“That boy calls you father. Do not bear a hand in his death.” Those were the words of Ogbuefi Ezeudu, the oldest man in Okonkwo’s quarter of Umuofia, when he privately warned Okonkwo against taking part in the killing of Ikemefuna in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Okonkwo, however, ignored the counsel. When the men eventually took Ikemefuna into the forest and the fatal blow came, the boy, in his terror and bewilderment, ran towards the man he had come to regard as a father and cried out, “My father, they have killed me.” Achebe’s tragedy was not just the death of a boy; it was also the tragedy of a man who, through fear and misplaced allegiance, participated in the destruction of someone he ought to have protected.
That classic Achebean episode gives us a rather uncomfortable metaphor for the Ogun State chapter of the All Progressives Congress, where an aggrieved aspirant, Abayomi Semako Hunye, has spent recent weeks parading himself as the party’s governorship candidate, months after a primary in which Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, popularly known as Yayi, polled 304,055 of the 305,287 accredited votes. The party’s state chairman, Chief Yemi Sanusi, had to issue a public statement dissociating the APC from Hunye’s claim and urging members to disregard it. Hunye is the most visible face of a quieter discontent; grumbling persists in pockets of the party, the kind that rarely rises to a formal challenge but never fully subsides either. A political party cannot afford to become so consumed by internal contests that its own members begin, deliberately or otherwise, to imperil the collective project they are supposed to advance. Whatever differences may exist among party actors, there ought to be enough institutional maturity to distinguish legitimate internal competition from conduct that ultimately weakens the party itself.
This is particularly important as the party looks towards the 2027 governorship election. If the objective is to retain public confidence and secure another mandate, then the party’s leaders and members must understand that electoral success cannot be built on internal sabotage, factional suspicion or the quiet undermining of one another. Political competition within a party is inevitable; political self-destruction is not. A party that spends more energy fighting itself than persuading the electorate eventually risks turning its internal disagreements into the electorate’s reason for looking elsewhere.
There is an even larger principle here. Political parties are not ordinary vehicles through which individuals pursue elective office; at their best, they are instruments for aggregating interests, organising political participation and translating collective ideas into governance. Edmund Burke famously described a political party as “a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” The phrase “joint endeavours” is particularly instructive. It suggests that while individuals may have different ambitions, the party’s strength ultimately depends on their capacity to subordinate those differences to a sufficiently important common objective.
For the APC in Ogun, that common objective should not be reduced to who occupies which position or whose influence appears greater within the party. The larger question is whether the party can present itself to the people as a coherent political organisation capable of sustaining good governance and earning another mandate. That requires concerted effort, strategic discipline and a willingness among its members to understand that nobody wins an election alone. Candidates need party structures, party structures need committed members, and the party itself needs the collective labour of people who may not always agree with one another.
This is why the language and conduct of party members matter. One can disagree with a leader without destroying the institution that leader represents. One can challenge a policy without sabotaging the administration implementing it. One can nurse an ambition without becoming an enemy of the person currently occupying the position one covets. Politics inevitably produces competing interests; mature political organisations develop mechanisms for managing those interests without allowing them to engulf the organisation itself.
It is in this context that I borrow Ezeudu’s warning and, with apologies to Achebe, give it a contemporary Ogun political rendering: Yayi calls you father; do not bear a hand in mortgaging his mandate.
The metaphor is deliberately provocative, but the point is simple. Those who belong to the same political family should be careful about the consequences of their actions. If the objective is to secure victory in 2027 and continue delivering governance to the people of Ogun, then every serious member of the party should be asking not just, “What do I gain from this?” but also, “What does this do to the collective project?” A party cannot demand the people’s confidence while its own members are working at cross-purposes.
There is therefore a need for the Ogun APC to shore up its own foundations, starting with how it manages men like Hunye and the quieter dissenters who have not yet gone public. Internal disagreements should be managed through dialogue, party structures and political negotiation rather than through the kind of subterranean warfare that leaves everyone weaker. The party must also resist the temptation to interpret every difference of opinion as disloyalty. Loyalty to a political party should not mean intellectual servitude, but neither should internal criticism become a convenient disguise for actions that damage the party’s electoral prospects.
There is another dimension to this story that the party cannot afford to dismiss. A campaign questioning Yayi’s indigene status, his nativity in Ogun West and, by implication, his claim upon Ogun State altogether, continues to circulate in the public space, sustained in no small part by voices politically aligned with the opposition. The claim itself is not new, and repetition alone has added no fresh evidence to it. However an assertion recycled often enough in Nigerian politics tends to acquire the appearance of settled fact. The sensible response, therefore, is not to shout the narrative down but to ensure that the house from which any rebuttal comes is united and credible enough to be believed. A party divided against itself is a poor advocate for anyone’s identity, including its own candidate’s.
Questions of identity and belonging, in any case, are not settled by political convenience. If a man identifies with a particular community, and the traditional institution, recognised community leaders and people of that place accept him as one of their own, it is not obvious what political opponents gain by attempting to redraw that community’s history from outside its gates. One may interrogate a man’s account of his own origins, demand evidence, even hold a contrary view; but there is a real difference between questioning an identity and assuming for oneself the authority to define another person’s roots. Nor does the Constitution offer much comfort to those who would settle the matter by law rather than argument. Section 177, which prescribes the qualifications for election as governor, requires citizenship by birth, a minimum age of thirty-five, sponsorship by a political party and a basic educational threshold; it says nothing about senatorial origin or indigeneship to any particular part of a state. Political actors are free to weigh questions of origin, equity and representation as they choose, but such considerations should not be mistaken for constitutional disqualifications, which they are not.
This returns us to the central argument. A party that is internally disordered cannot credibly flex political muscle against an external falsehood; contradiction is not a currency that persuades anyone. If the Ogun APC wishes to defeat the narrative around Yayi’s roots, it must do so with evidence, institutional confidence and demonstrable unity, not indignation alone. Those who genuinely believe in his candidacy would do better to strengthen the political house than to hand its opponents fresh material with which to attack it. It is possible, after all, to defend a man without pretending that every criticism of him is illegitimate, just as it is possible to question a candidacy without converting political disagreement into a rewriting of another person’s identity. The party’s task is to separate legitimate argument from manufactured narrative, and to ensure that its own internal contradictions do not become the scaffolding upon which its opponents build their case.
The real danger is that political actors sometimes forget that the electorate is watching. Voters may not know every detail of an internal dispute, but they notice disunity, rancour and the persistent spectacle of politicians fighting among themselves rather than discussing the future of the people they seek to govern. The electorate ultimately has the power to decide whether a party deserves another opportunity, and no internal faction is powerful enough to guarantee victory against a dissatisfied electorate.
Yayi may be the immediate beneficiary of the party’s mandate, but the mandate ultimately belongs to the people. His political colleagues therefore have every right to disagree with him, challenge him and even oppose particular decisions. What they should not do is become so preoccupied with personal or factional calculations that they inadvertently undermine the very political platform through which they hope to continue serving the people.
Achebe’s tragedy was that Okonkwo heard the warning but failed to understand its moral weight until it was too late. The Ogun APC should not make the same mistake. If the house must remain standing, those inside it must stop pulling at its foundations. And if the party hopes to return to the people in 2027 asking for their trust, its members must first demonstrate that they can trust one another enough to work for the same political objective.
Folorunso Fatai Adisa is a communication strategist and columnist. He holds a Master’s degree in Media and Communication from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and writes from Abeokuta, Ogun State.
Email: folorunsofatai03@gmail.com
