Buhari, APC and 2023 Elections

  ENI-B BY ENIOLA BELLO

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has, again, postponed its national convention. The party’s Caretaker/Extra-ordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC) Monday released a schedule of activities for zonal congresses beginning from February 26 and ending with the national convention on March 26. It would appear the APC Caretaker Committee quickly released the schedule of activities to present the party’s governors, who met that Monday to discuss a leaked letter the CECPC wrote to INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission) fixing zonal congresses for March 26, thus overriding the February 26 initial date for the convention without their knowledge and input, a fait accompli.

The CECPC, by name and mandate when it was set up June 2020 following the removal of the Adams Oshiomhole-led National Working Committee (NWC) of the party, was charged with one task – organise a national convention in December 2020. The committee had, however, been more pre-occupied with planning other extra-ordinary (pun intended) activities except the party’s national convention. Its chairman, Yobe State Governor Mai Mala Buni has become a visitor to Damaturu, the state capital, having practically relocated to Abuja. After twice requesting, and getting extension, for the party’s caretaker committee from President Muhammadu Buhari, Buni had written INEC several times informing the electoral body of the party’s national convention date; Buni has caused the convention date to be rescheduled from a non-specified date in December 2020 to July 11, 2021, then December 2021, later February 26, 2022, and now March 26, 2022. After almost two years of extra-ordinarily running the APC into multiple crises across several states, the very situation it was set up to avert, the Buni-led committee couldn’t be bothered to ask for any further extension of time before again rescheduling the date for the national convention.

It is strange that despite the diversity in principles and ideologies and cultures and traditions of the legacy parties that dissolved into the APC at inception in February 2013, and despite the calibre of powerful politicians in its rank, the ruling party could be so easily run like a secret cult. Since its inauguration, the Buni committee has, sometimes with Buhari’s approval, and at other times dropping the president’s name, but almost always with stealth, piloted the party’s affairs sans its organs and constitution unchallenged. Other party leaders seem to behave like zombies in support of any, and every, proposal Buhari’s name is associated with, whether real or invented.

The latest of this is the adoption of consensus option, on Buhari’s prompting, for the (s)election of party executives at the March 26 national convention. Buhari anchored his preference for consensus on the peg of how the previous three NWC members of the party, respectively led by Bisi Akande, John Odigie Oyegun and Adams Oshiomhole, were (s)elected. There is the impression that the consensus option would necessarily create some semblance of peace in the party. The party’s short history does put a lie to that. If Akande’s NWC was no more than an interim executive at the merger of APC’s legacy parties, neither Oyegun’s nor Oshiomhole’s NWC was allowed to run out its tenure without acrimonious leadership change. What is self-evident is that the APC is managed in such a cult-like manner that no one dares to interrogate the president’s position before it is adopted as party decision. That very situation did not spring up by accident. It is a consequence of the way the merger was consummated, and the reason for it.

After three failed attempts to be president in 2003, 2007 and 2011 elections, Buhari had had enough and had promised not to offer himself in future elections. However, Bola Tinubu, who recently admitted he’s had a life-long ambition to be president, calculated that the quickest way to achieve this was to target the ever-constant Buhari’s support base of 12 million votes in each of the three aforesaid elections Buhari had lost. With his associates in ACN (Action Congress of Nigeria), Tinubu reopened the failed merger talks, before the 2011 elections, with Buhari’s Congress of Progressive Change (CPC). The rump of the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) led by Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu and Rochas Okorocha’s faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) joined the merger talks that eventually brought about the APC. The nPDP, a Bukola Saraki and Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi-driven breakaway faction of the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), joined the APC shortly after its formation. Tinubu’s preoccupation was to be on the party’s presidential ticket with Buhari as the candidate. Although he achieved the latter without the former, Tinubu committed his all – resources, political capital/structure, associates, stronghold, et al – to ensure Buhari emerged as the party’s candidate and won the 2015 election.

In all the processes leading to the merger, the party primary, and the 2015 election, Buhari was no more than a passenger. He brought nothing else to the table outside of his 12 million voting-army, the very support base that could not, on its own, make him president in three previous attempts. For Tinubu, supporting Buhari had two attractions. One, going by his antecedents in government once as military leader and much later as Chairman, Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), the perception was that Buhari was a little laid back, if not mentally lazy; since he could not possibly be a hands-on president on account of his well-known style, the vice president should naturally be in pole position to run the government. Tinubu had hoped to be that vice president. Two, Tinubu had looked forward to a payback from Buhari’s political camp in 2023 when he planned to pitch for the highest office. In more ways than one, Tinubu’s permutations have not exactly worked out. In planning and scheming and working to win the 2015 election for Buhari, Tinubu made several strategic miscalculations.

The miscalculations? The APC, at its formation, was no more than a forced union of legacy parties which had differing political traditions and parallel, if not conflicting, philosophies. Described by their competitors as strange bedfellows, each of the political tendencies making up the party, in the quest for domination and control, operate as Dr. Muiz Banire, a former legal adviser of the party has elegantly described it, “in silos or independent entities within the same enclave”. Although the APC was, in the 2015 election campaigns, sold as a progressive party, Buhari, the president it gave the nation, is a conservative whose philosophy and beliefs and general understanding of existential issues are to the far right. The APC campaigned with the ‘Change!’ slogan; Buhari is buried in traditional values, completely averse to change. Tinubu and some other top politicians from the south who gave Buhari the required national spread to win campaigned on key elements of the party’s manifestos; the president has since disowned the very issues the party used to market his candidacy, including perhaps the most critical – restructuring.

Having been begged to contest the 2015 presidential election and having made little or no contribution to emerge the party’s flagbearer except perhaps make himself available, Buhari in no time began to see himself as a special gift to Nigeria. With APC governors and other party leaders always waiting on him before taking any decision, the president indeed believed he was bigger than the party, if not the country. Nobody in the party dared to disagree with or have a different opinion from his. None of his predecessors since this democratic journey began in 1999 had the luck to be so slavishly venerated. Even the bearish and bullying President Olusegun Obasanjo continuously contended with his vice president, National Assembly leadership, governors and party leaders. Other founding fathers of the party, having been caught in the middle of nowhere on account of their support for Buhari, equally lost their voices. Buhari’s failings, particularly his inability to run an inclusive government in a multi-ethnic society, his mismanagement of the nation’s diversity, his divisive utterances, his ruinous economic policies, his lack of empathy, and his failure to curb kidnapping, terrorism and banditry have combined to undermine Tinubu’s traditional support base. And the support base of other southern political leaders in APC.

No matter. Buhari has been held up in the party like the Kabiyesi (one who could not be questioned) of the old Oyo Empire. A few examples will suffice. Those members of the nPDP who noisily disagreed with President Goodluck Jonathan before joining the APC and helping the party to victory in 2015, quickly returned to PDP when they realised that airing a different opinion from Buhari’s in the ruling party could cause their political perdition. In June 2020, when APC’s National Executive Council (NEC) met to decide the fate of Oshiomhole’s NWC, Buhari, working on the advice of the party’s, sorry the nation’s Attorney General Abubakar Malami, recommended the setting up of Buni’s CECPC. There was no debating, not even a pretence to one, the president’s suggestion, particularly the legal implications of the party burying its democratic organs to allow the caretaker committee to operate without hinderance. Buhari had spoken, was the general response of other major stakeholders in APC to the heist of the party’s internal democracy. And each time the committee needed more time for its mandate, all Buni needed was the president’s approval for those extensions. The impression thus created is that Buhari is the party’s sole administrator. Even now that the party has settled for consensus in (s)electing the next NWC members, party leaders are reading Buhari’s body language for who he has endorsed for the national chairmanship position.

Yet, it is debatable if Buhari did really care about whatever happened to the APC beyond his tenure’s terminal end in May 2023. Were he a committed party member, he would not have advised voters in Ogun State to vote according to their conscience in the 2019 governorship election, the same voters he urged to vote for him in the presidential contest. He would not have accepted Gov. Buni as caretaker committee chairman in violation of the party constitution barring members from holding executive positions in both government and the party at the same time. He wouldn’t have tolerated Boni’s numerous extensions of the time allotted the CECPC, nay the constant postponement of the national convention. In any case, with Buhari, in a Channels TV interview, asserting that the 2023 election is not his problem, there can be no guarantee that the concatenation of internal crises resulting from the struggle for power and control wouldn’t cause the party’s implosion.