When Oyo APC Leaders Failed Followers, Abandoned Progressive Values

By: Dabira Adeleke 

The All Progressives Congress, a party that built its identity on the premise of progressive values and democratic process, has in one shameless exercise, torn off that mask entirely. 

The recently conducted APC gubernatorial primary in Oyo State, brazenly engineered to position Sen. Sarafadeen Alli as the preferred candidate, was not an election but a choreographed heist, with every layer of the party structure from state executives down to ward-level officials allegedly induced financially to execute a democracy-killing script. 

When a party sells its conscience from top to bottom, it has not just failed its members, it has shamefully confessed its own moral deficit. 

‎What unfolded was a grotesque parade of everything a political party should ever wish to become.

Intimidation, open threats of removal of any exco member who refused to toe the party line sadly dotted the social media space.

All these manipulations were not exceptions but became operating procedure. Genuine party faithful who came out in good faith were met with a contrived machinery, so brazen in its contempt for due process to the extent that it left party faithfuls not just disillusioned but humiliated, as their democratic rights became a privilege, sacrificed on the altar of a pre-determined outcome.

‎The most damning indictment is not only the charade of the internal election itself, but also the alleged wholesale purchase of the party’s entire leadership to enable it. 

If leaders and executives from state to ward levels were settled as alleged to facilitate this travesty, then APC in Oyo State is not a political party, but an unwholesome  enterprise dressed in party colours. As such it may not be out of place to declare that every compromised official has spat on the very soul of progressivism.

‎This moral catastrophe is particularly unforgivable because the APC did not rise to power through dubious means, it rose on thunderous proclamations of internal electoral integrity, as witnessed during the presidential primaries that produced Mr President. 

For its own operatives to now suppress what they once applauded for financial reward, is  hypocrisy so profound that it deserves harsher, undiplomatic language. 

Senator Alli’s purported emergence sits not on popular mandate but on manufactured consent purchased with dirty money. ‎The APC national leadership cannot look away and retain any credibility. A party that permits Oyo’s primary to be reduced to a paid performance has licensed moral anarchy in its ranks.

The disenfranchised members deserve not performative justice but decisive, consequential action against every individual who traded their conscience for cash. 

If progressivism means anything, it must mean that the powerful cannot brazenly purchase electoral outcomes. Oyo has become the test of whether that principle was ever real, or mere fiction.

Dabira Adeleke writes from Surulere Local Government Area of Oyo State