Even with the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the All Progressives Congress (APC) last Friday, the last may not have been heard on the crisis ravaging the party, Assistant Editor, North, CHUKS EHIRIM, reports.
It was the late reggae music legend, Robert Nesta Marley (Bob Marley), who, in one of his popular tracks, sang, “when they think it is peace and safety, a sudden destruction comes upon them”. These lyrics aptly describes what is happening to the All Progressives Congress (APC), a party that set a record in the Nigerian political history as the first to successfully conclude a merger of different parties into one. It also has the enviable record of being the first opposition party in Nigeria to have beaten an incumbent party in a general election.
Formed a little less than two years ago, the APC is today the ruling party in the country, with the presidency in its kitty, a slim majority in the Houses of Representatives, 22 out of 36 state governors, as well as controlling majority of the Houses of Assembly. But rather than celebrations for this huge victory over the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), its leaders have engaged in internal squabbles that may tear the party into shreds and render the desire of its teeming supporters for real “change”, a pipe dream.
Trouble in the house
Trouble had started immediately after the March/April elections when members of the party who were elected into the two chambers of the National Assembly began their permutations over who gets what as principal officers of the parliament. The scheming for positions in this regard did not just involve the newly-elected lawmakers. Rather, it was war by other means, engineered by political godfathers from different tendencies that make up the party.
These godfathers have just one thing – who controls the levers of power, both in the executive and legislative branches of government. As time went on, two clear tendencies emerged between the North and the South West. The South East and South South zones could not join in the struggle probably because of their poor showing for the party during the elections.
While the former president, Atiku Abubakar, and other powerful political figures in the North are seen as those leading the battle from the North, former Lagos State governor, Bola Tinubu, is said to be the arrowhead for the South West. The trophy in contention, political watchers say, is the presidential ticket of APC in 2019. To get this, each bloc feels it is imperative that it must control the National Assembly and possibly pocket juicy ministerial positions in the Muhammadu Buhari-led government.
This is the genesis of the crisis that rocked the party on June 9, when the eighth National Assembly was inaugurated.
War in NASS
On that day, sources disclosed, something akin to a civilian coup played out. About 4am, forces loyal to one of the warlords rang up the National Chairman of the party, John Odigie-Oyegun, from his sleep, with a plea that a meeting be convened for the party’s (then) lawmakers-elect before the inauguration later in the day. The meeting was supposed to be chaired by the president who was expected to be back from a foreign trip that morning. It, however, remains unclear whether the proponents of that meeting got the approval of the president before doing so.
That meeting has now become the sharp knife threatening to cut to pieces that which held the APC together. Before then, there was an attempt by the party leadership to get the legislators in a straw election, for selection of principal officers. The group loyal to Tinubu, which was fronting Ahmed Lawan as Senate President and Femi Gbajabiamila as House Speaker, had upper hand at the straw election; but their opponents led by Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara walked out.
On the D-day, the latter group had an upper hand in putting its men in strategic positions, having cut a deal with the opposition PDP. This happened while the Tinubu camp was waiting at the International Conference Centre (ICC), Abuja, for the meeting that would not hold.
Odigie-Oyegun takes the heat
Ironically, Odigie-Oyegun has been caught between the groups of gladiators. While the Saraki group accuses him of being a lackey of Tinubu, the other says he is working for Saraki, having refused to jettison the Senate president. The push came to a shove when Tinubu’s loyalists went to town with the allegation that Odigie-Oyegun was bribed by their opponents, especially Saraki, to ditch them. Matters were made worse when a leading member of this group and former interim chairman of APC, Bisi Akande, came out with a diatribe, alleging that the Northern political hegemony was arrayed against the South West. The group has also not relented in its calls for Odigie-Oyegun to be sacked from his position, a demand that appears to have united the rest of the country against the Tinubu camp.
It has also elicited harsh criticisms and calls for caution from various stakeholders of the party.
Atiku weighs in
One of the stakeholders, Atiku, last week, urged leaders of the party to shift from extreme positions to a centrist one for the interest of democracy and the party, the new administration and the country at large.
The counsel of the former vice president came against the backdrop of the APC National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting, the first since after the elections, in Abuja, on Friday, July 3.
A statement released by his media office in Abuja on Thursday, July 2, quoted the former VP as calling for the concentration of positive energies on building unity, cohesion and harmony among party leaders and other stakeholders.
“We can resolve our differences when our leaders individually and collectively shift ground from extreme positions and move to the centre in the interest of our party and our country,” according to the statement.
Atiku said it was high time the party overcame its current crisis of confidence arising from the National Assembly election of principal officers.
Stakeholders react
For Dr. Ezekiel Izuogu, a member of APC Board of Trustees (BoT), what is happening in the party cannot be divorced from the politics of who will get what in 2019. Izuogu, who frowned at the desperation of some elements within the APC to scheme out their rivals for the juicy booties in the party, warned his colleagues to tread with caution, to avoid the mistakes of the immediate past, especially those of the former ruling party, the PDP.
According to him, “What is happening in the APC today is that we are trying to manage our victory. We are weak at managing victory. What exactly this thing is showing is that we are not managing our victory well. But it is a problem we can overcome. Every person who has won victory knows that sometimes managing victory is difficult, depending on the kind of people you are managing. It is very difficult. We have not been in the party for a long time. People are still trying to study one another.”
Izuogu also foresees the possibility of the crisis hampering the ability of the APC government to deliver on the promises it made to the Nigerian people. He called for a gentlemanly approach to the management of the party’s victory and prayed for a quick resolution of the crisis.
His words: “There is also the struggle for future power, which is not right because we have just won the presidency. Let us relax and give the president time to manage the affairs of the country. In order words, though we are victorious, we should be humble victors. We should sit back and allow Mr. President to perform. We should not behave in such a way that performance becomes difficult for him because we are trying to entangle him, from one problem to another. That is not good. I do not like it. It pains me. I wish that this problem can be resolved overnight,” he said.
He rose in defence of the party’s national chairman, stating that those accusing him of corruption or wanting to unseat him, are not fair to the party.
“Oyegun is a man l know very well. Anybody who is accusing him of taking bribe does not know Oyegun. Oyegun cannot take bribe to do anything. Oyegun is a transparently honest human being. He will not take bribe for anything. Oyegun is a bit unlucky because instead of people celebrating the victory he has won, he brought us the victory of the presidency, the victory of majority governors, victory of senators, victory of House of Reps. We should celebrate Oyegun.
“Any human being in APC should celebrate the man who brought such victories. Talking about removing him is unfortunate. Anybody who is talking of removing him is not being fair. He is not being fair to the conscience of Nigerians. Oyegun midwifed everything.”
Speaking in the same direction as Izuogu, another stalwart of the party and legal practitioner from the South South geo-political zone, Okoi Obono-Obla, opined that the crisis rocking the APC is not strange in a democratic dispensation.
“It is a normal phenomenon in any democracy all over the world. It is not peculiar to the APC. Even in advanced countries, we do have this intense struggle for positions in the democratic practice in the United States of America, India and other countries.
“I will call it a struggle by different tendencies and factions within the party trying to control leadership. After all, politics is about who gets what. Politicians see the struggle as a means of outwitting one another and to become relevant in the scheme of things because politics is another form of warfare,” Obla said.
On the recent outburst by Akande that the Northern elite in the APC were ganging up against the Yoruba, Obono-Obla said such can only be the personal opinion of the former interim national chairman, adding that the disagreement is nothing, but a struggle for control of leadership of the National Assembly.
“I will not subscribe to Akande’s view; it is his individual opinion and he is entitled to that. But I do not see how this issue can be reduced to North-South West fight. It is not just that,” he argued.
On calls on the chairman to resign, he said: “Why will they be calling for his resignation? What offence did he commit? As far as I am concerned, Oyegun has done his best and has done very well because it was during his tenure as national chairman that the party won a decisive election. We won the National Assembly, we won the presidency. We won majority of state governorship elections and majority of the House of Assembly election.
“So why would a chairman that took the party to a decisive victory be asked to step down because of an isolated case involving our members in the National Assembly? I do not subscribe to that; I think the man has done very well. Those who are demanding his resignation are doing that for selfish reasons. We need a chairman who is very calm, well-calculated and who is diplomatic and also decisive as Oyegun.
“Yes, we accept that there is a disagreement; but the party is trying hard to resolve all the differences. Meetings have been held at various levels and there has also been a lot of behind-the-scene moves to resolve this issue.”
Odigie-Oyegun opens up
Odigie-Oyegun has himself denied the allegation making the rounds that he collected bribe from one of the parties to the crisis at the National Assembly.
The APC chairman, spoke for the first time since June 9 when this crisis enveloped his party, when a group, the South East, South South Professionals, paid him a courtesy visit at the APC National Secretariat, Abuja, Thursday. He took a swipe at his critics who have accused him of taking bribe in some quarters.
Responding to the address by the group, Odigie-Oyegun expressed shock over the allegation of his roles in pitting members of the party from the North against those from the South.
According to him, “There is nothing they have not said about me. One of their reports said the present executive cannot win us elections in 2019. Good lord! You’ve not even finished 2015, you’re talking about 2019. They also talked about the elite of the North against the people of the South West. Am I from the North? Am I the one organising them?” he asked.
He denied ever taking any form of gratification from any of the members aspiring for principal offices at both chambers of the National Assembly, adding that no amount of smear campaign against him would rubbish his character which he had built over time.
The battle ahead
A cursory look at the events shaping up in the party shows that at the end of the day, various tendencies will come together to square it up against those they see as having the inordinate ambition not only to control the APC but to pocket it completely for the purpose of realising their future political game plan.