Patrick Obahiagbon
On Thursday, June 25, 2020, the National Executive Council (NEC) of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) held in the bowel of Aso Rock Villa in Abuja. At the meeting, President Muhammadu Buhari, among other issues, recommended that the National Working Committee (NWC) be dissolved in the light of the many centrifugal forces pushing the party to several dangerous directions and precipices. That advice was carried and a caretaker committee was emplaced in its stead.
In the light of the chaotic and conflicted background leading up to the NEC meeting, foisted on the party by agents of revisionism and prebendalism, a red card for the NWC was not within my contemplation as an option; yet, who in that meeting could have suggested a contrary line of action to the President’s? You know, the President is the leader of the party and perhaps, largely, the only person that could be vouched for as neutral in the leadership intrigues and crisis. There were hidden masquerades everywhere.
To be fair to President Buhari, he had tried to rein in the revanchist and philistine forces whose conservative teeth were set on edges from day one by the reformist politics and policies by the enigmatic Comrade Adams Oshiomhole. As expected, the event has been interpreted in several perspectives. One, Senator Bola Tinubu and his rumoured presidential ambition have been dealt a seeming deathly blow. The assumption behind this reasoning is that the former party chairman, Comrade Oshiomhole, is a protégé of Tinubu.
Two, that for Adams Oshiomhole, it was a disastrous crash that may have possibly sent him on an impromptu retirement from politics. Indeed, Senator Tinubu and his tendencies within the APC may have suffered a temporary setback but I dare pontificate that the man is too strategic and resilient to be wasted by a single masterstroke. Those who have followed his politics will readily admit that his adversaries are merely celebrating a pyrrhic victory. In short, the Jagaban can take care of himself!
Those who think that Oshiomhole has been disgraced out of office, perhaps, are also not good students of party politics in the country. They do not understand the eggs a national party chairman has to walk on every day to carry out his assignments. This might not have been how the Comrade had scripted his egress as the chairman of APC, but human beings can only wish. The forces that pushed Oshiomhole out are still the same forces that have been forcing out chairmen of the ruling party since the return of democracy in 1999. Once a national chairman emerges in any of the ruling parties, be it APC or PDP, such a chairman must learn to become a willing tool in the hands of two distinct but very powerful forces.
On one side of this divide are the governors and on the other side is the leviathan silhouette embedded in the presidency which may not necessarily be the president. The longevity of any chairman in office is largely determined by his ability to maintain a delicate balance between these two forces. Once a sizable number of the governors agree with that leviathan presidential silhouette on their discomfiture with any particular chairman, he begins to skate on thin ice. In his two-term tenure as president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo dethroned three party chairmen- Solomon Lar, Barnabas Gemade and Audu Ogbeh.
There was no way Comrade Oshiomhole was not going to have a dialectical roforofo with entrenched machiavellian and mephistophelian political forces given his Oto Von Bismarck determination to stamp democratic authority in the running of party affairs and thus wean it from the asphyxiating and expansionist ozone of entrenched forces. We ought to understand that remaining as party chairman is not dependent on his good performance alone. It also depends humongously on how other stakeholders are willing to drop their egoistic and megalomaniacal habiliments for the greater interest of the party and the nation but a majority of the governors, (certainly not all of them) on their part, in my opinion, have become the greatest impedimenta since 1999, to any democratic consolidation in the land. Once elected, they assume the powers of an emperor, deciding who can become anything in their states.
State governors appoint new state party chairmen if the ones they met are not malleable; they put members of the state assembly in their chest pockets; nominate ministers and other federal appointees; hand-pick candidates for all the elective positions in their parties; and if the national chairman of their party objects, then they congregate at the coven of their Governors’ Forum to table his matter.
Oshiomhole, being a former governor and particularly because he had genuine and coruscating intentions to cleanse the Augean stables, had perhaps, thought that his sincerity of purpose would be a leverage for him in dealing with his former colleagues; but not exactly so because he was living ahead of his time and age. Entrenched forces of conservatism were not yet ready for a gadfly and revolutionary party administrator in his mould, bent and predilection. Bamanga Tukur, a former PDP national chairman and others have also had their story to tell even though for varied factors. What has been a common denominator has been the misreading of the viciousness of this new power centre in Nigerian politics. Tukur, as a former governor and an elder statesman must have said to himself, “surely they will respect me if not for anything, my age”. So, he tried to clip their wings and started with Governor Aliyu Wamakko of Sokoto State and the fire started.
Tukur forgot the unspoken code in the PDP, which is “don’t dare the governors”. In the PDP, as it were, if a governor complains that he wants to take your wife, the NWC will support him to take your wife and add your daughter as well. Turkur did not know this. Oshiomhole certainly knew but he was single-minded to undertake the rescue mission in the APC without caring whose ox was gored.
While for Tukur, it was their tragic flaw; not so for Oshiomhole whose gravitas, recusancy, capacity to take up the gauntlet with the spirit of a practised salamander set him apart. But for the President, it would have taken Armageddon to displace him from the top of Mount Olympus where he was already sizing up the oppositional elements like a victorious conquistador.
Hon. Obahiagbon writes from Benin City
