During the build up to the 2022 presidential primary elections of the two major political parties, General Ibrahim Babangida made it clear that the era of elderly aspirants is gone and that he will prefer younger persons in Nigeria to take up the mantle of leadership. He specifically put the age of future presidential aspirants to be sixty or below. President Muhammadu Buhari, himself being an aged President, during the signing of the not too young to run Bill, pleaded with the younger generation to allow him to complete his second term in 2019 and appear in 2023 with his full support. The young men left him to be the sole aspirant in 2019 but were left in the cold in 2022, preparatory to 2023. At the end of the day, it was the younger men that were prevailed upon to step down for the oldest aspirant in PDP, Atiku Abubakar, and in the APC, it was the younger aspirants that were prevailed upon to step down for the oldest aspirant, Bola Tinubu.
This is abnormal and inexplicable except that it has become obvious that Nigeria has come under slavery and attack by the self-centered leadership style of this generation of leaders who have been around since 1966, so incompetent, inept, corrupt and extremely insatiable in terms of power grabbing. They have practically destroyed every single denominator that makes us great and proud as a country. We are a rich oil nation, yet we pay trillions of our money which we even borrowed to import refined oil to power our epileptic economy. We cannot even meet up our export quota of the crude oil because most of the crude oil harvested from the soil is being stolen. IMF has warned that our entire revenue will soon be used to service debts, while insecurity has become intractable. It has graduated from mere killings to massacres. Yet the leaders who were part of the supervision of the gradual liquidation of this great country are recycled and rewarded with presidential tickets of both parties in their old ages.
This is inspite the fact that President Buhari understood the disadvantaged nature of oldness compared to youthfulness in the management of a developing nation like Nigeria. He lamented that he wished he was younger when he assumed power in 2015. It was not long before his prediction came to pass as he spent substantial amount of time in UK hospital, away from Nigeria, most of his first term, during which a certain cabal hijacked his government and produced, on his behalf, what may end up being one of the worst performances in governance among the past leaders in history. This was a man, who was not reported sick even for one day when he was the military Head of State in his forties or even when he was in detention for almost three years in Nigeria. The two choices of both parties in the primaries are sojourners with some sophisticated medical personnel abroad as a result of nursing both known and unknown ailments.
Let us be clear, we don’t believe that any body should be too old or too young to run, but the myriad of problems bedevilling Nigeria this time requires an active mind and body to run. We do not have any of such choices from the two parties. Both candidates, Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu were around from 1992 during the ill fated transition programme of IBB. Bola Tinubu became a Senator while Atiku Abubakar contested for the President of Nigeria. That was 30 years ago. In 1999, both of them got elected as Governors in Lagos and Adamawa. Atiku was elevated to the position of Vice-President by President Obasanjo before he was sworn in as the Governor of Adamawa. They have been around politically since then and have remained actively relevant. Essentially both of them are contemporaries. Basically two sides of the same coin. The same allegation and quantum of corruption have been levelled against both of them. Nobody has ever been described with the kind of words in terms of corruption like Obasanjo described Atiku, his former Vice President. No documentary has ever been so explicit in portraying any person as corrupt as the lion of bourdilion corruption tape against Tinubu. These men strangely can be described as fortunate, just for lack of better word, because the more you castigate them, the more they appear to be waxing stronger. The same Obasanjo, who even called God to punish him, if he ever supports Atiku for President, was the same Obasanjo who became Chief campaigner for Atiku in 2019. All the people who were part of the lion of bourdilion corruption tape had been made to eat back their words in apologies to Tinubu and the man has even appropriated the slogan as his mantra with the erecting of lions in front of his bourdilion apartment. All the evil prophecies the commercial prophets in Nigeria make about these men have largely refused to come to pass. Well, now they have come head to head against each other, one thing is clear, one of them or two of them will fail to become President come 2023.
The abnormally also extends to the brutal assault of the principle of rotation and zoning meted out against the people of South-East in the emergence of the presidential candidates of the two political parties. The principle of rotation and zoning between North and South and among the six Geo-Political Zones was not only an understanding between the two sections and zones of Nigeria but also a constitutional requirement of the two political parties. The only surviving major political party that existed from 1999 till date, Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, built the party on the foundation of the resolution by party leaders “to conform with the principles of power shift and power sharing by rotating key political offices amongst the diverse peoples of the country”. The party vowed in Section 7(3)(c) of its Constitution to adhere “to the policy of the rotation and zoning of Party and Public elective offices in pursuance of the principle of equity, justice and fairness”. It was on this trajectory that the APC borrowed a leaf and mandated its National Working Committee, subject to the approval of the National Executive Committee, in Article 20(v), to make Rules and Regulations for the nomination of candidates for primary elections and “All such Rules, Regulations and Guidelines shall take into consideration and uphold the principle of Federal Character, gender balance, geo-political spread and rotation of offices, to as much as possible ensure balance within the constituency covered”.
None of the political parties conformed to these provisions of their Constitutions. A closer look at the specifics of the provisions reveals that there’s a difference between rotation and zoning. Both provisions provided for both rotation and zoning, confirming that both are different. Rotation is between North and South while zoning is among the six Geo-Political Zones. While PDP grievously offended both the rotation and zoning principle of its Constitution, having voted another Northerner to succeed President Buhari, a Northerner, who will complete his second term by 2023, APC egregiously offended the geo-political spread provision of its Constitution, having voted a person from the South-West, as candidate, when the South-West has produced both a President and Vice-President since 1999. According to Ogbonnaya Onu, who himself was a presidential aspirant in the APC primary and who stepped down for Olu Falae in 1998, to enable two South-West Sons, Obasanjo and Falae to compete for the post of President in 1999, in accordance with the zoning formula of 1999, where is the justice? This is certainly a season of abnormally and the two parties have presented terrible political choices for the people of South-East. If the South-East supports Atiku Abubakar, then it has accepted the narrative that they are second class citizens that are not qualified to contest for the position of the President, even in the party they formed, and worse still they have unwittingly supported the narrative that the only way to win an election free and fair in Nigeria is to field a northern candidate. This will destroy their political standing and that of the entire South, both now and in future, because even if they accept the position of the Vice-President, they may not be enabled to become President in PDP after the end of the regime of the Northern President. If they support the candidate of the APC, they will not even aspire to be Vice-President in 2023 because a Southern presidential candidate cannot pick another Southern vice presidential candidate to go into a general election. Season of injustice is really a season of abnormally.
The journey for this debacle for the South-East started with the PDP convention. The worst thing that can happen to a people is to put all their trust in a party that treats them as second class. Can you imagine being an eagle and laying eggs and putting all the eggs in one basket to be secured by a serpent. The serpent will speedily eat them up. The PDP serpent has eaten up the political eggs of the South-East in 2023 which of course the South-East shares in some blames for putting all their eggs in one basket in the first place. Immediately the PDP refused to zone its presidential ticket to South-East or even the entire South, we knew that it was only God that could make a person from the South-East to become the candidate from the APC. No doubt God is the God of justice but it is also God that states that whatsoever you sow, you reap. In other words, God hardly approves reaping where you did not sow, except in some miraculous circumstances. The question, after the humiliation of the South-East by the PDP, was that, if the party you have been giving 90 percent of your vote in presidential elections since 1999 did not consider you worthy to be zoned the presidential ticket in 2023, what moral right do you have to demand it from a party that you gave 5% of your votes in presidential election in 2015 and improved skeletically in 2019. The two Governors of APC in the South-East today came from defection and Supreme Court judgment, so APC has no firm political grip in the South-East. PDP humiliated the South-East so much that they lost confidence in themselves politically. None of the two PDP Governors from the South-East was bold enough to pick the presidential ticket and South-East delegates in the presidential election could not even vote for the aspirants from the South-East. May something like the PDP never ever be associated with the South-East forever in Jesus mighty name we pray. There’s no need for agonising when you can immediately start organising. The South-East must get down to the drawing board to strategise.