PERSPECTIVE

Ekwueme, a coup-monger?

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com 

Not surprisingly the acrimony that has trailed last month’s PDP presidential primary has gotten worse by the day. Some degree of acrimony had also trailed the presidential primary of ANPP, the main opposition party, but compared to PDP’s, it was like a storm in a tea cup, something which the party was apparently able to move quickly to contain. True, last week the supporters of one of the losers, Chief Rochas Okorocha, tried to disrupt the inauguration of the party’s new executive council at the party’s headquarters, Abuja, which was a sign that not all the dissatisfied contenders for the party’s presidential ticket had been assuaged. However, the demonstrations by Okorocha’s supporters was more drama than substance in the sense that they did not begin to compare with the ongoing litigation over the outcome of PDP’s primary, in the litigation’s potential for damaging, if not destroying, the party and even, possibly, derailing the general elections as a whole.

It should be obvious why the acrimony trailing the PDP primary has gotten worse. First, although it was peaceful, it was certainly neither free nor fair. It could not have been free when the ballot papers carried serial numbers and were issued serially to states in alphabetical order, thus negating the central democratic principle of the secrecy of the ballot. It could also not have been free because the deep and widespread rebellion against President Obasanjo’s re-nomination, which Vice-President Atiku Abubakar himself admitted to, obviously required desperate measures on the part of the presidency, including blackmail and bribery, to neutralize.

Similarly, the PDP primary could obviously not have been fair because of the 1000 plus delegate advantage which the president enjoyed through the blatantly partisan inclusion of all presidential appointees like ministers, ambassadors, board members and presidential assistants, as delegates. Such partisanship by party leadership was unprecedented in the country’s politics.

Second, not only was the primary neither free nor fair, the president’s penchant for going back on his word was bound to deepen rather than heal rifts. The president, for example, had reportedly given his word that, in return for support from the rebellious PDP governor, he would guarantee their own second term bids. No sooner, however, had the president got his own ticket than he reneged on his word by allowing the party leadership to revisit several of the governorship primaries.

It can, of course, be argued that the president was right to refrain from interfering with the independence of the party leadership inspite of his commitment. But then, he should never, in the first place, have given the commitment to do something he knew was wrong.

Because, of course, it was the wrong thing to do, to have kept his word would have been morally reprehensible. But then, to have gone back on it was equally dishonourable. The choice between propriety and honour was obviously a difficult one for the president but his apparent choice of propriety above honour was bound to cause resentment among the governors who would argue, with good reason, that there is, after all, supposed to be honour even among thieves.

Third, not only was the PDP primary neither free nor fair and not only was the president’s penchant for going back on his word bound to disrupt party harmony, the very act of the governors’ rebellion, as publicly admitted by Vice President Abubakar, was bound to have after-shocks. Speculations are rife that the president’s inner caucus strongly believes that the rebellion was actually engineered by the Vice-President himself in order to force Obasanjo to retain him on the party’s presidential ticket.

For a long time there had been mutual suspicion between the two as was obvious from their denial of any rifts in one breath and an admission of such rifts in the next. This suspicion has led to well-founded speculations that the Vice President will heed the calls from his own supporters to snatch the ticket from his boss. It would seem, however, that the vice-president had concluded that if he did so, he would invariably earn his boss’es eternal enemity which, in turn, was bound to cost him the elections since Obasanjo, as a bitter incumbent, was more likely than not to repay his side-kick in his own coin.

The speculations are that the belief among the president’s inner caucus that the vice-president engineered the governors’ rebellion in order to force Obasanjo’s hands, has made the president’s men even more suspicious of the vice-president and are merely waiting for the elections to return Obasanjo before they “deal” with the vice-president, by, among other things, making sure that the second time around he is no more than a figure-head vice-president and also by frustrating his presidential ambitions for 2007.

However, whether these speculations are true or not, and whether vice-president is aware of them or not, Chief Alex Ekwueme’s legal challenge of the outcome for the party’s primary, is more than enough to deepen the rifts within the party, partly because litigations tend to harden positions but mainly because of the way the party leadership have handed Ekwueme’s protest. 

Last week the party’s national chairman, Chief Audu Ogbeh, more or less called Ekwueme a coup-monger for going to court over his defeat in Obasanjo’s hands. Ogbeh, in a counter-affidavit he filed against Ekwueme on Obasanjo’s behalf, said any possible court injunction restraining Obasanjo from contesting the April 19 presidential election, would be a subtle invitation for the military to return to power.

While Ogbeh was labeling Ekwueme a coup-monger, Alhaji Ibrahim Mantu, the Senate Deputy President, and a PDP stalwart, was busy castigating Ekwueme as disgraceful and unsportsmanlike. Alhaji Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi, the PDP governor of Kaduna State, on his part, was even more dismissive than Mantu. If Ekwueme didn’t like the heat in kitchen, he said in effect, while receiving the UNDP presidential candidate, Major-General Ike Nwanchukwu, at Government House last week, the former vice-present was free to get out, instead of complaining.

What is obvious from all this is that, rather than seek accommodation with Ekwueme as a, if not the, founding father of PDP, the president’s men are truly in a combative mood. Obviously, they seem to believe that alienating Ekwueme and his supporters from the party cannot do any serious damage to Obasanjo’s chances at the polls.

Perhaps so. However, rounding up on a party’s father-figure the way Ogbeh and Company have rounded up on Ekwueme, can hardly foster the harmony and stability a party needs to command the kind of loyalty it needs to sustain itself in power with popular support rather than through blackmail and bribery. And of all the unfortunate diatribe against Ekwueme, the one likely to do the most damage to party loyalty was Makarfi’s.

Makarfi’s remarks were clearly an endorsement of the blatantly unprincipled manner in which leading politicians have fished for party platforms for the realization of their personal ambitions ahead of the next general elections. In a country where people take their politics seriously, politicians do not go jumping from one party to the other simply because they fail to win nominations for one elective office or the other. As politicians of conviction, they remain in their parties to fight what they see as injustice, come rain, come shine. 

Of course, Ekwueme’s injustice could be Ogbeh’s fair play but neither position is entirely objective. It is in order to determine what the objective position is that we have the courts. It is, therefore, strange for the party leadership to accuse Ekwueme of being a coup-monger, among other things, simply because he has chosen to seek legal redress. If there was a classic case of crying wolf where there was none, Ogbeh’s remarks was surely one. The dangerous thing about such cries is that they could become self-full filling.

The party leadership says Ekwueme was hasty in going to court since he had not exhausted the internal remedies available to him. But what adequate internal remedies can there be in a party whose leadership is prepared to invoke the constitutional immunity of the president against prosecution in a case to which such immunity has no bearing whatsoever?

I may be wrong, but the way I see it, Ekwueme is by no means saying Obasanjo has committed a criminal act by purportedly winning his party’s primary. Of course, rigging an election could be criminal, but the responsibility for the conduct of the party primary is that of the party leadership, not of the candidates. And most certainly the party leadership is not immune from prosecution.

Even then, it does not seem to me that Ekwueme is seeking for any one’s prosecution. All he seems to be saying is that last month’s PDP primary was not free and fair and as such it should be repeated. This is not the same thing as asking for anyone to be fired or sent to jail. At any rate, the party leadership had reacted to Ekwueme’s demand for repeating the primary by saying it would be a waste of time.

The party leadership may well be right, but the only way to know for sure is to ask the court’s to pronounce on the matter. It is truly a sad commentary on the quality of our politics that an attempt to seek for a legal redress in a matter as serious as the presidential ticket would be described as coup-mongering.