26th February, 2013
Governor Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu stirs the hornet’s nest as intrigues over the 2015 Peoples Democratic Party ticket thicken
As he has demonstrated many times even on serious national issues, Governor Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu of Niger State combines loquaciousness and a penchant for mischief in equal measures. The former federal Permanent Secretary put both on display as representative of Nigerian Governors’ Forum at an event, organised by the Federal Ministry of Water Resources, at Aso Rock presidential villa, Abuja last week. Present at the event, tagged Presidential Summit on Water, were President Jonathan, Vice President Namadi Sambo and Senate President David Mark among others.
Speaking on the need for elected officials to work to meet the basic needs of the people rather than embarking on self glorifying projects Aliyu noted: “I really believe that with this summit, we will be able to come up with implementable policies. And I do know that with the combination of Patience (the President’s wife), Goodluck (Jonathan), Namadi (Sambo) and Dauda (David) who is the Senate president, I believe we will be able to deliver, so that we will be able, by 2015, to really walk away happy and people will be happy with us”.
Of course, the import of the Governor’s assertions, even though tinged with a lot of laughter, was not lost on his audience. This was more so as Aliyu, who is the Chairman of Northern Governors’ Forum had, three days before then, also said the President had no business being part of the 2015 presidential election. Jonathan himself has been shifty when confronted with the question of whether he would seek a fresh term when his tenure expires in 2015. When he was confronted with the question during his last media chat, broadcast on national television for example, the President refused to be categorical. Instead, he told his interviewers that he would decide on his future political ambition next year.
But the President’s aides and supporters have insisted that the President is entitled to two terms of office as stipulated in the Nigerian Constitution. The President’s aides and supporters are however not just affirming the rights of their principal as stated in the constitution. They have indeed, long before now, begun serious underground work to ensure that their principal would get a smoother sail this time around in the bid to get the presidential ticket of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party for the 2015 elections. Indeed, the crisis rocking the ruling party has been attributed to attempts by the President’s men to take over all its structures ahead of the 2015 elections.
However, if Governor Aliyu would have his way, the President should not think of being part of the next presidential contest under any circumstances. Instead, as he suggested at the Presidential Summit, the President should be getting prepared to park out of Aso Rock presidential villa for another occupant in 2015.
As he told a Kaduna-based radio station on Saturday, 16 February, this is because the President, just before the 2011 elections, signed an agreement with some governors, mostly from the North, that he would only spend four years in office if elected. This was just before President Jonathan who succeeded the late President Umaru Yar’adua, following the death of the latter in May 2010, formally declared for the 2011 presidential election. The Governor recalled in the live radio programme that with the death of Yar’Adua and given the PDP zoning arrangement, it was expected that the North was to produce the president for a given number of years. “I recall that at that discussion, it was agreed that Jonathan would serve only one term of four years and we all signed the agreement. Even when Jonathan went to Kampala, in Uganda, he also said he was going to serve a single term”, said Babangida, who noted that though the President had not declared that he has an ambition to do a second term in office, some people are already campaigning for him. “I think we are all gentlemanly enough so, when the time comes, we will all come together and see what is the right thing to do,” the Niger State Governor concluded.
As this magazine gathered last week, the remarks of the Governor on the 2015 presidential race has become a fresh and more serious headache for those anchoring the President’s second term plan. It was gathered that apart from being confused on how to effectively make a liar out of the Governor over his claims of an agreement, the Presidency is also being deliberately cautious in responding to the issue.
The only concrete response as at the time of writing this story last week was from Ahmed Gulak, Special Adviser to the President on Political Matters. “The alleged agreement only exists in the figment of the imagination of somebody with presidential ambition,” Gulak said in reference to the frequent mention of Aliyu as one of those angling to succeed the President in 2015. “President Goodluck Jonathan did not win the presidential election in Governor Aliyu’s state, Niger. Anybody who has a presidential ambition, it is such a person’s constitutional right to have ambition. He should however go about his ambition without coming up with frivolous allegations. President Jonathan did not sign such an agreement with anybody to the best of my knowledge,” he added.
And just like in other cases, different groups motivated or sponsored by different interests have, since the broadcast of the radio programme taken pages of newspapers, not only to deny the existence of any agreement, but they denounced the Niger State Governor. Ankio Briggs, a Niger Delta activist, described the revelation by the Niger State Governor as a blackmail directed at taking away the constitutional right of the President to run for a second term: “If Babangida Aliyu wants to run for President, he should do so without resorting to blackmailing Jonathan. That also applies to any Northern governor who plans to run. They should stop blackmailing Jonathan.”
But the pan-northern socio-political organisation, Arewa Consultative Forum, which asked Jonathan to abide by the “agreement” to vacate office in 2015 said the President’s eligibility to participate in the 2015 election was not a constitutional matter “but of honour, trust and confidence.”
But as noted by Gulak, Aliyu is not a particularly disinterested person in the matter of who succeeds Jonathan. He is one of the governors of states in the northern part of the country believed by many to be working to contest the 2015 presidential elections. The governors’ lecture/seminar circuit and presence at different events across the country since he was first elected in 2007, is believed to be one of his ways of ingratiating himself to Nigerians. But as the chairman of the 19 Northern Governors, Aliyu has also been at the forefront of campaign to ensure that the next Nigerian president is from that part of the country. “We must be united more than ever to go into the 2015 elections as one entity with the aim of producing the president,” the Governor of Niger State told his colleagues after their meeting in Kaduna on 17 May, 2012.
Aliyu is among seven Northern governors elected on the platform of PDP said to be battling to replace Jonathan and has been part of ongoing underground consensus arrangement to choose a candidate for the region. Governors Sule Lamido of Jigawa State; Isa Yuguda, Bauchi; Murtala Nyako, Adamawa; Ibrahim Shema, Katsina; Rabiu Kwankwaso, Kano and Aliyu Wamakko of Sokoto are other state chief executives said to be individually interested in the presidency.
This magazine gathered that the Governors had been working at cross purposes and even more significantly, finding ways of scuttling one another’s ambition, hence efforts to select one of them as the representative of the North in the expected battle for the PDP ticket against the incumbent has been difficult. Nevertheless, the desire to ensure that a northerner returns as Nigeria’s president in 2015 has, in the past few months, led to open and secret meetings between elders, activists and politicians of Northern extraction in the past few months. Just like in the run up to the 2011 election, the North is anchoring its claims to the zoning policy of PDP and the controversial one-term agreement with Jonathan.
The argument is that the PDP Constitution stipulates rotation of offices between North and the South of Nigeria. President Olusegun Obasanjo who was in office from 1999 to 2007, who was from the South, was in office for eight years. He was succeeded by Yar’Adua, a Northerner, who was expected to take the North’s eight-year turn, but he died before he could even complete his first term. He was succeeded by the then Vice President Jonathan.
A member of Arewa Consultative Forum who spoke to this magazine recently recalled a meeting of PDP members and Vice President Namadi Sambo at Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Sports Complex, Murtala Square, Kaduna in 2010, where the majority of delegates and stakeholders from the north met and finally agreed that Jonathan should be allowed to contest. Samaila Sambawa, former Sports Minister had, after that meeting, also told journalists: “We came out of the meeting with a resolution to allow Jonathan complete the joint ticket vied with the Late Umaru Yar’Adua in 2007 and leave in 2015.” The former Sports Minister added that the decision by delegates from the North-West and North-East to allow Jonathan vie was also in the interest of peace, unity and concern for the minorities and particularly the South-South people that were then marginalised politically by other zones. Just like Aliyu said in the radio programme, some northerners, particularly members of PDP from the North, strongly believed Jonathan should respect the “agreement” that he would only be in office for one term, which the President has never denied.
But one of the controversies that have trailed Aliyu’s assertion was whether there was indeed any signed agreement between the President and the Governors on the one-term tenure. The Political Adviser to the President challenged anyone in possession of such agreement to come forward with it. He said this on a television programme monitored in Abuja last week. But he was quick to add that there is a possibility of people coming up with a forgery, implying that any document presented will be doubtful.
Some Northern sources, however, insisted that there was such an agreement in existence, which was not circulated to the media. According to them, the PDP National Executive Council, NEC, meeting which was supposed to hold on 16 December, 2010 was delayed for one day because the governors then who were under pressure to support the northern consensus candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, were waiting for a concession from President Jonathan to take back to their people. It was gathered that this led to the convening of an emergency meeting of the governors with the then PDP National Chairman, Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo, ahead of the NEC meeting where the one-term pact was sealed. They added that it was on the basis of the promise of one term they extracted from the President that the northern governors agreed to go back and convince delegates from their states to endorse Jonathan at PDP presidential primary of 2011. With the agreement in place, the governors proceeded for the NEC meeting, attended by 27 governors of the party on 16 December, 2010.
According to the communiqué read out to journalists at the NEC meeting, Ibrahim Shema, the Governor of Katsina State, the governors recognised the right of President Jonathan to go for a “second term” as “entrenched democratic culture consistent with the presidential system and our constitution”. The governors also said in the communiqué that they “also recognised the Yar’Adua/Jonathan ticket and therefore hereby support President Goodluck Jonathan (GCFR) to contest the 2011 election as the PDP presidential candidate for a period of four years only.”
Rather than any pact entered into secretly, it was this aspect of the communiqué which was signed by 20 of the governors, including Gabriel Suswam of Benue State; Aliyu; Shema; Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom; Liyel Imoke, Cross River; Danjuma Goje, Gombe; Rotimi Amaechi, Rivers; Murtala Nyako, Adamawa and Timipre Sylva of Bayelsa, among others that has formed the basis of the belief that the President had committed himself to spending only one term in office.
Though the media reported the communiqué, including the fact that the President had agreed to run for only one term the next day, there was no denial from Jonathan’s camp. Rather, at a town hall meeting with Nigerians in Addis Ababa during his trip to Ethiopia to attend the African Union Summit in January, 2011, the President also confirmed that he would not be running in the 2015 elections. “Nigerians in the Diaspora will not vote, but I will work towards it by 2015, even though I will not be running for election,” the President told Nigerians living in the country when responding to questions on the possibility of Nigerians living abroad participating in elections back home.
Though the media back home had also feasted on the story, putting it on their front pages, there was no indication that Jonathan was misquoted from his aides. Former President Obasanjo had also, in a speech he delivered during the final presidential campaign rally for the 2011 presidential election in Abuja, commended the President for agreeing to run for only one term. And it was not only the agreement the President is now running away from as 2015 fast approaches?
The President has also insisted that he is in his first term of office, contrary to what was stated in the 16 December 2010 communiqué. This was in a reply of the Presidency to a suit filed by one Cyriacus Njoku in Abuja, asking the Court to determine “whether Section 135(2) of the Constitution, which specifies a period of four years in office for the President, is only available or applicable to a person elected on the basis of an actual election or includes one in which a person assumes the position of President by operation of law, as in the case of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan.”
The plaintiff who said as a member of PDP, he intends to contest for the Presidency in 2015, asked the court to declare that “the President’s tenure of office began on 6 May 2010 when his first term began and his two terms shall end on 29 May 2015, after taking his second oath of office on 29 May 2011; and by virtue of Section 136 (1) (b) of the Constitution, no person (including the first defendant) shall take the oath of allegiance and the oath of office prescribed to in the Seventh Schedule to this Constitution more than twice”.
But in his preliminary objection, the President, who described Cyracus’ suit as “frivolous and highly vexatious,” argued that he has the constitutional backing to seek a fresh tenure of office. Jonathan also declared that he is currently doing his first term of four years in office as the president of Nigeria as provided by the 1999 Constitution, as amended and that the Constitution of Nigeria only makes provisions for a president to contest for not more than two terms of four years each. Judgment is yet to be delivered on the suit.
Sources told this magazine last week that the presidency is anxiously awaiting the judgment which may signal a full blast to the 2015 campaign. It was also gathered that the President’s men had long anticipated that many clogs would be put in his way in getting the PDP presidential ticket for the 2015 elections. Thus, even as the President’s men continue to devise various means of taking over the structure of the ruling party, they are also deftly putting in the public domain measures they think will guarantee that their man gets the PDP presidential ticket without much rancour. One of the options being exploited is the guarantee of automatic ticket for the President once he indicated his interest to contest in the 2015 election.
Those promoting the idea said this would be done by amending the PDP Constitution to grant the right of first refusal (in the contest for the party’s ticket) to Jonathan. This implies that the President will not undergo any form of primary election to emerge as the candidate of PDP. Those behind the idea are arguing that it is in line with what happens in the United States where an incumbent is given express ticket to contest the election. Those trying to convince PDP top echelons to support the move, this magazine learnt, are also sweetening the concept with argument that it will help to prevent implosion within the party, that may result from stiff contest for the party’s presidential ticket. Such implosion, which they said may tear the party apart, according to them, may also make PDP susceptible to defeat by the new mega opposition party, All Progressive Congress, APC.
Already, many PDP governors were reported to be contemplating joining the new mega party out of frustrations with the way their own party is currently being run. “As the ruling party in Nigeria, PDP has faced so many challenges in the management of its internal affairs that even outsiders have expressed concerns over its future. The opposition has, in fact, been praying for the implosion of PDP which had been in power since the return of Nigeria to democracy in 1999. Because of the obvious danger and threat to the continued dominance of PDP, it has become absolutely necessary for the party to take a second look at the rules governing the conduct of its presidential primary”, said Max Gbanite who described himself as Convener of a group, Concerned PDP Democrats, who is now the face of the discreet campaign. Though promoters of the idea insist that it has received the blessings of top members of the party, Olisa Metuh, PDP’s National Publicity Secretary told journalists that there is no plan to amend the party constitution. Even then, he was quick to add that the constitution of the party could be amended if majority of party members ask for it.
The 2015 elections is still more than two years away. Such intrigues will get thicker in the ruling party, even as members try to prevent the party from being consumed by the several crises currently afflicting it.
—Oluokun Ayorinde/Abuja