In his own words, Senator Adams Oshiomhole is a terrible salesman of products. In the real business world, his premises would have been shut down and his products banned. But in politics, crime multiplies grace. Oshiomhole dragged Godwin Obaseki into the governorship race in 2016 when the odds were stacked against him. Obaseki’s day job was minding his own business at Afrinvest, a financial services company he founded. But he soon landed a side job as chairman of the Edo State Economic and Strategy Team at Osadebey House, Benin.
When Oshiomhole wanted to hand over the baton in 2016, after two terms as governor, Obaseki, the boy from Lagos, did not seem likely to do so. He was not marketable. Pius Odubu, the deputy governor, was well placed and seemed the favourite to get it, by most accounts.
Tinubu-Fashola model
But Oshiomhole wanted to replicate the Tinubu-Fashola model in Lagos. He wanted to be the Tinubu of Edo and make Obaseki, the technocrat and businessman with worldly knowledge, the Fashola. That was how Odubu, the local politician and man of the people, lost out.
A Lagos-based billionaire with a sprawling business empire also supported the plan, which eventually won Obaseki the All Progressives Congress (APC) nomination. Oshiomhole portrayed Obaseki as a genius, the special genius that the people of Edo had been waiting for, while demonising his rival in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Osagie Ize-Iyamu.
As I said in a article At that time, there was no name that Oshiomhole did not call Ize-Iyamu except the one given to him by his parents: Osagie. This man, he said, was a poor product, not worthy of the vote of the Edo people.
Short honeymoon
The genius Obaseki won, but the honeymoon did not last long. Not even a year passed before he fell out with his promoter, Oshiomhole. The disagreement was not over the performance or the party programmes, but over whether Tony Anenih, Oshiomhole's mortal enemy, should have been given a state burial and also over control of state resources.
The gubernatorial election in Edo, which was held out of season, made matters worse. Obaseki inherited a parliament installed in 2015, when Oshiomhole was governor, and the re-election of lawmakers in 2019 came a year before Obaseki’s. He managed to work with the lawmakers during the first three years of his term because they were all predominantly members of the same party.
When he defected to the PDP after being denied the APC gubernatorial ticket in 2020, there was a predominantly APC parliament in power, fiercely loyal to Oshiomhole. The House was a lion’s den, and Obaseki knew he would have had to plan for his survival if he won re-election. Oshiomhole toured Edo State begging voters to forgive him for selling them a “bad product” – the same product he himself had hyped as a brilliant offer in 2016.
This time, he offered them Osagie Ize-Iyamu, whom he had demonised and dismissed four years earlier, as the new candidate. Of course, the voters rejected the offer. Obaseki, who had defected to the opposition PDP with his deputy, Philip Shaibu, won the election.
To survive, Obaseki ruled with a parliament in trouble. More than half of the state's lawmakers camped out at Oshiomhole's house in Abuja because the governor refused to swear them in.
The seller begs again
The vendor has been pleading again for the sins he committed against the Esama of Benin, Chief Gabriel Igbinedion, hoping that forgiveness could also pave the way for the APC candidate, Monday Okpebholo, in this weekend’s governorship election.
It won't be long before we know what voters think. The stage is set for a three-way race between Okpebholo (APC), Asue Ighodalo of the People's Democratic Party (PDP) and Olumide Akpata of the Labour Party (LP).
According to electoral watchdog Yiaga Africa, there are 17 parties with about 2.6 million registered voters. For nearly two and a half decades, the political contest in Edo has been between two parties, until last year's presidential election altered the landscape, producing a result that gave the Labour Party 56.97 percent of the votes cast in the presidential election, one senator and one member of the House of Representatives.
The battlefields
The battle this weekend will be fierce in two senatorial districts – Edo Central, where the two leading candidates, Okpebholo and Ighodalo, are from, and the South, which produced a Senator and a Member of the Federal House of Representatives for the Labour Party and is also the stronghold of Obaseki and his ally and former SSG, Osaradion Ogie.
It was in the Central District, once a PDP stronghold, that Okpebholo defeated Clifford Ordia, a two-term senator. This weekend's contest gives Okpebholo the chance to prove that his victory was no fluke in an election where the two leading candidates, both from this constituency with the fewest local governments (five) and the lowest number of registered voters (440,514, or 16.68%), have everything at stake.
The South is the main battleground, the state's vote bank with 1,526,699 registered voters (57.81 per cent) and seven local governments. It is also crucial to the outcome for other reasons. As well as being the governor's base and the home of the Labor candidate, it is also the most cosmopolitan, which partly explains the emergence of the Labor Party as a force.
The South is the place where the governor’s record over the past eight years and the credentials of those who want to succeed him could face the strictest scrutiny. However, like most elite populations, it is also the most unreliable when it comes to results. If it rains too much, the weather is too hot, or the fear of violence becomes a clear and present danger, the elite has an excellent excuse to avoid elections and stay home.
With the APC and PDP threatening to make the election a matter of life and death and accusations from the PDP that the APC plans to use force and intimidation to rig the polls, low voter turnout, The threat, especially in the urban areas of southern Edo, is clear and present. This danger can erode the benefits that the combined forces of the Obaseki and Ogie of Oredo and Ikpoba local governments have brought to Ighodalo and tip the balance in favour of the APC and Labour Party candidates.
Not on the ballot?
Oshiomhole is not on the ballot, but his reputation as one of Edo’s most famous produce vendors over the past eight years is. With six local governments and 673,794 registered voters (25.51 percent), Edo North, Oshiomhole’s base, is the second largest vote bank in the state. It is also the base of Philip Shaibu, the stranded deputy governor.
I guess Obaseki’s style (not to mention his take-no-prisoners policy, a bad habit he may have inherited from his estranged promoter, Oshiomhole) may have further alienated him and reduced the chances of his candidate, Ighodalo, making significant inroads in the North. Prominent PDP people who protected Obaseki from vagrancy in 2020, to whom he turned his back, are waiting to take revenge.
Will it be triumph or perhaps redemption for the product seller? Will President Bola Ahmed Tinubu get his vindication four years after the Obaseki campaign taunted him with ” “State and country of Lagos?” Or will this be Obaseki's chance to assert himself as the new political force in Edo and shut down the production factory of the decorated, dismal product salesman once and for all?
Ishiekwene is the editor-in-chief of LEADERSHIPP and author of the new book Writing for Media and Monetising It.
