Saturday’s governorship election in Edo State will feature a keen contest among political gladiators whose names are not even on the ballot. On many fronts, the race has all the trappings of a proxy contest. Of the 17 candidates on the ballot, the three frontline candidates are: Senator Monday Okpebholo of the All Progressives Congress, APC; Mr. Asue Ighodalo of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP; and Mr. Olumide Akpata, of the Labour Party, LP. They will put up a good fight on their own and two of the three will run on their accomplishments in other fields. But all three are political newbies. Their three-way exertions will be dwarfed by the vigorous test of strength by other and more politically-experienced individuals and entities both within and outside the state.

This is because there are outstanding scores to be settled and new advantages to be scored by those who are not even on the ballot. These outside gladiators have a greater incentive than the candidates for the outcome to favour them or their camp. If it doesn’t work out, the APC flagbearer will return to the senate while the PDP and the LP candidates can return to their day jobs, take lessons from their first political outing, then give it another shot.

But more seems at stake for the external parties. For them: there is a grudge to be settled, there is an unfinished business to attend to, and there is current and future political relevance to contend with. These are some of the factors that drive desperation in Nigerian politics. Already, one of the external actors has described the election as ‘do-or-die’ and ‘existential’ while another could be mistaken as a candidate in the election. The Edo governorship election is of outsize significance and is likely to generate more heat, and attract more attention, than other regular off-cycle governorship elections. A week to the election, the heat is so palpable that it can be felt even beyond the state.

A briefing paper released on September 10^th by the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) brilliantly captures the various issues at play in the Edo governorship election and points out its larger implications for future elections in Nigeria. I fully recommend the paper. In my intervention today, I intend to tease out the proxy dimensions of the September 21^st poll, then close with how zonal dynamics within the state (itself a form of proxy) may impact the outcome of the election.

The first proxy contest will be among the presidential candidates of the top three political parties in the last presidential election: Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of APC; Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of PDP; and Mr. Peter Obi of LP. A major shift occurred in Nigeria’s electoral pattern in 2023 when the presidential contest expanded beyond the traditional two-way race of the previous six electoral cycles of the Fourth Republic. Obi alongside Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwanso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) bucked the trend and turned the contest into a truly competitive multi-party poll only close to the one we had in 1979, which incidentally was our first presidential election. Edo gubernatorial contests used to be a two-way affair, as no third-party candidate ever scored up to 1% of the votes cast between 1999 and 2020. This will definitely change this time around, mostly due the Obi factor.

One of the states where the Obi wave made a significant landing in the 2023 presidential poll was Edo State. Obi garnered an impressive 56.97% of the votes in the state and even denied his more experienced competitors and their established political structures the mandatory 25% of the votes cast. Tinubu, who won the overall election, could only muster 24.86% in Edo State. Alhaji Abubakar, whose party had been a dominant force in Edo and national politics since 1999 and was the ruling party in the state at the time of the election, got only 15.41%. Even when Saturday’s election is a local one, and we should not forget the maxim that all politics is local, the 2023 presidential candidates and their political parties have different points to prove in Edo State on Saturday.

For all three presidential candidates and their parties, winning the governorship election is way more than symbolic. To start with, governors remain dominant figures in our politics and the number of states controlled by a political party is a signifier of its relative electoral strength or a factor that can, to a large extent, be leveraged for electoral success. For Obi and LP, the Edo governorship election is an opportunity to show that 2023 was not a fluke and a chance for the party to be in charge of a second state (the only one being Abia State). A victory for LP in Edo will burnish Obi’s standing and relevance whether he chooses to stick with the party or not in the future.

Retaining Edo State will be a face-saving opportunity for Atiku and PDP, which was rudely upstaged in 2023 in the South South and the South East, two zones that had been the party’s strongholds in six previous elections. PDP had a particularly terrible showing in the federal elections in Edo State in 2023: it failed to produce a senator, and had only one out of nine House of Representative members. Retaining the governorship of Edo will keep PDP’s tally of governors at 13.  However, losing the state will increase the diminution of a party that at its height controlled 28 states and once boasted of ruling the country for 60 unbroken years.      

Winning Edo will grant APC a chance to regain a state it had governed for 12 years (2008 to 2020) and only lost in 2020 when the outgoing governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, and APC’s candidate in 2016 was denied a re-election ticket by his estranged godfather, Senator Adams Oshiomhole. Obaseki had to decamp to PDP, which successfully flipped the state. Victory in Edo State will increase APC’s governorship tally to 21. This will take the party close to its best showing so far since in came into being in 2013. In 2015, APC won governorship elections in 22 states.

For Tinubu, Edo State is a bit personal. This was where in 2007/2008, he successfully launched the bid to take his Action Congress (AC, later Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN) beyond its South West enclave and part of the strategy that eventually landed him the presidency. The 2008 victory came via the courts, but ACN won 76% of the votes in the 2012 governorship election in Edo State when its candidate, Oshiomhole, sought re-election. By 2016, ACN had merged with other parties to form the APC and APC’s candidate, Obaseki, won by a decent 55%. However, things soon fell apart between Obaseki and Oshiomhole.

Tinubu not only took sides but also openly showed his hands. He made and released a video close to the 19^th September 2020 governorship election in Edo State, and called on the people of the state not to vote for Obaseki whom he accused of many things. In response, the Obaseki campaign adopted and popularised a very effective slogan: Edo no be Lagos (in reference to Tinubu’s overbearing influence in Lagos politics and the way in which he, in 2019, denied Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode, then incumbent governor of Lagos State, the party’s nomination).

Obaseki personally replied Tinubu and promised to end godfatherism not just in Edo State but also in Lagos State. Obaseki said: “In Edo, we have been fighting godfatherism and by Saturday we will put an end to it, and after that go to Lagos and put an end to godfatherism in Nigeria.” Obaseki went on to win the governorship election by a handsome 57% of the votes cast, with the support of some APC members who had scores to settle with Tinubu and Oshiomhole. Tinubu, now the president of Nigeria, got eggs on his face for the manner he tried to intervene in Edo politics in 2020. He is thus unlikely to be disinterested in the outcome of the Saturday poll, even when he may not go for the ill-advised approach of 2020. And this is not just about merely wanting his party to triumph. There is an outstanding slight to settle.

But the most obvious battle on Saturday will be a proxy rematch between Obaseki and Oshiomhole. They have had two electoral face-offs since 2020. While Oshiomhole triumphed in the federal elections in 2023 by wangling two senatorial seats and six House of Representatives’ seats for his party, Obaseki clawed back in the state House of Assembly election, where PDP eventually won 15 seats compared to APC’s eight and LP’s one. For Oshiomhole, this is the final opportunity to put Obaseki in his place; while for Obaseki, this contest is clearly the last time he is in a prime position to show his former benefactor that he has grown to a formidable political force in the state.

A lot has happened in the last four years to change the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two gladiators cum godfathers. Oshiomhole is still in control of the APC structure in the state, remains the strongman of Edo North, has been a magnet for PDP members who have fallen out with Obaseki, and is in a position to attract federal support from a president who is not a disinterested party. Though term-barred, Obaseki has incumbency at the state level on his side and is from Edo South, which boasts of about half of the voting population of the state. Both frontline gladiators have major handicaps, which may rub off negatively on their parties’ candidates.

As said earlier, the three leading candidates have scant political experience. Ighodalo and Akpata are contesting for political office for the first time while Okpebholo was elected as a senator only last year (and was victorious largely on account of the decision of PDP not to respect the zoning arrangement within the Edo Central senatorial zone). The fact that the real contestants are political newbies with limited political capital further magnifies the likely impact of their backers. All the three candidates emerged from contentious primaries. The extent to which their various parties and the various tendencies within the parties have been able to pull together post-primaries will have some impact on the electoral outcome.

But beyond the godfathers and other interested parties, the Edo election will be largely shaped by zonal dynamics within the state. This is another dimension of the proxy contest. On the basis of equity and justice, the governorship of the state seems to have been zoned to Edo Central, a zone that has been unfairly locked out of the exalted position in the Fourth Republic. While indigenes of Edo South have served as governors of the state for 16 years (Mr. Lucky Igbinedion, 1999 to 2007 and Obaseki, 2016 to 2024) and Edo North senatorial zone has done eight years (Oshiomhole, 2008 to 2016), Edo Central has only had a shot at the highest elective position in the state for a very brief and annulled period (Professor Oserheinem Osunbor, 29^th May 2007 to 12^th November 2008). In addition, Edo Central has not produced a deputy governor for the state since 1999.

There seems to be an elite political consensus to correct the injustice meted out to the zone in this election cycle. Incidentally, the last time someone from current Edo Central served as governor was between 1979 and 1983, when Professor Ambrose Alli was the elected governor of Bendel State (which on 27^th August 1991 was split into present Delta and Edo states). It is ironic that someone from the zone could be governor of a much larger entity (Bendel State) but the zone has been struggling to be given a chance in a smaller space (Edo State). The Esans, who are the predominant ethnic group in Edo Central, are significant minorities in Edo State, the same way the Okuns are in Kogi State and the Idomas are in Benue State.

Prominent Esans have played important roles in national politics and national life. Some of these include Chief Anthony Enahoro (who moved the motion for Nigeria’s independence in 1953 and edited a newspaper, the Southern Nigerian Defender, at the record age of 21), Chief Peter Enahoro (better known as Peter Pan, renowned editor, publisher and satirist), Admiral Augustus Aikhomu (former military vice president of Nigeria), Chief Anthony Anenih (former chairman of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, former chairman of the Board of Trustees of PDP and former Minister of Works), and Chief Tom Ikimi, (former minister for foreign affairs and former chairman of the National Republican Party, NRC).

The Esans ironically have been relegated to a bit role in Edo politics because their senatorial zone is the smallest of the three: Edo Central has only five of the 18 LGAs in the state, compared to seven and six for Edo South and Edo North respectively; and going by the result of the 2020 elections, Edo Central accounts for only 18% of total votes in the state, compared to 47% for Edo South and 35% for Edo North.

However, it seems Edo is ready for restitution on its Esan problem (and hopefully Kogi and Benue would find similar political resolution for their Okun and Idoma challenge). It is thus not surprising that two of the three leading candidates, Okpebholo and Ighodalo, are from the favoured zone, Edo Central. On paper, this consensus puts Akpata at a disadvantage. An Akpata victory will mean another four to eight years for Edo South, which apart from having done 16 of 25 years since 1999 is also the zone of the outgoing governor.

However, Akpata is from the most populous zone in the state. It is not clear if the everyday voter in Edo South has bought into the elite consensus for power shift. However, it is also not clear that Akpata would have Edo South all to himself, given that the running mates of the two other parties (Mr. Osarodion Ogie of PDP and Honourable Dennis Idahosa of APC) are seasoned politicians from Edo South. The state’s most populous zone will probably be a hotly-contested ground.

The odds seem to favour one of the two candidates from Edo Central. There is an intra-zonal dynamic at play here too. Edo Central has two axes: Okpebholo and Agbazilo. The APC candidate is from the former while the PDP candidate is from the latter. The APC candidate reportedly won the senatorial seat in 2023 because of an attempt to upturn the agreed rotation between the two axes. In 2024, the argument is that the Okpebholo axis should not produce both the senator and the governor. There is also a not-so-subtle contest about who is more Esan and who is more accomplished/articulate between Okpebholo and Ighodalo. The score is even here.

But these are unlikely to be the major deciders of the race. To get over the line on Saturday, one of the two Esan candidates will need to make a respectable showing in his home zone, lock down one of the two other more populous zones, and be competitive in the other. This again brings into prominence the electoral capital that those not on the ticket, especially Oshiomhole and Obaseki, can muster on Saturday. It is sure a race to watch.