The general perception of some APC members including the Senate President, who should know better as one who had without grace hijacked the senate presidency, was that Buhari’s government has been hijacked by a cabal. Last week the President denied that Mamman Daura, his nephew has taken over his presidency. The problem however is that quite often perception is indeed a reflection of reality.
At first the debate especially in the social media was the President’s perceived lopsided appointment into some sensitive positions. The focus however changed in recent months into Daura, the President’s nephiew. I am not sure if many really care about whether Daura is treated as unofficial Vice President or Abba Kyari, a well known PDP stalwart who who once rejected an offer to serve in President Buhari’s CPC, is now his Chief of Staff. The President, it must be said has no constitutional limitation or moral constraints. In fact, this column once told critics of the President’s so much criticized pattern of appointment that Nigerians who earnestly wanted change and massively voted for him would not mind if agents of change come from his Daura village. But I think populating his kitchen cabinet and appointing PDP sympathizers with linkages to the all powerful “Kaduna mafia’ is what many APC members find insensitive and inattentive. Allowing the APC to be infiltrated by those with non pan-Nigeria agenda is not only a threat to the survival of the party but also the government.
The Kaduna mafia, it was said, sprang up after the first coup that wiped out the political and military leadership of the north. Its agenda among others was to avenge the January 1966 assassination of their political and military leaders and the actualization of the dream of Uthman dan Fodio, the revered radical cleric whose dream after overrunning the Hausa states and sharing conquered territories among his sons and brothers, was to plant the sword at the sea. Although this was checkmated by Ibadan, Ahmadu Bello, the revered Sultan’s grandson, came near to achieving it after the 1959 election when he gave Zik a horse and Tafawa Balewa, the Holy Quran declaring with a sense of fulfillment that that he has, like his grandfather, divided Nigeria between his two trusted children. Following the collapse of the alliance between NCNC and NPC, he had also tried to achieve the objective by exploiting the intraparty feud within the AG to prop up Akintola to whom he also gave a sword. The perception is that the mafia’s agenda which is to see Nigeria as the north with the south as its extension has been behind our crisis of nationhood since 1966.
It is however believed by many that even if indeed the shadowy group exists, President Buhari cannot be a member neither can he be said to share its dream. First he is not trusted by the northern political and military elite. They all worked assiduously to derail his presidential ambition during his first three attempts. His only sin is preaching egalitarianism to the poor in the north. He succeeded at his fourth attempt because Bola Tinubu outwitted the group and Atiku, their candidate in their own game.
It is also believed that the body as tested students of power simply hijacked Buhari as soon as he was elected. Observers believe it was not an accident that it was a prominent northern elite, former Minister of Finance and National Planning at different times under PDP who first falsely claimed Buhari won the election without the support of Tinubu and his Yoruba votes. Northern political elite soon closed ranks to join Aminu Tambuwal the governor of Sokoto State and Atiku Ababakar to ignite a civil war within APC by encouraging Saraki and Dogara to disobey the directive of their party. And when Pa Bisi Akande, APC first chairman, alerted the nation about the dangerous game by some northern leaders with pan northern agenda, he was quickly labeled a Yoruba irredentist, the case of a pot calling the kettle black.
It was also curious that with the President’s kitchen cabinet in place, there was no cabinet six months after election neither were the boards of the over 500 governments the party needed to implement APC programme reconstituted. This column at a period alerted Nigerians that Buhari needed help when it appeared no one was ready to tell the President the truth. And when the ministerial list finally came out, there was no evidence the kitchen cabinet helped the President. The ministry of information clearly underscores this point.
Lai Mohammed, a lawyer who has been in practice for close to 40 years, a former business man and a former airline cargo operator, is perhaps one of the most accomplished among the ministers. But as an APC spokesman who successfully talked his party to victory, he was a wrong candidate for the marketing of government programmes and policies. From the disposition of other ministers who fold their hands behind their back while standing before the President, the perception is that they may not be able to tell the President the truth about himself and style. Until last week’s disclosure by the Vice President that scores of Fulani herdsmen are in custody, the perception out there is that the Minister of Internal affairs was still watching the President’s body language.
And then it was too much a coincidence that an attempt was made to rewrite history by the President autobiographers. The perception, again, is that an attempt to downplay the contribution of Bola Tinubu to the success story of APC could only have been the handiwork of those with northern agenda. To say Professor Osinbajo became Buhari’s Vice President in spite of Tinubu as contained in the President autobiography is to say Tafawa Balewa became Prime Minister of Nigeria in 1959 in spite of Ahmadu Bello. Tinubu sacrificed his political ambition. The outcome of Buhari-Tinubu ticket would not have been different in Yoruba land where leadership is earned by service to the people and not by religious affiliation.
There is also the perception that history is repeating itself. The first attempt at overrunning the Yorubaland was through the conspiracy of disloyal Ilorin-based Are Ona Kankanfo Afonja. The second attempt was through Fulani attempt to exploit the intra party feud between Awo and the Are Ona Kankanfo Akintola. Tinubu undoubtedly is a brilliant politician who like Awo is a political strategist who thinks very fast on his feet. Even those who do not see face to face with him are now saying an attempt to undermine his leadership of the West is a rehash of similar failed strategy designed by the Fulani to undermine Awo’s leadership of the Yoruba.
Unlike Obasanjo who discovered only after his third term fiasco that some of his aides did not tell him the truth, Goodluck Jonathan who claimed after his 2015 electoral defeat that he was caged all through his presidency, and unlike their wives preoccupied with beauty therapy or building hotels and mansions and opening dollar accounts in fictitious names with funds traceable to Dazuki’s mismanaged arms funds, I think President Buhari should regard stakeholders currently warning him about the threat to the party as patriots.
The President must be reminded that party structure is needed not just for winning election but even more for the faithful implementation of party promises. He therefore needs to invest more on the party. He must be humble enough to accept he is not a politician, the major reason his previous platforms crumbled after every election. The party is the modernization agent through which developed societies achieved greatness. If Buhari, Tinubu, Oyegun Tony Momoh and their other colleagues mouthing change cannot build a party, they cannot build Nigeria.
