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“Reconciliation should be accompanied by justice, otherwise it will not last.”
—Coranzon Aquino
By Omoniyi Salaudeen
There is now the peace of the graveyard in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) following the organized coup d’état against its former National Chairman, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, and the subsequent emergence of the Deputy National Chairman (North), Senator Abubakar Kyari, as the acting chairman.
While the interregnum subsists, Kyari will be in charge of running the affairs of the party, most possibly as a placeholder, pending the time when another convention will be organised to elect a substantive chairman.
Already, an insinuation is rife that the immediate past governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Ganduje, might be dragged in to assume the position in an acting capacity, in the first instance, and then be confirmed later as substantive national chairman. Whatever the case may be, the task ahead of the would-be leader of the party is an enormous one. Topmost of it all is the challenge of forging unity among the aggrieved members.
Adamu’s purported resignation, which was announced during the week at an emergency NEC meeting was an anti-climax of the prolonged crisis of confidence that followed the presidential primary of the party.
Lately, there had been speculations about his imminent ouster, particularly watching some of his recent public comments, which seemed to have portrayed him as working at cross purposes with the powers that be. Tuesday’s impetuous change of baton, therefore, brought to an end the disquiet that had become a public issue over some months, though not without a rebuttal.
In politics, you cannot reinvent the wheel. You can only watch events and steer to get out of the turbulent winds. By doing otherwise, rocking the boat, Adamu committed a fundamental error of judgment, which he had lived with until he was pushed out of the office. By taking sides with a particular aspirant against other contenders in the run-up to the presidential primary of the APC, the embattled former governor of Nasarawa State shot himself in the leg. Being in a delicate position as chairman of the party, he should have been more circumspect. But he seemed to have forgotten the proverbial banana peel lying in waiting when he openly showed his partisanship in a highly competitive contest like the presidential primary, instead of maintaining a neutral position as a credible, mature, and unbiased umpire. By taking undue advantage of his closeness to the corridors of power dictating the shots, he made himself vulnerable to the proverbial banana peels. Fall he fell with a loud thud.
As some pundits have said, the treatment he got from the members of the NWC during the NEC meeting was the price he had to pay for the error of judgment he committed. In conventional power games, the ability to read and discern situations correctly is one of the basic tools of success. For there is no use throwing the charge only to find out that nobody is following. Adamu lost the confidence of the party bigwigs the day he unilaterally announced Senator Ahmad Lawan as the consensus candidate of the party to the chagrin of other stakeholders. At the time he attempted the botched imposition, he believed that he had the backing of former President Muhammadu Buhari only to realize later that he was on his own. Looking at him from afar, Buhari is cunning and obstinate. You’ve got to have a strong capacity to interpret his body language to be able to read him correctly. Events in the run-up to the last primary showed that Adamu lacked the power of inner light to see things through to escape the proverbial banana peel.
Consequently, he was literally left in the lurch when the Northern governors stormed the Aso Rock Villa to insist on a power shift to the South. What’s more! In response, the Daura-born-general just simply retorted: “I have no candidate.”
That is not all. Adamu must also be ruing the day he threatened to sanction Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the frontline presidential aspirate then that he wanted to stop, for the declaration of his popular Emilokan (It’s my turn) mantra in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, in the wake of the intrigues that characterized the conduct of the primary. At that event, Tinubu had claimed that Buhari prostrated for him, begging for his support in the run-up to the 2015 general elections, insisting that it was his turn to rule the country. Fuming with anger, swiftly and promptly, Adamu demanded a retraction of the alleged derogatory remark and threatened to apply punitive sanctions.
He had said: “His utterances are very insulting. It’s very unbecoming for a person of that standing to do what he did to the sitting President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the president produced by the votes of the APC.
“It is amazing how a fellow APC person would make that kind of comment in that kind of circumstances about the president. We take exception to this. It has shown that he does not show any appreciable level of respect for the office of Mr. President.
“Yes, we saw some part of a retraction, but that effort is inadequate. It is not sincere. It is not in-depth enough. It doesn’t wipe out the impression that that event has left in our minds.”
Beyond all this, there is yet a litany of other reasons the forces of change insisted that he must resign. These include the accusation of running a one-man show, the allegation of mismanagement of funds realized from sales of nomination forms, his unguided public statement about the leadership of the 10th National Assembly, as well as his inability to reconcile the warring factions across the structures of the party all over the country.
All said and done Adamu led campaign activities for the February 25, 2023 presidential election on the front line. Yet some still hold it against him that he was overtly opposed to Tinubu’s candidacy. Whatever is perceived to be his sins, whether forgiven or not, it is on record that he led the APC and its presidential candidate to victory. But again, in politics, there is always a payback time.
There is a whole lot of lesson to draw from this prolonged drama. One is for the new emerging leadership to learn to be neutral in all manners of circumstances for the overall peace of the party.
Part of the reason for the current burden of reconciliation facing the acting chairman is the inability of his predecessors to detach themselves from power contests among the party members.
APC has lost so much to the arbitress use of powers by the past leaders. For instance, while the tenure of Adam Oshiomhole lasted, the party lost the opportunity to field candidates in Zamfara and Rivers states in the 2019 general elections due to his alleged rabble-rousing. His immediate successor, Mai Mala Buni, now the governor of Yobe State, who worked in acting capacity also contributed his quota to the power play intrigues. There is a need to reverse the trend of reckless abuse of power in whatever guise.
It, therefore, behooves on the new leadership to ensure transparency, fairness, and accountability in the conduct of its affairs. It sends a bad signal to the populace anytime a ruling party is perceived to be deficient in the standard mode of behaviour that can serve as a leading light for the nation. In the next couple of months, people will watch to see the capacity of the APC to show the exemplary leadership the nation deserves at the critical juncture of its democratic journey. As they say, he who comes to equity must come with a clean hands.
Senator Abubakar Kyari, who was born into the family of the late Brigadier Abba Kyari, a former military administrator of North Central between 1967 and 1975, has no doubt acquired enough experience to serve as a guide for the new leadership. Having been in mainstream politics since the advent of the present democratic dispensation, he should know the antics, nuances, and intrigues of the power game and learn how to modulate things to restore stability back to the party. For so long, there has been an endless search for an elusive peace.
