Atiku’s Message Of Unity In A Disturbing Ambience

By NewsTrack Nigeria
June 3, 2022

Ayo Olukotun

“Most of us leaders in the North have a concept called fairness. What is fair is that after eight years (by 2023) of presidential rule by a Northerner, presidential power should go to the southern part of Nigeria”

— Senator Muhammed Abba-Aji, a former Executive Secretary of the North-East Governor’s Forum (Sunrise Daily, Channels TV, Tuesday, May 31, 2022)

Last weekend, the opposition, Peoples Democratic Party, held its Convention and primaries to elect its presidential candidate for the 2023 elections. There are different versions trending in the national and international spaces concerning the magnitude of dollarisation in the exercise. Although to be fair, this is not an exclusively PDP syndrome. However, we must take seriously the evidence supplied by major actors who attended and participated in the event. One of them, Dr Mohammed Hayatu-Deen, initially an aspirant (who later withdrew), berated the exercise as “obscenely monetised.” Two other aspirants who stayed the course, Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa and Senator Shehu Sani, recounted on national television recently the egregious levels to which outright seduction with dollars reached, notwithstanding the presence of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission. Corruption is not new to our politics. What should worry us, nonetheless, is whether it is attaining more heights as well as becoming more open and blatant.

One international weekly, The Economist, has an annual award for what it calls, The Most Improved Country. Against this backdrop, what is most disconcerting is rather than Nigeria being the most improved, it may earn a title like Most Regressed, considering what we have on our hands. Bad as that is, that is not the main burden of this intervention. Let me begin to articulate my most pressing concern obliquely by introducing a heart-rending story published on Tuesday in our newspapers. The report has it that close to $1.60 billion of substandard pharmaceutical products were dumped on Nigeria by Indian pharmaceutical companies. Ironically, Nigeria is mentioned in the same report to be the first country to introduce pre-shipment analysis in the Indian town of Mumbai, which makes one expect that it should be the most immune from the racketeering of the Indian drug dealers. The moral here is that we are often very correct on paper but extremely feral in practice.

To swerve back to politics, the Southern governors some months back, and possibly out of apprehension that in most cases the unwritten rule of zoning the presidency to North and South alternately was about to be breached, organised a meeting and issued a communiqué strongly admonishing that the presidency should return to the South following what would be eight years of Northern presidency. There was controversy, to be sure, about the declaration but that did not prevent several Northern leaders from speaking out on the side of the affirmation even while disagreeing, in some cases, with the emphatic nature of the statement.

In the case of the PDP, it was not an unwritten rule but a written constitutional imperative, which was complied with in the 2019 elections when former Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, if my memory serves me right, was the only presidential contestant and candidate from that party. The astonishing turn this year is that the party first annulled its own Constitution by a press release stating that anyone was free to be an aspirant, and impliedly a candidate, in both the primaries and national elections. Before the statement, the respected Dr Iyorchia Ayu, former Senate President and current chairman of the party, threatened to resign if the zoning formula was tampered with, with the consequence that a Northerner emerged as a presidential candidate. Apparently, the hurricane set in motion to achieve this singular objective proved too strong for Ayu’s moral quibbles. So we now have in that party Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Senator Walid Jibrin; Chairman, Iyorchia Ayu and presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, all of them from the same geographical part of the country.

If this is not a civilian coup in which the constitution of a party is not just turned aside but entirely overthrown in order to produce the exact opposite of what its authors intended, then I don’t know what else qualifies for that expression. Even if the party constitution did not so expressly state it, common sense does in the context of a federation in which centrifugal forces are strong. That is why the 1999 Constitution (as amended, 2011) provided for the operation of federal character in appointments and several other matters that pertain to national politics.

Outside Nigeria, there are federations or close-to-confederations, as in the Swiss case, which expressly rotate their presidencies to achieve balance and arrest a possible monopoly of power by one section of the country. This columnist thinks that it is somewhat amusing that Atiku has chosen to call himself a unifier, notwithstanding the violation of one of the fundamental tenets of our federalism, which is its inclusive mandate. The matter is not over because other parties including the All Progressives Congress have not concluded their primaries. But in a scenario where Atiku succeeds Buhari as President of Nigeria and is re-elected, the North would have held power for a total of 16 years. I believe that is what Senator Muhammad Abba-Aji was referring to when he talked about fairness. Nobody or hardly any person wins a presidential primary without having planned it for months or years, so this could not be said to have been an accident. As an elder statesman, a privileged one at that, the PDP presidential candidate ought to have known or foreseen the damage which this swerve and blow to the elementary canons of a united federation would have on the psyche of those who are excluded by this new form of political monopoly.

Of course, like Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, revealed, while the hegemonic plot was being hatched, some governors from the Niger Delta region were offering themselves to be Atiku’s vice presidential candidate irrespective of their presence at the Southern Governors’ Forum meeting referred to earlier. Such anti-heroes are not unknown in Nigerian history. They populate the entire spectrum of our political activities. As I have often said, Nigerians have a penchant for sleepwalking into avoidable tragedy. In every misadventure, there will arise opportunists and public relations practitioners of the negative kind who will justify the unjustifiable. This is not the place for this columnist to remind the nation how, before recent elections, those who had alternative suggestions about choices were shouted out of court by those who had personalist agenda. But we all have a stake, let us remember, in this country and truth must not be trampled upon.

The moment I saw several aspirants more than usual from the South, I smelt a rat and arrived at the conclusion that there was a game afoot. I may be severe but I doubt if, on present terms, the political elite in its current state can be trusted with the delicateness, tact and statesmanship that this country requires to survive.

Sadly, even if Atiku does not win, it may take a while for the disaffected citizenry to forget his controversial triumph. One can only hope that in spite of all, the future will not be as bleak as it seems.