14.12.2014
Let me play the proverbial mad man who went after rats while his house was on fire. The Pikin-Deceives-Papa (PDP) politics in Ebonyi State would have called for my attention but I saw it coming, I dragged it into our net but I was ignored. With its do-or-die politicians fighting to finish on the eve of the December primaries, the Ebonyi PDP will soon provide a textbook case of how not to impose candidates. An inscription on 911 Truck in Abakaliki Capital reads: No Condition is Permanent. Indeed duplicity is the stiff politics and politicians are made of. In politics everybody stabs everybody in the back. Therefore everybody should expect to be stabbed at any time.
Who says something in Nigeria and remembers it? Very soon those who crucified the APC will join the lorry. Who would have predicted correctly the membership of the alliance that hijacked the PDP in Ebonyi State? The coming together of men whose convictions in politics and morality are parallel was likely unpredictable. As it does appear the state government has surrendered, the unity of that alliance is as well gone. Once the enemy is off, the alliance decays because it contains the seed of its own destruction-greed.
Nigerians are literally the same, the APC and the PDP, two fingers of a leprous hand. One can comfortably call Buhari, Jonathan, and vice versa. While we keep in view the PDP’s imagery power of incumbency we peep into what the APC presidential primary, watershed of the APC’s presidential hope.
As the presidential primary election of the APC looms, the fight is squarely between Buhari and others. Let us refresh our memory by recalling that Muhammed Buhari, a serial presidential loser, had in 2011 made a solemn pledge to Nigerians: “This campaign is the third and the last one for me. I will not offer myself again for election into the office of president”. But persuasion and Tinubu’s offer made him retract words as he merged his CPC with Tinubu’s ACN party. Tinubu’s exaggerated South-west strength was calculated to be combined with Buhari’s mythical North-West supremacy. The result would be unstoppable- walk to Aso Rock. That was the confidence that saw Buhari withdrawing his resignation letter from active politics.
However, that political optimism ignored some variables. The massive condemnation of Muslim/Muslim presidential ticket effectively killed the delusion of a dreamt Buhari/Tinubu ticket. With APC’s diminishing relevance in the presumed stronghold of South-West, the dream is almost a foregone issue. The APC’s loss in Ekiti, the Pyrrhic victory in Osun the backyard of Tinubu and with Mimiko’s defection in Ondo bringing that state back to ambit of the PDP, the electoral windfall in the South-West for APC is already a myth.
Worst still, Yorubas’ penchant for indigenous party harbors ethnic suspicion towards the APC. Yorubas will prefer an indigenous party even if it lacks national audience. For them, the PDP and APC are the same, it is a matter of individuals and that case Buhari’s ethnic exclusiveness. At Buhari’s formal declaration of his candidature for president for a marathon fourth time at Eagle Square, Abuja, Tinubu sent his brigadiers to give him conspicuous moral support but the wily Asiwaju absented himself in pretence of being an honest power broker among the APC presidential gladiators.
Emerging survey shows that there will be no good luck in Buhari’s fourth outing; many including his close friends see him as politically unelectable as Nigeria’s president. For instance, Nasri El-Rufia who pretends to be Buhari’s right hand man noted this few years back that Buhari remains “perpetually unelectable” as a result of his “insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and his parochial focus”
Buhari’s resurgence has re-awakened old angst about his cynical political antecedents and made many reappraise his chances more realistically, now that his candidature was beyond conjecture. The judgment is unanimous- Buhari has die-hard Hausa-Fulani support in the north. The support from core Northerners is highly unlikely to translate yet again to victory at the centre, even with the fading out of relevance of Tinubu whose interest has been punctured by the rejection of Buhari/Tinubu ticket. There is also a discovery by Tinubu that Buhari is not the type of man to allow someone to become the king behind his presidential throne.
No doubt, the Tinubu mafia is already shopping for a new candidate with much less political baggage than Buhari. The writing on the wall is that they are more than likely to ditch Buhari in order to pitch their tent with some other, more malleable, APC presidential hopeful. But such choice is not easy either especially after Aminu Tambuwal withdrew from the race.
Amazingly, the Tinubus are now saying that Buhari is too old to be president as if his age was a hidden fact before. Indeed, if elected, he would be Nigeria’s oldest president at 73. If he runs successfully for two terms, he would still be president at 81. Fashola has made a u-turn saying Nigeria needs young leaders and not geriatrics: “when 40-year olds are now leading nations and our 40-year olds can’t even get to the Senate, they can’t even become governors. Are we really preparing this generation for the future? Those are the issues really. We cannot point to success in other countries and refuse to do what those people are doing to get things right.”
Without Tinubu’s boys, the chances of Buhari are too slim. And if Buhari is not chosen to fly the APC’s flag, it is going to be a bloodbath. There will be dead bodies strewn all over the convention floor. Dogs and baboons will surely be soaked in blood. Buhari’s talakawa supporters who caused mayhem when he lost the last presidential election will not take it kindly to his likely defeat at the APC primaries.
If Buhari is rejected he will be humiliated. If he decides to take his defeat with diplomacy, his die-hard supporters don’t have the word diplomacy in their vocabulary. If the APC decides to field Buhari, it will fail at the polls under the weight of his previous political bag and baggage. If it rejects Buhari, all reliance of his mystical 32 million votes will go up in smoke. Kwankwaso or Atiku cannot replicate those votes. They neither have Buhari’s hype nor his charisma. Atiku’s dismal performance in the previous polls is eloquent testimony that his presidential hopes are a pie in the sky.
More worrisome! Asked if he would back Buhari if Buhari wins the nomination for the APC ticket, Atiku indirectly told everyone he would easily stab Buhari in the back. He said: “I think I have proved that I am a pragmatic politician. Recall that in 2010 when I failed to get the PDP ticket against Jonathan, I and other went to bring about an electoral alliance between CPC and ACN”. Atiku’s pragmatism is the stuff of treachery. He failed in PDP so he promptly switched to create an alliance between two other opposition parties.
The dilemma is obvious. Between Buhari and others, the APC will implode under the weight of its own internal contradiction. This means that 2015 will likely be a battle between two PDP politicians. The APC that boasts to be an alternative to the PDP is likely to end up with a former PDP member as its presidential candidate.
What Buhari is to the APC is what whoever will fly the PDP flag in Ebonyi State will be. The PDP in the state may also implode in the same internal contradiction. If care is not taken, one can predict that power shift to the south may end up being a tale told by an idiot full of fury but signifying nothing.
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Citizens’ Adocate: 14th December, 2014.
