Nigerian Concord Newspaper
After reading Olusegun Osoba’s account of how Obasanjo allegedly deceived them in 2003, the first concept that came to my mind was the principle of party supremacy.
According to his account, the party functioned as the centre of gravity, exerting the dominant force that kept every political actor in a stable orbit.
However, the inversion of today’s political order where the reins of authority have shifted from party hierarchies to elected officials and defected governors is, in my view, one of the fundamental flaws in our democratic evolution.
Instead of political office holders remaining accountable to the parties that produced them, many parties now appear to be controlled by those office holders. This is a disturbing development for any democratic system.
The second takeaway from the account is that long-established behavioral traits often produce familiar outcomes, regardless of how fertile the environment may be or how much trust is invested.
Despite what they described as Obasanjo’s well-known pattern of dishonesty and deception, the Afenifere elders, Alliance for Democracy (AD) stalwarts, and influential traditional rulers in yoruba land nevertheless chose to work with him.
Kinship and a sense of shared identity appeared to create a cognitive bias that influenced their judgment, leading them to underestimate the predictive value of past behavior.
According to their account, that decision turned out to be a strategic miscalculation, one they believed would haunt them for years.
The final takeaway from the account is that one should not abandon a faithful companion who stood by them through their darkest moments for the allure of an attractive alternative making enticing promises.
As the saying suggests, do not jettison the wife who held the candle for you in the darkest hours because a side chick is promising romantic tones.
In the same vein, the Alliance for Democracy (AD) elders and governors abandoned their long-standing commitment to their party in response to what they perceived as the attractive promises of President Obasanjo at the time.
In retrospect, that decision has been portrayed as a failure of strategic risk assessment, the consequences of which, in the view expressed in the account, contributed significantly to the political decline and eventual extinction of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) as a major political party.
Kunle Awesu, an Akure renowned financial expert writes from Akure
25/07/2026