AFTER extensive consultations, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, eventually picked Delta State governor Ifeanyi Okowa as his running mate. A 17-member committee set up by the opposition party to select a running mate had signaled its preference, by an overwhelming margin, for the pugnacious and charismatic Nyesom Wike. Intense manouevres and horse trading begun even before the committee was constituted finally culminated in the choice of Governor Okowa, a one-term senator and two-term governor. He is 62 years old, and Delta Igbo. As expected, almost immediately after he was selected, and while the controversy generated by his selection was yet to abate, he had started vigorously pitching at the Southeast Igbo, asserting that he is one of them, and a proud one to boot.

Alhaji Atiku is a tested politician, and he has a mind of his own. He has no illusion that his choice of Dr Okowa would be controversial. By rejecting the more visible and voluble Mr Wike, the candidate knows he will in the coming months be sailing near the wind. Predictably, and until last Friday, the Rivers governor was yet to congratulate the running mate pick or reassure Alhaji Atiku of his commitment to the party or the ticket in the fateful electoral battle of 2023. Mr Wike’s proxies, if they are not self-motivated, have denounced the party’s choice and suggested darkly that all was not well with the party. After coming so close to the ticket during the presidential primary in which he scored 237 votes to Alhaji Atiku’s 371 votes, not to talk of winning the confidence of more than two-thirds of the PDP running mate selection committee, it would be surreal for him not to feel awful and alienated, his love and sacrifice for the party badly unrequited.

The rejection of Mr Wike will cast a long shadow over both the PDP and the presidential ticket. The Rivers governor had seemed poised for victory in the party’s presidential primary until his friend and co-contestant, Sokoto State governor Aminu Tambuwal, stepped down for Alhaji Atiku in order to consolidate the northern votes and make victory unassailable. It took many shattering days for the Rivers governor to get over what he feared was a conspiracy against his person and the southern region. In fact he was so incensed by the gang up by the North to retain power after two terms by a northern president that he at first dismissed talk of being running mate. After a while, he reconciled himself to the inevitable and began to angle for the pick. But even that has now eluded him, and in a way he unequivocally interprets as a direct affront. But whether he will go on to demand his pound of flesh for the repeated insults remains to be seen.

In the end, the repudiation of Mr Wike and affirmation of Dr Okowa were largely midwifed by party behemoths working in concert with shadowy figures from the North. If the party was to stand a chance at all in the presidential poll, they insinuated, the controversial and sometimes fiery regionalist, Mr Wike, could not be on the ticket. His remarkable achievement in nearly upsetting Alhaji Atiku in the presidential primary was dismissed with a wave of the hand. That he still seems to have a crossover appeal that transcends religion and regions did not seem to count with the behemoths. After all, they moaned, the primary votes were largely bought, and no aspirant’s score appeared to be a true reflection of competence, acceptability and electability. But, had the North not circled the wagons, the aspiration of Alhaji Atiku would have been in jeopardy.

Settling for Dr Okowa was not as hard as it appeared at first view, despite the tremendous support the PDP running mate selection committee gave Mr Wike. Party panjandrums saw the Rivers governor as deeply flawed, controversial and divisive, and Dr Okowa as mild-mannered, uncontroversial and enormously amenable. They saw the vice presidential pick as reinforcing the ticket in a way Mr Wike could neither contemplate nor dare. Alhaji Atiku is fairly eloquent, but Mr Wike would have brought colour, grandiloquence and entertainment to the ticket in a way Dr Okowa, with his staidness and lack of spiritedness, could never equal. But all that is academic. PDP leaders have made their choice, and unlike their opponent in the 2023 race which last week bought time by a clever political conjuration clumsily described as ‘place holding’, they will have to live with it, regardless of how Mr Wike responds to their provocation.

The 2023 presidential poll may be jinxed for the PDP. Apart from their refusal to purge their party and reposition it for the future, neither the presidential candidate nor his running mate grabs the electorate irresistibly. Alhaji Atiku is not thought to have depth, and at a time the presidential political atmosphere seems clement for a southern candidate, he is a northerner. Dr Okowa is sold as a stable and intelligent running mate, but it is doubtful whether the Igbo identity he touts so proudly can mesmerise the other states in the South-South as the PDP faithful hope. Going into an election from an opposition pedestal with a ticket that is neither charismatic nor capable of inducing seismic shifts in voting behavior may present serious difficulties to the cause of unseating a power-hungry incumbent.

Either by accident or by design, the APC waited until the PDP picked their presidential candidate. The ruling party eventually produced from their ranks probably the only man who can match Alhaji Atiku pound for pound, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Now, again, the ruling party has waited until the PDP picked a running mate. It is not certain yet whom the APC will pick, but he will likely tower above Dr Okowa. If ex-Borno State governor Kashim Shettima were to be that man, and his north-eastern origin would not circumscribe his value to the ticket, he would make mincemeat of the PDP running mate and add more value to the APC ticket than the PDP running mate could ever dream. If it were to be the untamable but effective Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai, and his tempestuousness and sometimes irascibility would not repulse party leaders, he would similarly make mincemeat of Dr Okowa. Katsina’s Aminu Masari and Kano’s Abdullahi Ganduje, sometimes mentioned, are both 72 years old. It is hard to see them on the ticket. In any case, the APC has the advantage of seeing the PDP deal its cards openly, and this may account for why the ruling party is having a tough time responding adequately and powerfully. They nearly picked a northerner in their primary to run against Alhaji Atiku, and would thus have lost their competitive advantage; but they managed to avoid self-destruction. They will hope to repeat the talisman in picking a sound running mate who is almost certain to be Muslim.

In picking Dr Okowa as running mate, the PDP managed to kill two birds with one stone: he is Igbo, though from outside the Southeast, and Christian. As chairman of the South-South Governors’ Forum, he had championed the cause of zoning the presidency to the South. How he quickly sacrificed that cause for political expediency must qualify as a disturbing window into his frothy mind. Soon after he enthusiastically accepted the offer, the Southern and Middle Belt Leaders’ Forum (SLMBF) decried the temerity of Dr Okowa’s repudiation of the decision made by a group he led and still leads. The grumbling group did not, however, offer any alternative. If, as they argued, no southerner should accept running mate ticket, assuming that order could be enforced, what difference would it make if PDP went North Central to pick someone else? Could the South engineer an electoral stalemate across party lines? Little by little, pressure groups such as the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the SLMBF may be discovering that beyond moral suasion they are not in a position to enforce most of their resolutions. On newspaper pages, their resolve charm the ordinary voter, just as the social media is bewitching Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi with his one-sided narrative certain to collapse soon under the weight of philosophical scrutiny and geopolitical indifference.

As indicated in the piece below, both the APC and PDP have bucked the trend and violated regnant political views stridently propagated by faith and regional leaders. They know that voters and party faithful easily break rank, are often not incommoded by religious and regional cocoons, and embrace little if much proves far-fetched. Alhaji Atiku has gambled the relevance and power of Dr Okowa to his ticket and the insignificance of Mr Wike. Should the Rivers governor respect the oath he swore to remain a PDP man to the end, it is nevertheless uncertain he would add passion and conviction to a loyalty he seems minded to render perfunctorily to the party. But before discounting the power of the PDP ticket, Nigerians must eagerly await the usually laggard APC response. If the ruling party does not find rest of mind in the Shettima or el-Rufai inclusion, and a dark horse from the Northwest becomes inevitable, they will hope that the horse is at least a prize racehorse, stallion or gelding.

CAN needs doctrinal refocusing

SHORTLY after the Owo, Ondo State, church attack in which about 40 worshippers were killed and dozens more wounded by gunmen yet to be apprehended weeks after, analysts warned that Nigeria’s political dynamics might have been substantially altered for the foreseeable future. The church, in particular the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), cottoned to the powerful but subterranean implication of that heinous act to forcefully speak on what they see as the disruptive trend in Nigerian politics, especially the skewing of the presidential tickets of the two leading parties, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Firstly, the analysts contend, the killings, supposedly by vengeful bandits from the North, had made zoning of the presidential ticket imperative. The ticket and the office must go South, or as the church continues to argue, be at least religiously mixed. The PDP, which had in late May damned zoning and reelected a northerner to fly the party’s flag in next year’s presidential election, looked the other way and continued to mind its peculiar business. In their minds, the state and the church had been divorced centuries earlier. Secondly, the analysts also contend, so, too, fiercely the church, that a same-faith ticket, in the case of the APC, a Muslim-Muslim ticket, was both provocative and undesirable. The APC appears set to ignore that caveat for political exigencies.

If the church and CAN, not to say other well-meaning commentators, are helpless in the face of PDP’s geopolitical indifference, it is not clear how mortified they should be in the face of APC’s sectarian impudence. Both parties have defied the church and analysts; they leave political comportment to lesser parties too weak and insignificant to make a difference in the next polls. Predictably, CAN has focused more on the need by the parties to infuse sectarian balance into their tickets. The PDP has expectedly complied with that balance, but defied zoning. The APC has expectedly zoned the ticket, either deliberately or by default, while defying the sectarian balance. CAN is now left with the unenviable dilemma of determining how to ‘balance’ their punishment of the parties.

Much more than itinerant analysts, many of them armchair critics, CAN has a higher degree of responsibility in refocusing and reexamining what their foundational doctrines say about such matters, whether they should get involved on the definitive levels they have set themselves or find better, cleverer and more spiritual ways of influencing the country’s political direction. If they cared about the dilemmas the two leading parties faced in electing their tickets, they have not said anything. The PDP simply did not have a sellable southern candidate – no offence intended – by design or by coincidence. They could not manufacture one in the short time it took them to do their primary. On the other hand, the APC would engage in self-crucifixion to foist a northern Christian running mate on themselves. So, all the contending groups in this debate face one dilemma or the other.

The Owo killings, instead of instigating and reinforcing sectarian anger, should lead CAN to look closely once again at the foundations of their faith, to see whether in the midst of the anger, hatred, killings, persecutions, suspicions, jealousy and self-righteousness Nigerian Christians cannot find a more beatitude-compliant and exemplary approach to chart a new example and direction for a country increasingly and self-destructively embracing darkness. Sometime in March, they had begun unwisely to promote a Directorate for Politics and Governance in the churches, as if there was a magic by which Christians could be made to sleep facing one direction. It was better to build and anchor individuals on the solid precepts of Christ so that wherever they went, into politics, business or other human endevours, they could be relied upon to shine their light, season their surroundings, and give life, rather than death, to their communities.

The most controversial part of the CAN approach to politics is that what they began in the Spirit, they are trying to perfect in the flesh. There can be no denying the militancy of other competing faiths, and the killings and murders they instigated or connived at, not to talk of the wholesale subversion of the commanding heights of government, particularly the three arms of government. The dangers these massive subversions constitute to the body politic are inestimable. No, no one can deny these terrible dangers and the retrogression that follows in its wake. But subduing kingdoms and overthrowing strongholds in a way that does not promote and entrench countervailing measures and features cannot be done by carnal means or by anger, threats and bitterness. If church leaders get sucked into the world system of doing and responding to things, how can they boast in their uniqueness, let alone point at the insurmountability of their moral high ground?

Years of reckless prophesying by adventurist spiritualists whose methods are not different from those deploying the facilities and amenities of Ouija board, séance, tarot cards, etc. as well as decades of doctrinal emphasis on the disgraceful materialism of the world have corrupted the faith and repulsed potential converts. This corruption has also seduced members into politics falsely citing God’s imprimatur on their self-aggrandising ambition. That they have repeatedly failed has also not dissuaded them from claiming heaven’s backing. Whether they admit it or not, the church is in crisis, a crisis that is centred on identity. Who are they, what are their goals, and how should these goals be achieved – by arm of flesh or by the Spirit? It took gentle admonition to get the church to backtrack from their vow to avenge Boko Haram’s burning of churches in the Northeast when insurgency began.

The unreflective immersion of the church in politics and in the world system has badly corroded the sanctity and identity of the church. CAN should not seek to worsen the crisis by threatening Armageddon against those who defy their formulae. The only force recorded that Christ deployed against anyone was when he upturned the tables of thieving moneychangers ensconced in His father’s house of worship and prayer. Perhaps it is time CAN asked themselves what Christ would do were He faced with Nigeria’s contemporary, amorphous and decaying realities.