Borno APC primaries and the fury of a loser

The anger and resentment that has greeted the primary elections into various political offices of all registered political parties across the country is still palpable in many states. There are still states where the controversies generated have refused to die. In Zamfara for example, the fire that was stoked in the run off to the […]

The anger and resentment that has greeted the primary elections into various political offices of all registered political parties across the country is still palpable in many states. There are still states where the controversies generated have refused to die. In Zamfara for example, the fire that was stoked in the run off to the primaries and soon after, has not only kept on burning, but is threatening to throw not just the APC, but the entire state into a political turmoil capable of igniting a much larger conflagration. The runoff to the primaries across the country and the intrigues, horse-trading and scheming that characterized the process have quite naturally mired and estranged political relationships so much that some analysts have suggested that the political terrain will never be the same again. The process as it relates to the primary elections of the APC in Borno state excites me the most. Borno is my beloved state and at the onset, I honestly feared that the large number of aspirants for the office of governor was so unmanageable and uncontrollable that the state would likely cascade into another security breach that will complicate an already bad situation. I am one of those who lampooned Governor Kashim Shettima for his inability to narrow the number since most of those in the race were members of his kitchen cabinet. I looked at the huge resources that were literally wasted in the purchase of nomination forms by the governorship aspirants in particular and I did a comparative analysis and comparison of the volume of goodwill and help that would have been extended to the millions of displaced people. On the face of it, it appeared as if that expenditure was as needless as it was avoidable. But as captured by one columnist, no price was too big to pay in an effort to give a level playing field to whosoever wished to exercise his rights to contest and that if the space is narrowed, it will amount to trampling on other peoples’ rights. This will have run against a fundamental and key democratic principle and if it snowballed into a security breach… and it might have, then we will have ourselves to blame.

The purpose of this piece is to draw the attention of one of the unsuccessful aspirants who, from utterances, actions and body mannerisms has allowed his apparent failure to become a fuel to inflame and stoke hatred and enmity within the APC family and within his own biological family, to the extent that dangerous divisions along ethnic, political and geographical lines are being fanned and exacerbated in a state that is struggling to shrug off a destructive religious fundamentalism of immense proportion. I am a Southern Borno minority and I have been active in the struggles for power shift to southern Borno, believing as we all justifiably do, that the marginalization inherent in the system has stirred up resentment in all of us. So, quite naturally, I and many others warmed up to Alhaji Idris Durkwa, a serving Director in one of the federal ministries and a man apparently with the financial war chest to galvanize support and organize the struggle to, within the ambit of the law, achieve the objective of power shift. It was painful that he lost, but the fact that there were other 22 or more aspirants who equally lost, drove the message home that, even if the process was not entirely transparent, the need to preserve peace and look forward to the future will, to my mind, have mellowed down any personal desire for personal conquests or acquisitions. The information to the effect that one of the aspirants is currently in the forefront to drum up opposition for the successful candidate and is already expending huge resources to sabotage the process is to me very unhelpful, unwarranted and insensitive.

If infractions are, as a rule, not looked over, the aspirant, who was alleged to have spent huge amount on the primary elections alone, will have been taken to task for flouting civil service rules which unequivocally prohibits any civil servant from playing politics, not to talk of aspiring to contest, without first resigning from office. I must stress here that I am not about taking away the rights of any of the failed aspirants to initiate processes to right perceived wrongs done to them. My grouse is with someone that has flouted constitutional, civil service and electoral laws, and is in breach of all norms known to man, to now stand on the heap of his own dirt, to instigate a clearly selfish agenda to impair a transparent process in a state that can ill-afford the slightest breach, all in pursuit of a wild ambition to become governor. I take cognizance of the number of votes that separated the eventual winner and the others during the primaries. Professor Babagana Umara Zulum got more than 4500 of the 5012 votes with his closet rival getting some 140 votes. It goes to show, therefore that the winner was the favorite of the delegates and what we expected was for the losers to be good sportsmen by accepting defeat and, as some 14 of them eventually did, to congratulate the Professor, join hands and team up to prosecute the bigger fight that lay ahead. In any case, there can never be two governors at a time and it therefore becomes imperative for men to become men and not to want to bring the roof down on all heads.

Williams wrote this piece from Biu, Borno State.