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With the flexing of muscles over the control of the political atmosphere by both the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Progressives Alliance, there is only one assurance: the road to the presidential election next year will be very tough
| By Olu Ojewale | Feb. 10, 2014 @ 01:00 GMT
THE stage is getting set for the 2015 general elections. Since the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, announced the time-table for the next year elections on Friday, January 24, the political horizon have been witnessing a lot of activities. Although parties are not allowed to start campaign until November, a good number of aspirants have also started to test the waters. There are a lot of consultations, manoeuvring, plots and counter plots by politicians to outwit one another. There are also pressure on some top politicians to publicly declare their interest to contest for different positions such the presidency, governorship and National and State Houses of Assembly. In line with the mood of the moment, a number of Nigerians have been sending messages to President Goodluck Jonathan that it was time for him to make good his promise and tell the world about his political aspiration. While it appears that the president is still looking for the auspicious time to make his intention known on his second term ambition, subtle campaign has been going on for him.
Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State, on Tuesday, January 28, pledged his support for President Jonathan’s 2015 re-election bid and called on the president to declare his intention to run without further delay. Speaking when he led the state delegation to the office of Adamu Mu’azu, the newly appointed national chairman of the PDP, Akpabio said the people of his state were willing and ready to vote for the president. “We did it in 2011 and I assure Mr. President that Akwa Ibom will do it again. We were the first set in 2010 to announce our support for him to go for his first tenure in 2011. We did that and other states followed. We are again the first state in 2014 to urge Mr. President to go back for a second term in office. We are a monolithic group in Akwa Ibom, although you may have one or two people who want to test the political waters here and there,” Akpabio said. While thanking the governor for his commitment to the party and his good works, Mu’azu used the occasion to warn the opposition All Progressives Alliance, APC, that the party should be ready for mass defection of its members to the ruling party very soon. “We will soon show to the opposition that though they are master poachers, if that is what they are teaching us, we will beat them to it; because when two members of your family fight, you should settle them and not for you to come and pitch one against the other,” Mu’azu said.
Apart from Akwa Ibom, the Ohaneze Ndigbo, an Igbo cultural group, has similarly promised Jonathan block votes from the Southeast in 2015. The cultural body said it was doing so in the interest of peace and unity, promising that a president of Igbo origin would emerge at the appropriate time. To achieve the objective, Gary Nnachi Enwo-Igariwey, president of the Ohanaeze Ndigbo, visited Orji Uzor Kalu, former governor of Abia State, recently and urged him to drop his presidential ambition. Enwo-Igariwey said the move was strategic and it would enable the Igbo to speak with one voice on the 2015 presidential election. “I was here about six months ago to actually discuss with him on issues concerning the Igbo nation. It was about rumours on presidential interest and I told him I will like to discuss that with him formally when he eventually decides on what to do. I have come in continuation of that discussion and to appeal to him to share my views with him. So, I have come here to rub minds with him and to tell him to join me in the discussions about Igbo unity so that we will speak with one voice. We no longer want a situation where we speak from different points and our agenda should be the same. I have talked to him about his views. I have appealed to him to shelve it in the interest of the Igbo nation. I have appealed to him to join hands with us and at the appropriate time when we make our statement, it will be with one voice as a people. That a great son like him should also join in that decision making and I have appealed to him to shelve that ambition in the interest of peace, until such decisions are made in Igbo land and he has given me his assurances that he would listen to Ohanaeze’s appeal so that we speak with one voice in the interest of the people.”
In response to the request, an apparently unexcited Kalu said he would reconsider his ambition to run for president. “Mr. President (Enwo-Igariwey) was here and he advised that he would like the Igbo to speak with one voice. They said a tree cannot make a forest. If the apex organisation in Igboland wants to say, ‘well; we don’t want any of our sons to contest for election this time’, well, we will hold on and work with them to see what they will do. I will never be a scapegoat that will sacrifice my tribe. Whatever my tribe says is superior to what I will think. I believe they have their reasons and their reasons may be more superior to what I think. He was here six months ago and I told him we will discuss it between December and January and not only him, there are many of our Igbo elite who have been to me in Lagos, Abuja and in the diaspora and I don’t know who I am to say no to them,” the former governor said. Kalu had contested the presidential election in 2007 on the platform of Progressives People’s Alliance, PPA. But he has since returned to the PDP, on the platform of which he was first elected governor.
If Jonathan is assured of the Southeast votes, he will need to work very hard to get the North to support him. Abu King Shuluwa, a PDP stalwart in Makurdi, Benue State, does not want the president to go for another term in office. Speaking in an interview recently, Shuluwa said it was the turn of the North produce the next president and that those who have been calling the president to go for another term would not do him any good. “The president is an individual. Yet, praise-singers and sycophants have taken over the party and they are the ones urging the president on and telling him that he is good and that people must support him. This is bad. The policy Jonathan is running should be the policy of the party and therefore, everybody will support him. But is Jonathan running the policy of the party? The answer is no. Are the governors running policies of the party? No, they are not. And we dare not say anything or you would be perceived as a bad man… Jonathan has nothing to tell Nigerians. Nigerians are fed up with Jonathan. All Nigerians want is for him to complete his tenure and leave. We are waiting for that day that he would dare say he will contest. So, let’s allow Jonathan to complete his work as we have given him the mandate and leave in 2015. We will find another person,” Shuluwa said.
According to him, Jonathan has failed the nation and does not merit another term in office. “He knows what is happening in Nigeria … and when he sees the body language of Nigerians, I don’t think Jonathan would want to contest. That is why I am telling you that Jonathan will not contest because he is not from the North. The president of this country must come from the North in 2015. The president of Nigeria come 2015, must be a northerner. Whether Jonathan likes it or not, whether anybody likes it or not, that is what we know and that is what must happen,” he added.
Whatever the PDP decides during the primaries for the presidential ticket is not likely to include Atiku Abubakar, former vice-president, who led the PDP renegades out of the party’s mini convention last year. The action led to the defection of five PDP governors to the APC. In the meantime, coast remains unclear which the platform Abubakar would like to use to actualise his presidential ambition. He is no longer in the PDP and seems to be chummy with the APC in recent time. In furtherance to his decision to consult widely before announcing his candidature for the 2015 presidential race, Abubakar was in Benin, Edo State, on Wednesday where he met Governor Adams Oshimhole. Detail of their discussion was not made public, but it was suspected that it had to do with the next presidential race.
In a radio interview on Sunday, January 26, dropped the hint that he was already discussing with some of the APC leaders on the 2015 elections. Abubakar disclosed that he and Muhammadu Buhari, retired major-general and former head of state, had shared their concerns and agreed that the situation in the country was grim and that country had not been in such a crisis since the civil war. “It is no longer about ambition but about Nigeria. We have got to a stage when you have an ambition, if the environment permits. The environment does not even permit that. So, you have to restore normalcy to the environment first before you begin to think about ambition. This is because if you allow your ambition to override it, you will find that you don’t even exist. Buhari and I have never seen things as bad. It’s really serious,” Abubakar said.
It is not clear if any of the two leaders would like to sacrifice his own ambition to support the other for the presidential ticket of the APC. It is well known that Buhari, who had previously contested for the president on the platform of the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party and Congress for Progressive Change, has said several times that he would like to give the contest another shot on the APC platform in 2015. But whether his ambition will have the support of the party is another matter altogether because a lot of Nigerians have twice rejected him in the previous polls because of his past record as a northern apologist and perceived religion bigotry. Nevertheless, Buhari, it is believed, has been working assiduously underground to pick the party’s ticket. To get it, he may also have to contest with new arrivals on the scene, who are being touted by supporters and members of the party hierarchy as potential party flag-bearers. One of such persons is Olusola Saraki, former governor of Kwara State and a serving senator. Saraki hinted recently that he has been receiving consultation from different quarters that he should vie for the party’s presidential ticket. Saraki is not the only new persons in the political calculation. There is also Governor Oshiomhole who is said to have received the endorsement of certain personalities in the party to fly the APC flag. One of his supporters is Governor Raji Fashola of Lagos State. At an occasion in Benin recently, Fashola said: “If Governor Adams Oshimhole decides to run as president of this country, he will have my vote. He is the kind of leader that Nigeria needs.” But analysts say the APC is looking up to the North for a candidate, which may narrow its selection of candidates, for now, to the likes of Buhari, Saraki and possibly, Abubakar. But since the former vice-president has not formally moved to the APC, it may be a little bit difficult for him to be the party’s candidate. In the meantime, Abubakar has the Peoples Democratic Movement, PDM, as the only viable platform to use to actualise his ambition. The only handicap for the party is that no one has been elected under its banner since it was registered last year.
In the interim, only candidates from the PDP and the APC seem to have a genuine chance of being elected president. On the political tuff, the two parties are the largest and most likely to produce the nation’s president. But the list of interested aspirants will soon get longer as the nation progresses to November when political parties are expected to campaign for president and National assembly elections.
As the situation stands, it is promised not to be a tea party for the ruling PDP. The recent crisis in the party was caused by President Jonathan’s perceived re-election plan. Opponents of the plan alleged that the body language of the president and his supporters had reinforced the general belief and suspicion among party chieftains that he might be scheming for the 2015 presidential ticket of the party. The sustained scheming by Jonathan’s aides and loyalists for him to get the party’s ticket for the 2015 election was one of the factors that sparked the lingering crisis in the PDP, which eventually forced Bamanga Tukur, erstwhile national chairman of the party to resign unceremoniously. The crisis has also led to a gale of defections, with five serving governors and a number of federal legislators elected on the platform of the PDP defecting to the APC. The five governors who defected in November last year, are Chibuike Amaechi (Rivers); Rabiu Kwankwaso (Kano); Aliyu Wamakko (Sokoto); Murtala Nyako (Adamawa); and Abdulfatah Ahmed (Kwara). Legislators in some states have followed their governors to defect to the opposition party as well.
To stop the drift and ensure that the situation does not have advert effects on the ruling parties, the PDP has been fighting tooth and nail to keep its house in order. The party has also appealed to defected members to return to the party with the promise that their grievances would be attended to. Hence, Adamu Mu’azu, the newly appointed national chairman of the PDP, has been going round the country to bring back dissenters and iron out their grievances ahead of the coming elections. On Sunday, January 26, Mu’azu had a closed door meeting with former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who recently severed his association with the party. The outcome of the meeting was not made public, but it was understood that the new national chairman of the PDP had scheduled a meeting between President Jonathan and Obasanjo to iron out their differences.
Even while Mu’azu was busy campaigning for reconciliation, there appears to be no letup in defection among members of both parties. On Wednesday, January 29, Lai Mohammed, interim publicity secretary of the APC, claimed in a statement that 11 senators from the PDP had formally written a letter informing the Senate leadership of their decision to defect to the APC and that the said letter would be read during Wednesday’s plenary. However, David Mark, president of the Senate, neither made any reference to the issue nor out the purported letters by the defecting senators, which were said to have submitted by the individual senators on Tuesday. The senators said to have defected are Bukola Saraki (Kwara), Shaba Lafiagi (Kwara), Adamu Abdullahi (Nasarawa), Ibrahim Gobir (Sokoto), Umar Dahiru (Sokoto), Aisha Al-Hassan (Taraba), Magnus Abe (Rivers), Wilson Ake (Rivers), Jibrilla Mohammed Bindowo (Adamawa), Danjuma Goje (Gombe) and Ali Ndume (Borno). In the statement, Mohammed said: “This is only the first instalment of many other senators of the Peoples Democratic Party expected to defect to the All Progressives Congress soon.” If the defection is carried through, it would increase the number of the APC members in the Senate to 43. The PDP senators are now 63.
However, the PDP is said to be mounting pressure on Mark to declare the seats of the defecting senators vacant in line with section 68(1) (g) and (h) of the 1999 Constitution which reads in part: “A member of the Senate or of the House of Representatives shall vacate his seat in the House of which he is a member if… Being a person whose election to the House was sponsored by a political party, he becomes a member of another political party before the expiration of the period for which that House was elected;
“Provided that his membership of the latter political party is not as a result of a division in the political party of which he was previously a member or of a merger of two or more political parties or factions by one of which he was previously sponsored; or
“The President of the Senate or as the case may be, the Speaker of the House of Representatives receives a certificate under the hand of the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission stating that the provisions of Section 69 of this constitution have been complied with in respect of the recall of that member.”
Elvis Chukwu, justice of an Abuja high court, had ruled on October 18, 2013 that there was no division in the PDP and as such, no faction would be recognised. But that decision has been challenged at appellate court which has yet to rule on the matter. But that notwithstanding, the Senate president has the final say on the defection of the senators in the chamber, and from all indications, Mark is more likely to respect the court order and not declare their seats vacant. Some analysts also believe that since the PDP is trying to put its house in order, it would be counter-productive for the party if the seats of defecting senators were declared vacant.
Last December, 37 members of the House Representatives had defected from the PDP to the APC, thereby giving the latter the majority. At press time, the APC had 172 members as against 171 for the PDP. Recently, there have also been some politicians who have dumped the APC for the PDP. On Wednesday, January 29, Ibrahim Shekarau, former governor of Kano State, abandoned the party for the PDP. By his action, Shekarau was apparently following the footstep of Attahiru Dalhatu Bafarawa, former governor of Sokoto State. The two former governors had helped to nurse and nurtured the APC to its current stage, but they abhorred the imposition of the governors in their respective states who defected from the PDP in November last year, to boss them.
In any case, the APC has assured the PDP that its legislators would no longer cooperate with the ruling party in the National Assembly. On Tuesday, the House stepped down the budget and replaced with the consideration of the report of the adhoc committee on the alteration of the Constitution. The move was considered to be a strategy by the House leadership to clear the tension generated by the APC’s directive that its members should block the consideration of the budget and other executive bills. At a news conference in Abuja, addressed by Femi Gbajabiamila, minority House leader, the APC said it intended to use filibustering or stalling executive Bills, to “protest the culture of impunity, immorality and illegality” of the government. “Let us be categorical, we intend to continue to protest the culture of impunity, immorality and illegality this government insists in entrenching in our system. We intend to insist on good governance; we intend to stand firm on our oath of office to defend the constitution and discharge our legislative duties in the interest of the people of Nigeria. Good governance is the end goal and filibustering or stalling executive Bills is the means and we believe that, in this case, the end definitely justifies the means. On the budget, we will not support a budget that does nothing for the people we represent. We will not rubber stamp a budget that seeks to borrow more money at ridiculous rates and further impoverish the country. Indeed, we refuse to support a budget that comes in with a huge deficit. We certainly do not agree with a budget that allocates a pitiable 25 per cent to capital expenditure, which capital component will only be implemented 30 per cent whilst recurrent will be implemented 100 per cent. How in the world do you stimulate an economy the size and population of Nigeria with a 25 per cent allocation to capital?” Gbajabiamila said.
The legislators also accused Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, coordinating minister on economy, of preparing anti-people budget. “We cannot in good conscience support a budget that comes with a benchmark and siphons away 30 per cent of the country’s revenue into an illegal excess crude account in violation of the provisions of Section 162 of the Constitution we individually swore to defend, with the resultant effect of short-changing the states we all individually represent. A budget where the economics do not trickle down to the common man. We do not want to be accessories after the fact by passing a budget when the president or minister of finance who has publicly admitted to the disappearance of $10 billion has not given explanations but seeks to borrow more money. And who continues to blame shortfall in revenue on crude theft by some phantom thieves,” he said. According to the APC, the measure was necessary to force the government to address the unhealthy political situation in Rivers State, where both parties have been fighting for the soul of the state. But the PDP appears to be having the upper hand and therefore being accused of using the federal might to deal with opposition.
Analysts have, however, warned that the APC’s threat to block the appointment of the new ministers and service chiefs as well as blocking the passage of the budget could backfire on the party. Already, the Senate has ignored the statement and cleared the service chiefs. But whether this will make the APC to desist from heating the polity is yet to be seen. What is obvious is that the road to 2015 is filled with bumps which could trip any politician. In the meantime, the polity is heating up serious and observers say the situation does not portend a good omen for the country.
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