Rhodes-Vivour, Gbadamosi and the Politics of Dressing Up Defeat as ‘Experience’

Lagos politics has seen its fair share of political reinventions; still, the 2027 governorship contest may yet produce one of the more interesting exercises in political rebranding: take two familiar opposition figures, place them in a new political vehicle, give the ticket a fresh slogan, and hope voters forget what the ballot box has already said.

That, in essence, is the uncomfortable question surrounding the African Democratic Congress (ADC) ticket of Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour and Babatunde Gbadamosi.

The names are familiar.

The political ambitions are hardly new.

The opposition credentials have been established over several electoral cycles.

What remains considerably less established is the one credential that ultimately matters most in an election: the ability to convert political visibility, campaigning and opposition rhetoric into an actual electoral mandate.

And that is where the numbers become inconvenient.

Rhodes-Vivour is being presented again as a formidable challenger in Lagos, but Lagos voters do not have to rely on campaign mythology to assess his electoral standing. They have a previous governorship election with which to measure it.

In 2023, as the Labour Party candidate, Rhodes-Vivour polled 312,329 votes while Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the APC polled 762,134.

The difference was 449,805 votes.

Sanwo-Olu’s total was more than twice Rhodes-Vivour’s.

Those are not propaganda figures; they are the declared election results.

And when Rhodes-Vivour challenged that result, the challenge did not end with a political press conference or a social-media argument. It went through the judicial process. The Lagos State Election Petition Tribunal dismissed the petition, and the Court of Appeal subsequently affirmed Sanwo-Olu’s victory.

So when the same candidate returns four years later under another political platform, the burden is not on the electorate to pretend that 2023 never happened. The burden is on the candidate and his political machinery to demonstrate what has fundamentally changed.

That is the question the ADC ticket must answer.

Not what has changed in the branding.

Not what has changed in the party logo.

Not what has changed in the rhetoric.

What has changed in the electoral arithmetic?

Politics is not a talent competition, not a rap battle where the best lyricist wins, nor is it the popular Big Brother Naija show where the best dramatic entertainer wins.

It is a contest for a MANDATE.

The more curious half of the ADC ticket is Gbadamosi, whose political trajectory provides even more material for uncomfortable questions about the difference between political persistence and electoral effectiveness.

Gbadamosi has been in politics for years; he has contested Lagos elections for over a decade, but political longevity becomes a rather hollow credential when it cannot be translated into electoral success.

In the 2019 Lagos governorship election, Gbadamosi contested under the Action Democratic Party and got 4,780 votes. The eventual winner, Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the APC, received 739,445 votes.

Those are official INEC figures.

Four thousand, seven hundred and eighty votes, against seven hundred and thirty-nine thousand, four hundred and forty-five.

That is not a narrow electoral defeat requiring creative interpretation. It is an enormous electoral deficit.

Then came the 2020 Lagos East senatorial bye-election, where Gbadamosi contested on the PDP platform against Tokunbo Abiru of the APC.

Abiru secured 89,204 votes.

Gbadamosi received 11,257.

The margin was 77,947 votes, with Abiru winning across all five local
government areas in the senatorial district.

Again, the issue is not whether Gbadamosi has political experience. He does. The issue is whether that experience has produced political capital capable of winning elections in Lagos State.

That is a completely different proposition.

Today, Nigeria’s political class has become remarkably generous with the word “experience.”

A candidate can contest three elections and suddenly be described as an experienced politician, but experience in losing elections is not the same as experience in winning a mandate. Experience in opposition is not the same as experience in government.

Experience on the campaign trail is not the same as experience managing a bureaucracy, and perhaps that distinction deserves to be made more brutally in Lagos.

The Lagos governorship is not a debating society. It is not an internship. It is not an opportunity for political experimentation dressed up as revolutionary politics. It is executive power over one of Africa’s most complex metropolitan economies.

The person sitting in Alausa is expected to understand public finance, infrastructure, transportation, urban planning, healthcare, education, security coordination, environmental management, bureaucracy and the complicated relationship between government and the private sector.

That requires more than political ambition.

It requires executive exposure.

It requires institutional knowledge.

It requires a governing record.

And it requires the ability to demonstrate that a political organisation can move from opposition rhetoric to the actual machinery of government.

This is precisely where the ADC ticket becomes vulnerable to scrutiny.

Its candidates have political histories, yes, but political history should not be confused with political achievement.

Rhodes-Vivour’s history shows a 2019 senatorial defeat and a 2023 governorship defeat. Gbadamosi’s history includes a 2019 governorship defeat and a 2020 senatorial defeat. The two men therefore arrive at the 2027 contest with considerable electoral mileage but, based on those Lagos general-election contests, none demonstrated a record of winning a Lagos general election.

That is not an insult.

It is an electoral fact.

Political commentators are entitled to ask what that fact means.

There is another uncomfortable dimension to this ticket: the repeated movement through political platforms.

Rhodes-Vivour contested the 2019 Lagos West senatorial election on the PDP platform before emerging as Labour Party’s governorship candidate in 2023. He is now seeking the governorship again under ADC.

Gbadamosi has similarly traversed the Lagos political landscape through different platforms, contesting the 2019 governorship election under ADP and the 2020 Lagos East senatorial bye-election under PDP before arriving on the ADC ticket.

This is where the phrase political vehicle becomes important.

A political party should be more than a vehicle for transferring individual ambition from one election cycle to another. It should have a structure, ideology, membership, grassroots organisation, internal cohesion and the capacity to aggregate interests into a viable governing coalition.

The question for ADC is therefore straightforward: is this a genuine political realignment with an organisational base capable of governing Lagos, or is it another platform carrying familiar opposition figures back to the ballot?

That question becomes even more relevant when the party’s own nomination process has already drawn controversy.

Princess Abiodun Oyefusi challenged the ADC Lagos governorship primary and alleged irregularities in the process, including claims that votes attributed to her were transferred to Rhodes-Vivour. The case was subsequently struck out by the Federal High Court on grounds relating to the internal affairs of political parties.

The allegations should not be presented as facts because the court did not make such a finding, but the political controversy itself cannot simply be erased from the history of the ticket.

A party preparing to sell itself as an alternative governing platform should expect scrutiny of its own internal democratic processes. That is not unreasonable.

It is the minimum standard of political accountability, and this is where the ADC ticket’s central problem becomes clearer.

The problem is not that Rhodes-Vivour and Gbadamosi lack political experience.

The problem is that their political experience appears to have accumulated faster than their electoral success.

That distinction is devastating in a governorship race because the Lagos electorate is not being asked to award a prize for political persistence. It is being asked to choose who should control the state’s executive machinery.

There is also a fundamental difference between being a recognisable opposition figure and being a credible governing alternative.

Opposition politics rewards criticism.

Government rewards delivery.

Opposition politicians can spend four years explaining what the government is doing wrong while a governor has to decide what to do, fund it, execute it, defend it, measure it and accept responsibility for the outcome.

That distinction becomes particularly relevant when the competing political proposition includes candidates with direct experience inside the Lagos executive structure.

Kadri Obafemi Hamzat, the APC’s 2027 governorship candidate, is not walking into the contest from outside the machinery of government. He has served as Commissioner for Science and Technology, Commissioner for Works and Infrastructure, and Deputy Governor of Lagos State since 2019, and was re-elected Deputy Governor in 2023.

That creates a fundamentally different political proposition.

One side is asking Lagos to take a chance on a ticket whose principal figures are established opposition politicians with unsuccessful electoral histories.

The other presents a candidate with years of direct executive exposure inside the Lagos government.

That distinction does not win an election by itself, but pretending the distinction does not exist would be intellectually dishonest.

The 2027 contest therefore deserves to be stripped of political theatre and subjected to the coldest possible question: what exactly is being offered, and what evidence exists that the people offering it can deliver?

Because Lagos has seen the campaign speeches before.

It has seen the opposition movements before.

It has seen candidates emerge with enormous enthusiasm before.

And it has watched political personalities move from one platform to another in pursuit of the same office.

At some point, the electorate is entitled to demand more than political reinvention. It is entitled to demand results.

For Rhodes-Vivour, the 2023 result remains 312,329 votes against 762,134 for Sanwo-Olu.

For Gbadamosi, the 2019 governorship result remains 4,780 votes, while his 2020 Lagos East senatorial contest ended with 11,257 votes against Abiru’s 89,204.

The numbers have no political loyalty.

They do not care about slogans.

They do not care about hashtags.

They do not care how impressive a campaign rally looks.

They really do not care about anyone’s oratory prowess.

They simply record what happened.

And what happened is that both men have contested major Lagos elections and lost at different times.

Now, in 2027, the political vehicle has changed.

The rhetoric will change.

The alliances will change.

The campaign strategy will change.

But before Lagos is asked to treat the ADC ticket as a new political phenomenon, there is one question that deserves an answer:

What, exactly, is new?

If the answer is merely another party platform, another campaign cycle and another promise of political transformation, then Lagos has every reason to examine the substance beneath the packaging.

Because political ambition is cheap.

Opposition rhetoric is cheaper.

What is expensive—and what Lagos should demand—is the evidence that the people asking for its mandate are actually equipped to use it.

In politics, a résumé can tell voters where a candidate has been, but an electoral record tells them what happened when the voters had the final word.

And for the ADC ticket, that record of failure- sorry, defeat- is already part of the campaign.

 

Ayobami Ladipo is a media practitioner and political enthusiast based in Lagos, Nigeria.