Buhari Should Be Concerned Over Senate President (Pt 1)

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My concern here, Your Excellency, is that in Nigeria, some politicians are more politicians than others. Apart from those who depend on their respective party structure to advance their political goals, others are a structure on their own. They have immense ‘war chests’ to attain any goals they have set to achieve without reliance on their political party. This was how Bola Tinubu kept Lagos state in the southwest from the grasp of Olusegun Obasanjo after the 2003 general elections.

My president-elect, you scared me when you expressed unconcern for who emerges as Senate president in your administration. It is, no doubt, a statesmanlike attitude to recognize independence of the legislative arm of government; nevertheless, even in advanced democracies, it is a normal incentive of the executive arm to lobby the legislature on matters in need of their cooperation despite their independence. It is to this fact that I am directing your attention. You are not skinned a lobbyist but it is an act you must learn as an elected president, in a democracy still taunted as nascent.

Your Excellency, I see the stability and focus of your administration tampered by your likely struggles with impeachment threats if you chose not to bother who should head the legislative arm of your administration. It is upon this reason and in the face of the drastic recovery mission you are confronted with that I made out to issue this unsolicited admonition. You have an onerous task to personally study the candidates thrown up to contest for the seat of the Senate president.

You must lobby against any politician possessing an unconventional political structure with immense resources to personally see his goals through, in spite of the position of his political party. Major in your consideration should be that such personality must not carry any moral or legal baggage into the race because this will deface your anti-corruption outlook, especially when it comes to equity: you must not allow any finger pointing against your administration in this regard. This is my dessert, served you as an ice-cream.

My first letter to you, my president-elect, was upon a sincere desire to see you get your policy direction right, and on issues of justice and national cohesion. But I cannot sit and watch you make a very vital error, which one of your predecessors, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, made during his first term in office. I will advise you to ask him to tell you his own story; peradventure you will see reasons with my submission in this letter.

I am aware that you have shown consistency in building your life and style around modesty and simplicity. I am also aware of how issues arising from your sincere efforts to see a better Nigeria in your first adventure as head of state between 1984 and 1985 have caused you pain, slander and near-damage to your hard-earned reputation. I wish to believe that, apart from been grateful to God and Nigerians for enabling your second coming as a leader over our country, I see you endeavouring to remedy the impression of some Nigerians that see you as stern. Believe me: you owe no Nigerian any apology for your service during that era. That time required such measures as you exerted.

I am very concerned that your desire to exercise care and caution in order to avoid an early mistake in the match to your inauguration as president is already making you shift unnecessary grounds. As president-elect, you should never say you can work with any leader(s) the National Assembly throws up. I agree that all members elected to serve in the Eighth Assembly are honourable and distinguished men in their rights. But believe me, few of them are more clever as politician than you are. My president-elect, I see you more as a studious democrat and not a politician.

Few returning members of the National Assembly are shrewd politicians who are essentially pretended democrats, and these can prove to be hard nuts to crack when you would need to crack nuts in your effort to move Nigeria forward if you mistakenly look the other way and allow such take positions that could stall some of your needed advance.

Let me give you an example of the direction my warning will take. Recently you received a delegation of the APC’s serving and elected governors, led by the indefatigable Owelle Rochas Anayo Okorocha, on courtesy visit to you at the Defense House in Abuja. During the visit, two issues were placed before you: recommendations from the states of who should form the list of your appointees to the federal executive council, and, secondly, a request for revenue bail-out to enable the states meet their present financial shortages. You outrightly refused both requests. I commend your courage and frankness.

I must confess that many ordinary Nigerians were encouraged by your reply to these demands. This is the caliber of man that you have built yourself to be: to say what you believe as you believe it. Nevertheless, your frankness and straight-to-the-point reply exposed you not only as a very determined leader, but also as a tactless, straight-forward ‘Nigerian’ politician. This is what ordinary Nigerians require from their leaders, but the political class will never see it like an ordinary man.

To them politics does not necessitate ‘permanent friendship’ but ‘permanent interest’. I realize how vulnerable your innocence and sincerity will set the people who think they ‘made’ you against you. Nevertheless, you should not believe that any politician made you, they all keyed into a divine providence that was waiting to happen.

Coming back to my illustration with the experience of Olusegun Obasanjo: you will recall your comic verbal exchange with the then-president during one of the National Council of State meetings, at a time you came down with a mild flu, during the 2002 ‘bird flu’ pandemic in China. The president had jokingly asked you if you had just returned from China, and you answered: “I have not been globetrotting, Your Excellency,” directly referring to his abandonment of governance at home and choosing to travel like “Ajala… all over the world”. He almost paid a dire price for leaving Atiku Abubakar in charge of governance, when, in 2003, he virtually knelt and begged him for his reelection.

What happened?

Atiku Abubakar, in the effort to entrench himself as the political leader of the PDP, cleverly warmed himself up to all the PDP governors in the country and cuddled governors of the opposition parties, buying off their allegiances to the leadership of the PDP. During the National Convention of the PDP in 2002 to elect its flag-bearer for the 2003 presidential race, it took a last-minute pitiable appeal by Obasanjo to Atiku Abubakar to save him from watching the emergence of Alex Ekwueme as the presidential candidate of the PDP. Subsequent events after this are known to Nigerians with astute political awareness.

Political influence of governors, erstwhile, serving or elected in the polity from that time has never been a matter any president took for granted. They consolidated their hold over the polity, and only the refusal of Chief Obasanjo to shift any ground for them during his second term lessened the gravity imposed by this new political power bloc. I recall how Chief Obasanjo strenuously tucked Orji Uzor Kalu into his mother’s apron and silenced him for the remaining part of his administration. Atiku Abubakar also paid his own price for being such temporary lord over his boss.

Obasanjo did no wrong in entrusting his powers to his vice president, it is a constitutional requirement to so do. But then, no president has tried that again: not even an ailing President Umar Musa Yar’adua upon his sick bed in Jeddah shared power with a brother ex-governor like him. Nigerian politicians, being who they are, require the ‘stick-and-carrot’ approach to governance.

So you are mistaken, my president-elect, to show no concern about who leads the National Assembly during your administration. Don’t be deceived, even the members-elect to the Eighth Assembly wish they could know your mind about their leadership. You must give them leadership here, my president-elect, especially over the newcomers, lest they are devoured by the returning ones of the nPDP and PDP breed.

I don’t know what led to the creation of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, but I can bet that Atiku Abubakar was more aware of this creation than was Olusegun Obasanjo. Let’s not forget that he started off as agGovernor-elect in that administration, and, being from ‘Shehu’s political school of thought’, he was seen in the PDP as ‘the leader’, a sort of a forerunner, and Obasanjo as a jobber.

So it was with naked power that Obasanjo bought back his honour as president, instituting the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), making a dare-blooded young police officer its inaugural chairman and setting him after all who opposed him. In this effort, not even Mallam Nasir El Rufai spared Atiku Abubakar, who was his benefactor.

Taking a look at the PDP today, please reminisce upon the G32 leaders who created and made the party the envy of others during the first part of the Fourth Republic, reminisce on what became of those frame-working leaders today: do they still have any voice in the party, or have they been made puppets?

Reminisce also upon the diabolic turns in the ‘no-love-lost’ relationships between every outgoing governor-godfather and their incoming governor-godson, and the present power rebasing of every serving PDP governor. These are all I have to showcase as reasons for my early warning to you, my president-elect.

I do not need to tell you that in the PDP, serving and erstwhile governors determine who gets what, who stays where, and who goes where. It is a recurring political pandemic. It is already a cancer in the political blood streams of all erstwhile, serving, and incoming governors of the PDP.

Let me repeat this for clarity: no governor of any opposition party has, before now, tended such power as the governors of the PDP tend over their president, party officials and their states. Opposition governors are known to follow after their leadership. This characteristic of followership by serving governors brought the APC this far.

It is not coincidental that members of the so-called nPDP association that joined the APC in late 2013 were led by Atiku Abubakar. I suppose you are not as naïve to believe that Doyin Okupe was daydreaming when he swore to be called a bastard if the APC survives one year.

This did not happen only because the nPDP entrants into the APC knew they had to stoop to conquer. The need to cooperate and enable the APC win at the centre was their main focus, no matter the sacrifice they would have to make to see it through. At least Chubuike Rotimi Amaechi made that clear to all recently, at his book, ‘Dynamics of Change: The Amaechi Years’, launch in Lagos.

Sir, it is now your responsibility as the leader of the APC to drum it into the overzealous brains of the members of the nPDP that they were never a party in the merger of the opposition parties, and that they joined in after the merger: this must be of cardinal note to the APC and its leaders when shifting grounds for members of the nPDP.

In all considerations within the party, it must be clear to the foremost members of the APC that the nPDP members are refugees in the APC, and in decision-making, the core merging parties must instill their kind of discipline to streamline activities and aspirations of the refugees amongst them. They must be made to line up with decisions of the merged opposition parties, not allow them dominate them in any way.

They should be given a choice, either to stay under rules or leave. After all, they have succeeded with joining to oust the PDP and have ‘the lesser devil': this is about ‘permanent interest,’ or you will regret any concession you make.

I have spoken at length, and this is what I am trying to point out to you, my President-elect: you must endeavour to focus more on all members of the originating opposition parties. Members of those parties have admirable political characteristics that identify them as consistent, dedicated and dependable. To have endured the painful neglect of participatory democracy for 16 years and never give in to the temptation of joining the PDP, or get drawn to their easy baits, as some have done, is worth rewarding.

Let me show you how the setting for your government has divinely played out itself.

Contributions to the merger:

Three political parties came into the merger that birthed the APC with their entire structure and organs: the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) that you founded and led; the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), ably led by His Excellency, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu; the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party (ANPP), led by His Excellency, Dr Ogbonaya Onu; and the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA), which came with a faction, but majorly, they came as the necessary bride of the APC to give it its national outlook. The APC was complete with this merger and never needed any other combination to make it thick and acceptable to Nigerians, who were already tired of the arrogance of the PDP.

In the current power-sharing equation, it is clear that you have taken the office of the president on behalf of the CPC. Your very dependable vice president-elect, Prof (Pastor) Oluyemi Osinbajo is of the ACN. I therefore cannot see the reason for you to close your eyes to the denial of the ANPP the opportunity clearly falling to it by allocating the seat of the Senate president to the party, and that of the Speaker of the House of Representative to the APGA.

I don’t intend to forget that the members of the nPDP also joined your party, but clearly not as a merging party, but as members of the PDP who were seeking refuge in the APC after it was registered. This is the major reason why it will be criminal of me to bring them in under equal terms with the others, when I have clearly illustrated how different the APGA is from the other three for bringing in a faction of itself.

It is therefore out of place to choose to reward a group of people, who, although being tested pillars of democracy, have continually demonstrated deviance to constituted party authorities and are known to be independent-minded. If a political party is supreme in a participatory democracy, then these men were somehow wrong in breaking up from their political party. You must watch their motives and their drives.

If the CPC and the ACN have been settled without any qualms, the ANPP and the APGA must follow suit according to their contributions to the merger. I am not attempting to sideline the nPDP, but I am drawing your attention, Your Excellency, to the fact that this breakaway group — not even a faction, because a court of competent jurisdiction refused to recognize them as such — from the PDP, known for their nature of mongering for power, should not be permitted in any way to use their money bags to wield influence over sound reasoning within the APC, especially anyone who has been a state governor under the flag of the PDP, in a way to undermine those who have been faithful to the cause of the opposition from 1999.

This is the first part of Mr Morgan’s message to Muhammadu Buhari; you may find part two here.

Ini Akpan MorganIni A. Morgan is a Port Harcourt-based architect, writer and public affairs analyst. He is married with children.