PERSPECTIVE

The futility of so-called consensus candidature

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

Long before President Olusegun Obasanjo told Nigerians last year that he was waiting on God to make up his mind about whether or not to go for a second term, it was obvious to close observers of the political scene that he had done so already. The shrewd politician that he is – soldiers are not supposed to be shrewd politicians, but in Africa at least, it seems the shrewdest politicians have been our men in uniform as in Congo’s Mobutu, Togo’s Eyadema and, of course, Nigeria’s Babangida – Obasanjo had determined early enough which individuals and groups would be the biggest obstacles to his second term bid, and mapped out his strategies for neutralizing them. He knew, for example, that his apparent determination to punish the North for his humiliation by General Sani Abacha would alienate the region, so he decided to use religion to divide and rule the region. He also knew that a policy of appeasing his fellow Yorubas by discriminating against other sections of the country in sharing out jobs and contracts and providing infrastructures will not be enough to win their loyalty, so he decided to embark on a project that would neutralize the seemingly implacable Afenifere, which seems to have a vice-like grip on Yoruba politics. This was the programme of creating the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE) as counterweight to Afenifere under the able direction of the late Chief Bola Ige.

As for individuals, he knew that probably the single biggest obstacle to his second term bid would be General Ibrahim Babangida who, along with his NSA, General Aliyu Mohammed, engineered  his return to power four years ago. To neutralize Babangida and others like him, he, among other things, set up the Oputa Panel, to dredge up the human rights record of the military president and keep it constantly in public view.

For someone who was insistent on God’s word before he declared his intentions to bid for a second term, these strategies seemed rather too pre-emptive. This was especially so considering the declaration by his Man Friday, Chief Tony Anenih, then Minister of Works, that there was no vacancy in the Aso Villa, even as the president was repeating his mantra about God’s guidance.

But God or no God, by April 2, last year, it was clear that the president had made up his mind about his second term. This was the day when about 19 governors, including, quite significantly, two from the rival ANPP, about 25 ministers, a horde of National Assembly members, including Senate Deputy President, Ibrahim Mantu, and many PDP stalwarts, beat a path to Ota Farm where the president was having his Easter break, to beg him to run again. That episode was simply too reminiscent of Abacha’s two-million man March.

This episode of April 2, 2002, was a reaction to a call by Alhaji Attahiru Bafarawa, the Sokoto State governor, to the North to produce a consensus regional candidate that will compete against Obasanjo in this year’s presidential election. Bafarawa made his call on March 28, 2002, during a seminar on the occasion of the second anniversary of the establishment of the Arewa Consultative Forum. Obasanjo, he said, has proved himself to be an arch enemy of the same North that helped put him in power. The president has showed his hatred for the region, said Bafarawa, by the way he had sacked Northerners from the military, by the way he had discriminated against them in the sharing of top jobs and contracts and by his willful neglect of agriculture, the backbone of the region’s economy. For these reasons, he said, it was “imperative that, at least for the sake of future presidential elections, we must all go in one direction. It is either APP, PDP, AD or any political party that may come up.”

Bafarawa claimed he was speaking for the 19 governors of the Northern states. However, not long after his speech, the governors of Nassarawa and Kaduna states, Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu and Alhaji Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi, respectively, entered disclaimers. Bafarawa, they said, was speaking for himself, and not for his colleagues. Adamu’s and Makarfi’s disclaimers were the first sign that a Northern consensus candidate would prove a tall order, at least, among the region’s elite if not its ordinary people.

However or not Bafarawa spoke for the Northern governors or not, his speech seemed to have rattled the presidency. The Sokoto state governor spoke on March 28. Five days later the political pilgrimage to Ota to beg Obasanjo to run again occurred. As if to prove this was no mere coincidence, the Minister of Information, Professor Jerry Gana, defended it, quite rightly, by arguing that if some people could call on the North to reject Obasanjo, other Nigerians too have the right to express their love and loyalty to the president.

Although the pilgrimage to Ota was obviously a reaction to Bafarawa’s call for Northern consensus candidate, the initiative for a consensus candidature did not start from the North. The credit for that must go to the presidency itself. This is obvious from its attempt to rig Electoral Bill 2001 in such a way that the 2003 presidential elections would have been a shoo-in for Obasanjo. The attempt to rig Electoral Bill 2001 was only frustrated by the vigilance of certain federal legislators and by the independence of the Supreme Court, which shot down those sections of the bill that the presidency, working in cahoots with some legislators, tried to smuggle into the bill.

Bafarawa’s call was, itself, therefore a reaction to attempts by some of the president’s men, notably Chief Anenih and Malam Adamu Ciroma, the finance minister, to foist Obasanjo on Nigerians either by crude force or by sleigh-of-hand.

Irrespective of who started it all, the issue of a regional consensus candidature has become central to the outcome of the next presidential election. Which is a great pity because much more important issues concerning Nigerians have been sidelined. These are those of public safety and security, public welfare, public morality and public health, subjects in which all the tiers of government in the country have performed disastrously.

Not that consensus candidature is necessarily bad in itself. No, it is not, so long it is not contrived. But even when it is not contrived it should never be the focus of political debate, in comparison to what a candidate can deliver.

It is indeed a reflection of how shallow our politics is that, barely a month and a half to the general elections, you search our newspapers in vain for discussions and debates on how the candidates propose to deal with these issues. Instead the reader is overwhelmed by discussions on how, at the federal level for example, candidates can secure the championship titles of the regions they come from and how they can the proceed from there to wrestle the national championship title.

Thus it is that today the No 1 topic of debate in our newspapers is how Generals Buhari and Obasanjo and Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, as the three leading presidential candidates, are not finding it easy to secure the unanimous support of their various regions or ethnic groups, as the candidates of the ANPP, PDP and APGA.

Those who engage in such debate ought to know it is indeed a waste of time for at least two reasons. First, it is a fact that no region or tribe in this country including possible the smallest ones, is a monolith, or has ever been one. The fact is that people of the same region or tribe may have different religions, different personal philosophies and interests, just like people of different regions or tribes may have the same religion, personal philosophies and interests. For this reason, it is pretty ambitious for any one person or group to claim that he or it can speak for his region, religion or tribe, all the time. Some of the times, possible, but certainly not all the time.

Second, not only isn’t any region or tribe in this country a monolith, it is not even desirable that they should be. Regional or tribal differences should not be cast in stone, otherwise it would be impossible to forge nation-states.

However, inspite of the fact that neither regional nor tribal monolithism is attainable or desirable, politicians continue to deceive themselves that they can, as part of a group or even single-handedly, speak for vast regions and huge nationalities. They conveniently ignore the fact even in the hey-day of strong regions and a weak centre during the First Republic, none of the regional premiers could say he defended the interests of the minorities in his region with as much vigor as he defended the overall interests of the major groups to which he belonged. If they could legitimately make such claim there would never have been the Willnick Commission which recommended special measures to protect minority interests ahead of our independence in 1960.

Of the three biggest tribes in the country, the Yorubas lay claim to being the most monolithic, on account of their low level of tolerance of dissention, if not of anything else. Yet inspite of this low level of intolerance, there is sufficient rejection of the dictat of the Yoruba Establishment to suggest that the characterization of Yoruba politics as monolithic is more image than substance.

Take the last governorship elections in all the six Yoruba states, for example. Even though all of them returned candidates of AD, as the alter-ego of Afenifere which claims to speak for all Yorubas, an average of 31% of the voters opted for PDP in those states despite the fact that it was painted as the party of the arch-enemy.

This rejection of the dictat of the Yoruba Establishment by a considerable number of voters was not restricted to the last election, but goes all the way back to the First Republic when NCNC remained a formidable party in the West inspite of Chief Awolowo’s superhuman domination of the region’s politics.

The significance of this point is obvious; if the Yoruba Establishment, with all its vice-like grip on Yoruba politics, cannot beat every Yorubaman into line, it is futile for Nigerians to continue to invest so much time and resources in trying to suppress dissent within their regions and tribes.

At a more personal level all the three leading presidential candidates will obviously spend their time and resources more usefully forging alliances across regions and tribes than in trying to square or squash dissent within their regions and tribes. The way they seem to focus on eliminating dissent, we may end up with the most divisive presidential election this country has ever seen.