The political obituary of Ladi Adebutu’s governorship ambition did not need to be written by his opponents, it was written by his own party’s obsession, and the latest twist has turned what was once a calculated campaign of blackmail into a full-blown political farce where the hunter is now being hunted by his own paperwork. For months the Ogun PDP has conducted itself not like a party preparing to govern a sophisticated state like Ogun but like a gathering of people shouting about a leaking roof in a neighbour’s house while refusing to check whether their own foundation is still standing, and if the late Lamidi Adedibu were alive to walk into this theatre he would first remove his cap and ask the question that destroys every political pretence, where is the party.
The party’s entire strategy has rested on one name, Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, Yayi. Yayi has become the PDP’s favourite campaign accessory, its manifesto, its economic blueprint, its press release and its closing argument. Mention Ogun politics and the PDP says Yayi, talk about indigeneship and it says Yayi, discuss history or 2027 and somehow it is Yayi again. At this rate one is forced to wonder whether Adebutu is actually contesting against Yayi or whether Yayi has been secretly appointed Director-General of the PDP campaign, because an opposition party that cannot complete a sentence without inviting its opponent into it has already confessed that it has nothing of its own to say to the people.
That emptiness is the core of the crisis, because Yayi is not the PDP’s education policy, he is not its healthcare programme, he is not its industrialisation strategy, he is not its agricultural agenda and he is certainly not the custodian of the PDP’s membership register. Yayi is running for the APC while the PDP is supposed to be running its own affairs, yet the PDP found it easier to attack Yayi than to explain itself to Ogun people. It discovered that fabricating controversies about Yayi’s background and shouting about indigeneship was cheaper than producing a coherent argument for power, and cheap blackmail became its only political product.
Then came the delicious boomerang that has ended the show. The Ogun Democratic Accountability Forum has alleged that Ladi Adebutu’s name is absent from the PDP membership register submitted to INEC and claims to have obtained a Certified True Copy of that register from the Commission. The allegation remains an allegation to be determined by the appropriate institutions, but politically the embarrassment is already fatal, because it turns the PDP’s favourite weapon against itself. The very party that has spent months demanding that Yayi produce documents, explain his background and prove his legitimacy is now being asked to produce the most basic document of all, proof that its own governorship hopeful is even a valid member of the party on the register it submitted to the electoral umpire.
The timing could not be worse because the Supreme Court’s recent restoration of Sections 77(5), 77(6), 77(7) and 84(2) of the Electoral Act has given the membership register a new legal sharpness. The register is no longer a mere administrative list in a secretariat drawer, it is the foundation upon which any nomination must stand. Without it, the entire edifice of candidacy collapses, and that is why the question of where Adebutu’s name is has become more damaging than all the noise the PDP has made about Yayi’s roof. The party wants Ogun people to stare at Yayi’s house with a microscope, but someone has now climbed a ladder and is looking at theirs, with the same microscope, the same light and the same standard, and what is allegedly missing is not a crack but the entire page.
This exposes the comedy and the tragedy of the Ogun PDP under Adebutu. It is a party that has tried to put Yayi on trial in the court of public opinion without realising that the court has more than one chair, and now quite unexpectedly Adebutu is sitting in one of them, not as prosecutor but as defendant, forced to explain his own credentials. The same party that has lectured endlessly about legitimacy now finds its own legitimacy under public scrutiny, and its confidence has evaporated. The endless sermons about who belongs where have suddenly become a question about where its own candidate belongs, and the political hunters have become the hunted.
The decay goes beyond Adebutu himself. Senator Iyabo Obasanjo, another prominent PDP figure, has also seen her candidacy caught in the wider turbulence generated by questions around the Electoral Act and party nominations, and the whole 2027 project increasingly looks less like a carefully constructed political programme and more like a collection of emergency explanations, one controversy opening after another while the party keeps shouting look at Yayi. Adedibu once warned that where one person is dictating it cannot work and spoke of the need for a common leader and rallying point after internal crises. Today the Ogun PDP has found a rallying point, but it is not a policy, it is not cohesion, it is not direction, it is Yayi, and a party that cannot survive without producing an enemy cannot survive at all.
That is why it is finished, not necessarily in the narrow legal sense which belongs to INEC and the courts, but in the deeper political sense where campaigns live or die. Before you spend all your energy examining the neighbour’s roof, you must be absolutely certain that nobody has discovered a missing page in your own house documents. The PDP failed that elementary test, and in doing so it proved that a campaign built entirely on cheap blackmail dies the moment its target refuses to be blackmailed and simply asks you to show your own papers.
