IT took all of about 18 months of fancy politicking to come to the simple conclusion to affirm the conservative and controversial Abdullahi Adamu, a senator and former Nasarawa State governor, as the new All Progressives Congress (APC) chairman. He takes the rein of office from the frantic and scheming Mai Mala Buni, current Yobe State governor. The PDP had mocked the APC for being unable to organise a simple convention. When the ruling party finally did two Saturdays ago, and discovered that there was really nothing extraordinary about a convention, it adopted the nefarious tactics honed by the PDP of coaxing a consensus out of the party’s fearful aspirants. APC leaders, including otherwise sound and seemingly progressive governors, irrationally ceded to President Muhammadu Buhari their rights to elect a truly progressive chairman. Uninvited, the president would still have made a power grab; but invited, and smelling cowardice and fear in the erstwhile leadership of the party, he moved in for the kill and gave them the indescribable Mr Adamu.

Whether the former Nasarawa governor will be a better party administrator than Mr Buni remains to be seen; but as the convention theatrics showed two Saturdays ago, the irrepressible former party chairman Adams Oshiomhole is better loved, and it seems, more missed. Mr Oshiomhole, a former Edo State governor, is at any rate more progressive than his two successors. The foisting – perish the talk of consensus – of Mr Adamu on a struggling and contentious party wracked by many policy failings on virtually all national fronts is a puzzle. It is true that the president is not a progressive, not by a mile, and his ideological barometer is in fact cracked, but to back Mr Adamu and risk his stature as president and party leader for a cause that is uncertain and even less noble is truly bewildering. That a party which boasts about the robustness of its members and leaders, not to say ideology, wilted so easily before the president’s cajolery calls to question the foundation of the party and the nature of party organisation in Nigeria.

Well, for the foreseeable future, the APC must contend with Mr Adamu, regardless of his antecedents and fractured political perspectives. He will supervise the coming party primaries, and if he finds the stamina and inspiration to ape Mr Oshiomhole’s pragmatism, will decide the fate of so many governorship and presidential aspirants. The aspirants can’t afford to antagonise him or even show a hint of radicalism. If they do not grovel before him, perhaps because it is beneath them, they will at least fawn over his wisecracks and fulminations and indemnify him against any abuse and misuse he might extend to them. They will do anything but scowl in his presence, not even if their facial muscles become taut with grief and displeasure. The president sold them a pig in a poke; they must shell out money and buy the imitation jewellery without a wince or resentment.

A month ago, said Mr Adamu at his investiture, he did not know he would be APC chairman. This revelatory piece of honest admission indicates that he is coming into office without a real and workable programme and vision for the party. His promotion surprised him as well as mystifies the party. Nigerian governors and presidents in the past few decades were accustomed to taking office without any clue what they planned to do with the office. Their fatuous hope was to be ennobled by the office. The president can, therefore, be forgiven for enthroning Mr Adamu. He is bringing nothing to the office, and by extrapolation, to the party. Perhaps in the view of the president, the new chairman will be neutral, and thus fair to all. But Mr Adamu holds very strong, often irredentist, and sometimes parochial and extremist views. If he has dropped those views and has, like a few in the cabinet, become repentant, it remains for him to indicate his metamorphosis in the weeks ahead.

All things point to the fact that the ethically and ideologically challenged chairman of the party will have a hard time convincing party aspirants and members as well as the country as a whole that he can be trusted to be fair and neutral. He will pleasantly surprise everyone should he display the neutrality and conviction many Nigerians look forward to in a party chairman. He has also spoken of the ‘marching orders’ given him and his team to win the next general election by a healthy and incontestable margin. How he hopes to do this without remaking the APC to be stylistically and ideologically different in a few weeks from the main challenger, the PDP, is hard to tell. In the end, Mr Adamu and his team may rely on the PDP consuming itself with its inimitable bungling and the crass and untethered ambition of its quarrelsome aspirants and leaders. Reassuringly to the ruling party, the PDP has said and done nothing to give hope to APC haters that it would give the ruling party a great and dignified fight.

When the APC affirmed its new National Working Committee (NWC) members, it impliedly gave up the idea of being qualitatively different from the PDP. In the years ahead, there will be little or no difference between the parties in ideology, political platform, administrative style, and something as mundane as membership recruitment. Regrettably, neither the APC nor the PDP will set the pace for other parties to follow. As their leaders have shown by freely and whimsically defecting across party borders and cavorting between party offices, it will become increasingly difficult to determine the reasons to embrace or denounce the parties. The APC boasts huge membership, far more populous than most African countries, but the PDP made a similar boast in its years in office. The APC claims policy and programme successes; so too did the PDP. The APC also organised a policy conference shortly after its convention, but without a clear ideology and impassioned leaders who can help implement their ideas, it is difficult to determine how they will pivot into new or great grounds.

Weeks from now, the campaigns will begin. The PDP takes solace in the fact that it has no fresh failings to attract ridicule, having been out of office for nearly eight years. The APC does not enjoy such insulation. The ruling party’s candidates will face the ordeal of not having a great legacy to serve as the fulcrum of their campaign pitching. Should they distance themselves from the Buhari presidency, they could become isolated; and should they leash themselves to the presidency, they could be guilty of the failings of the Buhari presidency by association. Damned if they do; and damned if they don’t. Without a clear policy on restricting the influx of foreigners into Nigeria, particularly from the country’s northern borders, without a workable population policy to manage the pressures on resources and land, and without concrete domestic programmes and ambitions to lift Nigeria from the doldrums, the APC has not demonstrated the imagination and inventiveness for which it was voted. It will take much more than the cosmetic changes that occurred on March 26 at the party’s leadership level to create the turnaround many frustrated Nigerians anticipated years ago.

Train attacks indicate underlying malaise

LAST Friday, Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai suggested that Boko Haram militants working in league with local bandits were responsible for last Monday night’s deadly train attack. The federal government is a little slow in revealing the identity of the attackers, considering this was not the first time. The governor has, however, been outspoken about terrorist attacks that have turned his state into the epicenter of banditry and terrorism in the Northwest, in the same way Borno State became the epicenter of the Boko Haram revolt in the Northeast. He is right to be distraught about the instability the attacks have unleashed, but whether his strident language mitigates the problem or distracts from the solution is another thing. Eight people were reported dead in the attack while fewer than 30 people were injured, and an undetermined number missing or abducted for ransom. Unbeknown to the government, the North is in full revolt as a result of the incompetent management of the region’s affairs.

The attacks have unfortunately brought out the continuing dissonance in the style and content of the All Progressives Congress (APC) government. Transport minister Rotimi Amaechi, perhaps feeling responsible for the gory incident, lashed out at his colleagues for declining approval for measures and equipment required to prevent train attacks in Nigeria. His burden is understandable. Train infrastructural renewal is one of the signal achievements of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, and Mr Amaechi is at the centre of it. That progress is now evidently under threat. Meanwhile, a careful but detailed leak was orchestrated last week by shadowy figures indicating that the Transport ministry itself grossly mishandled the request for train protection, and perhaps violated certain procurement principles. Mr Amaechi will probably now get what he wanted, but it will not compensate for the catastrophic failures that have blighted and muddled decision-making under this administration.

The federal government dithers over fighting insecurity, of which last Monday’s train attack was just one small aspect. There have been allegations of official conspiracy to downplay the lawlessness of bandits and their accomplices, and there have also been accusations that security forces pull their punches, probably for operational reasons. However, whether what the country is witnessing is conspiracy or complicity, the attacks and killings and abductions have led to all manner of suggestions as to how to deal with banditry and terrorism in the Northwest. Mallam el-Rufai wants indiscriminate bombing of bandit enclaves to exterminate the vermin, insisting that the government knows the attackers’ bases and phone numbers, including listening in on their conversations. In short, everything the government needs to take out the bandits is available to the government, Mallam el-Rufai insists.

Though the governor has moderated his carpet bombing suggestion, he has escalated his response to include warning the government that Kaduna could recruit mercenaries to fight the bandits and their accomplices who have made living and working in Kaduna a nightmare. It is of course impracticable, but everything points to the fact that the governor now cares, though he was not always so dispassionate about banditry going on in the state for years, which many Kaduna indigenes have classified as ethnic cleansing. The attacks may have intensified in the past few weeks, but before then whole communities had been erased with the state government initially rationalising them as revenge killings. The attacks have now gone high-profile, including the invasion of the city’s airport, thus eliciting diverse analyses and responses.

Given the audacity of the train attacks and the scale of the violence and death that accompanied them, the federal and state governments may now be on the same page, at least officially and openly. Whether this unity of understanding and response will lead to a solution is yet to be seen. The military will scale up their response, Mr Amaechi will get his surveillance equipment, and the bandits may be in for a hard time in the weeks ahead. But Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, the popular Kaduna-based Islamic cleric, has always argued that there can be no military solution to the problem. He has not precluded taking the battle to the bandits in their enclaves, but he insists that the problem is largely socio-economic. Those who disagree with his perspective suggest that the problem is nothing but brutal ethnic cleansing underpinned by kidnapping for ransom. While this may not be the Kaduna State perspective, Mallam el-Rufai continues to insist that no kobo would be paid as ransom for kidnapped victims in order to cut off the ‘fuel’ supply for banditry.

In the hysteria, the solution may become considerably muddled up. There is probably a mix of everything, including sheer banditry to make money for pleasure, ethnic cleansing, and perhaps low-scale civil war between the Hausa and Fulani. Had the government disentangled the problem when it began years ago, it would probably not have morphed into the dangerous, well-armed monster it has become. The bandits can be defeated if the political will is mustered. But firstly, the government must quit quibbling over the definition of what is wrong, regardless of the colour of the problem and the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the perpetrators of violence. This federal administration has struggled to deliver an acceptable definition. There is no way to defend bandits who sack communities and occupy them in the name of cattle grazing or living space.

Secondly, by refusing to moderate and mediate early enough the conflicts between Hausa farming communities and Fulani pastoralists, the federal government enabled the problem to metastisise. In fact, at the beginning of the crisis, the federal government was sympathetic to the pastoralists and had engaged in all kind of legal and cultural ruses to defend and encourage them against farmers. Now the combatants have dug their heels in and have become immovable and implacable. To move them by war and force may in fact not be sufficient to smother the rage that has spilled over to attacking travelling elites in the North. The government may have to be ingenious and holistic in developing a potpourri of solutions that will be both inclusive and placatory of both farmers and pastoralists. If the government can finally eschew its discriminatory attitude towards farming communities and moderate its propensity to renew and legitimise anachronistic grazing route practices, it may yet produce the neutrality and balance required to promote peace and development. The train attacks are mere manifestations of deeper, underlying problems; hopefully the government will take cognisance of these manifestations and produce the solutions Kano State and others had clamoured for.

Gov Buni’s boast

FORMER APC caretaker chairman and Governor of Yobe State, Mai Mala Buni, seems to think that after scoring his APC caretaker team 70 percent success in its assignment the party he handed over to the new chairman, Abdullahi Adamu, is cohesive and better placed to fight the next polls. It is not known what his enthusiasm is founded on, but setting aside the arbitrary score he assigned himself and team, he acknowledged last Wednesday that the party had not reached its desired destination.

He, however, ought to have spoken about his extreme reluctance to hold the convention in the first place, the internal bickering his political machinations and quest for higher office triggered, and the utter loss of faith his leadership induced in his fellow governors. They plotted a coup against his leadership, but he was reprieved by the president, and the convention he insinuated could not be organised in more than a year was done in less than two weeks. The relationship between him and his colleagues may have been damaged irretrievably.

Contrary to his boast, Mr Buni has not left a better party. He leaves a desperate party that must now find ways of picking up the pieces of the chinaware smashed by his antics, a desperate party that has ethically and ideologically become indistinguishable from the PDP. Even the chairman clumsily enthroned after him, thanks to the president, is alarmingly more controversial and vacuously ideological than he is. Mr Buni was known in the party to plot outcomes, but often failed; the more insular Mr Adamu is thought to be less liberal. It is anybody’s guess what the party would look like after him.