Tag: Datti Baba-Ahmed

The former presidential running mate to Labour Party’s Peter Obi, and founder of Baze University, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, appears to have experienced a political and psychological metamorphosis. He does not seem any longer to be the rabid revolutionary and ethnicist of the last presidential campaign. Some two years after the election, and perhaps having cured himself of the pains of defeat and the radical polemics he acquired in the process, he seems to have become a realist, even a thinker. During the election, and especially immediately after, there was nothing he did or said that made anyone associate him with anything university. Few years after the din of election and the anguish of defeat had dissipated, he seems more rational than anyone thought possible, prticularly judging from his fanatical antecedents. In a recent interview with Trust TV, he passed a verdict on the political coalition that had just taken over the African Democratic Congress (ADC), pouring cold water on their expectations, and ridiculing their oversimplifications.

His mind is with the coalition, he says, reflecting the bonding with his presidential candidate, Mr Obi, but he seems dreadfully uneasy about the party’s prospects and methods. A coalition is, in theory, a fine thing, he acknowledges, but if it cannot even disguise its trenchancy nor mitigate its obsession with seizing the presidency, it might be opening itself to a worse drubbing than it should deserve. This is surprising, that the sometimes agitated and caustic Mr Baba-Ahmed can summon the calmness to dissect the coalition and project its weaknesses and defeat should their self-centred leaders prove incapable of carefully curating their tentative platform. Mr Obi equally appears unsure about the coalition, but his sixth sense tells him that striking out alone with the lame feet of LP would condemn him to a shattering defeat a second time. That Mr Baba-Ahmed does not feel discomfited by the presence of his leader in the coalition to ventilate his heartfelt opinion and suspicion on television must be truly noteworthy.

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Mr Baba-Ahmed anchors his suspicion of the coalition on two grounds. One is that the victory of the APC in 2015 does not permit the unlimited extrapolations which the Atiku Abubakar-led coalition is clinging to. There are many hidden details in the 2015 coalition – more accurately a merger – that made victory possible for the APC. He does not mince words referencing President Bola Tinubu whom the amorphous coalition strives to overthrow: “I don’t yet see anyone in this coalition who can scheme and plan over 16 years. With all due respect to Atiku, he has contested consistently—this will be the seventh time. But tell me: is there anyone else in the coalition who will say, ‘Let it be the other person, and I will support them’? I’m yet to see that. Everyone seems only interested in their candidacy…He (Tinubu) stayed committed for 16 years and took it in 2023. Tinubu gave Atiku the ACN in 2007; gave it to Ribadu in 2011; backed Buhari in 2015; and waited until 2023 to take it himself. I’m saying: to defeat this phenomenon called Tinubu, you must do the unthinkable. If this coalition—which I recognise—thinks it’s business as usual, it won’t work. It has to be less about individual ambition and more about Nigeria. More action, less talk. Because talk is cheap.”

Second, he suggests that for a coalition to have meaning and appeal it ought to have a unifying figure, the kind Muhammadu Buhari represented for the APC at least a year before the 2015 poll. The coalition, Mr Baba-Ahmed muses, has no such unifier. He is respectful of Alhaji Atiku, and perhaps too of Mr Obi, but he is adamant that the coalition does not have a centralising man of heft and stature around whom the main opposition can coalesce. This is probably why the former running mate says comparing the dynamics of 2027 to the reality of 2015 may amount to oversimplification. Mr Obi is unlikely to be offended by his former running mate’s remonstration. He also has his misgivings, and is probably being propelled along for now because of the uncertainties in his own party and the pianissimo doubts that make him feel queasy.

Mr Baba-Ahmed’s transformation is, however, neither fundamental nor ideological. He has caught his breath, after the stridency of the 2023 electioneering, thus explaining his seeming moderation, calmness, and logical effusions. This new orientation may, however, not last beyond the next provocation, for the real Datti Baba-Ahmed is not pleasant at all. His party had absolutely no pathway to victory in the 2023 presidential election, especially with their inability to produce, before the election tribunal, results in about 54,000 polling units out of 189,000 polling units, according to an official of the party. The party also politicised ethnicity and religion, and divided the country along other primordial lines. But no sooner the election results were announced than Mr Baba-Ahmed began calling for revolution, threatening fire and brimstone should the winner be sworn in, and calling for the cancellation of the results. He then embarked on a long spell of incitement capable of causing chaos and fracturing the country. His real self emerged before, during and after that election. He might be sophistic today concerning a political coalition that makes him uneasy, especially sensing that he would understandably be dwarfed by the rhetoric and image of the big names and bigwigs in the adopted ADC party, but there is nothing to suggest that the sensible arguments he has begun to make very robustly reflect his enduring and essential self. The country must still be wary of him.

Apart from being remorselessly extreme in supporting the candidacy of Peter Obi in the last presidential election, not to talk of still irrationally propagating his phantom victory, both Datti Baba-Ahmed, Mr Obi’s running mate, and Aisha Yesufu, activist and politician, have continued to strain credulity to its elastic limit. Until last year, Mrs Yesufu had foresworn politicking; now she is an ardent fan of the former LP presidential candidate, and his foot soldier to boot. Mr Datti on the hand cuts a very urbane figure as an educationist dedicated to research and finding the truth. His virtues, it is clear, are exaggerated.

What indeed binds the two together is not just their fanatical loyalty to Mr Obi, which is bad and embarrassing enough, nor even their depressing inability to separate truth from falsehood, but their flippant talk and silly caress of chaos and revolution. Until the 2023 elections and their aftermaths, no one could guess the depth of extremism Mr Datti was ready to plumb. He tells himself infernal lies, and stupendously believes them. Activism, particularly the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, had masked the chaos and wishful thinking wreaking havoc on the mind of Mrs Yesufu. Sadly, just like Mr Datti, she still seems blissfully unaware of how odiously she drains the dregs of infamy with election denial and fact warping. It is shocking.

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Both Labour Party (LP) politicians do not have to like President Bola Ahmed Tinubu; they may even loathe him. They are entitled to their views. But surely they can’t be saying that had their favourite man won, the vituperations of Obi haters would be justifiable and excusable on the grounds of free speech and democracy; yes, the same democracy the lady and gentleman have done their utmost to undermine and ridicule with lies and perverse logic.