Despite the initial dilly-dallying by the Governor Samuel Ortom-led committee to determine the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential zoning formula, it was all but clear weeks ago that the party would throw the contest open. The country was in no mood to countenance anything but zoning of the presidency to the South, regardless of the flaws inherent in that restrictive method and the sophistry of some northern politicians enamoured of state power and its benefits. However, the PDP appeared fated to do what they have now, perhaps reluctantly, done. They don’t have a southern aspirant with enough heft, not even someone with the kind of superficial but enervating eloquence draining the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), and can no longer produce one given the timelines imposed on the political parties by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). They will have to manage what they have; but what they have is not only uninspiring, they stand the risk, as ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar has demonstrated with his vacillating tweets and laborious explanations on the murder of Sokoto student Deborah Samuel, of imploding before the 2023 battle is properly joined.

With the PDP fated to vie for the presidency through an open contest for the ticket, it would be confounding, if not cataclysmic, for the APC to ape the opposition by opening up their presidential race for the ticket. By design, political nomenclature, and antecedents, the APC has and will stick to zoning in the name of equity, fairness and justice. These virtues may be fundamentally alien to its raison d’etre, but having put a northerner in office for eight years, the party will stammer and be incoherent in pushing for another northerner, notwithstanding the ploy by some party leaders to mortgage the party’s conscience to the irresolute PDP. President Muhammadu Buhari may be rightly accused of running an insular presidency, but even he, not being eloquent as it turns out, will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to defend so blatant and outrageous a tactic. The party will stick to zoning, as informal as it may be, and stay true to it, win or lose. For apart from the president, the party has enough governors and political leaders with conscience who already advocate for fair and rational politicking, and have left no one in doubt which side their bread is buttered.

The race for the tickets in the two parties is undoubtedly cluttered. The president may have set the cat among the pigeons in his party’s presidential race, thereby pruning the number of aspirants from a hefty and unreasonable 28, but they still have enough men left to becloud the race, up the ante, and create some measure of anxiety for the leading aspirants. The improbable and comical aspiration of ex-president Goodluck Jonathan seems to have come to grief. He ran a short but bewildering race to get himself canonised as the APC standard-bearer despite ruling the country for almost six years on the platform of the PDP. Those who egg on AfDB president Akinwunmi Adesina as a potential candidate now have egg on their faces for infertile imagination and crass politicking. It was not going to work, his dazzling academic credentials notwithstanding, for not enough critical mass had been formed by political spectators easily mesmerised by eloquence and academic laurels. Ekiti State governor Kayode Fayemi and ex-Ogun governor Ibikunle Amosun formed an amusing pair, attending each other’s declaration for the race as if running for the presidency was a picnic. Their ambitions will peter out in the days ahead or at least end in fatuity.

The few northerners in the race of 25 remaining APC aspirants are in it as a fail-safe device, they argue. But that argument was never bound to be tenable. Enough sensible politicians occupy high positions within the party to know that the PDP is a bad example and a calloused conscience to emulate, and in any case, the party would be unable to sell itself in the Southwest and much of the South should it produce a northern candidate. Should President Buhari be succeeded by another northern president, what would stop that region from producing the president in perpetuity? This is the rationalisation that will probably doom the PDP. The opposition is unlikely to produce a southern candidate, and of the northern aspirants, the leading politician, the former vice president, is looking increasingly unsure of himself and his chances. He claims to be emotionally and politically ready for high office, but he will struggle to undo the damage a common tweet did to his image as a stoical and courageous politician. Worse, he has stammered considerably to prove that it makes sense for his party and the country to produce a northern successor to President Buhari. If he implodes, as many expect, Sokoto governor Aminu Tambuwal, already breathing down the former vice president’s neck, will leap to the front. The race is really between the two men for the ticket. The party’s best bet is Mr Tambuwal, but it is Alhaji Atiku that stands any chance of giving the APC pick a good and enthusiastic fight. His age may be taking a toll on him, and his principles may be opportunistic and indiscernible, but he has more contacts and a significant network to clinch the ticket and give a good account of himself in the presidential poll.

For the APC, there are really only two contestants worthy of any serious consideration – former Lagos governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. All the others are opportunists waiting for the leading aspirants to bite the dust. Since INEC has shortened the duration for the parties to nominate their standard-bearers, with a little over two weeks left to pick their candidates, neither of the two APC aspirants is likely to goof to a level that would doom their chances. In fact, they will both be extra cautious in words and actions. So far, given the torrent of abuse he has received and the cold shoulder party behemoths had given him, Asiwaju Tinubu has surprisingly run the more stable, even-tempered and coordinated race. His network built and quietly serviced for decades, not to say his obstreperous mentees who are nevertheless proof of his capacity for talent hunting, has remained solid and impregnable. The Southwest may be overbearingly critical, but they grudgingly admire his capacity and tenacity. The Northwest and Northeast, almost to a man, trust him. Having held the reins of power for about eight years, and seem about to be compelled to surrender it, the two regions desperately need a man they can trust, someone who though being a secularist is at least nominally associated with them in religion, and one whom they had dined with, cozied with, and who worked more than any other Nigerian to selflessly reclaim the presidential stool for them in 2015. They are unlikely to ditch him.

Why Prof. Osinbajo expects to best his main rival’s network built and serviced for decades is hard to say. Eloquent, polished, even debonair; however, this is politics, not haute couture. Those who inspired the Osinbajo challenge may be having a rethink. Even they don’t want to be on the losing side. There will be no opportunity to dazzle the delegates with eloquence and philosophy before the fateful votes. And it is uncertain that any of the southern regions will take a huge plunge into the cold and hostile pool of defeat with the eminent professor. They really don’t know him beyond his being the vice president, don’t know his antecedents, and don’t know what he really can do beyond smooth talking. In the end, southern delegates will probably bolt from his stable and berth where common sense and opportunity beckon.

On his own, the president has played his cards close to his chest. No one can claim to know exactly where he belongs – to everybody and to nobody perhaps. But even he may in fact be astute enough to know that the dynamics of his party are presenting him with a fait accompli. He senses that Asiwaju Tinubu has done enough homework to clinch the ticket, and he has been neutral enough not to impede that aspirant’s homework. By now he probably suspects that the man who can best protect his legacy and name, and still find time to visit him in Daura should the APC retain the presidency, is the man whom the presidency and the party had in the past treated so shabbily and yet did not take offence nor softened his zeal for the party.

What will probably decide it for most delegates, apart from networks and contacts, is who can best tackle the catastrophic decline suffered by Nigeria. The Chibok and Dapchi schoolgirls’ abductions are still unresolved, Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is perennially on strike, train attack and other hostages do not elicit the firm and spontaneous response the government should give to the crime, youths are perplexed, frustrated and ethically disoriented, the economy is in free fall, political paralysis has numbed and desensitised the country, cost of government remains prohibitively high and unsustainable, and the security services and law enforcement agencies are overstretched, archaic, ponderous and ineffective. Mutual suspicion fuelled by these crises needs someone who can galvanise the country behind him, someone the people can trust, someone who has the initiative and courage to firmly grapple with the problems.

In the weeks ahead, party delegates will almost certainly be called upon to pick between Alhaji Atiku and Mr Tambuwal in the PDP, and Asiwaju Tinubu and no one in particular in the APC. The PDP has shown a preference for a northern candidate partly because there is no viable alternative from the South. They are unlikely to engage in long-running manipulations to make their choice. Their choice may rankle with and alienate some delegates, but in the end they will pick between the two tested politicians. The APC on the other hand has been manipulative, secretive and conspiratorial. If they become exasperated with the futility of their own conspiracies, and bring all manipulations to an end, they will most likely pick Asiwaju Tinubu. Both parties know that their aspirants are flawed, not the least their final picks, but pick one they must. Despite the pall of religious gloom and zealotry hanging over the country, the parties know that they have an election to fight next year, not a papacy to struggle over; a presidency to win, not a clerical stool to claim.

Buhari steals the thunder of APC aspirants

When President Muhammadu Buhari peremptorily ordered cabinet members interested in elective offices to resign in order not to violate the laws of the land and jeopardise the electoral future of the All Progressives Congress (APC), it was probably the first time he would use presidential powers decisively, agreeably and uncontroversially for public good. Until last Friday, his party boasted some 25 aspirants, about 10 of whom were his ministers. It was mortifying that the ministers recklessly engaged in political junkets around the country in search of party tickets. Millions of their countrymen wondered whether the president had lost control to let his appointees run amok at the expense of public service. They were not to wonder for long.

Almost as if startled to action, the president announced at the tail end of the weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting last Wednesday that he had noted the political ambitions of some of his ministers, and would want them to resign before May 16 to pursue those ambitions. It was a bolt from the blue, and it was the turn of the ministers, who had obviously long viewed the president as a somnolent, phlegmatic figure easily manipulable, to be startled. It was as if they never knew him, at least not this side of him in matters unrelated to ethnic and geopolitical jingoism.

To worsen the shock, the president organised a farewell meeting with the 10 ministers two days later, nine of whom were present. He thanked them for their services, cracked his usual bucolic jokes, and added with a hint of sarcasm that the departing ministers had been well groomed in his cabinet to succeed him. It was unlikely he meant every word. How could he, especially with the litigious rascality of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Godwin Emefiele, a man so given to frivolity that he completely forgot the weight and primacy of his office. And, boy, was Abubakar Malami, the controversial Justice minister, shell-shocked. By Friday, it was still not certain whether he had resigned or not, or whether like the comical and excessive Labour minister Chris Ngige he had thought twice about going to Siberia – all for what.

If President Buhari was all along capable of this kind of enthralling move, there is no telling what else and what other jokers he might have up his sleeves. He had encouraged droves of charlatans to bid for high offices, at least those who saw him as imperial overlord; and there was not one, lay or clerical, secular or atheist, that he did not encourage to stake a claim for anything and everything. Alas, he saw them all as suckers, each leaving his presence assured of being already canonised. Even ex-president Dr Jonathan who should know better allowed himself to be taken on a merry-go-round, expecting to be foisted on a strange party he knew nothing about its founding. And if the gentle naïf Dr Jonathan, with all his presidential experience and antecedents, could be taken for a ride, why should Pastors Yemi Osinbajo and Tunde Bakare not be led by the nose? Nigerians would indeed give anything to know what this often inscrutable president thinks of the Kogi charlatan Yahaya Bello and the libidinous Sani Ahmed Yerima, the undistinguished and capricious ex-governor of Zamfara State.

There was always this streak of firmness and candour in President Buhari. Would to God he had applied these virtues to the grave problems facing the nation rather than lending them to massage his pet animosities against the Southeast and IPOB. The country recalls wistfully how he indulged this side of himself in the failed coup to unseat the party’s former caretaker committee schemers weeks ago. Had the coup not failed, Yobe governor Mai Mala Buni would have been disgraced out of office for fooling all the party some of the time. And then of course, there was also the game of thrones the president also sanctioned to banish former APC chairman Adams Oshiomhole in favour of the scheming caretaker committee.

Perhaps President Buhari will yet surprise everyone by firmly organising a credible succession against the run of play. He had played aloof for long, and stayed distant and imperial as political players imagining themselves to be members of his kitchen cabinet jostle for power and influence. He may have a much more developed sixth sense than everyone cares to give him. Should he indulge that sixth sense, no one can tell what the glorious end would be. But for now, he has pulled the carpet from under those who imagine themselves immovable. It is hoped that his sixth sense will be mixed with the mortar of logic to help him instinctively appreciate who in his party can best tackle the humongous crisis and complexity the country became on his watch.

THE opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) continues to cast furtive, incestuous glances at the so-called captive voters of the core North in order to define and shape its internal politics, particularly relating to the presidential nomination. Like the assumptive ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the PDP does not explain why those captive voters would not split their votes among competing parties. However, based on that controversial assumption, the PDP has prevaricated over the issue of zoning, but will eventually throw the contest open. Regional socio-cultural and political groups such as the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) speak, act and play their politics as if the PDP is synonymous with the North, as if the region is homogenous, as if the region also practices one faith – Islam. They never speak of any core North, for that would detract from their conclusions and weaken their arguments and presumptions.

In April when the party screened its aspirants, there were some 17 of them, predictably fewer than those on the much more frenzied platform of the APC. Many of the contenders hail from the South, which had for more than a year contended for the ticket to be zoned to their region. But by sheer coincidence, the South has been unable to produce an outstanding aspirant worthy of the ticket, deep, even-tempered, well-spoken and meriting support from huge swathes of the North and South. In contrast, the North has flaunted aspirants easier on the political and cultural senses. The South has history and logic in its favour; but the North has exigency and practicality on its side. This dilemma has created much dissonance in the party and prompted northern leaders to be reckless in their assertions, and the South to be offended by the unreasonableness of fellow northern party members.

Every passing day, it looks increasingly likely that the ticket will go North, as unfair and brazenly unjust as that may be. This supposition is reinforced by the spade work being done by the North’s regional socio-cultural groupings, particularly their emphasis on their region’s huge voting strength, a significant percentage of which will not be deterred by any consideration of fairness or unfairness in order to vote within or outside the PDP. There are of course a few aspirants from the South who are much better and have demonstrated more competence than any aspirant in the North; but aspirants like ex-governor Peter Obi, Pius Anyim and Sam Ohuabunwa have the distinct disadvantage of coming from the Southeast, a region which the North has formed the stupefying consensus to disrobe in the next presidential polls for a number of reasons, some harking back to the civil war and pre-war eras. There is also the added disadvantage of the Southeast’s and South-South’s low voter turnout.

For the 2023 presidential poll, the safe bet is for the ticket to go North, obviously undeservedly, but doubtless more pragmatically. Should that happen, the party will find itself contending with two harsh repercussions. The party is already worried about the low voting population of the two southern geopolitical zones of Southeast and South-South. Denied the ticket, turnout in the zone will be far smaller than envisaged. What then would become of the chief reason for denying the South the ticket, if the North’s so-called substantial turnout would not compensate for the South’s depressed voter population? The South has also threatened to bolt from the party should the ticket go North. But the steeds are truly fastened to the stable doors. The region has the more colourful aspirants: charismatic and loquacious like River State’s Nyesom Wike, dour but proven like Mr Obi, technocratic and deep like the pharmacist Mr Ohuabunwa, colorful and rambunctious like ex-Ekiti governor Ayo Faoyse, and dashing and eloquent like the Ovation Magazine publisher Dele Momodu. But it is one of the few contestants from the North that will take the diadem.

Theoretically, any of the five aspirants from the North, including the North Central, could take the ticket, not because they outclass their southern compatriots, but because northern socio-cultural groupings as well as the party’s leaders from the North have formed the opinion that only a northern candidate stands the chance of winning the presidential poll next year. They do not emphasise the quality of the aspirant/candidate; instead they focus on his ethnic and religious background. Sadly, as offensive as their arguments may be, not to say the benighted premises of those arguments, they are right to switch attention to a region and aspirants who stand any chance of winning. Of the five, only three can lay claim: Sokoto governor Aminu Tambuwal for his smart leadership of the House of Representatives when he was speaker, Bauchi’s Bala Mohammed for his outspokenness, not to say insularity in the defence of the Fulani worldwide, and ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar who does not need any introduction. Ex-senate president Bukola Saraki, from Kwara State, straddles the divide between North and South, and gets a look-in only as a possible dark horse or fail-safe option.

Shadowy figures in the APC have done their best to limit the chances of their frontrunner, ex-Lagos governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu, but have met with little success. The only shadowy figures with a say in the PDP are generally either inactive in the party or are not even members anymore. In any case, unlike the APC, the influential individuals dictating the direction for PDP are not even shadowy; they are well known. They will do their utmost to deny the former vice president the ticket; but it is not clear how they can succeed. He has name recognition, has deep pocket, is fearless, and a little charismatic but doubtless controversial. He prides himself on being a unifier than a pacifier like President Buhari. He is right. He has recounted with gusto his achievements in managing the nation’s economy as vice president, far better, it seems, than current vice president Yemi Osinbajo. Again, comparatively he is right. Then he talks of his plans being ‘sound’, his ideology being ‘solid and stable’, and his connection to Nigerians being ‘enduring’. No one has tested his claims in the real sense, nor has he provided proof of his idolatrous panegyrics.

Not only does he seem incapable of matching even the first three aspirants in the APC, there is little to suggest that Mr Tambuwal, Dr Saraki and banker Mohammed Hayatu-Deen can’t lay similar claims to equal policy fecundity and experience. He has spoken little of his record as a flighty politician who behaves like a bird of passage, flirting with party tickets as the spirit seizes him. He is a natural PDP politician, but he has remorselessly jumped ship and frolicked with other parties when the exigencies arose. He is naturally practical, even pragmatic; but to describe his casual and flimsy eclecticism as stable and sound ideology is gross exaggeration. He is dogged and committed to his own cause, a reason explaining his five attempts at winning the presidency. Maybe that constitutes the character he insinuates he possesses in abundance, a combination of his mental and moral qualities unique to his person. But if character is defined in the transcendental sense embodied by great men and women in history, it is hard to see his utter lack of dependability and poor vision as qualifying him as a man of character.

His appalling weaknesses notwithstanding, he is still the man to beat in the PDP. He can be beaten on all the scores he has set for himself, but his opponents lack the know-how to take him down. Indeed, it will take his party a lot to deny him the ticket, for no one else who gets the ticket can match his fortitude or money. If, as projected, he finally gets the ticket, the first time ever on the PDP platform, it will take his jousting with a united, sensible and less manipulative APC to get him truly whipped and unhorsed. APC will struggle to win the election if they get their primary right, if they manage to extricate the nomination process from the vice-like grip of shadowy cabals and manipulators. PDP, as currently constituted and led, and even with the best nominee in the world, will struggle much harder to achieve half the mark.

Frantic APC second-guesses PDP

THERE is sadly no end to manipulations in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). After the dissolved caretaker committee imbibed the vice and practised it for 18 months, the party has kept the apparition well fed. The manipulations began with the extension of the mandate of the caretaker committee, pirouetted through a number of other extensions, and ended with a foiled plan to enthrone a predetermined presidential primary outcome. Now, the party is intensifying the manipulations by plotting to foist a northern candidate on the party after failing to railroad the Goodluck Jonathan candidature through the party via an improbable consensus. Senate president Ahmad Lawan is in one corner being pressured into the presidential race. It is not known whether he will succumb. Jigawa State governor Mohammed Badaru Abubakar has also entered the race, and so too will a few more northerners, after a few alluring months of conceding the position to southerners. It is all part of the unfathomable plot by shadowy APC leaders the party and electorate earlier thought they knew.

Even though the party has not officially spoken, officials have rationalised the entry into the presidential race of some northern politicians. According to them, it portends danger for the ruling party to put all its eggs in one basket, seeing that the PDP has appeared to throw its presidential ticket open. If the race in the PDP is dominated by northern aspirants, with the distinct possibility that a northerner would be picked as standard-bearer, the APC manipulators argue that it could be disastrous for their party to be wrong-footed by the opposition. The opposition, not to say northern opinion moulders and regional groups, has begun to market the controversial logic that the core North consistently casts the most and winning votes in any election. If that is so, chorused the anxious APC manipulators, it would be suicidal for the APC not to also field a northern presidential candidate in line with the PDP logic.

The APC manipulators ignore two salient arguments. Firstly, where on earth did that galling fallacy emanate? There was never a time, and not in any of the country’s four republics, that either the North or the South could muster enough votes to win the presidential poll by itself. President Muhammadu Buhari himself, as candidate three times, probably embraced that fallacy by trying to go it alone when he vied for the presidency and failed. He succeeded at his fourth attempt only because he looked South, and in particular because he looked to the right South. Just looking South, he discovered to his consternation, was not even enough. The PDP, for its own selfish calculations, is selling a boondoggle, and a gullible APC appears ready to bite the bait. Secondly, when some sources in the APC leadership spoke wistfully about the PDP game plan of fielding a northerner for the presidential contest, the question must be asked what the APC truly believes, or whether the ruling party is indeed vacuous. If the PDP no longer possesses a sense of fairness and equity, should APC also be destitute of logic and fair play? After eight years of a president of northern extraction, should commonsense and virtue not dictate to the APC to believe and fight for what is right rather than what is expedient?

In all this, the problem is actually the president’s laissez faire approach to politics. He is the party’s leader. Whether he likes it or not, he exemplifies the party’s philosophy and worldview. He may lack the depth and substance to embody these virtues, but constitutionally, he personifies all that the party stands for and believes. Though he has received all presidential aspirants and encouraged them to forge ahead, which is perhaps the sensible thing to do, it is still no excuse not to chart a direction, the right direction, for the party in their effort to retain the presidential stool. It is okay for the president to be civil to all contestants, indeed it is imperative; but it becomes a problem when his party deliberately promotes a panoply of unfairness. It would be problematic for the president to try to ‘rig’ support for any aspirant at this stage of the contest, as he wisely reasoned and voiced out a few months ago, but his refusal and perhaps reluctance to coax his party into the right, politically inclusive path, especially knowing how testy the country has become in the past few years and how precariously it appears to be floundering around the precipice, is irremissible.

Notwithstanding his neutrality in the contest, the president is wrong to be aloof when a fractious Nigeria seems to be hurtling down the slippery slope of intolerance and exclusion. Zoning will doubtless become an issue in the coming presidential election, and since the PDP will likely pick a northern candidate, the president will in the campaigns have to speak to that issue. Better he should begin to speak to it now, shape the narrative, and determine its dynamics when he can still seize the initiative. The country is broken and divided; it needs healing. That healing will not come, and the brokenness will be exacerbated, if zoning is jettisoned. Political rhetoric has become inflamed, with southerners threatening doomsday should rotation be discarded, and northerners swearing they would keep power at any cost.

The APC has a signal responsibility, being the party in office, to temper the ongoing fierce discourses as well as redirect the country to the path of inclusion and sanity. If the president is unable to appreciate that the responsibility to manage the chaos rests with him, then the ruling party is more impotent than first imagined. The president and his party may try to evade being definitive on these controversial issues, but they will face them in the campaigns. They must hope it will not be too late.

RCCG’s Freudian slip

IT began incongruously in March as the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) Directorate for Politics and Governance, a unit designed for purposes described by critics as at worst amorphous and at best to help the presidential aspiration of Yemi Osinbajo, an RCCG pastor, Professor of Law and current vice president. Stung by allegations that the church was errantly walking into the murky waters of politics, the church struggled to rationalise the incursion as political altruism. The Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) rushed to the aid of the quibbling RCCG by owning up to the idea. But neither was successful.

Alas, to prove critics right, and to expose the church as politically naïve, the head of RCCG’s political directorate, Timothy Olaniyan, a pastor, sold the candidacy of Prof Osinbajo during the inaugural conference of a political movement called the New Era of Nigeria (NEN). Pastor Osinbajo – he described the VP as a pastor – is not just a pastor, he is also a child of God. Even though a few days later he tried to walk back his statement adopting and marketing Prof. Osinbajo to the electorate, his Freudian slip had done substantial damage. How the RCCG and PFN do not realise the harm their open, amateurish and discriminatory excursion into politics is causing is hard to explain.