Ondo election and revaluation of power

There is this old photo of General Olusegun Obasanjo playing a game of draught with then Colonel Ibrahim Babangida. Among officers watching the play were General Theophilus Danjuma and Colonel Sani Abacha. Both players looked serious, eyes on the board. But if today you ask IBB who won that game, he won’t think twice before telling you it was the General. Generals always win. In the military, it is sacrilege to disgrace a senior in any contest. To them, war and sport are synonyms. To lose a game is to lose a war. Now, when you have Generals playing politics, they do not need anyone to teach them how to win. They must win. From 1999 to this day, you have seen many examples of how Generals win their wars. They take prisoners if expedient, otherwise they drown the enemy.

It is clear now who the senior partner is in the single-purpose vehicle called All Progressives Congress (APC). If anyone had any doubt, the long knives of Ondo State must have removed everything. The most senior is that part of the party that belongs exclusively to the president. Others should be clear now that they were brought in as windbreakers in the desert storm of 2015 elections. Why would foot soldiers, ordinary draftees compete for authority and space and benefits of victory with the General? Buba Galadima reminded all of us, including Lagos and its sympathisers, recently that the north’s CPC had 12 million votes, South West’s ACN had two million in the 2011 elections. So? What are they talking about?

The Ondo election is over. The Lagos content of the APC is beaten and it is not funny. I read Senator Bola Tinubu congratulating Rotimi Akeredolu and describing President Muhammadu Buhari as “the” national leader of their party. I thought that title belonged exclusively to Tinubu himself? Politics of power and power relations harbours egregious plots. In politics, as in war, post-defeat appeasement does not work. Accepting the libation of the defeated will degrade the gods of victory. Machiavelli’s warning resonates whenever a surrender is seen. Generals know when a former ally surrenders to win. They learn from the fate of imperial Rome which lost its power to ex-friends who prostrated to conquer.

What we will see henceforth, post-Ondo, is a new definition of friendship in the APC. When you break off from your ranks to do battle against your own troops, just ensure you win, whatever it takes. A failure is fatal. Losing is not sweet at all. And the costs are enormous. It is like in the fine art of carpentry. You know what happens to the nail that stands up? It gets hammered down! There is not supposed to be peace anywhere kingmakers think and act regally. The relationship is more delicate when the king is a decorated General.

To Generals, it matters very little whether what they face are “the arrow cloud at the battle of Agincourt, the musket balls at Waterloo, or the steel rain of the Somme.” To them, all wars are the same, and must be fought with maximum fire and maneuver. They see in all wars, potential points of maximum danger. We have been told that wars have cultural colours. Our president is not just a General, he is also a Fulani. You do not take a Fulani for granted, especially when the contest is for power. He may be slow. He may perambulate, windy in arriving but he doesn’t lose sight of the ball and the goal post. He will score his goal not minding how many limbs are lost. The Fulani maintain very close historical and cultural affinity with the Arabs. Warfare historian, John Keegan, according to Norvell De Atkine, reminds us that Arab armies in the Islamic era were “masters of evasion, delay, and indirection.” This historical stone base, he says, explains why today’s Arabs excel in “insurgent, or political warfare” deploying hardcore deception to lure and level the enemy. Did you see these in pre and post-Ondo war?

I have also heard of some talking of betrayal and betrayers in the Ondo elections. I have read of some being cast in the character mould of Afonja. I feel like warning that we shouldn’t just go there at all. If we drag this, we are likely to draw a long list of Afonjas among the betrayed of today. If you were there and got a bloodied nose, stop whining. Instead of looking for persons to blame, reassess yourself, do a reevaluation of your gross and net worth. You don’t play games with Generals unless you are prepared to lose. If your design is to win, align with the General or don’t play the game. If winning is in your DNA, choose your play mate wisely. When you play and you display superior skills, the General sees a setup, he sees humiliation. In the uneven terrain of war and warfare, men are different from officers. Men know nothing and are nothing but tools. When a tool gets troublesome, the master drops it for a new one.

Generals are experts at weakening rivals, breaking walls, destroying factions, enriching trusted allies and impoverishing unruly friends. If you still do not understand, cast your mind back to the grand finale rally of Akeredolu in Akure. The president was there. Tinubu and his people were not there. But did you not see Senate President Bukola Saraki there? Did you hear his message at that rally? Akeredolu has to win, he said with his characteristic zero emotion. The president smiled. Akeredolu won, and Saraki won too. His trophy from that war is a golden chair in the other room of the party. If you are in doubt,  find out how close Bolaji Abdullahi, the new spokesman of the APC, is to Saraki. In all wars, Generals enter into strategic alliances. Here is a new one. It may last. It may not.

But in all this, who really lost? The poor man is the perpetual loser. He is the one who dances for politicians, empty stomached. The loser is the one who breaks bones doing acrobatics with aged motorcycles at campaign events. He is still the one, hungry and weak, waiting forever for his just and fair pay. The defeated is the one who just bought a bottle of palm oil for N900. The loser is the one who remembers that exactly this time two years ago, the government of Dr Goodluck Jonathan devalued the naira from 150/dollar to 168. The loser is that fellow who bellowed that time that the world had ended. He is the weather-beaten man who has lost his sense of counting. He is the lonely one who no longer sees any sense believing his mental calculator. For the loser, the accounts are just no longer getting balanced. The balance sheet is red, very red — even on payday.