Speaking at the 60th birthday celebration of former Rivers State governor and ex-Transportation minister, Rotimi Amaechi, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka was expansively humorous. In praising Mr Amaechi’s manner of pursuing his presidential ambition, the laureate said the former minister’s intransigence reminded him of the stubborn refusal of
President Bola Tinubu
(as Lagos State governor) to yield to ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo’s political and financial pressures to abandon the creation of 37 extra local governments in Lagos. The laureate said he derived ‘rascally pleasure’ in seeing Mr Amaechi stubbornly refusing to drop out of the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential primary in June 2022 when nearly every other aspirant was dropping out of the race. In a delicate, and perhaps eerie, extrapolation of that intransigence some three years ago, Mr Amaechi has sustained his adamancy and opposition to the same Bola Tinubu who defeated him in that race and went on to win the presidency the following year.
The bigger story of the 2022 primary is not of course the intransigence of any of the aspirants, or the concessions of the curious handful. What defined the primary and swung the votes was the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) primary conducted barely a week earlier on May 29, 2022, over which former Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike has continued to have an axe to grind with PDP leaders and electors who jettisoned his aspiration in favour of former vice president Atiku Abubakar. Unknown to him, instead of confining themselves to their party’s rotational principles, they anticipated the victory of APC’s Bola Tinubu in the ruling party’s primary a week later and were anxious to secure the services of a champion who could fight for the crown and give a good account of himself. They imagined that Mr Wike, had he emerged the PDP candidate, would be eaten raw by Bola Tinubu. So they gambled on the APC outcome by preemptively securing for themselves a deep pocket champion.
Meanwhile, APC leaders and electors who had spent weeks pussyfooting around Aso Villa and gallivanting between powerful interest groups around the country and APC governed states were greatly consternated by the PDP’s deft anticipation and calculations. Instead of leaving the primary to chance, in a sort of ‘may the best man win’, they borrowed logic from the PDP and resolved to secure a champion who could ‘outstrategise and outspend’ Alhaji Atiku. Mr Amaechi’s recalcitrance and Mr Wike’s fulminations meant nothing to the PDP and APC overlords. They faced a historic election, and they were sure that rather than engage in fancy footwork, they needed to put their best feet forward. And they did so, with brutal efficiency and ‘devil may care’ frankness. Had the PDP sustained their realpolitik to the campaigns, with Alhaji Atiku opting for the most savage and unfeeling methods to prosecute his election, probably his last, he would have found the ultimate weapon, financial or political, to placate the aggrieved Peter Obi, and unite the party behind him. In the end, he could not rejig the party’s formula for holding political offices, and then followed up by spitting on the political grave of the enraged Mr Wike.
On the other side of the aisle, the more astute and unassuming candidate Tinubu, who had been humiliated and humbled for more than two years before his party’s primary and thus had no airs about him, did everything possible, political and financial, to mollify his APC opponents. Those who held out against his blandishments or mollification were then isolated and neutralised. The APC and PDP candidates thus went into the 2023 presidential election with contrasting styles, thereby losing or winning the poll even before the first ballot was cast. Despite the clumsy and hugely disruptive intrusion of the Labour Party’s Peter Obi, which turned the election into a three-horse race, it was all but clear who the voters and the dithering presidency thought was the frontrunner. Their inability to cut that frontrunner to size was not due to a lack of effort as it was due to a lack of tactical brilliance. Once he became the front runner and sensed it, and knowing that the country’s political dynamics favoured a southern candidate, he pushed his luck, said many a gaffe, but managed to prevent himself from propounding anything that would scare anybody. His refrain at every campaign stop was simple, almost inelegant, but decidedly poignant and provocative, embellishing the country’s political dictionary and arresting the people’s wandering and often jejune thoughts.
And candidate Bola Tinubu won. Of all the footnotes of the 2023 presidential race, Mr Amaechi’s was the least significant. That of Mr Wike, which saw him carve a significant slice of the votes from Alhaji Atiku, was far more impactful, second only to the seismic electoral effect the unreflective Mr Obi brought upon the poll. Next time, in the face of Nigeria’s notoriously compromised pollsters whose predictions are always way off the mark, pundits should scrutinise the primaries to find clues as to the underlying dynamics capable of tilting the outcome of any general election. They will find, in the kitchen midden of the primaries, enough clues as to who will win, sometimes by a huge margin in the event of a two-horse race. They should never allow themselves to be distracted by the wailings and moaning of the Amaechis and Wikes, as crucial as they sometimes pretend to be.
Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (
Syndigate.info
).
