Tantrums galore in political parties

There has been a continuation of tantrums in the two leading political parties, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressive Congress (APC), weeks after their presidential and vice-presidential candidates have been selected and forwarded to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Last week, the tantrums reached a crescendo at the Port Harcourt airport where Governor Nyesom  Wike touched down from his trip abroad. He used the opportunity of a press conference to pour invectives on Atiku Abubakar, their party’s presidential candidate. On the same day at an Abuja event, two top-notchers of the APC, Babachir Lawan and Yakubu Dogara, had gone public with the squabbles perpetrated in their party over the selection of the vice-presidential candidate.

The squabbles in the two parties and the tantrums raised by their leading figures have become so pernicious to the body politic that their party members and even busybodies like us are getting befuddled.  Governor Wike fired the opening salvo during a meeting with journalists at the Port Harcourt airport when he called the PDP presidential candidate a liar. No doubt, Wike still harbours plenty of ill will for being beaten to second place in the presidential primaries race, and to worsen matters he was also skipped as the vice-presidential candidate.

Wike accused Atiku of concocting lies against him on both the occasion of unveiling Governor Okowa as the vice-presidential candidate and at a TV interview thereafter. He also took exception to what he perceived as insults from those surrounding Atiku Abubakar. He said: “Look at his attack dogs, Sule Lamido, Babangida Aliyu, Maina Waziri; look at the statements they issued. Look at the abuses they rained on me.” Readers might recall that in these recent times, Sule Lamido was a former foreign affairs minister and governor of Jigawa State, Babangida Aliyu was FCT Permsec and governor of Niger State, and Maina Waziri was SSA to President Obasanjo wherein he headed the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP), Petroleum Trust Fund  (PTF) and Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) and during the tenures of President Yar’Adua and Jonathan was a minister of agriculture as well as police affairs. Years earlier Maina Waziri was president of my ABU students’ union in 1975, at a time when ABU was the largest university south of the Sahara.

When Wike referred to these highly accomplished persons as ‘attack dogs’, then one sees how far he has gone from the pale. PDP has its job cut out for them. The only consolation is that in Nigerian politics nothing is impossible. After all, Governor Ortom of Benue State spoke in similar vein when Atiku Abubakar was named the presidential candidate, and also when his close ally, Governor Wike, was overlooked as a vice-presidential candidate. Now some weeks after, Ortom is singing an entirely different tune. A few days ago, this is what he said of Atiku: “He is my candidate and I am behind him. Whatever happened in the course of the primaries and the nomination of the presidential running mate is past and gone.”

In the neighbouring APC camp, the brouhaha might even probably be on a larger scale. The issue of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates belonging to the same faith is threatening to set the party ablaze. Babachir Lawan, a former Secretary of the Government of the Federation (SGF), and Yakubu Dogara, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives have pitted themselves in what could amount to a war of attrition against the party. They spoke on Friday at an APC Northern Christian Leaders Summit in Abuja, making it clear, in no uncertain terms, that they would urge all their associates to use their Permanent Voters Card (PVCs) and prayers to resist the party’s plans in the polls ahead.

Unkind analysts would dismiss both Babachir and Dogara’s threats as mere rantings of sour losers. Highly visible in the party hierarchy they had been touted as vice-presidential material when the ticket was zoned to the North. Unfortunately, Babachir who was SGF at the inception of the APC regime suffered a humiliating reversal when he was removed from that perch on the strength of an allegation over contract misdemeanours now popularly known as ‘the grass-cutting contract saga’. He went under for years. Dogara had always been of dubious acceptance to the party functionaries since he manoeuvred to be elected Speaker in 2015, against the candidate the party wanted. He had even stepped out to the PDP in the last election, to return to the APC later.

In any case, the two are lightweights viewed against the entire spectrum of the northern fabric. They even failed to garner support for their presidential candidate in their localities in the 2019 elections. Figures show that in the 2019 presidential election, in Babachir’s Hong local government, APC scored 20,471 votes against PDP’s 23,471. In Dogara’s Bogoro Local Government the picture was even more abysmal. APC scored 5,284 votes against PDP’s 23,664. While in Maiduguri Metropolitan Council, where Kashim Shettima the vice-presidential candidate hails from, the APC scored 146,181 votes against PDP’s paltry 9,832 votes.

The elections are still some months away. It behooves these political parties to do some immediate housekeeping to settle their squabbles and temper the tantrums of their belligerent members. We are eager to put their agenda under our microscopes, given the present challenges, so that we can make intelligent choices.