Osun: The Cost of a ‘Rehearsal’
Olusegun Adeniyi
The biggest losers in the Osun State gubernatorial election are the All Progressives Congress (APC) National Chairman, Prof. Nentawe Yilwatda and the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Mr Adegboyega Oyetola. For Yilwatda, his 276-member campaign council of “political heavyweights” was crushed by the dancing feet of Governor Ademola Adeleke. Despite boasting that the contest would end like “a trailer facing a Keke (bicycle)”, he was humbled by Osun voters. Had Yillwatda listened to his ownSpecial Adviser on Media and Strategy, Abimbola Tooki, he would have known that Oyetola and his proxy candidate, Mr Bola Oyebamiji (a respected professional in his own right) were no match for the ‘Ajobiewe’ of Ede. But now that the election has been lost and won, we should all be worried by what transpired in Osun State.
By the conventional indicators Nigeria uses to evaluate electoral success, the process appeared to have delivered. Votes were cast and properly counted. And the winner was determined by daybreak. But the more consequential question is what the election required in human, institutional, and material terms, and whether the Nigerian state is prepared to account for those costs. The first cost is measured in lives. Let’s begin with the dead. On 12 August, three days before the election, Ayegbo Oluwadele was shot near a family compound in Esa-Oke, Obokun Local Government Area. On 6 July, Timilehin Oni, a 19-year-old who would have been participating in his first governorship election, was shot dead in Ijebu-Jesa. These deaths were not isolated incidents; they formed part of a wider pattern of election-related violence reported across a state where a serving Senator introduced a new refrain, ‘Pi pa ni o’ which literally translates into a license to kill political opponents.
How many lives were lost to the election? Here we arrive at the first scandal. The Kimpact Development Initiative recorded 73 election-related incidents and 29 deaths. YIAGA Africa’s Samson Itodo placed the death toll above 35. The Nigeria Police Force reported at least 30 politically motivated killings, while the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development recorded 18. The APC reported ten members killed; the Accord Party reported fifteen. The disparity reveals a serious weakness in Nigeria’s capacity to document electoral violence. The country can record electoral outcomes with extraordinary precision while failing to establish, with comparable certainty, how many citizens died in the same electoral process. Votes are subjected to meticulous enumeration while deaths are reduced to competing estimates.
No one should pretend that this was a crime by one political party. Members of the two major political camps were among the dead, while both have faced allegations of mobilizing or arming young people for political purposes.
Let’s now consider what it took to hold the ring. For a single electoral day in a single state, approximately 25,310 security personnel were deployed: 15,000 police officers, 10,210 personnel from the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), and over 100 Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) operatives. A Deputy Inspector-General of Police was deployed to coordinate operations while 30 Police Commissioners were assigned across the state’s 30 local government areas. Helicopters and drones were used for surveillance. The Army restricted movement into and within the state from midnight, with exemptions for essential services and voters.
Even if we ignore the enormous financial cost involved at a period most Nigerians struggle to eke out a living, the scale of this deployment amounted to roughly seven security personnel for every polling unit and approximately one security officer for every 40 votes eventually cast. Meanwhile, farmers in several states face insecurity on routes to their fields; and travellers along major corridors remain exposed to kidnapping and other forms of violence. The issue is therefore not the availability of state capacity to address the challenge of insecurity. It is about the allocation of that capacity. Osun demonstrated what the Nigerian state can accomplish when political stakes are sufficiently high. The unresolved question is why comparable urgency is not consistently applied to the protection of citizens outside electoral periods.
Then there was the ‘migration’. In the final week of the campaign, senior political figures from across the federation converged in Osogbo. No fewer than six APC Governors were in Osun State with their retinue of aides. The senate president and his deputy were also on ground along with numerous National Assembly members. These actors exercised considerable influence over the campaign environment, despite the fact that none was an eligible voter in Osun State. But here is the lesson of it all: The full weight of the APC federal might was placed on one side of a scale, and the scale did not move: the margin of victory, 66,252 votes, was more than twice the 28,344 by which the same man won in 2022!
And then the money. Reports from across the state put the going rate at between N20,000 and N50,000 for a vote, with agents of both leading parties named. Consider what that means. In a state where roughly 1.9 million people live in multidimensional poverty and nearly 297,000 children of primary school age are not in any classroom, the highest out-of-school rate in the entire South-West, the ballots for who governs for the next four years were battered. This is not intended to diminish the legitimacy of the mandate but rather to place it within its social context. A functioning electoral democracy requires citizens to participate without being induced, political actors to compete within established rules, and the state to protect citizens without selectively concentrating security capacity around political events.
Now to the crux of the matter. The APC National Chairman told us three weeks ago what Osun gubernatorial election represents. It was, in his own framing, a ‘rehearsal’ for the 2027 general election. I took Yilwatda at his word in this column exactly two weeks ago, Osun Polls as Tinubu’s Litmus Test – THISDAYLIVE. And I take him at his word now. We have seen the ‘rehearsal’. Twenty-nine dead, or thirty-five, or eighteen, we still cannot say. Scores of others injured. Twenty-five thousand security personnel deployed. Votes traded openly like a commodity. For the 2027 general election, we do not want to see a repeat of such ‘rehearsal.’
The ballot box was invented so that the transfer of power could be settled by counting votes rather than breaking heads. That was the entire bargain of democracy. In Osun State, we ran both systems at once. We counted the votes and we broke the heads. Yet, until the political class can be persuaded that the first makes the second unnecessary, we are conducting a census of who is willing to die for other men’s ambition. And then holding a vote afterwards to make it official. A democracy that compels citizens to count the body bags after counting the votes is imperiled.
Beyond Frank Omenka’s Moonlight Tales
I cannot count the number of people who have forwarded to me the interview granted by Colonel Frank Omenka, where he made copious references to me. In the first part, he said: “There are many approaches to interrogation. It depends on the condition. I didn’t touch anybody with the ones I used. There’s this boy, Olusegun Adeniyi. He’s a pressman like you people. When I took over the Security Group, I think he had been invited before I took over. But he came. I looked at him. I said, such a small boy. He came there because he was arrested for being a courier for one Cornelius Adebayo or something. I said, don’t do this. This is not good. When he left, what did he do? He wrote a book, saying that I was hostile to him. Yes, people are mad because they suffered.”
In another part, he said: “When Olusegun Adeniyi was released, I begged him not to do anything that had to do with being a courier or a drug peddler, carrying cocaine or something. Don’t put yourself in trouble. I said, go. Come back tomorrow by 10 o’clock. Ask him. As he was about to go, I just said, just one minute. Please come back. Don’t put us in trouble. In any case, if you don’t come back, we are going to arrest this person. I gave a name that we had done a job on before. He sat down in my office, sweating. I said, no, you can just go. Tomorrow, come back around 10 A.M. The next day, he came back before 10. The person whose name I gave I think must be the wife, or the girlfriend then. He sat down. So, he came early. He wasn’t detained. Ask him whether he was detained in my office.” In yet another part of the interview, Omenka again made allusion to me: “This other boy, Adeniyi, I think he was doing courier job for, not NADECO per se, but for the agitators.”
My encounter with Omenka happened 30 years ago when I was living with Second Republic Kwara State Governor, Chief Cornelius Olatunji Adebayo (who died last year) in his rented three-bedroom flat in Surulere, Lagos. I was then an Assistant Editor at Sunday Concord with Mr Tunji Bello (currently the Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission), as the Editor. A prominent NADECO member, Adebayo—who later served as a Minister under President Olusegun Obasanjo—had been arrested along with the late Chief Anthony Enahoro, and detained first in Abuja and then later in Calabar Prison for eight months. A few weeks after regaining freedom, Adebayo was forewarned that Abacha’s gunmen were after him, so he fled the country to Cote D’Ivoire before he eventually ended up in Canada where he took up asylum. It was while in Abidjan that his Personal Assistant, the late Mr Jonathan Olalere Laiyemo, visited him. On the way back to Nigeria, Laiyemo was arrested at the Seme border by security people who found all the letters he (Adebayo) wrote to NADECO/Afenifere colleagues (Chiefs Abraham Adesanya, Ayo Adebanjo and Olanihun Ajayi, who are now of blessed memories) and family members, including me. I was also to deliver the other letters. That was how I entered Omenka’s frame.
However, contrary to Omenka’s claim, I have never shared my DMI experience in any of my books. But it is true that he neither hit me nor did I see him or any of his men physically assault anybody throughout the period I was at their office. Eight years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the death of General Sani Abacha, and one year to the 2019 general election in which the late President Muhammadu Buhari was seeking a second term, I used that memorable encounter with Omenka to make a critical point. That point is as valid today as it was eight years ago:
…As an assistant editor at Sunday Concord, I was arrested around 3am in October 1996 by truckloads of soldiers who were shocked to see a “small boy” and became sympathetic the moment they realized I was a journalist (they told me they thought I was a ‘419’ kingpin since no reason was given them for the arrest). Dumped at the DMI dungeon in Apapa at that ungodly time of the day, I did not get to meet the much-dreaded DMI Director, Col Frank Omenka until around 5pm to endure verbal abuse, bullying and threats in the name of interrogation that lasted five days. While I will tell my story if I live long enough to write a biography, I can never forget that, right in my presence, a man was hurled into the room to whom Omenka threatened: “I will detain you here tonight and organise some boys to go and rape your wife at home.”
After the distraught man had been dragged away, Omenka now turned to me. “I will let you go home tonight but you must come back tomorrow with everything you have ever written, including your latest piece where you compared General Abacha with Idi Amin. Meanwhile, greet your wife for me.” When I replied that I was not married, he countered: “I know that already. But you have a fiancée who is undergoing her youth service in Ogun State.” Seeing how shocked I was, Omenka pressed his advantage. “I know everything about you. You are a lucky boy because my instruction before I left office yesterday was that my men should arrest and dump you in the underground cell for two months before bringing you to me but when I came this morning and I saw you asleep on the sofa, I had pity on you. But don’t push your luck because, as you must be aware, I stammer and I am already provoked. Since you are a small boy, maybe I can still mend you. And if I cannot, I will make your mother to weep over you…”
NOTE: In that same column of eight years ago, ’20 Years after Abacha: Lest we Forget,’ this was my conclusion:
Given the internal contradictions that have led to convulsions within the ruling APC, the orgy of violence in certain theatres across the country and the manner in which institutions of state are now being used to fight personal battles, there are genuine reasons to be apprehensive as democracy loses its meaning when mob passion or crude coercion overwhelms the rule of law and public decency. Yet, if there is any lesson we must learn from the Abacha era, it is that when the security and law enforcement institutions become extensions of the political agenda of the incumbent and the political elite cannot see beyond its narrow interests, the society can never advance or be peaceful.
As we therefore approach the 2019 general election, with the security agencies preoccupied with regime protection, at a time a cult of personality has effectively been built around the president by an uncritical mob, the answer to the question Abacha posed to our system (before the divine intervention of 8th June 1988) lies in the people not letting down their guards. Eternal vigilance, as the old saying goes, is the price of liberty!
ENDNOTE: I wrote the foregoing on 7th June 2018, and I hope some people would still get the message as they plot their ‘rehearsals’ for the 2027 general election. To Colonel Frank Omenka, please accept my sympathy. This ‘small boy’ has since moved on with his life. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot rewrite history!
