By Dalhatu Danzago,
Last week has been an interesting time in Nigerian politics. The Bola Tinubu government with a president who is away to France for the 8th time for various inexplicable reasons, appears to be coming to terms with the reality of our politics.
Tinubu’s media team has within the same week gone helter-skelter managing the fall-out of the accusations of violating the federal character provisions in the Constitution for appointing over 150 persons from the same ethnic group into key agencies of the government in the economic, legal and social sectors – by suggesting that all appointments were on merit.
It is not only the other five geopolitical zones that were unconstitutionally excluded from the distribution of key appointments in the Tinubu government.
The members of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), which was the largest single electoral bloc amongst the parties that merged into the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2013, has been virtually excluded from the leadership of the executive and legislative arms of government.
This has not only angered the defunct CPC leaders, but has infuriated the electorate that apparently gave Tinubu more votes than even his ancestral Southwest did in the 2023 election.
As soon as the Tinubu government settled into office, former President Muhammadu Buhari and his legacy came under deliberate attack for reasons that were initially unclear, but evident now.
Every hardship caused by the wrongheaded policies of the current administration, and their poor implementation and sequencing was being blamed on what was inherited from the Buhari administration.
Every incident of insecurity and the failure to prevent same was blamed on the Buhari administration.
A tendency to appease and even pay kidnappers and bandits in the North-West zone is reminiscent of the decision of a previous government to ignore Boko Haram’s territorial gains in the North-East at a time, as part of a strategy of vote suppression in zones that are perceived as unlikely to vote for the incumbent president in those days.
It is evident that the current government’s approach to solving security problems in the North-West combines denial, media propaganda and negotiating with bandits.
In the guise of ‘non-kinetic strategy’, kidnapping and banditry incidents have escalated in Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina, and Kaduna states as the bandits have been paid hugely in ransom monies that have then been used to acquire even more lethal weapons.
The states of the North- West were the most consistent electoral base of the defunct CPC and former President Buhari.
Some of the current administration’s top national security and economic policy officials appear to have hatred for Buhari and his legacy and did everything to rubbish him as soon they got into office.
It is on record that officials like Nuhu Ribadu and Wale Edun had attempted at various times to blame the fallout of the Tinubu government’s ill-timed fuel subsidy removal (without any thought of a social safety net) and the thoughtless floating of the Naira (without adequate foreign reserves to ensure exchange rate stability) on the Buhari administration that had prudently managed these for 8 years without causing harm to lives and livelihoods.
The combination of some of the reasons above seemed to have led to the decision by some former Buhari ministers like Rauf Aregbesola, Isa Ibrahim Pantami, Abubakar Malami, and Emeka Nwajiuba on the one hand, and other Buhari loyalists like Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir El-Rufai on the other, to reach out to other like minds to explore an eventual exit from the APC to another party.
This, apparently, created panic that the ‘used and dumped’ CPC bloc is about to be lost. The only known appointees of Tinubu that had ever been in the CPC – (Yusuf Tuggar and two special advisers) neither have the grass-root reach to prevent the imminent exodus of CPC faithful from the APC, nor possess the capacity to rebuild the bridges that seemed to have already been burnt.
These defunct CPC chieftains appear to be targeted- their phones, laptops and homes under round the clock surveillance for exercising their constitutional rights of association.
Some are being actively investigated with a view to intimidate them into silence and prevent them from exiting the APC. This, again, has not only angered the defunct CPC leaders but also infuriated the electorate that gave Tinubu more votes than even his ancestral Southwest gave him in the 2023 election.
All of a sudden, what we have seen in the last few weeks was affirmation that the ‘expired’ Buhari that supposedly caused all the problems of Nigeria that Tinubu is trying to solve is now the new messiah needed to preserve a seeming suffocated APC. The progressive governors’ forum first went appealing to Buhari to abridge the constitutional rights of free association and direct all defunct CPC members to remain in an APC that has not met in nearly two years, and cares little for the concerns of ordinary Nigerians.
The northern states governors’ forum, it is gathered, has also been directed to visit Buhari as well, and appeal for Northern unity behind the Tinubu administration.
And when former Vice President Atiku Abubakar paid a long-delayed visit to Buhari on Friday with former governors Achike Udenwa, Bindow Jibrilla, Gabriel Suswam, Nasir El-Rufai, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, and several former Ministers like Idris Umar (Gombe ), with Abubakar Malami and Professor Isa Ali Pantami, the APC leadership notably went into unmatched panic.
The response of the Villa was, it seems obvious, to compel the APC Chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje and his NWC to rush to Buhari and disturb his usually quiet Friday evening. Ganduje, who once referred to Buhari as “Habu na Habu” of the famous Mamman Shata song (of a drunk who invited people to his home for celebration and then scattered the event due excessive drunkenness) in 2022, now humbly seeks Buhari’s validation.
What the Tinubu government and the APC are doing is to mobilize those that the defunct CPC bloc refer to as the Black Sheep of the family to publicly create a sense of abiding faith in the Bola Tinubu leadership.
These Black Sheep will claim to speak for the defunct CPC bloc and its electorate. Those in the old CPC know them. They are doing this for their personal benefits- and not for the defunct CPC faithful. They are no longer CPC leaders, and they will never speak for us. Let them collect their benefits and appointments and join Tinubu and Ganduje. It is their choice.
Their bold usurpation and action will not only anger the defunct CPC leaders but will certainly infuriate the electorate that gave Tinubu more votes than even his ancestral Southwest gave him in the 2023 election.
We wish these Black Sheep all the luck in their ill-chosen path of betrayal of the defunct CPC, Northern Nigeria and the Nigerian people.
Dalhatu Danzago writes from Paris, France
ddanzago@yahoo.fr
+33 652 185 809 (WhatsApp only)
