[Op_Ed] Yeketi: Should Yesterday’s Wrong Become Today’s Defence?

Over time, there is an increasingly familiar pattern in the defence of the AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq administration: whenever questions are raised about misgovernance, maladministration, imposition, exclusion, lack of consultation, high-handedness or the handling of succession and party tickets, the response from the governor’s allies and loyalists is often to reach back into the past and remind everyone that similar things happened before.

The latest example came yesterday, Thursday, 17th September 2026, from Alhaji Musa Ayinla Yeketi on Sobi FM’s Oro Ilu programme.

Yeketi is not a detached observer of Kwara’s political history. He was a prominent figure in the political structure of the old Saraki era, serving in successive administrations and playing a key role in its machinery. He was one of the figures who made political fortune through the old Saraki political establishment until he decamped to the APC after the defeat of that dynasty. That background makes his argument even more instructive.

In defending the current controversial party election process, Yeketi invoked the 2022/2023 experience, including the manipulation of the Kwara Central senatorial ticket against Senator Ibrahim Oloriegbe to favour Senator Saliu Mustapha, as well as other instances in which political outcomes were influenced in favour of individuals who are today among those questioning the current order.

But that is not a defence. It is an indictment of the very practice being defended.

If the 2023 process was manipulated, as Yeketi openly acknowledged, the lesson should be that such manipulation was wrong and must not be repeated. If other political actors benefited from questionable arrangements in the past, that does not confer a licence to subject them—or anyone else—to the same treatment today.

Democracy is supposed to learn and offer improvement. It is not supposed to recycle its worst habits.

And this is where the recurring argument from loyalists and defenders of the present administration becomes problematic. Rather than confronting the central question—whether the current process is sufficiently consultative, inclusive and credible—the conversation is repeatedly redirected to what happened under previous administrations or how similar practices favoured some people in the past.

This shamefulness thus makes one ask: what exactly was O’toge’s struggle about?

It was a political revolt against an order that many participants believed had become too concentrated, too exclusionary and too dismissive of genuine stakeholders. It promised a departure from the politics of unilateralism and imposed choices.

That makes it particularly ironic when practices condemned under the old order are now invoked as precedents for defending similar conduct under the new one.

O’toge was supposed to correct the wrongs of the past, not inherit them and perfect them.

Yeketi’s intervention has now given concrete validation to the position earlier taken by members of the G15/TOP, who declined to appear before the reconciliation committee on the ground that its composition was one-sided and its neutrality could not be assured. That concern can no longer be dismissed as mere apprehension. Yeketi is a member of the very committee constituted to reconcile the aggrieved stakeholders, yet he has chosen to go on air and openly defend the disputed process, justify it by citing past instances of political manipulation and, in effect, argue the case of the very side he is expected to engage as a neutral conciliator.

This is no longer a question of perception; his own public intervention has demonstrated the very bias the G15/TOP feared.

A reconciliation committee cannot reasonably command the confidence of all parties when one of its members is publicly defending the process under dispute. Yeketi has every right to express his political views, but having done so in this manner, he has compromised the neutrality expected of his role and strengthened the argument of those who chose not to submit themselves to the committee in the first place.

The larger issue, therefore, is not Musa Yeketi alone. He is simply the latest expression of a recurring defence.

The argument that “they did it yesterday” cannot become the permanent justification for “we can do it today.”

If yesterday’s political manipulation was wrong, today’s should not be rationalised. If yesterday’s exclusion was condemned, today’s exclusion should not be defended. And if O’toge was genuinely about changing the political culture of Kwara, its greatest betrayal would be for those who inherited its political gains to become defenders of the very habits that produced the revolt in the first place.

The standard should not be who benefited from the wrong yesterday. The standard should be whether we are doing better today.

Bolaji Aladie writes from FCT