The rationale was easy to understand: in a simple reversal of
roles in the past eight years, the national chairmanship position went to the
North while the presidential ticket, after eight years of Muhammadu Buhari,
would return to the South. There was a like-for-like microzoning arrangement
that saw office positions held by the South-South, South-West and South- East
swapped by the North-Central, North-West and North-East
respectively.
However, bent on claiming all the benefits, the scheming
Northern hegemons within the party are insisting on an open contest for the
ticket with a thinly-veiled ulterior motive of abusing their control of the
party to bend the race in favour of yet another Northerner, a situation that
would leave the South with nothing and see a 16-year-long Northern hegemony.
The signs are hard, if not impossible, to miss with Abubakar
Badaru of Jigawa and Senate President Ahmad Lawan from Yobe State, being
positioned as the party’s flag-bearer. Sources from within the party indicated
that at a meeting held by the Northern leaders with the APC Chairman in
attendance and presiding, it was proposed that these two aforementioned
individuals alongside Governors Zulum (Borno) and El-Rufai (Kaduna) should
purchase the presidential nomination and expression of interest forms, a
proposition that Zulum and El-Rufai declined. Also at the forefront of this
agenda is Governor Bagudu of Kebbi.
The excuse offered for the growing betrayal, according to inside
sources, was that the APC must act to counteract the PDP, the opposition party
that also looks poised to shatter its brittle unity by ignoring loud calls for
equitable power distribution within its own rank to favour the recycling of a
Northern candidate, Atiku Abubakar, for the 2023 contest.
Atiku’s emergence on the platform, the argument goes, would lock
the popular votes from the North in his favour and seal the APC’s defeat.
Tribal and religious affiliation matters more to the average Northerner than
party loyalty, they claim. But this simplistic, navel-gazing argument is not
only disingenuous, it is clearly unfounded.
The idea of a monolithic North ignores the multifarious interest
and demands of the North Central and large Christian population in states like
Taraba, Adamawa, Kaduna and equally sizeable in Gombe and Bauchi. In the South,
grave questions are being asked given the fractious state of affairs within the
general body polity.
If after eight years of wielding power, some in the North can
still not be persuaded to relinquish it to the other side in a multi-ethnic
union, what then is the point of the alliance – or the national union? To
exclusively cater to the interests of the North and reduce the South to
glorified courtiers?
Since 1960, the year of Nigeria’s independence, grumblings of
‘Northern dominance’ have cast a pall on Nigeria’s politics. Although
successive governments have sought to downplay the notion and manage the
resulting ethnic tension, the Buhari administration has failed spectacularly in
this regard.
With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, President Muhammadu Buhari
has made appointments and other political decisions that carried optical
problems and worsened anxiety down South, further complicating the position of
Southern leaders of the APC who face agitated questions from followers on
whether or not they have been fooled into an unprofitable merger.
To replace Buhari with another Northerner as the candidate of
the party is to effectively affirm the fears and portray the Southern
extraction as political fools. Such a candidate, in that circumstance, would be
impossible to sell beyond the North. And this reality exposes the fatal flaw in
the argument of those arguing for the retention of power in the North.
It is an argument that both take the Southern votes for granted
and exaggerate the swaying power of the ‘core North’ and its votes harvest –
precisely the sort of thinking that reduced President Buhari to a perpetual
failure with the misses of 2003, 2007 and 2011, before he eventually reached
out to the South and secured victory in 2015.
His previous failures and eventual success in 2015 when he
obtained the backing of the South underlined the glaring fact that no single
region can claim presidential victory without the active – and enthusiastic –
support of the other.
Former President Goodluck Jonathan, a Southerner, would also
learn this lesson in 2015 when, ignoring the agreed zoning arrangement, members
of his party turned on him and delivered the APC a historic victory as the
first party to unseat an incumbent since Nigeria’s return to democracy.
But beyond a costly lesson on the importance of honouring the
informal power-sharing arrangement of a complex nation of multiple cultures and
religions delicately glued together, the South’s courage and steadfastness in
halting Jonathan’s tenure extension bid to return power to the North in honour
of the agreement also shows why the excuse of the APC’s Northern hegemony is
untenable. If the South can persuade its voters and stand up to its own
president, there is no reason that should not be the case up North.
Furthermore, if the PDP does recycle Atiku, a tired warhorse
tainted by damaging accusations of corruption, the fallout would throw the
party in disarray and present the APC a powerful opportunity to contrast itself
with the opposition as a party sensitive to the country’s unity and the South’s
legitimate aspiration for power with the nomination of a Southern
candidate.
To do otherwise is to lose all the in-roads made in the other
regions besides the North and render futile the hard work of its South core to
portray the party as a truly national party, not a ‘special purpose vehicle’
chauffeured by megalomaniac Northern hegemons who are playing them (the
supposed Southern partners) for fools. In other words, the APC cannot count on
the South’s votes if it nominates a Northern candidate, and if President
Buhari’s experience is anything to go by, that is a sure path to defeat.
If the South rejects the APC and the PDP for perpetuating
Northern hegemony and invests it hopes elsewhere, causing an impasse in 2023,
what would that portend for the future of the country as a single and united
entity? Danger lies ahead, but it’s still within the power of the APC to draw
the country away from a perilous cliff.
*Mallam
Kazaure, President of Arewa Political Forum of Nigeria, is an Abuja-based
commentator on public issues
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