Paying the price of tactical blunders
In fact, this insincerity about its commitment to internal democracy and justice has exposed the underbelly of the CPC leadership, thereby shaking the confidence of its followers who wrongly assumed that their party is the citadel of fair play. What is even more nauseating about the activities of CPC leaders such as Alhaji Buba Galadima […]
In fact, this insincerity about its commitment to internal democracy and justice has exposed the underbelly of the CPC leadership, thereby shaking the confidence of its followers who wrongly assumed that their party is the citadel of fair play. What is even more nauseating about the activities of CPC leaders such as Alhaji Buba Galadima and Alhaji Sule Hamma is the manner they hijacked the party to impose their preferred candidates on the party. It smacks of double standard to allow people to go and vote for gubernatorial primaries and then throw their verdict overboard because it didn’t favour your preferred candidates. Why should the CPC leaders allow primaries when they had no intention to respect the outcome? If, indeed, the party had the prerogative to choose candidates rather than the people, why allow the contestants waste their time and resources to participate in a charade called primaries and then refuse to respect the verdict of the people? Buba Galadima even threaten to expel any candidate that goes to court to challenge the party policy of replacing validly elected candidates with those who lost the gubernatorial and other primaries.
Most of the candidates that were unjustly substituted are very popular. A case in point was the replacement of Alhaji Mohammed Abacha, the validly elected candidate at the January 12th 2011 gubernatorial primaries, with Colonel Lawal Ja’afaru Isa under the so-called prerogative of the party to nominate candidates by selection after an election was previously conducted to determine the popularity of candidates. Party prerogative to impose candidates at will contradicts the whole idea of conducting primaries to determine the popularity of candidates. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the Police, the SSS and the court had all confirmed Mohammed as validly and peacefully elected. He was officially declared by INEC as the candidate of the CPC in Kano State.
Few days to the April 26, 2011 gubernatorial election, however, the CPC leadership won the appeal at the court, which upheld the power of the party to nominate candidates regardless of the verdict of the voters. Outraged by the injustice meted out to Mohammed Abacha, thousands of CPC supporters and members found their enthusiasm dampened. In fact, it was reported that about 27 CPC House of Assembly candidates withdrew their interest to contest the election because their hard work to build the party was rewarded with ingratitude and humiliation.
As expected, the PDP and ANPP in Kano State took advantage of the internal crisis in the CPC to push the new party out of reckoning. The CPC’s biggest blunder in Kano State is to push its luck too far. How do you fight when you lead a divided house? How can Ja’afaru Isa win the confidence of Mohammed Abacha or his supporters after allegedly sponsoring malicious newspaper publications against him, calling him unprintable names? The smear campaign against Mohammed Abacha has earned him more sympathy and created more enemies for Colonel Ja’afaru Isa. It would have been a big miracle if Ja’afaru Isa had performed any better than he did during the April 26 gubernatorial election. With diminished good will, Isa was trailing behind PDP and ANPP candidates. It was clear that protest votes worked against Colonel Isa’s chances at the governorship polls.
The CPC has been mismanaged by myopic and selfish leaders who are riding on the back of Buhari’s personal integrity to promote their own private agendas at the expense of the party unity and cohesion. Haunted by a messiah complex, the CPC leaders believe that Nigerians need them more than they need Nigerians! The consequence of this mentality is that it takes the will of the people for granted. In fact, the outcome of the gubernatorial election in Kano State is a rude awakening to the CPC leaders who believe that the will of the people should go to hell. As the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Spiritual leader argues “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson.”
No discerning and keen observers in Kano State had expected the CPC to perform well in the gubernatorial election after the party inflicted a fatal blow on itself by taking unity and internal cohesion for granted through the insensitive policy of throwing the will of the people overboard. The CPC is about four months old and therefore, its leadership should have made internal democracy the core value of its political culture. The CPC is no longer better than PDP and ANPP in terms of internal democracy. Didn’t Buba Galadima and Sule Hamma foresee the dangerous scenario the destruction of internal democracy could cause?
Galadanci wrote in from No. 21, Panama Street, Maitama, Abuja.