By ABAKE FAKUNLE
As expected in a presidential
democracy after a fiercely-fought general election, which was won by the ruling
All Progressives Congress, APC, the battle ground has shifted to the sharing
table of the booty. Of course, the National Chairman of APC, Comrade Adams
Oshiomhole, and the National Publicity Secretary, Lanre Isa-Onilu, had warned
their party men and women that the game was a winner-takes-all, thus making it
clear to the opposition parties in the Legislature that there was nothing to
share with the majority party in the choosing of principal officers in both the
Senate and the House of Representatives.
“My emphasis is on the fact that
we are not going to share powers, including what the PDP people call juicy
committees and we call strategic committees, with people that Nigerians have
rejected. They are exclusive for the APC”, Isa-Onilu, had barked out at a
recent press conference.
If you think that the
apparatchiks in the ruling party are vehemently fighting to protect the
interests of their members in the legislature, you’re dead wrong. And if you
believe that this post-election hysteria and even paranoia for the PDP in the
run-up to the inauguration of the 9th Assembly is down to the experience four
years ago, you miss the plot too.
There is really nothing
altruistic in the insistence of the APC leadership that Senator Ahmed Lawan
must be elected the next president of the Senate. And in the same vein, there
is no overriding national interest recommending Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila as the
next speaker of the House of Representatives. Both men are qualified for the
different positions – just like their other colleagues! In fact, feelers from
the senators-elect, for instance, seem to contradict the tyrannical imposition
of Senator Lawan on his colleagues. If the APC leadership does not have ears to
the ground, they might be rudely shocked again. As it appears, many of of the
APC senators – and even PDP senators – for different reasons think that Ali
Ndume rather than Lawan has defended the APC position in the Senate with
everything in him both in the day and at night and therefore prefer him to be
elected as Senate President! This is the kind of danger inherent in zoning to
an individual rather than to zones or regions.
If the APC leadership can pretend
that it zoned the Senate presidency to the Northeast, and not to Ahmed Lawan,
there is no room for such pretence in the alleged zoning of the speakership to
Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila. And the reason is quite obvious for even a blind man to
see. Whereas the entire Northeast has nothing to hold on to so far, the
Southwest region already has in its kitty the office of the vice president. And
when it is considered that the President in his second term has exhausted his
constitutional opportunity for re-election to the same office, the import and
the opportunities in the office Professor Yemi Osinbajo holds in the name of the
Southwest cannot be overemphasized. Now, tell me how anyone can justify
overloading the Southwest yet with another position of speakership when zones
like the North-central and Southeast have nothing in the national power-sharing
formula?
Therefore any mention of
Gbajabiamila in the race for the position of Speaker in the 9th Assembly not
only offends the principle of equity and justice but also offends the very
logic of winner-takes-all of the leadership of the APC. It offends the logic in
the sense that regions are partly rewarded on the bases of the votes they
contributed to the victory of the ruling party. This perhaps explains why a
large zone like the Southeast even in the face of obvious inequity is only
making a half-hearted demand in the APC zoning formula. Yet the same cannot be
said of the North-central that played a key role in the first coming of the APC
to power in 2015 and has remained steadfast even in the face of mistreatment by
the Federal Government, especially in the several deathly herders-farmers
clashes. Even in the just-concluded general election, the North-central zone
gave more votes to Buhari and the APC than the Southwest!
Let nobody be deceived by the
propaganda that there are precedents in the past justifying the simultaneous
holding of the offices of the vice president and speaker by a particular zone.
Yes, in 1979, Chief Alex Ekwueme from Anambra state was the vice president
while Chief Edwin Ume-Ezeoke from the same state was the Speaker of the House.
The truth, however, is that there was a power-sharing accord between the ruling
NPN and its alliance partner, NPP. So, whereas, Ekwueme was of the NPN,
Ume-Ezeoke was of the NPP, and the emphasis of the sharing formula then was
between two parties whereas now it is among regional zones. Even then, the
country was not as divided as it is now with all manner of fault-lines crying
to be attended to.
Let it be known that the greatest
danger of what APC has done in zoning to individuals rather than groups is that
it undermines national solidarity and even group interests. What is APC afraid
of in allowing a zone that a position is ceded, to arrive at a consensus on who
they have chosen themselves? Surely that is more democratic and a political
party in power has the added responsibility of showing good democratic examples
by following the due process.
Even then, all this “it must be
Lawan or it must be Gbajabiamila” by the leadership of APC may in fact be a
euphemistically-designed plot to allow only one individual to decide for a whole
nation of over two hundred million people who becomes President of the Senate,
Speaker of the House and logically afterwards the committee chairpersons in his
bid for the presidency in 2023. This same powerful individual has already
conquered the APC by planting his vassal as party chairman and so the next
level is to conquer the government. Who noticed that someone is already
grandstanding publicly as an alternate president advising on policy matters?
Even then, our country is certainly too great to be reduced to a footstool of
one individual, no matter how powerfully he looms!
Fakunle wrote from Ilorin, Kwara
state
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