By Olusegun Adeniyi
Yoruba people warn that one should be wary of planting guinea corn with rainfall that comes from certain individuals. The message is that a promise made by that person can never be relied upon. This is the lesson many of those who aspired for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential ticket failed to heed. At the end, each of them wasted not only the N100 million posted for the party’s nomination form but also their time and other campaign expenses.
From a former president of the country to the sitting vice president to the president of the African Development Bank (AfDB) to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor and numerous serving ministers, jostling for the APC ticket was an elaborate scheme. And if you asked close supporters of these eminent personalities what was propelling their ambition, the quick response would be that they were encouraged to run by President Muhammadu Buhari or some shadowy people around him. The scam is now effectively over.
Yesterday morning, after 24 hours of drama during which the APC national chairman, Abdullahi Adamu, failed in his brazen attempt to play the Sani Abacha script, former Lagos State Governor, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu emerged the party’s presidential flagbearer. But with APC, that may just be the close of a chapter rather than the end of the book. I nonetheless congratulate Tinubu who fought a long war of attrition and prevailed despite all the kitchen sinks thrown along his way over the past three years. It is a remarkable feat. I know many APC big wigs who swore that Tinubu would never be the APC presidential flagbearer. Fortunately for Tinubu, the nomination of the APC presidential candidate was not left to the machinations of some power mongers or to likes or dislikes on Twitter!
For more than two decades, Tinubu has been building a formidable political structure. And when it mattered most on Tuesday night, this paid off for him. Like former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, Tinubu is a man who has been around. He is also someone with whom I have had extensive interactions, beginning in 1992 when he first contested for senate (Lagos West) on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Records of his stewardship in Lagos are also readily available for interrogation. So, in the weeks and months ahead, Tinubu will engage my attention along with other presidential candidates. But he is not the issue for today.
At his inauguration seven years ago, President Buhari said rather memorably: “I belong to everybody, and I belong to nobody.” The line may have been crafted by an inspired speech writer, but it goes to the make-up of Buhari. He has always been for himself. When asked last year about his successor, he said: “That is not my problem.” But to the surprise of many Nigerians in January this year, Buhari indicated that he actually had someone in mind. Responding to a question regarding his likely successor, the president said: “No, I will not tell you, because he may be eliminated if I mention his name.” That perhaps explains why, in the build-up to the APC primaries, almost every APC aspirant sought his endorsement. One by one, they trooped to the Villa. He encouraged them. And every single one believed he was the anointed. I had warned a few of the aspirants not to bank on the president and I had my reason.
In the 2011 presidential election, Buhari ran on the platform of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC). While he lost the presidential election to the then incumbent Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP, his party won overwhelmingly in 12 of the 19 Northern States. His CPC defeated the PDP in all seven Northwest states of Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara and four of the six Northeast states of Bauchi, Borno, Gombe and Yobe, losing only in Adamawa and Taraba states. In the six North Central states, Buhari was defeated by Jonathan in five (Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Plateau and Nasarawa) winning only in Niger.
So one would have expected Buhari’s CPC to do well in the gubernatorial election in the 12 states where he won decisively in the presidential election. That was not what happened two weeks later. CPC lost all the 12 states and only won the gubernatorial election in Nasarawa where Buhari had earlier been defeated by Jonathan, essentially because of some internal contradictions within the PDP in that state. What happened? The moment Buhari lost the presidential election, he literally walked away, oblivious to the fact that there were other elections. Had he stood firm and campaigned for the CPC gubernatorial candidates, his party would have swept those 12 states.
It is against the foregoing background that I was surprised when President Buhari last week Tuesday met with APC governors, asking that he be allowed to pick his successor. I was certain he was pushed into the idea so I waited to see how it would all play out. “In keeping with the established internal policies of the party and as we approach the convention in a few days, I wish to solicit the reciprocity and support of the governors and other stakeholders in picking my successor, who would fly the flag of our party for election into the office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2023,” the president read from a prepared text at the meeting which was also attended by the APC national chairman, Abdullahi Adamu.
Ordinarily, you don’t expect a press statement on such occasion. If the president had a candidate to sell, he would call a few of the influential governors and ask them to market such person for him. Expectedly, exactly a week later, the president disowned Adamu (who announced the name of senate president Ahmad Lawan) and declared that he had anointed no candidate for the party. That was after the APC Northern governors had seized the moment to zone the presidency to the South to save the day for the president and their party. Had they not done that, Adamu would have imposed on the party a man who ended up securing less than eight percent of the votes at the national convention in the name of a dubious ‘consensus’. And the president would probably have done nothing afterwards.
Nobody has perhaps done a better disquisition of President Buhari than international development specialist, Dr Hussaini Abdu. His trending short treatise on WhatsApp (I confirmed the authorship from him) is on the bane of leadership in Nigeria, using Buhari as a case study. The president, according to Abdu, “loves himself so much that he will never stake his neck for anybody. Those who know Buhari, even before his election, will tell you this. People can go behind him, around him, drop his name etc. to get things for themselves. If you succeed so, be it. If you fail, he disowns you.”
Flowing from the foregoing, Abdu argues that in leadership recruitment, it is important to always pay “attention to critical details like social background, psychological make-up, personality type and how these contribute to shaping their approach to leadership,” while highlighting how President Buhari avoids conflicts he is expected to manage and hardly makes strategic decisions. “It is therefore a wild goose chase to expect Buhari to determine the presidential flag bearer for APC in the 2023 elections. He will not, because he has never done that for anybody, not a Councilor, not a LGA Chairman, not a Governor, not even a party Chairman.” He concluded: “APC is currently in a leadership mess because Buhari is not a big decision maker, he avoids decisions, or at best, get others to do it for him.”
While I will come back to examine Tinubu and other presidential candidates that have emerged from the primaries, let me say something about an issue that came up during this entire exercise. I did not believe that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo should have thrown his hat into the ring. That is because I could not see any path to victory for him in the APC primaries. And I never bought into the cold calculation by his supporters that he would secure the endorsement of the president. It was never going to happen. Besides, considering what we have seen during the primaries, such endorsement even if given might not have made any difference.
However, I fail to understand why some people would imagine that it was wrong (or treacherous) of Osinbajo to seek the presidential ticket of his party. Any vice president or deputy governor or deputy anything who says he/she has no ambition for the number one job is either a fool or a fraud. Osinbajo is neither. The fact that he was once an appointee of Tinubu should never have counted against him. Could he (and some of his pompous aides) have handled the situation better? Certainly yes. But those who are writing tales of how Osinbajo became this or that, miss the point. At different times, Osinbajo was recommended for public offices in which his loyalty should be to the people.
Tinubu is a student of power so he must understand that Osinbajo has not done anything wrong by contesting the primaries. But it is important that the duo mend their relationship while their supporters, especially in Yorubaland, should be called to order. The overwhelming nature of Tinubu’s victory indicates that he has wider acceptability across Nigeria. That should be humbling enough as he prepares for what promises to be a titanic election battle with his longtime friend and associate, Atiku Abubakar. But it is President Buhari who should be concerned about his place in history.
The fact that an incumbent African president would allow the matter of his succession to drift out of his reach and control as we witnessed before and during the APC primaries is a curious phenomenon. It means that President Buhari is either an objective and impartial democrat or a selfish political introvert. Either way, the handling of the APC transition nomination is one act of political tardiness that is likely to haunt Buhari’s retirement days in Daura. If Tinubu wins the 2023 presidential election, he will not likely forget how hard he had to fight to get the APC ticket. In a statement which I quoted in my book, ‘Against the Run of Play’ about those who prevented him from being Buhari’s running mate in 2015, Tinubu said: “While I have a thick skin, I don’t have a thick mind.” If, on the other hand, Atiku carries the day, Buhari’s entire legacy will go up in smoke.
Good leadership, President Buhari must understand, entails a keen awareness of the operating environment and the subtle but often unsaid shifts in perception to which those who occupy positions of trust must be sensitive.
Blood on the Altar
On Tuesday, the Catholic Diocese of Ondo confirmed that 38 persons were killed in Sunday’s attack by gunmen at St. Francis Catholic Church, Owo, the hometown of the Ondo State Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN. Scores of other injured parishioners are currently in hospital. While I join in commiserating with the families of the deceased as we pray for the injured, I hope the security agencies will bring all the culprits to book. The greater work will be how to heal this grieving community after what has just happened.
The tragedy in Owo reminds us once again of that famous play by the 20th century British playwright and social critic, T. S. Eliot. In writing ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, which tells the story of the assassination in 1170 AD of Archbishop Thomas Beckett by loyalists of Henry II, Eliot was said to have drawn heavily from the account of a clerk who witnessed the tragic event in Canterbury Cathedral and recorded it for posterity. Although the play dwells largely on a confrontation between the Church and State at the time, I have always believed that it also contains embedded lessons which speak to contemporary times in Nigeria.
Before Owo, we had witnessed several of such tragedies in different theatres across the country. We cannot claim not to the reason why. The weakening state capacity, and leadership ineptitude amid declining resources, has facilitated the emergence of dangerous non-state actors who seem determined to drive our country on the path of anarchy. We should not allow them. But when the authorities fail to assure hurting people that they can get justice for heinous crimes, they leave room for these criminal gangs to peddle their trade. To our collective shame!
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