YOBE State governor and All Progressives Congress (APC) caretaker committee chairman, Mai Mala Buni, does not give the impression he can read the signs of the times; but even a man so suspicious of and hostile to party rules and conventions must feel a sense of unease and trepidation in losing the confidence of President Muhammadu Buhari and the APC rank and file. In last week’s widely circulated front page photograph of the president posing for a group photograph with Mr Buni and Education minister Adamu Adamu after their London meeting, the APC chairman and Mr Adamu grinned more broadly and persuasively than the president. Whether out of his health concerns or a reflection of just how disturbed he was about his quarrelsome party the president’s smothered grin seemed painful and disobliging.

No one has given a comprehensive account of the discussions between the president and the APC chairman, and Mr Buni’s conciliating remarks to the leaders and members of the APC seem to gloss over the fundamental problems of the party and the depth of despair that has dismayed and shaken the ruling party. In a bid to show that nothing untoward was happening in the APC, the caretaker chairman had uncharacteristically backed the firm and swift measures taken by the Niger State governor Abubakar Sani-Bello, who, it is now generally accepted, acted for the chairman when the latter was in Dubai for medical attention. But a lot has happened, and nothing done or said by the president mitigates the life-threatening catastrophe awaiting the party in the months ahead.

The APC chairman may be shocked by the scale of the uprising against his leadership, but he is smart enough to know that rather than stand his ground and pretend that all is well, he needs to pursue reconciliation. The caretaker secretary, James Akpanuduoedehe, is not similarly gifted. Angered by the uprising against the party leadership, but gloating over the failure of the uprising, he has unwisely sought vengeance against the rebels. The problem, however, is that the rebels not only stand on a higher moral pedestal than Messrs Buni and Akpanudoedehe, they are also highly placed and influential leaders of the party without whom little can be achieved. Mr Buni saw all this and has tried to mollify the rebels. His efforts may, however, be too little too late.

Mr Buni must now try to accomplish in one dizzying week the responsibility he had spent more than a year trying to deflect – holding the party’s national elective convention. His scheme for APC constitutional amendment has all but collapsed, and his membership revalidation and registration efforts may eventually count for nothing ameliorative to the party’s well-being. Even his dream of appearing on the party’s presidential ticket may also have gone up in smoke. He is aware that most of the rebels who rose against his leadership in the short-lived coup of about two weeks ago also harbour similar presidential ambition to his, but because some of his opponents genuinely want an elective convention, and have mixed with the crowd of anti-Buni forces, he is hard put to sweep the revolt under the carpet or mass all his enemies in one putrid cauldron.

That Mr Buni can pull off the convention without a hitch is stressful to a man undertaking medical treatment abroad. He will, however, try, having been given the matching order in London by the president to whom all the party panjandrums have obligingly ceded control of the party. Secretary Akpanudoedehe had tried to turn the hands of the clock back; but Mr Buni hushed him, and 10 out of the 12-member APC caretaker committee passed a vote of no confidence in him. So the resistance against the convention may not have collapsed altogether. There are also court injunctions to be vacated, some of them allegedly inspired by Mr Buni’s cohorts in the party. The main injunction against the convention was reportedly vacated last Friday, but success is by no means completely guaranteed. Then there are a plethora of administrative bottlenecks that Mr Buni’s long-standing dithering and self-inspired conspiracies had given fillip. Should he overcome those inhibiting factors in one week, it would mean his talents had been underestimated.

For now, however, Mr Buni perches precariously on the horns of a dilemma. He knows the expectations of the rebels in the party, though he is sure he can discountenanced their hope and even take the battle to their doorsteps. But that would prolong the crisis in the party and jeopardise the convention. So, he will continue conciliating the rebels, as galling as the idea might seem to him, and risk an inglorious end to his leadership of the party. Far worse for him, he also knows the expectations of the president, particularly concerning the convention. To allow the convention miscarry, no matter the justification, is unthinkable, nay an anathema. So he will grovel before his enemies and friends in equal measure to enable the convention hold. Even then there are no guarantees; for running the gauntlet of rebels on one side and a plaintive and distraught president who has given him a reprieve, on the other side, is not an easy task at all, even for an accomplished schemer like him.

The wily but ineffective Mr Buni appears smarter than the impetuous Sen Akpanudoedehe. It is not for nothing that he is caretaker chairman of the party, a position he rose to on the backs of scheming fellow governors united in their common and implacable resolve to forbid the presidential aspiration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the party’s national leader and former Lagos State governor. Having risen to that caretaker position, and sadly abused it, Mr Buni is not ignorant of the shenanigans inside and outside the party. He knows by instinct that the president is saddened by his dithering, even though that sadness had not been expertly and effectively communicated. He also knows that the failed coup against him, though not inspired by the president, was sanctioned both by a majority of party leaders and President Buhari himself. That the coup failed was due more to the rebels’ tactical incompetence than any dispute as to the widespreadness of the hostility against the caretaker chairman’s leadership style.

Indeed, it is suggested that Justice minister Abubakar Malami, regarded as Mr Buni’s backbone, was responsible for foiling the coup than the tactical incompetence of the plotters contributed to the debacle. Working in league with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mr Malami is credited with cleverly pulling the carpet from under the feet of the plotters, just as he is thought to be behind the puzzling and indefensible judgement of the Federal High Court Umuahia to nullify Sec 84 (12) of the Electoral Act on the wrong legal premises. INEC resorted to its enabling law to ambush the plotters; and the president, in a letter to the Chairman of the Progressives Governors’ Forum, Atiku Bagudu, pointed out both the legal and administrative fallacies of the coup. And while Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai gloated on television about the irreversibility of the coup, and Niger State governor Abubakar Sani-Bello inferred the president’s endorsement of the coup, and Ondo State governor Rotimi Akeredolu was profusely lyrical about Mr Buni’s yahoo-yahoo supporting cast, Mr Malami portentously admonished caution. The Justice minister not only knew something the plotters didn’t know, he also knew, as an ambitious politician himself, which side his bread was buttered.

But in the end it was President Buhari who sounded the death knell of the coup. Though he had no constitutional basis to drive the party hither and thither, he did it anyway. In the aforesaid letter to Mr Bagudu, excerpted in all newspapers last week, the president peremptorily directed party leaders to cease bickering and ensure the return the party to status quo ante. Mr Buni, he further directed, should be allowed to organise the convention for March 26. But far beyond the intent of the letter is the hidden fact, probably not lost on Mr Buni, that the president supported the coup, and more damning to the caretaker chairman, clearly regretted the failure of the coup. Said the president: “In addition, it has come to my attention that because of recent events the APC is faced with a multiplicity of court cases pending against it in various courts across the country. As a result of this, the party faces the possibility and prospect of the invalidation of all its activities and actions by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Furthermore, the party has demonstrated its inability to proceed with the issue of effecting change in the leadership of its Caretaker Extraordinary Convention Committee (CECC) in a way that is inclusive, legal and respectful of the time limit set and required for giving the INEC sufficient notice of the time and venue for holding its convention. No doubt, these controversies and uncertainties, as enumerated above, pose a real threat to the party, and may lead to a possible non-recognition of its activities, elections and the probable invalidation of all its other actions by INEC. This may ultimately even lead to its implosion…”

Mr Buni may have received the president’s grudging support against the coupists, but he is smart enough to know when he is being damned with faint praise. Had the coupists carried out their operations timeously and inclusively, not to say also acknowledging and managing the legal strictures in their way, the president would have not minded the change in leadership. Instructing the party to return to status quo was the president’s last-ditch effort to save a very bad situation from becoming a cataclysm. Mallam el-Rufai and company may have egg on their faces, but they must console themselves with the fact that they did nothing horrendous or reprehensible. They had the backing of the president, as he indirectly indicated in his letter, but their inability to manage their rebellion expertly prompted the president to distance himself from the fallout. The coupists will still kick against the Buni stone, but it is not clear how effective they can be until the harried Mr Buni proves spectacularly incompetent in meeting the March 26 date.

The main beneficiary of the impasse in the party, not to say the churning coup and countercoup unsettling the APC and party leaders, is Asiwaju Tinubu. He steered clear of the pro- and anti-Buni plots, sensible enough to know that he was, and perhaps still remains, the principal target of the pro- and anti-Buni forces. But whether the desperate urgency to hold a successful convention by the Buni forces and the humiliation felt by those who attempted to dislodge Mr Buni will be sufficient in attenuating the plots against the presidential aspiration of the former Lagos governor remains to be seen. March 26 is just a few days away. Leaders and members of the APC unencumbered by the seething plots in the party will hope that the convention will be successful. They do not have the luxury of time to fool around, for their opponents in the PDP wish the impasse in the ruling party to become even more intractable.

Atiku’s aspiration and foretelling PDP’s demise

FORMER vice president Atiku Abubakar continues to display an unyielding resolve to win the presidency. As they say, it is his lifelong ambition. He is entitled to his dream, just like any other Nigerian. Though his restlessness is the political equivalence of judicial forum shopping in search of his dream, unfazed by what looked like his enchantment with political harlotry, he has a right to keep hope alive. He is currently berthed in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Indeed last Tuesday in Abuja he reportedly held a seven-hour meeting with his party’s Board of Trustees (BoT) to infuse them with the urgency and logic of his aspiration, with the intent to make his ambition their own. It is after all politics.

But it is not clear what kind of politics he is playing which prompts him to alarm party elders enough to whip them into line. By leashing his ambition to the party’s survival, indeed qualifying his candidacy as a winning and indispensable ticket, the former vice president seems to be leaving the party with no alternative. In his words: “I am worried, and you should be worried too, that if we do not win, it means we will be in opposition again for the next eight years. By the next eight years, I don’t know how many would be left in politics and it may even ultimately lead to the death of the party because people gravitate, particularly in developing countries, towards governments. Ordinary people naturally gravitate towards the government. So, this is a very, very crucial and historical moment in history, for our survival.”

He characterises Nigerian politics as irrational, unprincipled and unpredictable. By suggesting that he was the party’s best bet for winning the diadem, and foretelling the party’s death should it loose the presidency over the next two terms appears unduly apocalyptic, if not megalomaniacal. His intellectual and administrative mettle as vice president was untested. His proclivity for defecting from one party to the other at the drop of a hat does not portray him as principled, ideological and gritty. He has also not availed the nation of his experience and thoughts in books or journals; so how do Nigerians, let alone his skeptical and querulous party, measure his worth? As vice president under Olusegun Obasanjo he evinced his stubbornness and readiness to fight for what he believes, but there was little in his fights to show that what he always believed were exemplary, farsighted and incontestable. In sum, he will need more than alarming the grey hairs of his party to throw in their lot with him. More, even if they embrace him, he will still need to convince the country that his talents and manners are suited to the grave needs of the country. Then, finally, he must demonstrate beyond doubt that repudiating him and his party for the next eight or more years would spell doom for the PDP.

The general suspicion is that the PDP has done little or nothing in about eight years out of office to rejig itself administratively, philosophically and ideologically to turn the hearts of the electorate towards the party. The lessons of its losses in 2015 and 2019 are entirely lost on the party. They think they have read the mood of the country expertly, and that their political fortune rests on the misfortune or misdeeds of the APC. What if the country judges the misdeeds of the ruling party as more tolerable than the hesitations and incompetence of the PDP in their 16 years in office? They are yet to finalise their zoning formula, particularly on the presidency project. And Alhaji Abubakar himself has prevaricated over that issue to the point of promoting a quaint mathematical justification for retaining the presidency in the North. But the former vice president will have to say, do and think much more than he has ever done to merit both the ticket and office he says he has prepared himself all his life to take. So far, he has been unconvincing to a skeptical country and cantankerous PDP leaders and members.