By Ishaya Ibrahim
Acting News Editor
A former Minister for Education, Oby Ezekwesili, has started an ambitious governing project of rallying Nigerians to vote a different party other than the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ahead of the 2019 general elections. TheNiche polled a cross-section of Nigerians who said that her red card to the two dominant parties would not work.
Based on the election timetable released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), all political parties are expected to field candidates for states and national elections between August and October this year.
Ezekwesili is yet to announce her party of choice for the 2019 project.
Head of Department, Politics and International Relations at Lead City University, Dr Tunde Oseni, said that the 2019 presidential election would be won by either APC or PDP.
He explained: “The elite in Nigeria don’t think of what is there for the people. It is what they stand to get. And party structures are largely individualised and not institutionalised. So in 2019 it is either going to be APC or PDP or one of them dies for another to emerge.”
President of Voters Awareness Initiative (VAI) and constitutional lawyer, Wale Ogunade, agreed with Oseni.
He said that the only two power blocs in the country were the APC and the PDP due largely by their structures. He said that Ezekwesili lacked the political base to disrupt that pattern.
“Who is Oby? Who knows her in her backyard?. If you are talking of the former governor of Kano State, Rabiu Kwankwaso, or his former governor, Ibrahim Shekarau of Kano, they are the ones that can give Buhari some wahala,” he said.
He dismissed the possibility of the former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, in unseating President Muhammadu Buhari.
“Atiku has quarter legs in some parts of the country. He has no leg in the North. He has no leg in the South West. He can’t even get the PDP ticket.
“We the activists are the third force and we are saying President Buhari is loved by Nigerians and there is no vacancy in 2019,” Ogunade said.
But a Kaduna based lawyer, Abdulaziz Ibrahim, said right now, Kwankwaso is the third force.
According to him, if the APC does not push Kwankwaso out of the party, he would defeat Buhari in the party primaries and proceed to clinch the presidency.
The reason he gave is because majority of APC’s National Working Committee are secretly rooting for him.
He recalled that on January 12, 2018, thousands of Kwankwaso supporters in Kaduna went to Jumaat prayer decked with their red cap which is his signature dressing, indicating that his support base is huge.
Ezekwesili, who is also a co-leader of the #BringBackOurGirls movement, tweeted on Thursday that the essence of her new agenda was to “disrupt and end the political and governance stagnation and retrogression that our cyclical low equilibrium political Russian roulette has cost our country and people.
“Enough is enough,” she said, through her Twitter handle @obyezeks.
“My political agenda is simple. I shall actively campaign against APC and PDP in the 2019 elections except in rare cases where they field new minds with a strong record of public interest.
“I shall actively campaign for the best candidates of all other parties in the elections.
“My individual effort to campaign against APC and PDP in the 2019 elections may not amount to much, but it is at least a definite expression of my personal conviction.
“My conviction is that it is time to end the tyranny of rulership of a wicked minority political elite class,” she wrote.
Ezekwesili’s position is a reflection of the general discontentment among Nigerians against the country’s political leadership.
