The report that the last-ditch effort to resolve the persisting political differences between some governors in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the party’s presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, ended without a solution is a clear indication that the party will go into the election as a divided house. In one of the interventions here, this commentator mentioned that Atiku and his group seemed to have called the bluff of Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike’s group. It has become evident that Atiku is doing it his way.
Wike has thrown all he has into the battle. He has insisted that the party has not displayed any form of equity in giving out sensitive positions. It had made the North hold on to the most powerful positions in the party. The presidential candidate and the party chairman come from the same zone at a time when there is a clamour for the presidency to go to another zone. Governor Wike, who had his eye on the presidency, had worked for the exit of Uche Secondus as the party’s chairman before the party primaries. Observers did not know that the man had an agenda when he worked openly for Secondus to be booted out of the exalted position of chairman. It was in his pursuit of equity, should he emerge presidential candidate. It would have been glaringly lopsided for the presidential candidate and the party chairman to hail from the same state. Wike got Secondus out of the way but he did not know that Atiku was coming to torpedo the balancing act in the party.
Governors from the southern part, across party lines, had seemingly put their foot down that the presidency must rotate to the South after President Muhammadu Buhari would have done two terms thus exhausting his constitutional entitlement in the office. They did not know that rotation would suffer a terrible setback as orchestrated by those who were hell-bent on being President. Governor Aminu Tambuwal flew the kite when he said the important thing about power was to get it first. In his estimation, only people from his divide of the county had the numbers and support to get power at the centre.
But we need to back track to the emergence of Goodluck Jonathan as the presidential candidate of the PDP in 2015. All hell was let loose within the party. Some members from the northern part protested Jonathan’s move to remain in power. They masked their grouse under sundry complaints. They formed the nPDP, an acronym for New PDP and later moved into the opposition at that time. They said power should not remain in the South. Some of them said Jonathan made a commitment to do one tenure after the completion of the late Umaru Yar’Adua’s term. It did not matter that they could not prove that the former President committed to such agreement. His supporters continued to call for a proof of such agreement. There seemed to be none, given that no one produced any. The aggrieved people made a political move, which found a willing partnership in Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who organized a coalition of seeming strange bedfellows that became formidable enough to unseat a sitting President.
Those who wrested power from Jonathan have found themselves in the same situation they boxed Jonathan into in that 2015 election. Wike, Jonathan’s kinsman, who saw the seeming political travesty, is working hard to give them a taste of their own pill. The moral quagmire of having power remain in the same zone has become their albatross. They are hard put to explain how they want to commit the same political crime for which they worked against Jonathan. The difference, in this instance, is that Wike did not lead his group to leave the party. They have opted to fight from within rather than adopt the strategy of 2015 when the aggrieved people aligned with the opposition. They have opened a window for mending fences but there seems to be no hope of mending any fence when the entire wall has collapsed. There is no meeting point on the matter given that the party seems adamant in its insistence that the current chairman, Senator Iyorchia Ayu, who the aggrieved people want to step down for someone from the South, can only do so when Atiku wins. The aggrieved governors and their followers have said no deal, as they can only be pacified with Ayu’s removal. Some political pundits have opined that they would have made greater impact fighting from outside rather than from inside the party, where the structure seems to have been too ingrained to be uprooted in a jiffy. But they have a snag given that Nigeria’s political system endows so much powers on the party. They cannot join forces with other parties where they would become gold diggers, coming to reap where others have sown. Some of them have also been strategic about their moves. Governor Seyi Makinde, for instance, would rather give his energy to a second term bid and be taciturn about the matter than shout to the rooftops like his colleagues whose political stakes are minimal. Wike insists on fighting from inside because he considers those at the commanding heights of the party as renegades who ran away but have now returned to call the shots. Sometimes, life does not give people what they deserve. They have to fight for it, which is why some pundits wonder if the fight would not have yielded better fruits from outside.
Wike says any candidate who does not have Rivers, Lagos and Kano in his kitty might as well kiss the presidency goodbye. The implication is that his party must bend over backwards to get Rivers from his firm grip. Now that the party seems to have called his bluff, the situation presents like the conflict in a literary work waiting for the creative writer to surprise his reader with a jaw-dropping resolution. We watch with bated breath. The resolution cannot be anybody’s guess. It could bring down the roof on all warring parties.