Apart from the D’Rovan Presidential Electoral College fiasco of AD in Ibadan, one other factor that led to the implosion of Afenifere and the AD was the pact we had with President Olusegun Obasanjo over the 2003 presidential election. Contrary to the impression in some quarters that the AD governors were solely responsible for the support for Obasanjo in the 2003 election, the truth is that it was the collective decision of the Afenifere/AD hierarchy.
Everyone knew that there was no love lost between Governors of Afenifere/AD and President Obasanjo. Even though we did not want the relationship between the state and the federal government to be antagonistic, we were not Obasanjo’s friends in any way. I never had any one-on-one private meeting with him throughout the four years he was in office. All the AD governors too were not Obasanjo’s friends. The AD governors were committed strictly to implementing the programme of our party.
It was the attempt by the House of Representatives under Right-Honourable Ghali Umar Na’Abba in August 2002 to impeach him that thawed the icy relationship between us and Obasanjo. That created an opportunity for Obasanjo to want to embrace us too. But we didn’t have a meeting with him on this crisis to support him. Out of our own volition, we decided that the democratic experiment in the country was too fragile for the kind of shock therapy that Na’Abba and the House of Representatives were planning to apply to it by impeaching Obasanjo.
