More than the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the All Progressives Congress (APC) will in the coming months contend with a welter of presidential aspirants which its puny administrative talent cannot cope with. The race will be more streamlined in the PDP, for obvious reasons; but in the APC, the race will be frenzied, tumultuous, rowdy, bitter and full of intrigues. The foundation for an acrimonious race was laid right from the founding of the party in February 2013. But it was smothered by the simple fact of their newness and, at the time, dreamy objectives. Once in office, however, all their innate and inert demons rushed out of the closet and soon began to gnaw at the fabric of the party. Those demons have not let up, with their talons still embedded both in the body and mind of the party. There will be no fresh demons in 2023 to assail the party; but having been indulged for more than six years in all manner of demented ways, and having sucked the blood of its founders and earnest supporters in an orgy of bacchanalian revelry, the old and tested demons will shake the rafters of the party and probably displace its foundations.
Until next year, it will not be possible to know just how many aspirants will brave the odds to announce their interest. However, even now, a few pretenders to the throne are rearing their heads and are eager to bite the bullet. One of them, Kogi State’s governor Yahaya Bello, fancies his chances of being Nigeria’s next president, more because of his youthfulness than any possession of capacity or character. Except perhaps himself and his immediate family, it is unlikely anyone can explain his fixation with the presidency, not to say his rationalization for coveting the office. He has promoted himself as the adopted political son of President Muhammadu Buhari, and has on that account governed the state more from Abuja, which is next door to his state, than from Lokoja, the blighted and forlorn state capital that has witnessed little touch from his administration. The president, not to say many powerful public and security officials, also see him as a curious and persistent young man. They are amused by his hollow tenacity, a curious form of tenacity that is not anchored on any noble or inspiring idea or objective.
Perhaps Mr Bello sees his connections with the high and mighty in Abuja whom he had wooed and lathered with false expectations of his capacity as sufficient to qualify him for the presidency. Or perhaps he sets great store by his youthful age to aspire, on account of only that, to the presidency. Certainly he cannot be aspiring for anything in 2023 because of his records. His records are dismal and, judged after eight years, should be sufficient to consign him to the most brutal and unforgiving gulag. If it is his connections with the president whom he tried to see in company with the rabble-rousing Femi Fani-Kayode, it may never be known why he thinks the president would be an important factor going into the next election. The president is already a hors de combat. He is unable to influence anything substantial even now. Going into 2023, the coterie of influencers and cabals around the president will dictate the pace, and even then, inexpertly. Many things may be unknown in the coming presidential poll, but one thing is certain: the president will be an insignificant factor, even if impactful decisions are taken and done in his name.
Mr Bello is infatuated with his age. Had he been educated in the best traditions of the world’s average statesmen, he would have known that age is just a number. There have been men who took power in their twenties and done great things, including hewing out an empire out of disparate and fractious peoples and races; and there have been men who took office quite advanced in age, and have done incredible things, including giving the world unexampled leadership. But even if Mr Bello cannot be dissuaded from his obsession with age, surely he must confront the question of what impact youthfulness has had on his years in office, especially given the brigandage he authored and inspired to secure a second term.
At bottom, Mr Bello knows he has done nothing significant to merit a presidential run. It is pure gimmickry. Sponsored and misguided youths in parts of the country may whoop for him and paste his campaign posters all over, but he knows that it is merely to stay relevant post-2023. Without his self-appointed mentor, the president, and with nothing he has done or propounded to merit anyone remembering him, it is hard to see how the relevance he craves can be sustained after the next polls. Kogites abhor his politics and scorn his vaunted self-importance and records. He will have no base to point to in running for higher office; and mercifully, will have nothing original or deep or philosophical, or even ideological he has said to recommend him. How something can come out of nothing, even for a man of excessive volubility and unequalled self-promotion, is hard to fathom.
Mr Bello may be the archetype of many of the misguided aspirants who will assail Nigerians for votes in 2023, but he is obviously not the only one. Doyin Okupe, a medical practitioner and former presidential aide is considering a run for the highest office. Described as an attack dog many years ago during the Goodluck Jonathan presidency, and eager to join a fray, any fray at all, it is not clear what he thinks he might bring to the presidency should he have the chance. It is true many aspirants think they could not conceivably perform worse than the present occupant of the office, but they would be hard put to convince Nigeria’s increasingly skeptical electorate that men whose poor image they had viewed and endured with great embarrassment and dismay should seek to replace someone who had planted a sword among the people.
Alas, every time newsmen speculate about Dr Jonathan running for high office again, they have been met with his excessive prevarication. There were indications months ago that some APC big wigs were soliciting the defection of the former president to the APC as a prelude to offering him the ticket to run, win and serve for only one term. The APC leaders and Dr Jonathan have of course denied the speculations. But they have not issued their denials in irrefutable and irrevocable tones and terms. Whatever the case, there still remains a teeny-weeny chance that Dr Jonathan might do the unthinkable. Should he attempt it, he would of course have to convince the country that he had so much character, resolve and wisdom left in his agitated heart than he gave when he presided over the affairs of Nigeria for about five years. That would be impossible. In his response to speculations that he might run for the presidency in 1999 shortly after he was released from jail, former president Olusegun Obasanjo rhetorically asked how many presidents Nigerians wanted to make out of him. Eventually, he ran, won, and after completing two terms, wanted to keep running. Such is the obsession with power occasioned by Nigeria’s imperial presidency that no one should rule out even Dr Jonathan quivering before the temptation. But it will end in fiasco.
Towards the end of 2021, the list of those who want a shot at the presidency will lengthen and become clearer. But only a few of the aspirants will prefer to be judged by their leadership character, ability to assemble a great team of achievers, vision, and understanding of how a modern, inclusive government should be run – in short the perfect antithesis to the current and increasingly illiberal presidency.
– Idowu Akinlotan | The Nation
