Osinbajo’s Tactless Gambit and Political Naivety

One discernible indiscretion of the Senator Bola Tinubu support mob, if you like call them groups, was their intolerance to a competitive culture. The assumption that Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, having worked with him, when he was governor of Lagos State, took away his right to seek the same office as Tinubu, was an idea from a rather narrow mindset.

Truth is, there’s no progressive democracy without the culture of competition. Even in some of Africa’s struggling democracies with high political instability, competition is hard to kill, otherwise, it is quick to exposing the dictatorship tendency in their leaderships. And there’s no aspect of life where competition is totally absent.

It was, therefore, within the right of Osinbajo to seek to be president of Nigeria, more so, when he is adequately positioned as a sitting vice-president, who has worked hard and walked with his principal for almost eight years and understood the government and their development agenda.

Unfortunately, Osinbajo, unlike an average politician, failed to recognise, when to pull the breaks, a situation, which spoke more to his lack of political discipline. The direction the All Progressives Congress (APC) Special Convention eventually took, assumed shape in less than 24 hours to the exercise proper. 

However, the smart politicians in the race and from the same place, saw the direction early enough. They had seen that the president had returned to his usual mode – aloofness. They had also seen that the governors had eventually sold out and agreed on where to go. Whether or not anything exchanged hands was secondary at the moment. Above all, the various power centres in the presidency, had closed the deal. So, it was game over.

Osinbajo couldn’t have claimed that as the number two citizen of this country, he didn’t get the intelligence to the humiliation that awaited him. Thus, as some of the aspirants – seven of them – started to stand down one after the other in view of consensus building, Osinbajo needed no more convincing to ascertain that the game was up. This is politics. While some may take their chances, no one can deny the fact that there is science to the game of politics – the science of working to a desired answer. 

Yet, an evidently naïve Osinbajo lost the momentum. He thought giving up and stepping down at that point could disappoint his “#EndSARS and Twitter” supporters, a majority of whom had no PVCs and chose to fight to the finish. It was not a smart choice, arguably. What more, finishing a humiliating third place was not good for anything either – the optics especially. But standing down at that point could have saved and repaired many damaged bonds. Osinbajo failed to recognise and seize the momentum.