Abdullahi Adamu: Doing the right thing at the right time

Since writing a three-part series on “Cracks in the APC” nearly three years ago, I have been watching developments in the party with more…

Since writing a three-part series on “Cracks in the APC” nearly three years ago, I have been watching developments in the party with more than a passing interest. And going by events over the past 12 months, it is clear to me that the National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and former governor of Nasarawa State, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, who resigned last night, had a decision to make, which is whether to quit or stay on in the post.

If I had a say in the matter, my advice would be to resign now that the ovation is loudest. Such a call is borne entirely out of respect for the man, and from a sober reading of the current political scene. And while I do not know the outgoing leader’s specific reasons, but it is worth reflecting on why leaving the post now is the right thing at the right time.

The first point is moral. One of the oldest and most powerful conventions in democratic politics is that once you take a side in a political contest, and your side is defeated, then you are both morally and practically obliged to quit the stage in order to ensure a smooth sail for the winner. This is true particularly if the contest is internal to the same political party or faction, but it is also why opposition parties generally do not form government.

In British politics, for example, senior politicians who support a candidate for party leadership, the gateway to becoming Prime Minister, normally quit the front bench if their candidate is defeated, unless the winner requests them to stay. This happened when Ed Miliband defeated his older brother, David, in the Labour Party leadership contest in 2010. It happened again in 2016 with Jeremy Corbyn and other contenders, and across the political aisle of British politics when Boris Johnson defeated the current Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt for the Conservative Party leadership position in 2019.

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In Nigeria, the military equivalent of this convention is a bullet to the chest. If you participated in or supported a military coup and you lost, you will not live to support another, a norm that even cadet officers came to accept and respect. Even then, the moral force behind the convention is nearly universal. It is based on the understanding that a democratic election is an argument, and once your side is defeated, the winning side deserves the space to put their viewpoint into action, and you are to create that space by leaving the stage.

Now, it was open knowledge that Senator Abdullahi Adamu, even as party chairman, supported a different candidate than emerged at the APC presidential primaries. His choice for the party’s flagbearer, as many knew and said openly at the time, was then Senate President Ahmed Lawan, who not only lost but came a distant fourth in the race. Current President Tinubu, then a candidate, won that contest, and by the political convention I am describing here, the former APC chair simply lost the political argument, and with it the moral basis to stay in the post beyond this point.

There is a second reason. The position of party chair is perhaps one of the most tenuous in recent Nigerian politics. No thanks to former President Obasanjo who set the stage for the weakening of the party and its officials throughout his eight years. The role of the national chairman of a party—that of the ruling party in particular—is a far cry from what it was in the Second Republic, or even the aborted Third. Nearly every chair of the major parties, ruling or opposition, has literally been hounded out of office, in very nasty circumstances for a handful of them.

Regardless of which side of the internal presidential contest he took, Senator Abdullahi Adamu still did his best to midwife the affairs of the party to victory at the presidential and other levels of the elections. I don’t know beyond what I am saying, but along with the credit that goes with delivering victory for your party must also come the quit notice. Any attempt to stay on would have turned the man into a square peg in a round hole because the post-primary election fence-mending to deliver victory did vitiate the original sin of supporting a different candidate in the same election.

In the context of our politics, there is simply no way President Tinubu, or any other president in his shoes, would have felt free to work with a party chair who only 12 months ago openly endorsed another person for the post. This is why recent events in the party, such as the selection of the national assembly leadership and principal officers, happened with the blessing of Tinubu, but not of the party chair, as he himself reportedly complained about. By resigning, the former chair has simply chosen to carry on, as an elder would.

This leads me to the most important reason why leaving is best now. As I wrote nearly three years ago in November 2020 shortly after the #EndSARS protests, the APC is to be distinguished by three different features. One, it is the most successful coalition of Nigerian politics’ historically bitterest rivals, the North and the South West, as the dominant partners. Both the NNDP in the 1960s and the SDP in the 1990s failed to enthrone a durable government at the centre. The APC, by contrast, has been eight years in power and counting.

Second, the success of the APC has largely depended on the unwritten rule between the two partners: we fight to win office together but we govern separately. In both 2015 and 2019, the Tinubu faction of the party joined hands with the Buhari faction to win the elections, and also shared the spoils of victory in terms of ministerial and other appointments. But by and large, the Tinubu faction was outside of Buhari’s government in terms of core personnel, policy priorities, and responsibility for the government’s decisions.

As far as the Tinubu faction is concerned, the shoe is now on the other foot and they expect the same courtesy. But rather than a weakness, this unwritten rule of the APC is in fact the strength that preserves the party and gives it durability, since, quite frankly, the two factions cannot even govern together because they represent very different ideological impulses in Nigerian politics.

As I wrote earlier, “The reason is simple, but not simplistic. The two blocs need federal power for very different things within the Nigerian federal space. The North lacks economic and cultural power, so it seeks political power to protect itself within the Nigerian federation. The South West, like much of the south in fact, on the other hand, seeks political power to advance and project the economic and cultural power it already has”.

Being cut of the old northern political cloth, Senator Abdullahi Adamu more generally represents that northern impulse as described here. And to that extent, in my view, he is better able to serve those concerns away from his chair position than while hanging precariously to it. And this is where the personal meets the political for the former governor. He is one of the oldest politicians still in the game in Nigeria, reaching the summit of his career in his immediate past position, after nearly 50 years in politics. He is also one of the very few politicians who today can look anybody in the face, president or not, and tell them his mind without fear or favour.

It would absolutely not have been worth it to risk all of that just to hang on to a position that was clearly no longer tenable. Better to leave now, when the ovation is still loud, than to go the way of other former party chairmen.