A simmering anticipation has gripped Osun State over the past few days as the state await the supreme court judgement on the September 2018 governorship election in which the INEC declared GBOYEGA Oyetola of the APC as the duly elected governor.
People of the state are generally on edge as the verdict is being awaited.
One thing is Sure, that in a couple of hours from now, Osun state with either go the way of Golgotha by the change of Government to the PDP or to purgatory by the way of victory for the APC.
If the APC is declared the winner by the supreme court, it will be time for the party and her candidate to go into reflection, go into purgatory and rebrand. It is obvious that the party has lost lots of goodwill before and after the last Governorship election basically because of non performance and non people oriented policy of the party at the National and the seeming impoverishment of the people of the state by the government of Rauf Aregbesola who would rather build structures by plunging the state into debt than make provisions for the people to be fed.
Should the Candidate of the PDP be declared the winner, the state will be heading to Golgotha as so many structures of the present government will be dismantled both implied and imagined. It is to be expected that the state will bleed as so many things that were hidden will be exposed and that which has been kept away will be unearthed.
Whichever way it goes, the people will benefit. The people will win!
Should Oyetola’s victory be upheld by the Supreme Court, it presents a major headache for our law and will set a precedent as reagards the circumstances of the re run election by which he was declared winner and inconclusive becomes a new word and legally so in our democratic lexicon.
Three main options are opened to the Supreme Court. It can uphold the original results, that being that Demola Adeleke of the PDP won on first ballot and declare the re run illegal and Demola narrowly triumphed and avoid the necessity of a runoff. The second main scenario is that the Supreme Court orders a rerun in the affected areas should she agree with the claim of vioence and intimidation at the re run poll.
But there’s also a third option open to the Supreme Court and that’s to order that the re run election was legal and Gboyega Oyetola was validly elected. Limited new poll based not on the declaration of systematic fraud, but just small discrepancies not enough to invalidate the process and the emergence of a winner.
It should also be said that the battle has been that of an old battle in a new guise.
It is a battle between the Tinubu Political dynasty and the ancestral name of the Adelekes.
Whichever way it goes, the determinants of an election judgement such as this are split between “fundamentals” and “sentiment.” The former is evidence based on prior existing judgement and the provision of the constitution usually grounded in social facts like demographic identity and the state of voters’ satisfaction based on outcome. The latter is the mood or zeitgeist that makes improbable events – like Demola gaining victory despite all social odds against him– upset conventional wisdom and possibly rewrite the rule book on what’s normal.
When observers are biased towards fundamentals, they sometimes discount sentiment as mass illusion and false ideology. A famous example is Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Observers with this bias risk not seeing a sentiment-based shift in the fundamentals that Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift.
Historical events are not the same as natural events that the tools of natural science, like probability modeling, were designed to analyze. Though some, perhaps most, historical events, seem (like the weather) to follow the causal logic of nature, other historical events are unpredictable black swans. What happened in 2010 that brought a Rauf Aregbesola to power in the state is still fresh in the mind and perhaps Osun as a state is designing her own pattern and re writing her own history.
The bottom line is that the 2018 election in Osun has already been the most unusual in recent memory. Both Oyetola and Adeleke have historically high negative favorability ratings.
As either of the way to Golgotha or Purgatory emerges, let it be known that Governance is too important an issue to be left only to goodwill and euphoria of victory.
Serious minded people for gvernance and people centrered policies must be brought in to provide a complementary and contrasting perspective such that will be of immense gain to the people. Only then is governance likely to become a concept that can be debated among equals and lend itself to measurements that provide a fairer commentary and perspective on individual communities than the current scales used to measure governance.
AYODEJI OLOGUN is a political analyst, a public speaker and a broadcast Journalist. He can be reached via emmanologun@gmail.com
