If Bamanga Tukur sinks, so will President Jonathan
As good politicians, PDP Governors who are toying with the idea of a bloody fight with Jonathan for the control of the party should, in their own interest, have a re-think.
A thinker, Bhaghwad Gita wrote that there are three gates to self-destructive hell: lust, anger and greed.
To say that the elected governors of the
ruling party on one hand, and the President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan and
the Chairman of the most successful political party in independent
Nigeria’s history on the other hand are right now knocking on the door
of self-destruction is to make an understatement. Any man who fails to
overcome greed and desires and pursues them as blindly as we are
witnessing with our political leaders will bring ruin not only upon
himself but on the country at large.
“The fire in the mountain” or the “civil
war in Africa’s biggest party, PDP” as the Nation newspaper on
Monday called it may have had its seed sown in injustice. The failure to
give justice is an invitation to anarchy. Here, we have a party which
leadership is unafraid of authority including and in particular the
courts of law, which is a sure recipe for anarchy.
But the party’s biggest undoing as we
are witnessing today, is the scramble for offices in the 2015 elections,
which has pitted the PDP state governors against an ambitious
President. In 2015 or shortly after, the PDP will be graduating no less
than seventeen (17) governors who have completed two terms of eight
years. Those of them from the North, namely, Sule Lamido of Jigawa, Isa
Yuguda of Bauchi, Dr. Babangida Aliyu of Niger and Adamawa’s “Baba mai
Mangoro,” Murtala Nyako are currently being mentioned as possible
candidates in that election.
To achieve their dream, one of two
things must happen: either that the sitting President, Dr. Jonathan does
the right thing by staying out of the race, to save the party and
nation of unnecessary crisis of political domination or they take away
the ruling party from him, in which case he does not have a platform on
which to contest. From every indication, the latter of the two options,
which is to chase him out of the party by seizing its control, is what
they seem determined to do.
If the PDP Governors succeed in taking
away the party from the President at this time, it will not be the first
time they will be doing that. In fact, as far as the PDP is concerned,
its body and soul have been with the governors since the late Umaru
Yar’Adua accidentally became President. When he unexpectedly became the
President and leader of the party, the greenhorn from Katsina Government
House didn’t give a damn about the party, especially in regard to its
funding. At some point, there were many who thought he harboured a
utopian aspiration of liquidating the PDP and replacing it with another
party with a radical or left-leaning aspiration. Power hates a vacuum
and based on this, the governors moved in with their money and seized
the party by funding all of its activities.
Before this time, the PDP had been
controlled from the Presidential Villa. Under Obasanjo, he first
delegated its management and control to Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
There was a good reason for this. Obasanjo came into office for the
second time as a leader-statesman who, it was wrongly assumed had the
midas touch to right the country’s wrongs. He himself pretended that he
was above politics. This was before he became enchanted with fascism and
yearned to be seen as an all-powerful, charismatic leader before whom
party members and anyone else must bow. So he began by divesting Atiku
of control of the party and taking over first through surrogates and
later, directly by himself. He enforced order by deregistering members,
issuing threats, thuggery, loss of office, assets forfeiture and jail
terms for the recalcitrant some.
With election for the office of
President less than three years ahead in 2015, and with Mr. Jonathan
himself making every move towards that, it is not out of place to take
it that he will borrow pages from Obasanjo, the author of the party’s
Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Mr. Jonathan may be a bad President
or a clueless one as it has become fashionable to say, but nobody should
ask him whether he has the will and the dynamism to pursue power which
one can say is principally the only thing his presidency is all about.
To that extent, it would be foolish to
write him off or assume that he, President Jonathan will not be able to
take opportunistic, harsh decisions and actions against opponents in
order to make political gains. Already, the Governor of Jigawa state,
Sule Lamido has been put on notice by the EFCC’s arrest of his son.
As good politicians, PDP Governors who
are toying with the idea of a bloody fight with Jonathan for the control
of the party should, in their own interest, have a re-think. A good
politician should be able to make adjustments without being handicapped
by ego. At present, the President seems well disposed to Bamanga Tukur
as PDP Chairman and may be prepared to swim or sink with him. This is
easy to understand, considering that it was the President who in the
first place brought Tukur against the wishes of the governors and the
electorate. In power calculus, his own strategists may have convinced
him the if he allowed Tukur to go down at this time, the next thing the
insatiable governors will do is to chance him by asking for his head.
From all of the above, it is clear that
both the President and the Chairman are on the one hand and the
Governors on the other have hard, personal political choices to make.
This is not about Nigeria or the common man. It is a titanic power
tussle between two powerful forces and it is difficult at this time to
predict who wins