By Lasisi Olagunju

The Cambridge English dictionary defines ‘carcass’ as “the body of a dead animal, especially a large one.” The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) was recently described as “a carcass” by one of its former governors, Mr Ayodele Fayose. Yet, that carcass defeated the reigning lion, the APC, in a decisive election in Oyo State at the weekend. PDP was dead; PDP is not dead. If I were the APC presidency, I would accept this reality as a divine warning. I would go back to work; I would talk and scheme less, I would start working truly for the people’s welfare. I would know that only this will kill the ‘dead’ enemy.

An APC leader told me that the Oyo election result was “the effect of bizarre developments in the APC.” He said the APC candidate “scored 6 (six) votes in his polling unit.” Oyo State APC truly has a huge reward problem. It has the liability of a Lagos-centric Abuja, unfair in appointments in Oyo, imperial in disposition. Does this solely explain the loss? It does not. Listen. I work and live in Ibadan and I know that the state governor, Seyi Makinde, has a firm grip on the politics of the state. His stellar performance as governor and his humility before the palace and the people have made it very easy for everyone to be his friend. It will take more than ‘federal might’ to defeat such a person (and his party) now and in the future. Indeed, the by-election was a referendum on his six-year tenure as governor. It was also a pointer to how well the APC and its federal government have sold themselves to the people of Oyo State.

Defence minister, Alhaji Muhammad Badaru Abubakar, is the immediate past governor of Jigawa State. His image handlers spent the night of Saturday and the whole of Sunday fighting off the news that he lost his Jigawa State polling unit to the PDP. Because bad news is good news, the story of the minister’s loss was quite popular on the internet. Then a report surfaced on Sunday that “Badaru did not vote at PU 001. His accredited polling station is PU 002. There, the APC secured 188 votes while the PDP scored 164 votes.”

The unit which the minister is disowning is Babura Kofar Arewa Primary School PU 001, very next to the one he claimed, and both situated in the same primary school compound. At that Unit 001, while APC polled 112 votes, PDP won with 308. Now, do the arithmetic. The minister did not vote in that unit, but his polling unit shares the same location with this unit where his party lost with a margin of almost 200 votes. Can we just add the two units’ votes together and ask the powerful minister to say something? Did his party win the election in that location? If I were the minister, I would keep quiet and nurse the wounds inflicted by a mere carcass.

The ruling party must be very unhappy at the pushback it got across the country on Saturday. The APC wants to go into the 2027 elections without opposition. And it is working really hard to achieve that. Poisoned carrots in the air; State of Emergency and defections down there; arrest and detentions here and there. Who will warn ‘them’ that what they desire is lethal? Where there is no opposition, there is no check upon corruption; the government itself becomes the opposition to good governance, and ultimately its own death. Find out why there are ample provisions for His Majesty’s Government and His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in England. There was a reason why democratic Canada, in 1905, provided a good salary for the leader of the opposition. Parliament voted that year to give the incumbent an additional salary allowance, “equal to that provided to Cabinet Ministers.”

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C. P. Bhambhri in 1957 wrote ‘The Role of the Opposition in the House of the People (1952-56)’. In that seminal piece, he warns that: “In a community where no opposition parties are permitted, the alternative government is one of courtiers, policemen, soldiers and gangsters and it is only by violent methods that the government may be ousted.” It is the Indian’s argument that “an effective opposition renders a government a going concern. It prevents the formation of monopolies in politics. It ensures a neutral and non-political civil service and armed forces.”

Flood should stop thinking it will sweep away the river. What we saw in Saturday’s by-elections was a reassurance that despite everything, the opposition is alive in Nigeria, and the people and their democracy are safe. But it is not enough to be alive; it will be enough only if and when the opposition is not a living dead. A vibrant opposition is needed against a creepy dictatorship slithering into the walls of our democracy. Listen again to Bhambhri: “To find out whether a people is free it is necessary only to ask if there is an opposition and if there is, to ask where it is. The existence of a strong opposition is the greatest guarantee that there shall be no tyranny of the ruling party.”

So, the dead can come back, fight and win a war? There is a story in the October 1856 edition of the Church Missionary Society (CMS)’s ‘Quarterly Token For Juvenile Subscribers’. The story has this convoluted headline: ‘The dead, alive—The lost, found: Dasalu’s Odyssey.’ It is a story of death and of not dying. It reads: “In the Yoruba country, which you know is in West Africa, there was a town called Igbore. The Apena, or judge of the town, was named Deri. One of his sons, born about 1810, was generally called Dasalu, but sometimes Ogan. By and by, Igbore was destroyed by slave wars; but Deri and his family escaped to Iro. Afterwards they went to Ijana, where Deri died. Dasalu’s mother, Lutumbi, then took him to Ilaro, andp

A finally to Abbeokuta. Many Igbore people had settled there. That part of Abbeokuta in which they live is called Igbore. The boy grew up a bold, active young fellow, and the head of a party who used to roam about the country, seizing all the people they could, and selling them for slaves.” He later converted to Christianity, dropped his wild ways and was christened John Baptist Dasalu.

During the Dahomian invasion of Abeokuta on March 2, 1851, Dasalu was at the war front, defending his land. After the war, he was discovered to be among the missing. His elder brother, Lujobi, on the fifth day claimed that he had found a headless corpse in a bush. He then proceeded to seize “the poor fellow’s property, to the amount of fifty pounds as the headless corpse was claimed to be his.” However, it was later discovered that Dasalu had been captured, not killed, and was taken as a prisoner toward the coast. “Great was the stir the news made in Abbeokuta. Well it might! Had not his dead body been found? So, everybody thought at the time. Everybody? Did Lujobi? Or did he knowingly pass off some other dead body (it was headless, remember) for Dasalu’s? Lujobi’s cruel conduct afterwards seems to condemn him.” From his place of captivity, undead Dasalu managed to send a coded letter (àrokò) to his wife: a stone, a piece of charcoal, a pepper-pod, and a grain of parched maize, or Indian corn, all tied up in a rag.” What did this mean? “It meant that he was quite well, and as hard or strong as a stone. The prospect before him was, however, very dark, like charcoal. This has made him hot as pepper, and his body had dried like parched maize. While as for his cloth, it was a mere rag.” All attempts to ransom the man failed because he was known by his other name, Ogan. Years later, freed Yoruba returnees from Cuba brought news that Dasalu was alive there, writing as “Dasalu, the lost one.” He had been shipped as a slave but ended up in Havana after his vessel was seized. The British Consul eventually found him, and he was taken to England, where his photograph was made. So, Dasalu, once thought dead in the Dahomian war, was actually captured and enslaved, later found in Cuba, and eventually freed to return to his wife, Martha, in Abeokuta. His case is a dramatic story of loss, faith, betrayal, survival, and redemption.

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The grim content of Dasalu’s aroko to his wife aptly represents the state of things with the PDP today. Like Dasalu, the carcass of the PDP rose from the cemetery to defeat the ‘Dahomians’ on Saturday in Ibadan. The Ibadan North Federal Constituency by-election saw a “dead” party blindsiding the all-powerful APC with 18,404 votes; the Abuja party struggled and netted 8,312. Now, do the maths: the difference is 10,092 votes. When a contest records such a margin of win, the English man would say it was a shellac. I would have borrowed from the Germans the word ‘blitzkrieg’ (lightning war) but that would have been grossly inappropriate to describe the Oyo State operation. It was not ‘surprise’ that overwhelmed the defeated on Saturday. No. Ogun Àwítélè means a war foretold; the defeated knew they would fall.

Check how the newspapers reported the result of Saturday’s electoral contests across the country; read the headlines: ‘PDP clears all 12 wards In Ibadan North by-election as APC candidate loses PU’;

‘Violence, vote-buying mar by-elections in Ogun, Kaduna, Kano;’ ‘Kano by-election marred by electoral malpractice, APC alleges’. Indian scholar, Railul Ramagundam, in January 2005, did a paper on the relationship between newspaper headlines and how a society is run. He entitled the piece: ‘The ‘State’ Revealed in Newspaper Headlines.’ The man says: “From a newspaper headline one can draw not just news and views about a society, but also ascertain the nature of the society and the state itself.” Those headlines are proof that Nigeria is very far from what the enemy designed for it: a one-party dictatorship.

Ramagundam wrote about India, but because scholarship is universal, we feel the validity of his thesis here, daily. Take this headline from last week: ‘After spending N21bn, FG budgets 180x more for Third Mainland Bridge repairs’. Someone in government would read this and wonder who the ‘subversive’ sub-editor was that cast that headline for Business Day newspaper. To announce the latest trillion naira contract binge of the Federal Government is to tell us that because opposition has collapsed in the parliament, money has become rain water here. Almost all federal roads in the South -West are ‘dead’, less than two trillion naira will fix all of them. But works minister, David Umahi, said recently that he was begging the president for funds to fix the collapsed South-West roads; yet our president casually and calmly approved N3.8 trillion for a bridge repair in Lagos. And he will campaign for 2027 votes outside Lagos.

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Each of the parties in Saturday’s by-elections across Nigeria must have learnt some lessons in how not to take the people for granted. For parties that are rent by the dog-eat-dog posture of politics, I recommend the Bible’s Mark 3:24-25: “And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

Folklorist Solomon T. Plaatje, in ‘English in Africa’ (September 1976) has this story for parties of the avaricious: Once upon a time a Bechuana village was attacked by an army, which chased the people from their homes. There remained among the ruins a cripple and a blind man. These two invalids agreed that the blind man should carry the cripple, that they should flee and follow the people. While they were passing through the country, the blind man carrying the cripple, the one who could see, saw some vultures hovering. So he told the one who had the use of his legs about it, and they went towards the place (where the vultures were hovering). There they found some vultures assembled round the carcass of a wild animal. When they had driven away the vultures, a dispute arose between them (over the meat). The cripple said: “It was my eyes that found this anima”; the blind man said: “It was my feet that found it.” When their dispute became more heated, and they would not give in to one another, the cripple crawled away from the blind man. Then the blind man, being unable to see neither his companion nor the animal, called out: “My friend, it is evident that you are our eyes. Why should you lose your temper? I know that the animal was found by you.” The cripple heard his partner and came back and led the blind man to the animal, their food.

Our politicians will never step back as the blind man did. They quarrel over spoils, over positions, and over privileges, and won’t mind losing everything to birds of carrion.

The Bechuana tale speaks to the folly of selfishness and the wisdom of cooperation. It reflects directly on the greed of the avaricious in our politics. We wait to see which politician or party learns from this as we jog towards 2027, the year of the apocalypse. The cripple and blind man story teaches all scammers in power that collective survival depends on honest partnership; that those with vision need those with mobility, and vice versa. In 2015 and 2023, the wily among politicians forged alliances to take power; they succeeded in their mission; but the king and his men scammed many allies; they rewarded a few. They consolidated and moved further, scamming the people. Today, they elevate political 419 to state policy. With exclusive claims, they own a free meal they didn’t prepare. But do they know that their conduct invites vultures to come over, inherit and eat what should have sustained everyone?

Those who lost Saturday’s by-elections will lose the 2027 general elections unless they stop taking the people to be Shakespeare’s “blocks, stones… worse than senseless things.” The people may be hungry and powerless, but they are not stupid. They are waiting and watching. It is a clitche to say they will laugh last. Niyi Osundare says it better in ‘The Eye of the Earth’: the people always outlast the palace.