Guardian
6 May 2011
By Reuben Abati Opinion
IT has been pointed out that the Broom Revolution in the South West represented by the ACN in the 2011 elections takes the South West back to its original mode as the stronghold of opposition politics in Nigeria, and thus puts an end to the dominance of the People’s Democratic Party in that part of the country since 2007. But whereas this has been widely remarked upon as an indication also of the South West being the only region that seems to have voted mostly for a “regional party” in nearly all the 2011 elections (except the Presidential), the analysis often overlooks how a state in the South West, Ondo, appears to be the only one that is untouched by the Broom Revolution, dominated as it is by the Labour Party. Both the ACN and the Labour Party in the South West are united in terms of one essential character: their leaders insist that they are progressives, they provide in their areas of influence an alternative to the PDP, both were determined to keep the PDP out and they succeeded in doing so, and once upon a time, the leaders of both parties worked together. There however seems to be an emerging rivalry between the ACN and the Labour Party in the South West which I think needs to be carefully managed, considering how what seems to have started as campaign-moment differences could degenerate into something unmanageable.
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