Let me start today with a confession – on the nature of politics and elections in most nations of the world , especially Nigeria – that I not only find the political party primaries difficult to understand but I am equally baffled with the high rate at which candidates spring up overnight wanting to be president . I think I have myself to blame for both my ignorance and distress on the primaries because even though I am a card carrying member of a political party, I have never attended a political party meeting in my life not to talk of witnessing any primaries . Having said that however I know many Nigerians like me who are not apolitical but are just not interested in party politics or the rigors and costs of political participation in Nigeria . This is because our political system has left people like me and others stranded because the entrance fee to party politics is not only unaffordable and expensive but clearly beyond reach. Especially when the forms for presidential aspirants cost 100m naira and registration fees are so high for all politically available vacancies. They are reasonable at that price only for professional politicians who live on politics and have been at the game for so long that they have no other vocation , hobby or distractions of any type , because politics , outside religion , and yahoo yahoo , has become the most lucrative undertaking and past time in our great nation
Right now the primaries for the presidential candidates are in high gears in the two major parties , the APC and the PDP as well as the many obscure ones whose candidates know certainly that they have no chance in hell of getting anywhere near the presidency but are still in the race because they can afford to pay for the registration forms any way . It is this race , the primaries , that draw our attention today even as we proceed to look at elections elsewhere globally . Especially with the primaries for the November 2022 mid term elections in the US , and the just concluded presidential elections in the Philippines .Of course , we start with Nigeria , where we really know where the shoe pinches with regard to our expensive politics and equally fragile and offensive democracy .
I had a discussion with a former Federal Attorney General in his country home some time during which he told me when I asked of his immediate future plan , as he was about to leave government and an election was approaching , and he told me that I should be patient because there was going to be what he labelled a realignment of political forces before the election . He never witnessed the realignment he saw or the election because he was assassinated shortly after and his killers are yet to be found till today . Today however a realignment if forces is in the offing the way the ruling party is about to elect its presidential candidate this weekend on Sunday , tomorrow . There is talk of a possible concensus candidate similar to how the Chairman of the party was recently elected but the Chairman himself has debunked that by saying the presidency is a different ball game too big for concensus . However a stark show of realignment of forces that was unthinkable before is possible emergence of former President Goodluck Jonathan who was defeated in the 2015 presidential elections by the incumbent president . Jonathan is not a member of the APC but is reportedly being wooed by those close to the president . It has even been mooted that the deadline for submission of forms will not affect him even though he has not collected the form yet and the deadline is gone for submission of forms . Until now , the former president was his successor’s able envoy to places where there have een coups recently like Mali and Guinea , sent to persuade successful coup plotters in those nations to return to their barracks or set dates for return to civilian rule , a task in which he failed woefully because the soldiers never called off their coups in those nations . Now it seems the president is about to reward his predecessor with the presidency for failed assignments in calling off coups on behalf of ECOWAS .That will be a daunting task even for our strong president who wields great power in his party given the way the chairman was evolved by concensus last time around . Given that 26 aspirants are in the primaries there certainly will be a lot of bad blood if the president handpicks a candidate and foist him on the party . Such resentment will lead to a new round of alignment of forces after the primaries . It is obvious who is the forerunner is in this race and that is the candidate who stuck his neck out from the Lagoon in Lagos to proclaim that the present president was electable and the party rallied round that campaign call and the president got his two terms . I really can not see how the president can hand pick any other person than the Jagaban , Bola Ahmed Tinubu . Otherwise the race should take its course and the primaries should elect the APC presidential candidate from the 26 aspirants . To do otherwise is to set afoot an unexpected chain of events the end of which no man can foresee . It makes one to recall the prediction of the great Tony Enahoro sometime ago on the start of events that culminated ominously in the AG crisis of 1962 and the Nigerian civil war subsequently .
In the US , the party primaries in the Republican party has pitched former President Donald Trump against fellow Republicans like his Vice President Mike Pence ,which is a real realignment of forces now in the November 2022 mid term elections, and perhaps later in the 2024 US presidential elections . The reason is simple . Trump asked his Vice President not to validate the 2020 election results won by Joe Biden at the last stage of the counting of the states electoral ballots as required by law . Pence refused and what has been called the insurrection of Jan 6 2021 ensued . Now Trump supported the opponents of both the incumbent Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the Republican primaries but the two Republicans defeated Trump’s surrogates . That is a realignment that did not favor Trump’s claim that he won Georgia in the 2020 presidential elections, a claim that the two victorious Georgia Republicans strongly denied.
In the May 9 2022 presidential elections in the Philippines a dynastic political pairing of Ferdinand Marcos Junior , the only son of his father of the same name who was deposed in 1986 and the Daughter of incumbent President Duterte , Sarah won the presidential elections . That really was a vintage concoction of a realignment of forces and a remarkable one at that , given the fact that the father of the new Vice President was so anti corruption while in office and the father of the new President was unrepentantly corrupt and was indeed a kleptocrat , before being sent out of office in 1986 . It remains to be seen why the Filipinos chose this combination to vote in , against all odds , but the fact cannot be denied that a strange realignment has emerged most unexpectedly in that nation .