Fortune has already started to smile on the All Progressives Congress (APC), as the party begins preparations for the Saturday, November 28 governorship election in Kogi State. Within the two weeks the party opened shop for the sale of expression of interest and nomination forms for the election, it made a whopping N137.5 million from 27 aspirants who expressed interest to contest the election on its platform.
Among those who parted with N5.5 million to enlist in the race from which just one will emerge to become the party’s flag-bearer are the former governor, Abubakar Audu; a young millionaire, Yahaya Bello, who is fondly called Fair Plus by his numerous admirers; Sen. Nicholas Yahaya, Sani Shuaibu, Suleman Ali, Air Vice Marshall Saliu Atawodi, Muhammad Abdullahi, Sen. Nurudeen Abatemi-Usman and Hajia Hadiza Ibrahim.
Others include the former Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch magazine, Yakubu Muhammed; Clarence Olafemi, Suleman Abutu, Sunday Ejibo, Suleman Ipinmisho, Dr. Tim Diche, Habeeb Yakeen, Rotimi Obadofin and Babatunde Irukera.
However, Hajia Ibrahim, the only female aspirant among them, did not pay to obtain her form, in keeping with the party’s policy of giving such forms free to female aspirants.
At the end of the sale of forms, the party set up a seven-man committee headed by a prominent politician, Boss Mustafa, to screen the aspirants. The committee sat for four days at Bolingo Hotel, Abuja, where all the 27 aspirants appeared before it. The decision to hold the screening sessions in Abuja, instead of Kogi State, was, according to a party source, to avoid a situation where the process is hijacked by any of the aspirants, to the detriment of the rest.
With the screening over, the aspirants are now working real hard to convince the delegates who would be drawn from executive members of APC, from the ward to state levels in the state, to vote for them on the primary election which comes up on August 28/29.
Sources within the state told TheNiche that former Governor Audu stands a better chance to pick the party’s ticket. One of the numerous APC members from Kogi who have been storming the party’s national secretariat in the last two weeks, told our reporter that Audu remains the APC trump card for winning the November election in Kogi.
“APC stands the best chance of emerging victorious in this election, given the monumental failure of the present government in the state. But that victory can only be predicated on the choice the party faithful make concerning who flies (APC’s) flag in the election. The best choice the party has today is Prince Abubakar Audu. Any mistake in the choice of candidate can cause us the election,” said the source who gave his name simply as Abdulmalik.
Another commentator from the state, who pleaded not to be quoted, also gave it to Audu. According to him, “Audu, having led the party to massive victory in the state during the March/April general elections, is the only person with the magic wand to deliver Kogi State to APC in this governorship election.”
He pointed out that the APC did not only win the presidential election with wide margin, it also won the three senatorial slots in the state as well as more than two-third of the House of Representatives seats in the state.
“The truth is that all these victories were made possible by the contribution and hard work of Audu in building the party in the state. Most of those in the race today are those who joined the APC from other parties, especially the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), after these victories which Audu worked very hard for. You don’t change a winning team. The party needs him now, to continue winning elections in Kogi State,” he said.
Audu is also said to be enjoying the confidence of many of the APC national leaders, including President Muhammadu Buhari and former Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos State. In fact, Buhari was said to have called to thank Audu immediately after the result of the presidential and National Assembly elections last March were announced. A source close to Audu disclosed that Buhari, who had never done well in Kogi in previous elections, was pleasantly surprised at the landslide victory of his party in the state this time around and called to thank him for it.
Another factor that would decide who gets what in the party’s primary election, apart from the issues of ethnicity and religion, is financial wherewithal. Few of the aspirants in the race for the party ticket, including Audu, are moneybags.
The stature of some of these aspirants is said to be frightening the ruling PDP in the state. This, political watchers say, has given rise to insinuations that some of the APC aspirants are actually sponsored by the PDP. Even within the APC, some aspirants are also said to be moles planted by opponents to weaken the main characters in the race. Some of them may not have acquired the requisite experience to govern the state.
Audu alluded to this fact when metaphorically described some of his co-aspirants are school-leavers without the required experience to govern the state. He was speaking with journalists in Abuja.
Speaking after receiving his nomination and expression of interest forms at the APC national secretariat, Audu declared that all the structures he left as a governor of the state 12 years ago were still the ones standing, without any addition by his successors.
He said: “Presently, Kogi is in a very bad shape and sorry state, and as such you cannot allow somebody to go there and learn on the job; it requires technocrats, people with experience to bring it up to the level I left it in 2003.
“Most of the aspirants now, I don’t want to say much about them, are trying to do it as youth corps job. Some of them are just young ‘school-leavers’. Because they stumbled on some money somehow and they feel they should be governor of the state, what do they want to achieve? What is the present state of the state? How do they want to eliminate the very sad situation prevailing in the state? They have no idea; all the want is to be governor.
“Kogi, during my time as a governor, was said to be the fastest growing state in Nigeria, and I was crowned by the Nigeria union of Journalists (NUJ) under the media tour that was undertaken to access the performance of every governor in Nigeria, especially those that were on seat between 1999 and 2003.”
He believes that his party, the APC, recorded ‘huge’ success at the last general election in Kogi, and will repeat same in the forthcoming governorship election.
Reacting to the insinuation that there should be powershift from a section of the state to others, Audu said he had met with several people about that and promised to hand over power to a competent person from those region after four years.
Other leading aspirants in the race also bared their plans for the state. Addressing journalists after picking his expression of interest and nomination forms, Yaqeen, who decried the high rate of unemployment, robbery and kidnapping, attributed the ills affecting the state to bad governance.
His words: “I believe and so strongly that Kogi State is endowed with highly competent and capable people. What is required is sincere leadership with a vision and a purpose to harness these resources, so as to realise a just Kogi State that is secure, stable and prosperous with the highest possible standards, which everyone can be proud of.
Yaqeen said he abandoned his lucrative job to save the people of Kogi and promised to bring investors from the United States of America (U.S.A.) in the areas of partnership to provide modern and affordable healthcare to the people of the state, as well as revive the Ajaokuta Steel Company.
Dichie gave three cardinal objectives that will be the hallmark of his government, if elected. They are improvement on the infrastructure in the state, wealth creation and peaceful coexistence among the people of the state.
Another aspirant, Ipinmisho, who had served as Director-General of National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), promised to make transparency his watchword.
He said: “A state being run like Kogi is the black sheep of the nation and we must not allow it to continue.”
He urged the media to enlighten Nigerians to get government functionaries to be accountable to the mandate given to them.
Hon. Shuaibu’s blueprint for the state includes social security, human development, job creation and agricultural development.
Reacting to the issue of powershift in the state, he said it requires a roundtable discussion, saying the APC has no reason at this stage to discuss that. “Right now, what Kogi needs is not powershift, but who can lead the state to the promised land.”
Meanwhile, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is said to have kick-started pre-election meetings for the Kogi and Bayelsa governorship elections. The preparations were reported to have kicked off on Wednesday, August 12.
To this end, the Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) for the two states, it was reported, were summoned, with their retinue of staff, by the Acting Chairman, Amina Bala Zakari, to the Commission’s headquarters for the first set of preliminary meetings leading to the elections.
The Bayelsa governorship ballot is scheduled for Saturday, December 5, 2015.
Already, critical departments have forwarded their budgets and schedule of activities for the two elections which were approved by the Commission last week.
The Commission also met last Thursday with RECs. That was the first of such quarterly meetings under the watch of the Zakari.
Highlights of the meeting, according to sources close to the INEC, include: articulating modalities for Continuous Voter Registration (CVR), distribution of Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs), review of on-going litigations/tribunal cases, storage of the Smart Card Readers deployed in the 2015 general elections and the impending Borno senatorial by-election.
