It has become obvious that the feud between Atiku Abubaker and Nyesom Wike emanating from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential primary is a tough nut to crack. Both men have fought tough political battles in the past. They are not new to such battles. Wike has thrown his all in this fight, but it has become evident that Akiku and the party hierarchy may be willing to call his bluff. Can they? Wike’s major grouse is that Atiku has muscled the party to jettison zoning, which had taken root in the party since inception in 1998. The party, under the formative eyes of the late Alex Ekwueme and others who had gone through the political evolution of the country at critical curves and knew where the mines were laid, did its best to move away from the mines lest they explode. Zoning thus became the soothing balm to douse the often trumped complaint of shutting out groups of people from the political process.
Founders of the party split the nation into six zones and ensured that each zone got one of the most prominent political and party positions. That was the testing ground of the six geo-political zones stirred during one of the many conferences whose outcomes never saw the light of day. The PDP split the presidency, Senate president, Speaker, party chairman and Secretary to the Government or so among the zones. The scheme worked well when Olusegun Obasanjo blazed the trail in 1999 as President. The political elders in the land knew that the presidency should go to the southern part because equity demanded it. The only snag was that they literally handpicked who they wanted, and worked him into office. But the critical thing was that they knew that zoning, although not captured in the Constitution, was the equitable thing to do under the peculiar Nigerian circumstance.
The underlying scheme to make equity the bedrock has a tendency to douse tension. The PDP had continually tried to be equitable in the distribution of power. It was the major reason some of its members defected to the ruling party and conspired, at it appeared, to get former President Goodluck Jonathan out of office. They thought the allure of power had made him want to disrupt the equity that held sway in the party. They thought power at the centre should rotate to the North, but Jonathan’s supporters held that the former President was a product of providence in taking two years of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s tenure, given that he later passed away. Jonathan’s traducers insisted that allowing him do another tenure would make him the longest serving President in Nigeria and consign the party’s rotation template to the backwaters. They conspired and got him out such that even party members from the North stayed back in the party and still worked for the opposition.
This is the underlying current behind Wike’s fight. But, like most politicians, he has masked a personal political interest, to which he is entitled, with an altruistic fight. First, he worked for the removal of the immediate past party chairman, Uche Secondus, in order to clear the way for his presidential ambition. He worked hard to shatter the party’s move to micro zone the presidency to the South-East, in accordance with the equitability principle, and the zone’s loyalty and ardent support for the party. He did not remember that angling for the top job was tantamount to taking over from his kinsman, given that Jonathan was the last person from the South to be in that exalted office. He took over from Rotimi Amaechi as governor of his state in spite of both men coming from same zone.
Atiku’s emergence as candidate split the party down the middle because the move placed ambition beyond equity. His emergence as candidate and election, if that happens, would mean taking over from his kinsman, an outright slaughter of equity on the altar of ambition. When Obasanjo stated that politicians could set the nation on fire, he probably meant such moves. Atiku seems to have seen the presidency of Nigeria like an entitlement, a mission that must be accomplished at all costs. It would seem like his biggest political battle, yet it is a typical case of damning the consequences. What would be the nation’s mood in the imaginary scenario that, on completion of two terms as President, a Nyesom Wike hands over to a Rotimi Amaechi, irrespective of the party? That is what the Atiku presidency would represent. One part of the nation would have lit up like a raging flame, yet Atiku and his party give no thought to this because their leader must be President.
But it also ironic that southern governors made the famous Asaba Declaration, insisting on a southern President, come 2023, only for the man who read the declaration to grab the offer of running mate with both hands. What other game or profession can be so full of deceit? Integrity is a scarce commodity in the nation’s political terrain. The ruling party tried to be equitable but cut it midstream when it relegated religion to the dustbin, insisting it had a winning strategy in presenting two people of the same faith on one ticket. What strategy would jettison religion in a country where even those who came to power through the barrel of the gun did the balancing act? It was the late Gen. Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo in 1976, Ibrahim Babangida and Ebitu Ukiwe, later Augustus Aikhomu, in 1985, but the politicians of 2022 think nothing of it. The strategy actually sought to curry a zone and a religion. Atiku’s ambition negates his unification agenda. The real unification would manifest in a less hypocritical outlook, if he had buried his ambition at the grave of the nation’s unity.