AFTER holding its breath for more than a year, the All Progressives Congress (APC) finally exhaled last week when the party’s caretakers grudgingly consented to a convention. The caretakers, with the improbable acronym of CECPC (Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee), attempted a last-minute rigmarole to defeat or postpone the convention, but the plot imploded in their faces. The convention was to have been organised six months after they were inaugurated in June 2020. But one postponement after another saw the caretakers expanding their mandate sans frontieres, and their tenure ad infinitum. All the political pirouette came to a crushing end last week after one dizzying week of feverish plots to buy time and sate party members’ yearnings with zonal congresses. Through the Progressive Governors’ Forum, the party put a stop to the dithering and machinations and, in league with the president, forced a March 26 date for the convention.

There have been speculations as to why the Mai Mala Buni-led caretaker committee was unenthusiastic about the convention. Some say that many state chapters are still embroiled in crisis, despite months of what party leaders described as painstaking reconciliation sessions. There were also some mischievous suggestions that the caretakers themselves, in clear manifestation of conflict of interest, harboured political aspirations for which they were determined to sacrifice every principle known to man. And, finally, it was also believed that the caretakers made it their obsession to put mechanisms in place in the party, complete with irreversible faits accomplis, to preclude certain presidential aspirants from actualising their goals. Whatever their reasons, and no matter how far they have gone in consummating their goals, they must now subject themselves to the will of the party and ensure the convention holds as advertised. President Muhammadu Buhari had coaxed them to hold the convention in February, but they ensured by acts of omission that the plan miscarried.

Last week also, the APC zoned party offices and seemed indirectly to have gone a step further than its rival, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to zone the presidency. But the devil is in the detail, for a few party leaders, including the Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai, have continued to waffle over the issue, insisting that zoning the presidency was not a done deal, and preferring to still leave the matter precariously open. The media, which immediately disseminated the news that the APC had zoned the presidency to the South, has not been as cautious as some APC leaders in drawing conclusions nor as reticent as presidency officials who have kept sealed lips about the president’s preferences. Indeed members of the two parties have begun to build scenarios around the 2023 presidential poll. They have zeroed in on which of the zones in the South appears best placed to win the party’s candidacy, while a few PDP leaders have imprudently suggested that the opposition party could not be hamstrung by the permutations and political dynamics in the ruling party.

Sooner or later, both parties will have to make unequivocal statements about where they expect to pick their presidential candidates, whether from the South as many have read into the APC game plan or left open to all-comers as the PDP has agonisingly conceded. It seems for now that the APC may suffer fewer pangs than the PDP in making that delicate choice. President Buhari is from the North, and the APC will find it exceedingly difficult to justify that region’s retention of the presidency. Many party leaders from the North are of course not averse to retaining the presidency, but they will have a herculean task arguing for it and justifying it. Going by the furious attempt to delay the convention, few doubt that most APC leaders are destitute of principles. What the party has going for it is that, given its present power configurations, justifying a southern candidacy is enormously easier than angling for a northern standard-bearer. By sheer coincidence, northern presidential aspirants in the APC have smothered their ambitions in order to escape public and humiliating censure. This has left the field wide open to strong presidential contenders from the South.

The PDP has different demons to contend with. Somehow they have been consistently wrong-footed in the past eight years or so since they were humiliated out of the presidency. The APC’s performance has not been stellar, but even in the ruling party’s shortcomings and failings, they have creatively reframed the narrative in such a way as to render their weaknesses in entrancing colours than the PDP has painted its achievements in gloomy colours. Worsening the PDP nightmare is the fact that just as they could not manage their successes for 16 years, frittering away early triumphs and advantages, and romping between the sheets in saturnalian delight, they have been even more woeful in coming to terms with their political tragedies, especially the ignominious defeat of 2015. Also compounding their woes is the vexatious and insurmountable fact that the South is to them a barren landscape in finding presidential material. Even if they surmount the curse of political geography, it is hard to see them overcoming the excesses of the few aspirants from the South.

Does this make the 2023 presidential poll a foregone conclusion? Hardly. The APC is gifted with self-destructive impulse that unnerves its supporters and fascinates its officials and leaders. They are plotters extraordinaire, compulsive intriguers, and unconvinced ideologues who resent order, control and systematic thinking. Experts at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, except when properly restrained, they will as soon bewitch themselves with self-defeating legal adventures as engage in bloody jostles for meaningless agenda. It took them more than one year and a half to organise a common convention after an inexpert insurrection against their long-suffering chairman; there is no telling what other complications and odiousness they cannot inveigle their party leaders into committing. Their stamina always looked tenuous, and their resolve fragile, but what appears more alarming about them, that is, apart from their fratricidal longings, is their secret yearning for collective suicide. After repeatedly threatening to drown themselves in their seven turbulent years of leading and sometimes mastering Nigeria since 2015, who can tell whether one of these days they will not yield to their natural instinct?

PDP leaders face a huge dilemma in the coming presidential poll. They will keep casting furtive glances at the APC, like a jealous housewife. What they will see will depend on their acuity in reading signals and decoding ciphers, for even APC apparatchiks make heavy weather of reading their inscrutable self. For outsiders to read them well, particularly a jealous outsider, he will require double the adeptness of APC members. But since APC leaders have now exhaled and crossed the Rubicon, and seemed to have got the zoning enigma right – that is if they leave well enough alone – they will try to make themselves unbeatable in 2023. They will, however, first need a chairman, whom they are poised to elect either indirectly or by consensus. And if they get that mystery solved and the chairman does not become a pawn in the hands of party schemers, why, the PDP will be forced to play second fiddle not only in the next poll but for much longer.

But there is a huge question mark. There are indications that some of the leading figures in the party dread a strong candidate to carry their banner to the poll. Yet they want to win the presidency by having their cake and eating it. They can’t have it both ways. The president probably played a strong role in cajoling the party’s caretakers to fix the convention for March 26. He will need greater resolve to secure his legacy. Chief Obasanjo showed more character in office than President Buhari has done so far, and yet the former president was unable to influence the election of a worthy successor, leading to both the spectacular collapse of his party in 2015 and the obliteration of his legacy. President Buhari will need all the advice and help he can get to influence the election of a worthy successor, first as his party’s candidate and then as president. Pulling off this magic will considerably task him to produce the ingenuity many Nigerians are skeptical he possesses. But if he manages, despite himself, to do what is right he will have guaranteed the future of his party and the security and consolidation of his legacy.

Ukraine upsets calculations

NO one was left in doubt what the outcome of a war between Russia and Ukraine would be. The Russians, not to talk of their expansionist president Vladimir Putin who is nostalgic about the days of empire, will make short work of it. Arguments have been raised about the motives of the war and at what point Mr Putin would feel pacified. There are also suggestions that the war was motivated by the enormous economic resources in Ukraine, the strategic importance of the country to Russia, the creeping expansionism of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the United State’s desire to resuscitate the Cold War and sabotage Russo-European economic and diplomatic relations, etc.

While these factors may be important, other factors explain Mr Putin’s angry determination to restore Russia’s influence in the world. If Russia takes Ukraine, it will inevitably share borders with Poland and a few other NATO member countries. So it is really not about border contiguousness, or the existential threat constituted by NATO. Russia, despite its huge size, simply wants more living space, like China, a goal that is akin to Adolf Hitler’s ill-fated Lebensraum. The Russians may not be able to occupy Ukraine in perpetuity, but they want it a weak and dependant satellite. Its independence and political virtues seemed to mock their awkward democracy and the goal of recreating the Warsaw Pact.

France and German live next door to each other even though they’ve been rivals for centuries. Russia and Ukraine could get along despite their differences and values; but Mr Putin is from a different era, and his knowledge of history is so benighted and circumscribed that he believes he can sustain his country’s misadventure in Ukraine for decades. He cannot; nor will his presidency last forever. He may be a military strategist and a passionate ‘Czarist’, but it is clear he still needs extra lessons in statesmanship to recognise that might has its limitations. Carving a sphere of influence like the US has done in the Americas is indefensible. The US Monroe Doctrine is an arrogant and reprehensible policy; it should not be used by Russia to justify intimidating weaker nations, as it seems prepared to do to Finland, Norway and probably Sweden, some of which were driven by fear of Russia into NATO arms. The lesson in all this is that every nation should simply get strong and be able to deter the big powers, for as far as the powers are concerned, and as Hitler demonstrated in 1939, one conquest is never enough.

2023: The age factor again

WEEKS after former military heads of state Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar spoke glowingly of allowing and enabling youths to take the presidency, of course democratically, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo has added his voice to the same campaign. This column took issue with the former military leaders when they seemed unintendedly to inaugurate the Minna School of Politics by arguing in favour of age as a factor in leadership. As world history indicates clearly, age has not been a factor in great leadership: young and old leaders have demonstrated exemplary leadership skills or displayed gross incompetence despite their age. But regardless of arguments discountenancing age as a factor in sound leadership, the idea that Nigeria is in dire straits because old and lethargic people are ruling Nigeria continues to gain currency.

Chief Obasanjo suggested at the Murtala Mohammed Foundation annual lecture last week that his generation should step aside for the younger generation. If someone like him still desired to contest the presidency or governorship, then something was wrong, he exclaimed. “We need to have an intergenerational collaboration,” he began cautiously, as if all he wanted was collaboration. “Fayemi (Ekiti State governor) said he was in primary school when Murtala and Obasanjo were there (in the State House). So, if people of the Murtala/Obasanjo era are competing with you as governor, then, something is wrong. The Murtala/Obasanjo group should be stepping aside. Whatever experience and knowledge we have, we should be able to give it to you and you should be able to give it to those coming after you…”

The Minna-based generals spoke of youth as a factor in the presidency; Chief Obasanjo spoke of generational shift. A lot of imprecision obfuscates the references to youth and generation in the discourses of the former leaders. This obfuscation has trickled down the age ladder and now permeates discourses among younger politicians who want a celestial fiat to remove the elders ahead of them. They believe that their chances would be brightened with such flagrant display of political eugenics. The Minna generals, however, qualify their suggestions by restricting their presidential choices to politicians not older than 60 years. They are not incommoded by the arbitrariness of that age.

Chief Obasanjo is famous for imprecision. He indulged it again when he spoke about his generation vacating the turf for the ‘generation coming behind’. What ‘next generation’ means in the context of his suggestion is hard to say. He is about 84, though he is not sure. Who then qualifies for those coming behind him when, demographically, a generation is understood to be on average about 25 years? Perhaps a 60-year-old politician? That brings his suggestion closer to that of the Minna generals who advocate for a president not older than 60 years. The obsession with age, perhaps triggered by the Nigerian experience, however, impedes a better understanding of what makes for great leadership, at least the kind of leadership capable of rescuing Nigeria from unremitting retrogression. They may not confess it, but none of the three generals who ruled Nigeria in the idealistic age of their dreams – Obasanjo at 39; Babangida at 44, and Abubakar at 56 – offered the country the kind of leadership they now enthusiastically recommend.

The three ex-heads of state were unprepared for leadership when they took office; yes, including Chief Obasanjo at his election in 1999. Myriads of religious and ethnic factors complicate Nigerian politics, predisposing them to elect safe but incompetent leaders. How to reverse that trend should engage the newfound pundits advocating generational shift. By putting undue emphasis on age, however, they give the impression that other factors are inconsequential or secondary. Chief Obasanjo spent eight years in office without producing or preparing the ideal generation he fancies, not to talk of laying the right structural foundation for the growth and stability of the country. Gen Babangida also spent about eight years in office destroying what was left of the legacies of his predecessors and British colonialists. And after him was the deluge.

Nothing precludes youths and coming generations from contesting the presidency. The constitution ensures that. But to hope for a day when political elders would voluntarily vacate the presidential space for the youths would be like chasing a chimera. It is unlikely to happen. That hope, however, plants the seed of rebellion in the minds of the so-called next generation who could begin to see every elder as a nuisance, and smooth-talking and charismatic ‘youths’ as the answer everyone must embrace.