Of all the major events that shaped 2017, three stand out for their great impact on the country and on the year. The furious legal gymnastics over who leads the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) convulsed the better part of the year and only ended, fairly dramatically, after the party’s December 9 convention. The outcome of the legal fight and the consequences of the convention are bound to influence the shape of politics in 2018 and perhaps far beyond. There was also President Muhammadu Buhari’s illness which took the better part of 2017. The health crisis began almost imperceptibly in January, intensified by midyear, and culminated anticlimactically in August. The politics of that illness has already begun to shape 2018 and will most likely reverberate into 2019, Nigeria’s epoch-defining election year. The third event was the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) agitation that rocked the Southeast and exhumed a hugely disruptive and sweeping ethnic suspicion and bigotry template long thought to have been ameliorated by years of tribal co-mingling, expansive interethnic and interstate business deals, and political alliances.
It is not certain which takes the precedence between the PDP’s fateful events of the year and the president’s equally impactful illness. But it is clear that both events will deeply shape Politics 2018 and Elections 2019. When the president first took ill around June 2016, it seemed to be nothing more than the consequence of overwork going by what was marketed as a thoughtful president engrossed in the humongous task of cleaning the Augean stables left by the PDP. But by early 2017, it was gradually becoming clear that the president was not in such a fine fettle as he and his aides sold to the public. For an illness that first manifested as a simple ear infection, and was apparently believed to elicit nothing more than a week or two of vacation and medical examination in the United Kingdom, it shocked everyone that that trip soon yielded to another trip in May, this time more desperate and urgent. Whereas the January trip was to begin on the 19th and end on February 6, but ended inadvisably on March 10, the May trip took nearly all of 104 days, ending only on August 19.
Both the January and May trips, around which buzzed whispers and rumours of the president’s death or vegetative state, triggered rounds of speculations and permutations about the survival of the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and the politics of re-election or, more accurately, succession. Presidential aides, supporters, ambitious party officials and other political adventurers had even started to entertain very fanciful projections about Elections 2019. Visit after visit to the president in the UK, not to talk of social media gossips that strained credulity, birthed morbid stories of the president’s debility. It was soon concluded, albeit prematurely, that even if he recovered he would be in no shape to seek a second term. Neither the president, whose voice in those debilitating days never rose above hoary whispers, nor his dispirited aides who pined in agony, talked about a second term.
But when he returned in August looking more sprightly than anticipated, most calculations fell apart. His recovery since August has even been more surefooted, leading to speculations that he might be disposed to re-election. Not only has he now spoken of a second term, for a man and president so naturally reclusive, he has even begun to make trips to states few ever thought he would go. As his health status becomes more robust, he has become more mollifying, more gregarious, more conciliating. It is remarkable how the ebb and flow of his health bore direct impact on the political mood of the country, and particularly the moods of many top politicians. Those who cannot endure the president having a second term, that is if the electorate would oblige him, have embraced radical alternatives. The conclusion in both the APC and the PDP is that President Buhari is interested in a second term, will be nominated by his party, and will give the re-election race his all.
Now to the PDP. After first appearing to be depressed by its terrible electoral loss in 2015, and even seeming to have fractured irreparably, the PDP finally decided to pick up the pieces in 2016. But like a jilted lover falling in love on the rebound, the PDP in desperation climbed into bed with the colourful and rambunctious former Borno State governor, Ali Modu Sheriff. He seemed the perfect counterpoise to the fierce and unrelenting APC, and with his immense wealth and generosity of spirit, gave indications he was both prepared to spend the money at his disposal and give battle to the intransigent ruling party. He was not beholden to anyone or group, and was not known to suffer fools gladly, nor to be discomfited by any form of squeamishness. The PDP leaders thus saw in him a champion worth the name and the money. However, soon after a giddy start to a reign initially conceived as a stop-gap only, PDP leaders and apparatchiks whose ways and ideas appeared at variance with that of the former Borno governor began to scheme how to reclaim their party.
After many months of bitter legal wrangling, complete with a Court of Appeal judgement in favour of Sen. Sheriff, the PDP finally reclaimed their party from the ambitious former governor through a July 12 Supreme Court judgement. That final judgement left the party in the hands of the more amenable, but no less enigmatic and mercurial former Kaduna State governor, Ahmed Makarfi. Though also clearly ambitious, Sen. Makarfi was however seen as a team player, a bureaucrat, and an ideologue. He in fact appeared like a more acceptable face of the embattled party, one who could be trusted to organise a convention without seeking at the same time to hijack it. An elective convention was finally held on December 9 after many backroom deals, leading to the enthronement of a new chairman, Uche Secondus. He is trusted. More, he is an insider. If the party can find a standard-bearer to match the APC’s President Buhari in 2019, and find the wisdom to cobble a great and winning platform to take advantage of the ruling party’s complacency, and also atone for their dismal performance in office in years past, they could give the APC a run for its money, and even challenge its dominance.
Though less far-reaching in its impact on both politics and the country as a whole, the pro-Biafra separatist group, IPOB, took the country by storm and with more flourish than both the president’s illness and the PDP’s apparent reincarnation. IPOB was of course not the first nor the only pro-Biafra group in the Southeast, but it was led by the more colourful but less cerebral Nnamdi Kanu. In less than one year, he took separatist agitation to a new height. Acerbic, unfeeling, illogical and extremist, Mr Kanu pompously roused the disaffected in the Southeast into a frenzied anti-Nigerian horde. That the IPOB agitation was more popular than its predecessors, particularly the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), was due less to Mr Kanu’s flourish or talent than to the alienation supposedly suffered by the Igbo under the Buhari presidency. That alienation was glaring and indisputable.
Mr Kanu also cashed in on the lack of closure to the civil war. Virtually none of the issues that engendered the war has been satisfactorily resolved. The Southeast has borne the brunt of infrastructural decay and general developmental stasis. It has also so far been unable to produce a nationally acceptable politician as presidential candidate for any of the two major political parties, and that inability has seemed to accentuate what the region describes as marginalisation. Consequently, and for the foreseeable future, movements like IPOB and MASSOB will continue to agitate, and their agitations will always resonate. Until perhaps a more acceptable political structure is found, one that lessens the value and impact of winning the presidency, and one that devolves power in such a way as to enable the regions achieve political, cultural and social fulfilment, the insane craze for Aso Villa will continue with all its attendant frustrations.
The IPOB agitations and the manner in which the group was put down have sadly worsened the animosity against the Buhari presidency in the Southeast. The president is now struggling to convince the region that he does not harbour a natural dislike for the Igbo. He is unlikely to be able to dispel the anger in that region. Instead, that anger will morph into politics and be transferred into the dynamics of the 2019 polls, with the Igbo and the South-South region likely to embrace the PDP in overwhelming number. In frustration, the APC government in Abuja will also likely abandon every thought of conciliating the two regions while it concentrates its efforts in holding on to the Southwest, consolidating its popularity in the northern parts of the country, and making those regions impregnable.
Last year undoubtedly hosted many more events of seismic scale beyond the three events identified on this column today. The events of 2018 and the polls of 2019 will eventually be found to have taken their roots in the three hugely impactful events adumbrated in this place. Next year is unlikely to be as disruptive and earthshaking as 2017; but it will determine what will happen in 2019 and how far the country can go in its effort to reform the polity and transform the economy under the APC government.
