The ballot box has the final word

By: Patrick A. Ebojele

SONALA Olumhense’s latest intervention on Edo State duly elected, INEC Certified and Supreme Court of Nigeria affirmed Governor Monday Okpebholo’s 2.5 million-vote target for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu come January 2027, makes a big mistake from the outset- even the visually impaired can see it but not the author. It is treating an election that is in the future, as though its result has already been calculated. Olumhense’s arithmetic may look neat. But the politics is not. We do respect  the elder as an accomplished columnist. But that does not make him a deity or a demon! His lame report of a 12-year-old walking six miles to an examination hall is strong. He knows too that emotion can not substitute for political analysis, just as past election figures can not predict a future election even with all the  mathematical certainty. Moreso in our clime.

His submission is that if Edo recorded about 600,000 votes in the 2023 presidential election, a 2.5 million-vote target for 2027 is impossible. That is his very flawed conclusion. Perhaps amnesia has set in–Elections are not photocopies. Voters do not remain permanently attached to the choices they made two , three, or four years ago. Political alliances shift. Governments change. Candidates change. Party structures expand or die. AD, PDP, and labour are political parties that died! Campaigns alter perceptions. Most importantly, voters make new choices based on new circumstances. And so Elder Olumhense’s purile figures prove only what happened in 2023. Peter Obi received 331,163 votes in Edo, while President Tinubu polled 144,471. These are undisputed facts, but why should they be treated as a political prophecy for 2027?

Edo politics has not remained frozen since 2023. Governor Monday Okpebholo represents the change in the political environment of Edo. Like he articulated, the 2023 figure was due to dissatisfaction with the beleaguered junta in the state at the time. The elder then descends into the ridiculous when he suggests that Governor Okpebholo “did not really win” the 2024 Edo State governorship election. He did and not as a matter of political interpretation but of judicial record. And since Sonala lives in a faraway hamlet in his location abroad and is cut off from the rest of the global village, his challenge can be understood on this score. Shame. Unknown to him, the Supreme Court, sitting as the final court in Nigeria, unanimously affirmed Okpebholo’s election. That decision followed judgments by the Edo State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal and the Court of Appeal, both of which rejected the challenge by the petitioners.

The Court even noted that the petitioners challenged results from only 395 of 5,019 polling units and failed to discharge the burden of proof required to overturn the election. Three levels of court examined the evidence. Three levels reached the same conclusion. But Elder Sonala Olumhense can choose to play the ostrich  As a columnist, he is entitled to dislike a result. He is entitled to criticise the process or argue that the political contest was imperfect. What he can not reasonably do is turn a settled judicial decision into a matter of personal arithmetic. This can only depress his ilk. Just as well is his claim that Governor Okpebholo’s 291,667 votes were somehow insignificant. But they are votes that were sufficient for him to win the election. This was a was not confined to the governor’s traditional political strongholds but statewide.But how can someone so cut off from reality comprehend such?

In Oredo Local Government Area, the home base of the former Governor Godwin Obaseki, the APC secured 30,780 votes against the PDP’s 24,938. That result alone should caution anyone against assuming that Edo voters can be permanently assigned to one political camp. What of the July 11, 2026, local government elections? The Edo State Independent Electoral Commission declared APC winner of all 18 chairmanship positions and all 192 councillorship seats. Twelve political parties participated in the election. Agreed, a local government election is not a presidential election. Nobody seriously should claim otherwise. It, however, provides a snapshot of the current political reality in Edo. It says something about party organisation, grassroots mobilisation, and the ability of APC as a political party to reach voters across the 18 local government areas.

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Those are precisely the structures that will matter in 2027. On the 2.5 million target itself, Mr Olumhense is free and can argue that the number is too high, politically extravagant, or difficult to achieve. What he can not establish from previous election figures is that it is impossible. It is a target and not a result. Governor Okpebholo is not claiming that he has already received 2.5 million votes. He is setting a political mobilisation target for his party. The voters will decide whether that target is achieved. That distinction should ordinarily not be difficult to understand. The more question now is, what Edo voters will consider when they enter polling booths in 2027. Will they look at roads? Security? Schools? Healthcare? Salaries? Infrastructure? Government performance? The strength of political parties? Their personal economic circumstances? Certainly. That is why the performance of Governor Okpebholo since November 2024 deserves more scrutiny than a lengthy excursion into the governor’s schooling and personal history.

If the argument is about what will determine how Edo people vote, then the policies, programmes, and results of the government should be at the centre of the discussion. The governor has made a big promise. His political opponents should test it. Edo is not a spreadsheet. The 2023 figures belong to 2023. The 2024 governorship election belongs to 2024. The 2026 local government election belongs to 2026. The 2027 presidential election will be decided by voters in 2027. When the votes are counted, we will know whether Okpebholo’s 2.5 million target was achievable, ambitious, or wildly optimistic. Until then, the ballot box—not an aging columnist’s calculator—should have the final word.

•Ebojele, PhD. in Public Administration, is the Chief Press Secretary to Governor Monday Okpebholo of Edo State.