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By Chinelo Obogo
After the committee set up by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to decide on zoning for the 2023 general elections announced that the presidential ticket has been thrown open, aspirants from the North and South intensified their campaign.
However, a former spokesperson of the Atiku Campaign Organisation in the 2019 presidential election, Umar Sani, said that many aspirants didn’t wait for the committee on zoning to conclude their deliberations before purchasing nomination forms because the party didn’t wait before selling forms and setting out a timetable.
He also dispelled fears that the party is not united and its discordant tunes will cost it the election, saying that the performance of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the past seven years has increased the PDP’s chances in the elections.
Why didn’t aspirants wait for the committee on zoning to be set up and conclude before they start picking nomination forms?
The party didn’t also wait before they started selling forms and brought out a timetable. No one would wait for the party because you don’t even know when the committee would bring out the report, so, if you’re waiting until the report is out, then NEC sits and decides on it, perhaps, your campaign would be late. This is the reason why I think that aspirants like Atiku decided to go ahead and however the zoning ends would now be a subject of an understanding within the party.
The jury out there is that PDP is not united and the discordant tunes will cost it the election. Do you agree with this assertion and do you think your party would go into the election in a united front?
What is happening is that each side is looking for how to be the president of Nigeria because it is only a good party with good chances that attracts such type of argument as to where the presidency should come to. If you go to other parties that are not very strong, no one is angling for where the presidency should go. But because the PDP is very strong and the APC has given us the opportunity by their poor performance, now everybody believes that with any good candidate, the PDP can win the election in 2023.
So, the point is that people are agitating that it should come to their side. The South East is saying that they have never had it before and they have been very loyal to the PDP, while the South South is also claiming that they only had it once through Goodluck Jonathan. The North is arguing that the PDP didn’t give them enough chance and they only had the presidency under Yar’Adua for about two years before the North fizzled. The committee has now thrown the contest open and everybody can go and no one would be left behind. If the committee and the NEC had said that it should go to the South, then there would have been a committee that would be set up to persuade the Northern candidates to step down and if they refuse to step down, because it is within the principles, the delegates would be sensitised that the thing has been zoned to the South, so they should vote for only Southern candidates.
What is the guarantee that if a candidate emerges, others won’t work against the person?
Let us say that hypothetically, Atiku wins the primaries, you heard from his speech during his declaration that he will run a transition government which means that he will do only one term just like Nelson Mandela. If by what Atiku said, it comes to pass, it means that the North would have had a reasonable share and it goes back to the South. The South would now look at it and micro zone it to wherever they want it to go. However, if by our party’s decision, it goes to the South, it is the South that would decide where it goes to.
The issue about Atiku selecting Peter Obi in 2019 generated furor because the South East governors felt that they needed to be consulted and taken along in the choice of who becomes vice president. But they just woke up one day and heard that Obi had been chosen and perhaps most of them were also ambitious of becoming VP because they assisted Atiku to win the primary at the Port Harcourt convention; so everyone had a sense of entitlement and if you don’t get that thing, you need to be given a reason why you didn’t get it. Even Ohanaeze Ndigbo felt that they should have been consulted to tell the PDP the pulse of the South East. However, I don’t see any correlation between that and what is likely to happen in 2023.
Do you have any apprehension about the fate of the PDP or fear that the issue of zoning will disintegrate the party?
There is a marked difference between the PDP and the APC. The VP has insinuated that he will declare very soon, Bola Tinubu has been very insistent that he wants to be president and there are quite a number of people from the South who have said they want to be president in the APC and the party has zoned it to the South. If you listen to what Tinubu has said in the past, he issued very subtle threats when he said he is ready to fight dirty. I believe that if APC doesn’t give him the ticket, he is likely to move to another party. If these types of statements are coming from Tinubu, it means that there could be an implosion at the end of the day because he is a key leader of the party and that is a minus. More importantly, there are some pockets of problems which have not been resolved in APC. For instance, the Shekarau and Ganduje issue in Kano with the state executive and this is a problem. There are alignments and realignments and people are making contacts across board, so whether Buhari makes a choice or not does not make it easy for them. In fact, it makes it even more difficult, because whoever he choses will not be acceptable by other people. Most of the presidential aspirants from the North are those that orchestrated the nPDP that liaised with the APC to bring about the PDP’s defeat. At the time, the likes of Atiku, Kwankwaso, Tambuwal and others opposed former President Jonathan because according to them, it was the turn of the North to rule. They helped President Buhari come to power in 2015 and by 2023, it would have been eight years of having a president from the North. Why are these same aspirants who later returned to PDP now still insisting that the party should zone the presidency to the North?
Politics is about interests. Someone can leave a party and come back and add value to the party. It is the value that you add that makes you important. Atiku was part of those that left but he came back and won the primaries in 2019, so no one raised any eyebrows about why he said Jonathan should not contest because it is the turn of the North. The issues now are not even about whether it is the turn of the North or not; the issues are that everyone wants to get it for his own region. In the PDP, all the zones in the country, except the South West are contesting. Each person comes with his own argument. When they were saying that it was the turn of the North, what they were invariably saying was that they want to contest and they should be allowed the benefit of contesting. Look at all of them, apart from Wamakko and Murtala Nyako, all the people that left at the time are all contesting. They are perpetual contestants, so what they are saying is that it they wanted to be given the oppourtinity to contest and if Jonathan who was an incumbent was contesting, it would be difficult to upstage him.
