Oyo APC at the Crossroads: Concord or the Samson Option? | Timilehin Kolade
Politics is fundamentally a contest of interests, ambitions, ideas and competing visions of power. Yet the maturity of a political organisation is not measured by the absence of disagreement but by its capacity to manage disagreement without allowing it to become self-destructive. As the 2027 election approaches, this is one of the most important questions confronting the Oyo State chapter of the All Progressives Congress. The party stands at a political crossroads: concord or the Samson Option; collective victory or internal self-destruction.
The Samson Option is a particularly instructive metaphor for the danger of political desperation. In the Biblical account, Samson, having been captured and humiliated by the Philistines, brought down the pillars of the temple, killing his enemies but also bringing about his own death. The political lesson is profound. The Samson Option represents the mentality of “if I cannot have it, nobody should have it”—the willingness to destroy the political structure because one cannot control it. It is a dangerous political psychology because the person seeking revenge may ultimately become a victim of the destruction he has engineered. In politics, there is no wisdom in defeating one’s opponent by destroying the house in which both of you live.
Oyo APC must therefore be careful not to confuse political competition with political warfare. Competition is natural to democracy; destructive warfare within a political organisation is potentially fatal. Every political party contains competing tendencies because political parties are coalitions of interests. Ambition is not itself a problem. Rivalry is not necessarily a problem. Even disagreements over leadership, strategy, candidates and political direction are not inherently destructive. The real danger begins when political actors stop regarding one another as members of the same political project and begin treating every disagreement as an existential struggle requiring the humiliation or destruction of the other side.
Nigeria’s political history offers sufficient warning. The crisis within the Action Group in the First Republic remains one of the most instructive examples of how internal contradictions can weaken a formidable political organisation. The disagreements between Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief S.L. Akintola cannot responsibly be reduced to a simplistic story of loyalty and betrayal. They involved questions of leadership, political strategy, power, succession, federal politics and competing conceptions of political direction. Both men possessed considerable political capacity and contributed significantly to the political development of the Western Region. Yet the inability to sufficiently reconcile their differences contributed to a crisis that weakened the organisation they had helped build.
The lesson from the Action Group experience is not that political disagreement should be suppressed. Indeed, strong political organisations need people capable of independent thought and constructive disagreement. The lesson is that political disagreement must have institutions, relationships and mechanisms capable of containing it. When disagreements become personalised, when compromise is interpreted as surrender and when every concession is regarded as weakness, conflict can escalate beyond the capacity of the organisation to manage it.
This is precisely why Oyo APC requires more than superficial reconciliation. It requires political concord and genuine conflict transformation. Conflict transformation goes beyond bringing opposing parties together for a handshake or producing temporary agreements designed to calm an immediate crisis. It seeks to transform the relationships, grievances, perceptions and structures that reproduce conflict. The objective should not merely be to make political actors stop fighting today; it should be to create a political culture in which tomorrow’s disagreement does not automatically become another political war.
Political concord does not mean uniformity. A healthy political party should accommodate different opinions, tendencies and ambitions. Concord means the capacity to pursue a common destination despite differences. It requires dialogue, negotiation, empathy, restraint and, sometimes, the willingness to sacrifice immediate personal gratification for a larger political objective.
The wisdom attributed to Mother Teresa that “we must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools” carries particular relevance here. But in the context of Oyo APC, there is an important qualification: we are not fools. We must therefore refuse the temptation to behave foolishly. We cannot allow anger to become strategy, resentment to become ideology or personal disappointment to become an electoral programme. Nobody should become so aggrieved by an internal political disagreement that he becomes willing to weaken the very structure through which his own political future must ultimately be secured.
There is a deeper strategic reason for this. Elections are not won merely by individual popularity. They are won through aggregation—the aggregation of people, interests, structures, narratives, resources, relationships and votes. A party that enters an election divided carries its internal contradictions into the electorate. Its members communicate different messages, its supporters receive conflicting signals and its opponents exploit every visible crack. Conversely, a party that successfully manages its internal diversity can transform competing tendencies into a broader electoral coalition.
This is why Oyo APC must move beyond the politics of victor and vanquished. Internal politics should not produce permanent winners and permanent losers. The objective should be a genuine No Victor, No Vanquished settlement in which every tendency retains dignity and every stakeholder sees a future within the party. Nobody should be politically exterminated simply because he lost an argument, an internal contest or a particular political negotiation.
The party must also reject the politics of humiliation. Political humiliation rarely produces lasting peace because the humiliated actor does not disappear; resentment simply waits for another opportunity. A wiser political strategy converts former opponents into stakeholders. It transforms resentment into participation and competition into cooperation. That is the essence of conflict transformation: not pretending that the conflict never occurred, but changing the relationship between those who were previously in conflict.
There is also a profound lesson in the political history of Nigeria: a divided political house creates opportunities for its opponents. The strength of a political party is not merely the sum of its prominent individuals; it is the ability of those individuals to work within a common institutional framework. A party can have influential leaders, wealthy supporters, experienced politicians and a formidable candidate, yet still underperform if its internal relationships are poisoned by distrust and factional warfare.
Oyo APC therefore needs a new political psychology before 2027: less vengeance, more reconciliation; less factional triumphalism, more institutional loyalty; less exclusion, more accommodation; less suspicion, more communication; less politics of personal victory, more politics of collective victory.
The closer an election becomes, the more expensive internal division becomes. What can be resolved through dialogue today may become much more difficult to resolve when campaigns intensify and political emotions rise. Reconciliation should therefore not be treated as an emergency measure reserved for the eve of an election. It should be a continuous political process. The party needs structures through which grievances can be heard, misunderstandings clarified and disputes resolved before they become existential conflicts.
The 2027 election should therefore challenge Oyo APC to demonstrate a more mature form of politics. Political strength is not measured by how many people one can exclude, intimidate or defeat. It is measured by how many people one can bring into a common political project. The real political genius lies not in permanently defeating one’s opponents but in making former opponents see sufficient common interest to become partners in a larger enterprise.
This is particularly important because political offices are temporary while political relationships and communities endure. Elections come and go. Political positions change hands. Alliances evolve. But the people who share the same communities, institutions and political history remain. It is therefore unwise to destroy permanent relationships for the sake of temporary political advantage.
Oyo APC must consequently make a deliberate choice between concord and fragmentation, transformation and perpetual conflict, collective victory and the Samson Option. The party cannot afford internal pyrrhic victories—victories in which one faction defeats another only to discover that the entire organisation has been weakened.
The Samson Option must be rejected categorically. There is no political wisdom in pulling down the temple simply because one cannot occupy its highest chamber. If the temple falls, everybody standing inside it is endangered. The future of Oyo APC must not be determined by the logic of revenge, exclusion or mutual destruction. It must be determined by collective survival, strategic discipline and a shared commitment to victory.
The question before Oyo APC is therefore bigger than who gets what position, who controls which structure or whose preference prevails at a particular moment. The fundamental question is whether the party possesses the political maturity to subordinate temporary disagreements to a larger collective purpose. If it can, its diversity can become an electoral asset. If it cannot, its internal contradictions may become the very instrument through which its opponents defeat it.
The crossroads is therefore clear: concord or the Samson Option. Oyo APC does not need a politics without disagreements; it needs a politics mature enough to survive disagreements. It needs leaders and members who understand that the party is larger than any individual, that 2027 is bigger than any faction and that the future of the organisation cannot be entrusted to the destructive logic of “if I cannot have it, nobody should have it.”
If we do not walk together as brothers, we may indeed perish together like fools. But we are not fools. We have the historical experience, political intelligence and institutional capacity to choose another path. The time has come to choose political concord, embrace genuine conflict transformation and build an Oyo APC in which every stakeholder understands that the road to victory is not through the destruction of one another, but through the disciplined aggregation of our differences into a common political purpose.