BY the time you read this, there will be three days until the presidential and National Assembly elections. By Tuesday, the 28th, the All Progressives Congress would be involved in damage assessment. The result of the on-going civil war would show in votes, hopes, and regrets. It would be the responsibility of Nigerian voters to pass judgement on the party’s performance, but party leaders, managers, beneficiaries, stalwarts, and others whose political careers are entirely dependent on the verdict of the voters would be remembered as the people who set the barn on fire on the eve of the feast.
There are few innocents in this, unless they are buried deep in the mountains of grievances and high-stakes maneouvres. A party that was entitled to assume a fairly good chance of succeeding President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration despite the gaping holes in the inheritance is left to scramble for crumbs from fights over its very foundations.
If the APC wins the presidential election, it will almost entirely be due to the opposition’s flaws and failures, rather than its credible performance in the campaigns. Its candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, has run the best campaign money can buy. If he does not become president, it will be entirely to the credit of the most damaging unscrambling of a party that had always been built on the ego and whims of one person: Buhari. Tinubu was the second half of a contraption meant to capture power and make Buhari president. The moment that goal was achieved, his portion of influence in that contraption shrank to the size of the designs of the other owner. Buhari became APC, which is now managed by other beneficiaries and opportunists who pushed Tinubu out today and opened a small door for him the next day. He did pick up some of the spoils of the victory of 2015, including a rickety understanding that he would succeed Buhari as president. A deal to treat the leadership of the country like a relay baton, between two people defined and bound only by a finely-honed ego and personal ambition waited for time and the antics of palace fixers to be tested.
It has been a long race, in which many spectators, officials, and managers joined at will. The rules were changed several times, with the exception of the one that kept Buhari ahead so that other race participants could benefit from being left to their own devices. It was good enough for an increasingly smaller circle, except for Tinubu, who now finds that he has to fight for space among many others who have also assumed roles as kingmakers or powerful courtiers. It got worse for Tinubu when he found out that there was a scramble for his position as anointed successor.
He must have remembered Buhari’s borrowed phrase from his swearing-in ceremony, in which he warned that he owed no one a debt and was available to everyone. Many politicians would have walked away, murmuring treachery and betrayal. Tinubu is not the old fighter he once was. Ego and ambition that matched Buhari’s reinforced a strong sense of indignation, and he threw everything into a fight for what he believed was his, but was about to be snatched by an assortment of all-comers.
It was an expensive and bitter battle, made more difficult by the appearance of hostility toward Tinubu’s access to the ticket from Buhari. If Tinubu felt bitter that he was reduced to groveling and deal-making with APC governors from the North, many of whom would not have answered his greeting a few months earlier, no one would have blamed him. Tinubu must have realised by that point that Buhari was APC and APC was Buhari. He then had to fall back on a few Northern governors who had learned the art of twisting arms from Buhari. They made their deal, went in, killed the notion of an anointed Northern candidate in Buhari’s grasp, and made the ground a little more level for Tinubu. It was a key bend in a long marathon.
The nation watched a party in all its political disarray show the power of a few political fixers and tremendous wealth, which bought power. Tinubu emerged from a bruising selection process and ran into a storm over his choice of a Muslim as his running mate. The distinction between political correctness, principled stubbornness, and risky foolhardiness was lost in his decision to run with a Muslim in a country that had turned faith into an expensive political commodity.
Tinubu lost many friends and gained only a few over his choice of a Muslim running mate. Large sections of the targeted Muslim voters were not impressed. The Christian community was divided between those who saw his choice as a supreme act of hostility, and others who saw it as a political risk they could live with. By the time Tinubu’s expensive campaign to succeed Buhari left port, the impression of a party that had no respect for loyalty or the sensitivities of the population was spreading faster than insecurity under Buhari. It was already burdened by the empty legacy of the party’s administration under Buhari. That meant it had to begin below ground zero. To denounce the record of its own sitting president, who was at best indifferent to its success at that stage, was dangerous. To whitewash it and attempt to sell it to a nation that knew a lot better was to take a very poor risk.
Tinubu had to run on his own steam and maneouvre between huge obstacles. He was running for the first time for the presidency against an experienced PDP candidate who just beat Buhari’s record by running for the fifth time. The North was not going to be an easy ride with Atiku’s presence there. His own primary constituency in the South-West was going to take some effort to rally behind him. Labour Party’s Peter Obi would eat deeply among offended Christian communities in the North, while its barricades in the South-East would keep him out almost entirely. The South is up for grabs for all three, so he could not expect too much there. The appearance of some health limitations, whether real or exaggerated, has not helped his campaign to provide a strong leader who will pull the country out of its current mess. The North is at best ambivalent toward him.
Still, it would have been wrong to write off Tinubu’s chances if the on-going civil war in his party, which is compounding the misery of most Nigerians, did not eat deeply into the sympathies of Nigerians for his party. The circumstances and events triggered by the implementation of the Naira redesign policy are a cruel turn of the knife at the back of the Tinubu project. Those who believe the rug has been pulled out from under Tinubu’s feet will not be labeled as conspiracy theorists if the timing, process, and high-stakes actions of the president, key appointees, and governors cannot be proven to be random coincidences.
It will be difficult for Tinubu’s campaign to avoid being smeared by a president who ignores the Supreme Court, a CBN governor who appears to live in his own world with only Buhari’s photo on the wall, APC governors treating the Constitution and the president with disdain, a distressed nation groaning under additional burdens, and an election that is imminent. It appears that Tinubu himself has received the legacy of the party he helped form: a political contrivance built around the ambition of only one man. He did inherit Buhari, but it will be a cruel trick if it turns out to be an empty inheritance.
