By Jide Oluwajuyitan
Loyalty is political party’s highest badge of honour. Therefore parties hardly invest in those with shifting loyalty. Of course the party oligarchy made up investors, former office holders, current office holders, also have obligations to party members. What therefore sustains political party is members’ trust that their leader will always do the right thing.
If APC has in recent months become an irresistible refuge for PDP and Labour Party elected members trying to escape from what President Bola Tinubu describes as a sinking ship without life jacket, it is precisely that they found trust in APC and its leadership which unfortunately was absent in PDP during their 16 years of war of attrition, called family wars over the sharing of our national resources. Although President Tinubu had said as a democrat, he was not expected to reject anyone trying to escape from a sinking ship, I am sure he must have today become overwhelmed by what seems to have become a tsunami.
The irony is that APC is an amalgam of strange bedfellows made up ACN with progressive world outlook, Muhammadu Buhari’s ultraconservative CPC, a faction of ANPP and APGA joined by a faction of PDP led by Atiku Abubakar and a few PDP governors bent on bringing down their party over the sharing of proceeds of fuel subsidy scam. In fact, leading members of PDP including the late Doyin Okupe, President Obasanjo’s erstwhile attack dog, swore APC would implode after three months. Rather, the party has gone on to uproot PDP that had boasted to govern for 60 years, from power in 2015 and defeated it round and square in a keenly contested 2023 election because of the usual greed of leading light of the party which led to its splintering into three factions on the eve of what Obasanjo would have described in his days as ‘do or die election’.
But if it is going to be of any relief to PDP, they must be told that what stood out for APC was a group of loyal party members led by Bola Tinubu who understands the role of political party as modernization agent in the 20th century. Indeed this group of loyal party men and women did not include the late President Buhari, Tinubu’s collaborator during the 2013 APC formation. Buhari neither loved politicians neither did he see political party beyond a tool for attaining political power.
Tinubu as APC leader was never discouraged by internal betrayals and party intrigues. He remained a committed party man even after Nasir El Rufai and some PDP stalwarts, who, Buhari’s wife claimed had no idea about APC manifesto, prevented an access to an ‘un-electable’ Buhari he carried on his back around the country, he remained a committed party man as against NCNC and NPP of first and second republics who for similar reason pupped down their coalition.
As a loyal party man, he was on hand to dance around Nigeria with Adam Oshiomhole for Buhari’s re-election. He remained steadfast and worked for Burari’s re-election. But not long after this, betrayal came from his southwest serving and former governors he had invested heavily on. Driven by ambition, they bought the dummy sold by Buhari’s Abuja loyal gatekeepers of automatic presidential ticket once their principal was out of the way. They soon joined hands with their principal’s potential rivals, Owelle Rochas Okorocha, Rotimi Amaechi and his political foes including El Rufai and Governor Boni, to illegally remove Oshiomhole as APC chairman thereby preventing their principal’s access to a party in which he was by far the greatest investor.
If President Tinubu took risk to remove the fuel subsidy scam which allowed criminals in shining suits to rape Nigeria using NUPENG and PENGASSON to inflict suffering and untold hardship on Nigerians, facts available to his predecessors who did not have the courage to rescue Nigeria, it was because Tinubu has his party behind him.
If he frontally confronted the bank owners, principal owners of society and Godwin Emefiele their CBN governor-collaborator and others who became billionaires overnight as a result of foreign exchange round tripping, it was because he was sure his party would shield him from dangerous sharks.
If he dared states and LGAs to whom much resources had been deployed to do more for their people at the grassroots level, it was because he knew his party has faith in him as an independent arbiter when it comes to the sharing of resources.
Governor Peter Mba of Enugu’s principal reason for joining the Tinubu train besides the vexed issue of Igbo voice not being heard when it mattered most, was “seeking affiliation where our interest as a region are represented in the form of fair partnership” and our vision is heard at the federal level. Mba in summary was talking about trust since “Igbo DNA does not change; their “destiny does not change; even while their “vision now finds stronger reinforcement at the federal level”.
For Governors Oborevwori’s “the decision to align with APC is strategic and thoughtful move driven by a singular objective: to fast-track Delta State development through enhanced collaboration with the federal government”.
But I think his predecessor Senator Okowa captured it better.
“People wondered why, but in the history of a people, there is always a time to change their path for the common good of the people, and whatever decision we took was based on that common good and the need to change our path in the best interest of our state”. It is just as well if APC is the instrument Delta whose successive leaders have been accused and in fact indicted for frittering away billions that would have changed the lives of impoverished people of Delta for better, in underwriting campaign expenses of President Umaru Yar’Adua in 2007 and allegedly, Atiku Abubakar in 2023. I think it will be a big relief for a people whose leaders including the late Augustus Aikhomu and ex-president Jonathan did not see stealing government money as corruption.
Akwa Ibom governor, Pastor Umoh Eno went biblical by aligning himself with the children of Issachar in the Holy Bible who were able to interpret the times and flow with the tide by declaring “I have progressively moved to All Progressives Congress (APC) I have changed my political affiliation; we are support the president for second term in office to complete reforms he has started”.
Everything boils down to trust.
Nigeria has been haunted by lack of elite consensus since the run up to independence with the tenuous one secured through the British stick and carrot approach collapsing barely two years into independence. The result was a descent into turmoil of warring groups starting with Isaac Boro’s Niger Delta insurrection, the Middle Belt violent resistance, military coups, and pogrom; civil war, and 30 years of military dictatorship. And when they were finally humiliated out of power in 1999, they replaced themselves with military-baked “new breed politician’ who behave like military occupation. In what they often describe as ‘family quarrel’, they spent 16 years fighting over illegal sharing of the resources kept in their temporary care. The era witnessed the privatization scandal through which Nigeria’s total investment of over $100b was according to House probe, sold to PDP stalwarts for $1.5b; fuel subsidy scandal through which PDP leading light and their children embarked on monumental theft of the nation’s resources.
President Jonathan unbundled PHCN after government’s injection of billions of taxpayers’ monies and sold them to PDP stalwarts. They even in the name of dubious monetization policy sold properties dating back to pre-independence period kept in their care for our children to themselves.
President Tinubu, of all our past leaders, is today in a unique position to address the source of the nation’s nightmare. With those who have moved into his APC in droves with the party now in control of 72 senators in the red chamber, 265 in the green chamber and 24 of the 36 state governors, he should be able to leverage on those who have claimed to be driven by his courage to take hard decisions on behalf of the nation.
He has shown by his institutionalisation of six development commissions that he doesn’t need to go back to 1957 or 1963 that we and our fathers have agitated for in the last 50 years. His former political foes now turned political collaborators are all he needs to prevail on National Assembly to legitimize the development commissions as federating states with central police patterned after Amotekun of southwest with local and community police holding sway in the states.
