PEOPLE & POLITICS

Obasanjo and Buhari: Between the rock and a hard place

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

It’s been six weeks today since we last met on these pages. Since then the nation’s politics has changed so much it defies any precise description. For me personally, events during the period have gone quite contrary to my expectations. For one, I did not expect President Obasanjo to win the PDP presidential ticket for the second time just like I did not expect Major-General Muhammadu Buhari to win the ANPP ticket.

True, Obasanjo had incumbency and his famed tenacity going for him. He also had much of the media going for him, inspite of his dismal record as president. He had all these and more going for him. But then I thought he had done enough to alienate just about every section of this country, with the possible exception of his Yoruba kith and kin – even here the Afenifere had not shown much enthusiasm for the man – for most Nigerians to want four more years of him.

He had alienated the North by sacking their sons and daughters from the armed forces and the federal bureaucracy even before he had fully settled down on the presidential chair. He had tried to divide and ruin the North using mostly religion and a bit of tribalism and had succeeded in a way that Chief Obafemi Awolowo before him, never did, mainly because unlike Awo, Obasanjo commanded huge federal resources. His success in dividing and ruining the North would indeed have been 100 percent but for his piece of bad luck in massacaring Tivs in Zaki-Biam – the very Tivs who are at the heart of the Middle-Belt struggle for a separate identity from the North.

Above all, the president had shown a determination like no any Southern politician to permanently change the demography of this country by hook or crook so that the North can never again claim numerical superiority over the South, a superiority which has been a basis of its control of power at the centre, apart from the famed political sagacity of its leadership and its erstwhile control of the army.

Just like he had alienated the North, so also had he alienated the South-East by, among other things, doing little or nothing to rehabilitate the region’s poor infrastructure and by turning the Igbo leadership of the Senate into his political playground. The Igbo senators themselves probably deserved the president’s contempt for not standing up one for all and all for one, but the way the president relished in his apparent contempt for them, could hardly endear him to the Igbo leadership and followership alike.

As for the Southern minorities, the president could not have alienated himself more from them by the cat and mouse game he played with them over the issue of oil wealth, aka, resource control.

All of which left the president with support from only the Middle-Belt (thanks to his use of religion through the instrumentality of Christian leaders like Chief Solomon Lar, and ministers like Lt. General T.Y. Danjuma and Professor Jerry Gana) and from his native South-West. Even in these regions, support for him was not unqualified. In the Middle-Belt, Zaki-Biam, as we have pointed out, had done considerable damage to his success, while in the South-West the chances were indeed high that his effort at undermining Afenifere’s hold on Yoruba politics could backfire – and to some extent has indeed backfired.

Given all this and, of course, given his dismal record on the economic and corruption fronts, I thought the president was unlikely to overcome the odds against his second term bid, even though before Chief Alex Ekwueme, his principal rival in 1998, came along, I couldn’t think of a ready alternative. I thought his record was bad enough that it would not take much doing for some dark horse to dislodge him. As things turned out, the odds were even higher than I thought what with the near wholesale rebellion of the PDP governors against the president on the very day of the presidential primaries on January 3. In the end, however, the president defied the odds and clinched the ticket.

Clearly those of us who thought Obasanjo will not make it the second time, under-estimated the power of incumbency which the presidency deployed to the hilt using the carrot of monetary inducement and the big stick of blackmail if the allegations of Ekwueme, who is hardly given to speaking in vain, is to be believed. Obviously, we also over-estimated the capacity of those initially opposed to Obasanjo to withstand the presidential sticks and carrots.

Now just like I did not expect Obasanjo to clinch the PDP presidential ticket so also did I expect Major-General Muhammadu Buhari to lose his bid for ANPP’s ticket. Indeed, I had rated Buhari’s chances lower than Obasanjo’s for the obvious reasons that (1) he did not have the incumbency factor behind him, (2) seasoned civilian leaders of ANPP like Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi the Marafan Sokoto, were expressing serious objections to the domination of our politics by retired generals, (3) the general seemed incapable of living down his contempt for politics and politicians and (4) his image – as opposed to the substance – as an Islamic fundamentalist was unlikely to endear him to the non-Muslim politicians in his party.

However, as with Obasanjo, one was also proved wrong with Buhari – indeed even more wrong with Buhari, because the ANPP primary was freer and fairer than PDP’s. PDP did make a great show of transparency, and as Dr. Stanley Macebuh, one of Obasanjo’s senior special assistants has argued in his reply to Prince Tony Momoh’s criticism of the PDP primary, conventionally, primaries are invariably ratificatory. The problem with PDP’s transparency, however, was that it was more image than substance for the simple reason that the numbering of the ballot papers and their issuance serially vitiated the secrecy of the ballot. As for Macebuh’s argument that primaries are invariably ratificatory, the problem was that PDP’s case seem to have been an exception to the rule because Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, whose support for Obasanjo has since been universally acknowledged as the most critical factor in Obasanjo’s success, put it on record that he had not made up his mind whether to support his boss or not even on the very day of the primary. There is a lot of reason to suspect that delegates were surborned into voting for the Obasanjo-Atiku ticket rather than do so of their own free will.

In sharp contrast to PDP, there was little evidence of any arm-twisting at the ANPP convention. Shinkafi and Company who stepped down for Buhari, seemed to have done so on their own volition. Certainly Buhari was in no position to blackmail or bribe them. Again up to the time of the convention he was not exactly in the good books of the northern emirs who many southern newspapers said intervened on his behalf. Certainly he was not in the good books of the Emir of Gwandu, Alhaji Mustapha Jokolo, the third highest ranking Emir in the North and possibly the most influential emir at the moment. Nor was Buhari in the good books of many other influential Northern emirs like those of Kano, Zaria, Ilorin and the Etsu Nupe, all of whom seem to support Obasanjo even as some of them are critical of his record, especially as it concerns the North.

Much has been made of the attempt by the ANPP to arrive at a consensus candidate as evidence of arm-twisting. Indeed, the five leading contenders for the party’s ticket led by the very articulate John Nwodo Jnr. walked out of the convention because of the attempt at arriving at a consensus candidate which they said was aimed at imposing Buhari on the party. None of the boycotters, however, has denied the fact that they could not agree among themselves to present one Southern candidate to confront Buhari just like northern candidates agreed to step down for Buhari. None of them could also deny the fact that they were not denied entry into the race once they failed to agree on what to put forward among themselves. More important still, their own supporters did not follow them when they dramatically walked out of the convention.

My own suspicion is that Buhari emerged as ANPP candidate inspite of the party’s leadership which probably had other plans. Buhari may have emerged because he had struck the right cord with grassroots opposition to Obasanjo and the party leadership felt it was not in its own interest nor in that of the party to frustrate those grassroots feelings.

Now that the two most unlikely candidates have emerged to lead the two leading parties in the country into the next elections, the big question is what is the prospect of a free, fair and peaceful election for the country? In other words, what are the chances that the next elections will consolidate rather than undermine democracy in Nigeria?

This is a question I shall tackle next week, in sha Allah.

For now it can be said without any fear of contradiction that Nigerians will be faced in the next elections with one of the country’s hardest choices since independence in 1960.