023 stumps where he resonated the lyrical anthem: “Enilolobo ma re o!” to the chagrin of opposition camps.

Besides all this, the claim of Enilolobo to the status has been the underpinning factor unsettling the peace of Alimosho for far too long a time. He has sustainably struggled to die back with it as he died down through his worrisome travails of waning political relevance from year 2021 that marked his exit from the mainstream of Lagos hegemony.

Even if one would want to take it without conceding to the factuality, the purported Governor’s reaffirmation of it at the Idowu Egba’s event may not be wrong as much as it could deem not right either. It could not have been wrong because it is his unabridgeable right to own and express his perception views, which may coincidentally align with the wish and feelings of a factional camp on the short and long run. By implication, this would presuppose that Enilolobo is, indeed, the Apex Leader to his factional faithful. And while not taking their right to hold this by rote, how their emotion in this regard can thrust him to the official quarters of GAC gathering remains the issue to factualize about it.

On another presumption note, whatever may inform the intention of Mr. Governor by the pronouncement – yet ‘purportedly’ – at this time of emerging peace and harmony that are yet fragile, it is my candid view that he would have picked the wrong time doing so. With it, he would have surely dug wider and deeper the hollow gulf upon which that fragility rest. It is only a matter of time to see the harmony cave in. And when it does, it should have been his responsibility to own up to it as a consequence of his unguarded open partisanship.

Additionally, I do not think the Governor would have wished to claim ignorance of the fact that the pronouncement could as well be perceived as a significant statement of his open contempt for the sitting Alimosho GAC member, who should deem to hold the exclusive right to that status.

Everything therefore borders on the utterances of a leader superintending over a diverse groups of conflicting interests. Sanwo-Olu surely holds a good record in handling such diversity, having once discharged an enviable savvy with his apportioning of 55:45 percent sharing formula.

There could be no question about Governor Sanwo-Olu being the statutory State Leader of APC in Lagos – allegorically over the GAC members too. It would not be out of place to say he surely realises that the status refer to the office he occupies, not his person. The office, thus in direct demand, makes him a non-partisan leader over the entire APC members – and this instructively requires his imperative disconnect with party’s component factional groupings. Given this fact, he would have realized also that he carries that aura of the office around him everywhere he goes and he must endeavour to make his speech in consonance with that leadership status and not in subjugation of it to the whims of his personal emotion.

He has enough example for a lesson in this from Muhammodu Buhari as the statutory National Leader of APC at the time of his Presidency. Whatever anyone may want to hold against Buhari for his aloofness in the last presidential electioneering process, which openly manifested as his denial of direct support for the Aspirant Asiwaju Tinubu against all expectations, the astute readers of politics with discernible mind have actually commended that as a father-figure role that gave the 2023 Presidential Election the desirable sanity that conferred the unblemished legitimacy of office on his successor. With that, Buhari left behind a united party in the hands of a successor whose political savvy could guaranty the formidability of the party’s future.

Compare that to the 2007 version of the Presidential Election conducted by equally exiting Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. He made his personal emotion overwhelmed with intuitive vendetta to override his status as overall PDP leader conferred by his ‘Office of Presidency’. With that, he set the wrong footing by going ahead to invoke a code of military action – “Operation Totality” – to underscore the spirit of election he superintended over as a “do or die affair”. We all knew the consequences of his unguarded partisanship utterances in all that. The foremost of all was that he only succeeded in leaving behind a thoroughly divided and destabilised party, which defied all manner of reconciliations and finally imploded about five years after. The loss of that PDP implosion became the gain of APC afterwards.

While we may acknowledge that the harmony achieved in Alimosho, indeed across the many troubled LGAs, so far is yet peripheral and devoid of deep ideological unification. The best for stakeholders in the Lagos progressivism should therefore be a work towards achieving the totality with a filling of the gulf, not any further chiselling of the gulf walls. The water look calm in the surface now though. But, surely, election is a big rabble rouser ever ready to inflame passions of electorate and one may not be able to tell the direction their wave of balloting could flow in the recent time of their political awareness trajectory. It could as well begin with the Local Government Elections around the corner if President Tinubnu’s administration could succeed in underpinning the autonomy of local government in process with INEC taking over the conducts of elections at the grassroots level. The opposition parties may be in limbo or state of rest for now. An INEC conducted local government election may become they need as energizer to wake up from slumber.