Anti-party activity

It was Maikahon Karo that came to me with startling political information. He heard it from the state party secretary, who is disgruntled because the Governor has failed to fulfil his promise to appoint him as a commissioner. He is tired of being the party secretary after many years, and the Governor said he will […]

It was Maikahon Karo that came to me with startling political information. He heard it from the state party secretary, who is disgruntled because the Governor has failed to fulfil his promise to appoint him as a commissioner. He is tired of being the party secretary after many years, and the Governor said he will make him the Commissioner for Health, since he once worked in a hospital. But every time the governor did cabinet reshuffle, his name did not appear, so he is very angry.
The secretary told Maikaho to tell me that the top political posts in the state have all been shared out ahead of 2015. The sharing was done at a secret meeting in Abuja. Although he was not at the meeting, the state chairman told him in confidence what was agreed and sought his cooperation to actualise it, with a promise that he will be taken care of adequately. It is like this. Since the Governor is completing his second term, the governorship ticket will be given to Goshin Bauna from Tafki South while the Governor will take the Senate seat for Tafki North. The senator for Tafki North, Ali Daudawa, will become the state party chairman. The chairman Sallama Maikudi, who is from Tsibiri Local Government in Tafki South, will be given the Senate seat for that district. The State Assembly Speaker, who is from Tudu Local Government in Tafki Central, will be nominated as minister to displace the current minister. The Speaker’s post will then be zoned to my own local government, Gebe in Tafki Central, in order to eliminate me from the race for governor.
There are four major losers in this arrangement, namely the Deputy Governor who is from Gangare Local Government in Tafki South, the current minister who is from Kwazazzabo Local Government in Tafki Central, the senator from Tafki South, and I. The whole process is to kick off with the bye-election for Tsibiri/Marmaro seat. Since the senator is from Marmaro, the house seat will be given to someone from the same local government so that when the main election comes, it will be said that Marmaro cannot have both a House of Reps seat and the senator, so he must vacate the seat for the state party chairman who is from Tsibiri. That is the arrangement they have made.
We immediately began working feverishly to rubbish it. The starting point is the bye-election. The candidate they sponsored is Goshin Bauna’s personal assistant, so I sponsored a former House of Assembly member to contest against him in the primary. A day before the primary, party chairman Sallama Maikudi himself announced that it had been shifted by a day and would hold in the state capital for security reasons. When my candidate and his supporters were on their way to the state capital, they heard that the primary had taken place and Goshin Bauna’s candidate had won. That was when we decided that we must ensure that our party’s candidate is defeated in the main election.
I went to the Deputy Governor, the Minister and the Senator for Tafki South, told them the plan that had been made and asked them to join me in a plan to defeat our party’s candidate in the election. The Deputy Governor is a very cowardly man. He said no, we should not fight the governor, we should leave him and his plan, that it is Allah that gives power to whosoever He wants and whatever the Governor plans is irrelevant because Allah has made His own plan. So I left him and went to the Minister. That one is a worldly Abuja man. He readily agreed that we should sabotage our party’s candidate but he tried to be clever; he said he will only give money but will not send his political aides to help. At least that is something so I agreed.
The one who agreed to come out openly and fight was the senator because he understood that he is the first target of the plot. As soon as he collected his quarterly constituency allowance from the Senate, he rushed down and together we planned what to do. We mobilised our supporters. We went and had a secret meeting with leaders of the opposition Everyone Should Eat Party, ESEP. We deployed our Youth Wing; wherever they saw posters of the candidate of our party, Get and Spend League, GSL, they tore it. Two days before the bye-election, Maikahon Karo went to Marmaro Local Government and hid in one small hotel while Tsinin Kusa went to Tsibiri Local Government. There was no hotel there so he entered one brothel and paid the woman so that he could operate from her room. Unfortunately, as he was going to the toilet early in the morning, one of Goshin Bauna’s men who was also in the same brothel saw him. He asked him why he did not see him at the party office since he was in Tsibiri for the bye-election, and Tsinin Kusa said he was not there for the election but had come to see his runaway girlfriend.
Our effort did not succeed because the Governor poured a lot of money into that election. They also warned all the village heads that they must get their people to vote for GSL. That was how our party’s candidate managed to win the bye-election by a very narrow margin. As soon as the election ended, the party leader in the area wrote a petition to the state secretariat saying we did anti-party activity. I denied it vigorously. I said I was ready to swear that it is not true. When Musa Kutunku went to his office and brought out a copy of the Qur’an, I said I will not touch it because I had no ablution.