Kevin McCarthy’s lesson for Atiku

General Yakubu Gowon must be living the rest of his life in regrets. In case you meet him tomorrow, don’t let him convince you that this conjecture is not true. At moments when he ought to have fought to win battles, he settled on the pips of uniting Nigeria. Even then, he had no balls to call a victory; instead, he called a truce – no-victor-no-vanquished. 

Gowon did not contest his overthrow. Granted full pardon years later with a freshly minted PhD in political science, Gowon sought to put theory into practice in politics, but let Olusegun Obasanjo heckle him into silence when he asked what he forgot in Dodan Barracks that he wanted to return to Aso Rock to pick up. 

I don’t know what you make of all that, but it is not a McCarthian attitude to winning fair and square. Last weekend, Kevin McCarthy endured a string of humiliating defeats for a spot in the Guinness Book of Records that Gowon could have earned. Fourteen times, McCarthy, the ranking member of the US House of Representatives, refused to give up on his dream. Fourteen times wedges were placed against his bid to become the 55th Speaker. On the fifteenth call, McCarthy broke the record and announced his enrolment into the Waziri Ibrahim’s school of ‘politics without bitterness’.

McCarthy spent his entire life eyeing the speakership position. He rode on the wave of the last American midterms to make it happen. It was meant to be a walkover; instead, it became a battle with history. Opposition members of his Republican Party built solid walls against his ambition. He threw every trick in the books at them but they refused to budge. In the end he proved that persistence pays.

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While Gowon lost because he didn’t care to fight, Atiku Abubakar is gradually making history as a serial runner. But for age that may not be on his side, there is still fuel in the tank to be a Nigerian political McCarthy. If he fails at the February 25 polls, he needs not give up. There is another American political personality who showed that ‘no’ is not always the opposite of ‘yes’. America’s 16th President, Abraham Lincoln rose like a phoenix through failures to become an icon of his country’s definition of tenacity.

One is inclined to encourage Atiku not because we have forgotten the years of the locust or his role as the auctioneer of the country’s common patrimony, but because of the hurdles the former Nigerian vice president would have to face to clinch the ultimate price. The fact that he wants to return to sell more shows he is a good trader. It’s up to Nigerians whether they have enough left to be auctioned. 

Politicians might share our physical attributes, but truly they are from a different planet. The rest of us are Gowon’s siblings – we give up just when we should have fought to win. One would have thought that Obasanjo meant well bringing up the Dodan Barracks thing but the Owu chief has the attribute of a vulture. The patient bird does down prey; it lets other carnivores do dirty job and take their first bite before sweeping down on the carcass. It’s the patient bird that eats the fattest bone.

After writing himself into Abacha’s bad books and earning a death sentence in the process, Obasanjo swooped on an invite to return as a civilian. He grabbed that opportunity with both hands and could have scored a Museveni one on Nigerians but for pure fate.

Atiku shares Kevin McCarthy’s fate. According to Nyesom Wike, there was an agreement by which the presidential candidate should never share regional consanguinity with an incumbent chairman. By that covenant, Iyorchia Ayu was to have relinquished his chairmanship post when Atiku emerged as presidential flag bearer. On Lugard’s old map, Ayu and Atiku are not just northerners but Middle Belt or North Central citizens. Unfortunately, Atiku clinched the ticket and Ayu kept his position.

Ayu’s recalcitrance has become an albatross on Atiku’s candidacy. Wike has gathered four malcontent governors to his side. In the McCarthy selection, 21 republicans refused to support McCarthy as speaker. With horse trading, they soon thinned out to six. They lost, McCarthy won.

So far, Atiku is battling five renegade governors in his party. With 45 days to federal elections, the G-5 or Bad-5 governors have stuck tenaciously to their ‘principle’ just as Ayu is clinging to his. In the game of numbers, there are those who would have asked Ayu to surrender in the overall interest of his party except that this is an extraordinary election. There is no ironclad assurance that the PDP, a party in opposition would swing the upcoming vote in its favour even as we remember that politicians are from a different planet.

It is said that 24 hours is a long time in politics. A big disadvantage for the PDP rebels is that only one of them, Seyi Makinde of Oyo State, is up for re-election. The renegade quadruplets of Wike, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, Okezie Ikpeazu and Samuel Ortom are not facing the electorate. Aside from seeking retirement in the Senate, they have nothing to lose if Ayu and his executive decide to wield the big axe. As it were, those who are down, need fear no fall. They are like the proverbial mouse that wastes the beans it could not consume. When the rebels met in Ibadan last week, they postponed the announcement of who is likely to be their bride in the February 25 polls. Like the McCarthy opponents, they are holding their cards very close to their chest.

Given this scenario, Atiku Abubakar need not listen to Bola Tinubu’s taunts about being a serial candidate. Except that the ex-vice-president might be waiting to get the votes first before dealing a death blow on his enemies; there is nothing wrong with being a serial candidate or even a serial loser. Indeed, Tinubu’s mentor, Muhammadu Buhari, not only lost several times, he needed the alliance with Tinubu to win. Not only that, he shed tears to get that alliance.

While the Tinubu and Atiku camps are throwing shades at each other, Atiku has maintained the stoic calmness of a McCarthy having spoken into troubled waters when he urged voters not to vote for Ibo or Yoruba candidates. Could the party wield its big stick on its rebels without losing face? Could its high command appeal to Ayu to drop his rights in the interest of greater interest? If that happens, how would Wike and his friends react? These are the kinds of questions likely to agitate the minds of the Atiku camp.

The other thing is whether in victory, Atiku would employ the Gowon way of no-victor-no-vanquished and the Waziri/McCarthy principle of politics without bitterness to rally the party for a common cause. In the case that rebellion and insurgency send Atiku back to the trenches, he’ll be sharing resilience with the grandson of a cattle rancher who won at the 15th attempt, becoming the 55th Speaker of the 118th Congress. That is the lesson of the McCarthy win that came too late for Yakubu Gowon.