Thinking about APC presidential aspirants racing towards the finishing line at their special convention which begins in Abuja Monday, I remembered a nature film I once watched on NatGeo Wild, of a tiger hunting deer in an Indian reserve. A dozen deer were feeding on the grass. A tiger emerged from the trees and silently crouched towards them. When it was within striking distance, the tiger burst its cover and took off at very high speed after a selected deer.
The deer saw the tiger and also took off. Within seconds, both tiger and deer were sprinting at full speed. The camera zeroed in on the tiger, its powerful leg and shoulder muscles very visible in sprint. The commentator said in heavy Indian accent, “The tiger’s thrust is powerful, but it cannot be sustained for long, which is why the element of surprise is very important.” He was soon proved right because after a powerful chase lasting a few seconds, the deer widened the distance and the tiger suddenly abandoned the chase and lay down, panting.
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, always considered the front runner in the APC presidential pack, learnt the difference between a sprint and a marathon towards the end of this race. For nearly a decade he had been running like Abebe Bikila, the legendary Ethiopian marathon runner. He was strategizing, building bridges, mending fences, building IOUs, planting his associates in key party and government positions, visiting distressed persons and communities, making hefty donations, picking his words carefully at occasions, carefully tending to his public image and managing his relations with President Buhari with the patience of Job. It was very much like the tiger stalking a deer.
Last Thursday, Asiwaju suddenly changed his pace from marathon to sprint. He broke cover and launched a final sprint at the nomination. He did so at an occasion in Abeokuta, at a huge gathering of Yoruba political leaders, where he delivered a long speech, in Yoruba language, sprinkled with gestures, mock faces and poetic phrases. His speech immediately ran into a political ambush. Missiles flew from left, right and centre. His ardent supporter, former SGF Babachir Lawal, described Asiwaju’s remarks as “bullshit.” APC chairman Senator Abdullahi Adamu publicly threatened to discipline Tinubu for what he called insulting Buhari. Suddenly it looked like the prey widened the distance and predator was politically panting.
Asiwaju’s top supporter in the North, former Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima, waded in on Friday with a blistering interview on Channels and TVC stations. He forcefully made a case for power shift to the South and for APC leaders to reward Asiwaju for his immeasurable role in forming the rainbow party in 2012 and giving it the fillip to victory in 2015. In the process, the intellectual and deeply philosophical Shettima took a dig at two Tinubu rival aspirants, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and Senate President Ahmed Lawan. Osinbajo, he said, is a good man who should be selling ice cream. This is an old English language phrase, that the most likeable people are those who sell ice cream. Some people quickly grabbed the remarks and said Shettima ridiculed the country’s Number Two and Number Three men in one fell swoop. At the weekend, both Asiwaju and Shettima walked back on some of their remarks, saying they were mistranslated, misunderstood and mis-contextualised.
Asiwaju and Shettima’s speeches were only the second and third that fired up the political scene in Nigeria last week. Since mid-last week, anxiety had enveloped the APC scene with President Buhari’s speech to APC governors, in which he hinted at personally choosing the party’s presidential candidate. His demand was cleverly couched, but when Buhari referred to APC governors getting second terms, anointing their successors and then asked for “reciprocity,” he was clearly asking for the right to choose the presidential candidate. When flaks flew from all sides, the president’s spokesman Femi Adesina also tried to walk it back, saying it was wailers at work. The statement however tallied neatly with Buhari’s stance in 2015 when he said governors were free to choose commissioners in their states while he would brook no interference in choosing federal ministers.
Neither the Constitution, nor the Electoral Act and nor even APC constitution or election guidelines provided for anyone anointing his successor. In practice, a man could do so by manipulating the rules and processes, but it was not something to be openly stated in a public speech. Besides, if Buhari really intended all along to anoint a successor, he should not have acted non-challantly when the 2023 race was unfolding. Last week alone, he travelled abroad three times [to Equatorial Guinea, Spain and Ghana] while preparations were in top gear for the APC convention. In fact, Buhari could have decided on one or more likely successors many years ago and deftly empowered him, her or them with very responsible cabinet positions in order to get optimum publicity, reach and influence, if not resources. To wait until the last minute, when aspirants have invested so much time, energy and resources and then spring an anointing surprise on them could utterly wreck the party.
On Saturday evening when he met with the top APC aspirants, Buhari refrained from naming an anointed aspirant and instead asked them to go and work on producing a consensus candidate among themselves. This system has never worked and is unlikely to do so now. In this country we have no reliable opinion polls which the aspirants could refer to and say they are most popular. So a meeting to try to arrive at a consensus will only result in bruised egos and self-serving arguments.
In the event, all three men [Buhari, Tinubu and Shettima] were saved by a bombshell announcement on Saturday evening that drove their critics off the airwaves. Eleven serving and one powerful ex-Northern governor forcefully asked Buhari to push the APC presidential ticket to the South. Jigawa State Governor Badaru Abubakar promptly responded by stepping down from the race. Strident Southern voices for power shift were suddenly silenced. All the claims that there was a Northern plot to deceive the South and “retain” power in 2023 collapsed in one fell swoop. No “cabal” in APC or the Presidency could possibly deliver on any anointed candidate, Northern or otherwise, without the support of these governors.
The stance of these APC governors showed that they were not intimidated by Atiku Abubakar’s emergence as PDP’s presidential candidate. They ignored the rumoured danger that Northern voters, the bedrock of APC support, could desert the party and vote for Atiku, for regional or other reasons. It instead endorsed Kashim Shettima’s argument that APC should stabilize politics and the country by producing a candidate from the South, however a sellable one in the North.
Northern governors surrendering the APC presidential ticket to the South did not however end the party’s agony. At the weekend, Aremo Olusegun Osoba led a meeting of South Western leaders to try to produce a single aspirant from the many powerful ones in the zone, including the sitting Vice President, the chairman of Nigeria Governors Forum, and Tinubu. Osoba’s team has nothing near the power of the 23 Afenifere leaders that picked Chief Olu Falae over Chief Bola Ige as Alliance for Democracy’s [AD] presidential candidate at the D’Rowans Hotel, Ibadan in 1999. So this effort is unlikely to succeed.
To add to the problem, some people quickly waded in and said the South West leaders should learn from the Northern governors’ magnanimity and further micro-zone the APC ticket to the South East. For many reasons this is impossible. APC has preciously little support and no strong aspirants from the South East. IPOB’s violence has so much fouled the atmosphere that APC could hardly risk pitting a South Eastern candidate against Atiku Abubakar. To boot, they could hardly tell Jagaban, Osinbajo or Fayemi to step down in the name of “equity and justice” when the top prize is tantalizingly within their reach.
Why did the Northern governors not finish the job by taking the next, critical step of agreeing on one person to support? That would have forced the hand of South West leaders and of almost everyone else, including the president. Trouble is, they too are divided on that score. I suspect that majority of them are Tinubu supporters but we don’t know how much damage his remarks of last week did to that support base. Some of them are probably closet Osinbajo, Fayemi or Amaechi supporters because it makes it easier for themselves to be picked as running mate. They probably refrained from making a final choice in order to give Buhari the “reciprocity” to endorse a candidate, very late though he has left the matter. Very dramatic developments could yet come between Sunday evening and Monday afternoon, when the APC special convention gets underway.
