By Suyi Ayodele

“In this geopolitical zone, we must deliver 100 per cent in favour of APC. Therefore, Ondo State, you must be at the forefront, the two other states – Oyo and Osun – we will capture them, but I will not reveal our secret. We are strategising. Everything must be 100 per cent behind President Bola Tinubu.”

The above vow was made by Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, APC National Chairman, at a meeting with APC stakeholders ahead of the November 16, 2024, governorship election in Ondo State. He did not stop at vowing to capture Ondo State. He listed two other states: Osun and Oyo, as part of the states he would “capture” for supper.

When that is done, the entire South-West geo-political zone will be 100 percent APC-controlled region.

I am bothered about Ganduje’s choice of words. His use of the word ‘capture’ reminds me of how Samuel Ajayi Crowther was captured by the Fulani and sold into slavery some 200 years ago at his village, Osoogun, near Oyo town. History says “Ajayi was around 12 years old when he and his family were captured, along with his entire village, by Fulani slave raiders in March 1821 and sold to Portuguese slave traders.” Ganduje is Fulani.

I checked the semantic implications of the verb, “capture”, using the Semantic Principle of Contextualisation. Ninety-nine percent of the results I got have negative connotations. For instance, one meaning describes it as “take captive”, another synonym gives it out as “subjugate”; and one informal usage says it means “collar’.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: “act of seizing or taking as a prisoner or prize; gaining possession of by force…” (Pg 345). Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (Fourth Edition), adopting the Stylistics strategy of Foregrounding says “capture” means: “to take someone as a prisoner, or to take something into your possession, especially by force” (Pg 218). Collins English Dictionary & Thesaurus says it means: “to take prisoner…” (Pg 173). And Webster’s Universal Dictionary & Thesaurus defines it as: “to take prisoner; (fortress, etc) to seize; to catch…” (Pg 87).

The heat from the political furnace of the APC will also roast many of the PDP-controlled states in the South-East, South-South, North-Central, North-East and North-West. Some of these states will willingly surrender to the ruling party, while the others will be decimated. Nothing can change that permutation as long as Bola Ahmed Tinubu remains the President of Nigeria, and he seeks to be president again for the second term.

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When a woman speaks, pay attention to what she says with her eyes. The axiom is equally applicable to the menfolk, especially the political elite of this era, who can give anything, and do anything, to achieve their goals. The only beautiful thing is that our politicians warn us before they strike. The fault is ours that we fail to act to counter whatever they say.

In the build-up to the 2023 presidential election, President Tinubu said that “Political power is not going to be served in a restaurant. They don’t serve it a la carte. At all costs, fight for it, grab it, and run (away) with it.” Nigerians refused to pay attention to him. We waited for the February 25, 2023, presidential election date to know the full import of what Tinubu said.

But then, it was too late. By the time we realised what was happening, the same Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and its Result Viewing (IReV) portal, which worked for the senatorial and House of Representatives elections held the same day, time and venues with the presidential election, did not work when it came to Tinubu’s election. The man did not only grab and run away with the election, but he has also done a dash with our collective posterity.

The APC employed that method in 2015 when it captured the entire country. It repeated the feat in 2019 and took it to a bestial level in 2023. Now, 2027 is knocking on the political door and Ganduje is already telling us what to expect. The whole mess in the country is all because of the 2027 second-term ambition of President Tinubu. Nobody should be deceived by Ganduje’s addendum of “but I will not reveal our secret.”

Every good student of Semantics and Stylistics must pay attention to words, their meanings and the strategy deployed in using them. When a man employs the strong evocation, as contained in the modal auxiliary verb, “Must”, the way Ganduje used it in Akure, my Semantics teachers said it has one basic function to perform; and that is compulsion!

What Ganduje meant is that the APC would win Ondo State and other states that he mentioned, by all means! This deployment of diction does not pay attention to the political preferences of the voters. The APC “MUST” win because the region “must” be 100 percent behind the president.

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The APC National Chairman has already told us what was in the offing. APC has only one “strategy” and one “secret”: win and let the opposition go to court. All the states in the South-West must go into the APC’s captivity for Tinubu to obtain 100 percent home-base support. I am worried because too early in life, I was trained to pay attention to what a man says and use the same to measure his character,

Brother ‘Biodun Ogunleye taught us Literature-in-English in Form Five. He was a colourful teacher. He never allowed any of his students to call him “Mr. Ogunleye”. He was content with the simple “Brother Biodun”. He said that made him closer to his students. And he was indeed close to us. He was not a teacher; he was, and he is simply a brother. We loved and enjoyed his classes.

In one of the sessions, he taught us the topic, characterisation. He stated that every character speaks according to his or her psychological make up. The adopted text then was Ola Rotimi’s “The Gods Are Not to Blame. He would ask us to read out the words uttered by a character and then ask us to describe who the character is based on what we read.

It was from him we learnt that King Odewale, the main character in the play is “temperamental.” ‘What a man says speaks more about his personality’, the teacher of teachers said. Brother ‘Biodun is eternally correct. He later left the teaching profession for Law. At a time, he was the Ekiti State Secretary of the APC. How our darling Brother Biodun ended up with the figures in the APC is one topic I will take up with him anytime we happen to be together. But thanks to him for that cradle knowledge about how to situate every character.

Words don’t just come out of human beings. All the words we utter are processed first before they are vocalised; except in the cases of some Nigerian politicians who utter words before they process them. A former National Chairman of APC, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, once described his successor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, as a man who talks before thinking. Every man is therefore as good as what he says.

I am applying the same principle to the utterances of Ganduje in Akure because of his antecedents, and more importantly, the antecedents of the political party he represents. When a political party is populated by people with Machiavellian tendencies the way APC is configured, the people suffer.

This is why the people of Ondo State, and the two other states Ganduje mentioned should begin to have sleepless nights. APC will “capture” Ondo State; there is nothing anybody can do about that! Sad! But that is the reality! Anyone who witnessed how the September 21 governorship election in the neighbouring Edo State turned out will understand that Ganduje was not joking.

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But you must love Ganduje for who he is. Negative as his political character portraiture may look, he must be commended for forewarning the people of the three states waiting to be “captured.” A foretold war is not likely to kill a wise lame. The man with walking difficulties is usually counselled to begin the journey to exile the very day the warning bell was tolled. Unfortunately, it may be too late for the people of Ondo State.

I say this because APC is not a silly party like the docile opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Ganduje said he “will not reveal our secret.” One would expect the PDP or any of the opposition parties to decode what “our secret” means.

But not the PDP, not any of the non-existent parties! When a child eats eko (agidi) with an elder, and the elder does not stain his fingers, let the child know that the secret is under the leaves used in wrapping the eko.

Incidentally, the wisdom in the above saying is lost on the PDP. The party is too busy with the distraction from its recalcitrant children like Nyesom Wike and Ayo Fayose of this world to be able to think outside the box! A political party which lacks the testicular fortitude to deal with the likes of Wike and Fayose will always be at the receiving end of the political shenanigans of a rampaging APC. Shior!

This is why Ganduje threw diplomacy and decency to the wild winds and announced that APC would “capture” Ondo, Osun and Oyo States for Tinubu. He is a man who states it as it will happen. His antecedents confirm that. He is like that notorious character, Obika, the son of Ezeulu, in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, who gets away with virtually all his irresponsible actions. When a man’s character depicts the negative side of life, attention must be paid to whatever he says and does.

Under Ganduje as governor, the streets of Kano were a sea of suffering – beggars, old, young, male and female. The number of out-of-school children ballooned in unimaginable percentages. That is the marketer-in-chief of the APC in a South-Western state in 2024. Bí ìyà ńlá bá gbé ni sánlè, kékeré á g’orí eni.

Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa should run away from him if he would be lucky again and the world would truly be his’. A man who answers Orimisan (My head is good) as his middle name should be circumspect when in company with dangerous, devil-may-care people. The man who wears a white garment has no business embracing the man who carries a keg of palm oil! “Wisdom is profitable to direct”, says the Holy Book in Ecclesiastes 10:10.

APC and Ganduje can gloat today because they get away with whatever perfidy they concoct. But I have a word of advice for them. The duo should not rejoice because they have the capacity to capture the entire nation. The day will always break; so, the one who rejoices for wearing a rag in the darkness of the night will be totally exposed. There is a limit to which the people can be pushed before they will react.

When a goat is pursued to the wall without any escape route, it turns to attack its traducer. One day, the ones in captivity will break the chains and fetters holding them bound to violence. Obika rides on the personality of Ezeulu, his father, to commit all manners of crimes. But, when the people got tired, they ensured that he was humiliated by being flogged publicly by the white man. Every act of perfidy has an expiry day. Maybe the November 16, 2024, “capturing’ of Ondo State will be the Nunc dimittis for the APC; who knows?

Ogun Awitele (Foretold War), as a storybook written by inimitable Adebayo Faleti, ends with victory over an audacious band of night marauders. The villagers won because they didn’t go to sleep when they received the promise of the robbers to capture them and their goods. If the South-West wants to become 2024 Ajayi Crowther, let them sleep with all their heads in one direction.