This should have been written some five years ago but it was not yet time. Today is very appropriate, especially for purposes of not only argument but also of history. Any Nigerian can choose to deliberately or even innocently forget our history of only five years ago. But I will not.
Indeed, only lately, at a social gathering in Lagos, a senior colleague asked for my view on the lot of the South East zone on the ongoing struggle for political power in Nigeria. I told him my view was already formed and would be made public later, lest I be blamed for the misfortune or at least setback south-easterners already made for themselves since 2017. South East had the best chance to produce the President of Nigeria on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for obvious reasons. The party’s strongholds are mainly South East, South-South and scattered areas of North East. Somehow, South East couldn’t have had a better chance than the present political hustling. Finding South East so vulnerable, the PDP at its convention proceeded to somersault its regulations to ensure the South East was stranded not for now but also for the distant future.
The most correct account was given by Rivers State governor, Nyesom Wike, who accused fellow PDP southern governors of selling out to the North. Otherwise, what happened to those South East governors who came with 50 delegates but recorded a total of only 14 votes for their presidential hopeful, Senator Pius Anyim? Could this humiliation and loss of the South East have been avoided? More importantly, should President Muhammadu Buhari be blamed for this political misfortune of the South East zone? The past one year has recorded calls and demands that, for what they called purposes of fairness and justice, the South East should be allowed to produce the next President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Most irritatingly, most of these calls are from positions of persecution complex.
For a start, as part of efforts to ensure all sections of the country produced the President at one time or the other, the idea was most vociferously rejected, especially in the South East, on the ground that rotation or zoning of the presidency would create what the critics called “mediocrity.” Those were the days when former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan reigned and ruled in Aso Rock. How anybody could ever have thought that, after Obasanjo and Jonathan, a south-easterner would have followed was baffling. Also, it remains a joke to expect a southerner as President without zoning or rotation.
To worsen matters, former Commonwealth Secretary-General and Nigeria’s ex-External Affairs minister Emeka Anyaoku, at that very time went on record that “the international community would not be happy” at any idea of zoning or rotating the Nigerian presidency. International community my foot! Have the international community ever been up in arms over the situation in the most peaceful country in the world, Switzerland, where the presidency is ever rotated? What is the business of the international community in Nigeria’s effort to give a sense of belonging to all sections of the country? On the opposite side was Femi Adesina (yes, the same Femi Adesina) then editor of The Sun daily and now Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari, who joined me arguing in this column in total support for zoning/rotational presidency.
The plain truth was and is still that, without the special circumstances, both Obasanjo and Jonathan could never have become Presidents. Chief MKO Abiola, after winning the 1993 presidential election, died in detention and the consequent war of attrition between bellicose protesting NADECO and Nigeria’s powers that be, as well as the death of General Sani Abacha, forced a concession to South West to produce the next President, a situation in which Obasanjo was imposed on Yoruba by his fellow military officers. In Jonathan’s case, he had to succeed President Umaru Yar’Adua, who died in office. Nigeria cannot expect to face such tragic circumstances as a way of solving leadership succession problems. But did our fellow south-eastern citizens consider this?
In any case, in 2017, President Buhari made a move unprecedented in Nigeria’s political history to weaken or even scrap the seeming perpetual rule by only one section of the country. You may not like Buhari’s face but nobody can take it from him that he made the effort. Nigerians either did not take note or have forgotten Buhari’s act of statesmanship after only two years into his first term. In 2017, he sent the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha, to Governor Dave Umahi of Ebonyi State to announce to south-easterners that the Nigerian presidency would be zone to South East in 2023. Repeat, South East would be favoured to produce Nigeria’s President in 2023. Boss Mustapha not only delivered that message to Governor Umahi but did so at a public rally at Abakaliki, the state capital.
The then Ohanaeze president Nnia Nwodo, as widely reported by the media, instantly and completely rejected the Nigerian Presidency for South East in 2023 and nobody throughout South East ever countered Nwodo till now. Today, the very offer which the entire South East rejected in 2017 is what the same South East is longing for, demanding, threatening about, if not begging for. The inevitable question is: What has happened between 2017 and today in South East to make it so demanding to earn the Nigerian Presidency in 2023, a prize so contemptuously thrown back at Buhari’s face?
In rejecting Buhari’s offer of the presidency to South East in 2023, Ohanaeze president Nwodo, in his chat with the media in 2017, said South East preferred restructuring the country to Nigerian presidency. I then advised him in this column that, if the South East placed such premium on restructuring of the country, it (Ohanaeze) should jump at the offer of the Presidency from where it could then proceed to restructure Nigeria. That was how Buhari’s offer of the presidency to South East against 2023 was lost.
Another man, Dele Sobowale, in his column in the Sunday Vanguard newspaper, in more than three intermitent editions, argued the merit of South East for the Nigerian presidency, with reference to politics, history, economic acumen of the people, fairness and statistics, despite the rebuff of South East for Buhari’s offer. Fortunately, all of us involved are alive. President Buhari, Chief Anyaoku, Governor Umahi, SGF Boss Mustafa, Chief Nwodo, Femi Adesina, Dele Sobowale and myself.
Was President Buhari playing politics when he offered South East the Nigerian presidency against 2023? For purposes of convenient argument, that suspicion may be conceded, since South East never voted for him in 2015 and (he) might be playing the zone to vote for him in 2019. As a young boy growing up in Lagos in the 1950s, I voraciously read that compelling educationist/Daily Times columnist, Tai Solarin. Ever different from whatever might appear to be popular or common views, Tai once submitted that, if you are in trouble and the devil offers a helping hand, take it and survive. What did it matter if Buhari was playing politics, as long as he could land South East the presidency? Yes, he was playing politics when gave South East a new Niger bridge and repaired a few highways like Enugu-Port Harcourt or Enugu-Onitsha.
The entire Benue and Plateau states voted Buhari and APC in 2015. Owing to the unexplained and unending killings of innocent people in the two states, the people voted differently in 2019 without saying so. In fact, after luring and very warmly welcoming him to the two states, their leaders assured him of overwhelming votes and that he should not bother coming down from his car. Well, 2019 election results came and Buhari lost in both states. It was, therefore, wrong and tactless for South East to have publicly gone on record as rejecting the offer of the presidency against 2023. Better still, we must remind ourselves Buhari is already in history to have offered South East the Nigerian presidency and it was rejected.
Finally, the unusually high number of presidential aspirants should not surprise observers. Following the rejection of the offer of presidency by South East, there was a vacuum to be filled and the crowd applied.