Sharp blade on barber’s scalp

It could also signal a round of high level defections from APC to PDP. I thought Bafarawa’s exit from APC was a foregone conclusion when I read the statement by APC’s deputy chairman Aminu Masari, who said every APC governor is the party leader in his state. Among the men who may see that statement […]

It could also signal a round of high level defections from APC to PDP. I thought Bafarawa’s exit from APC was a foregone conclusion when I read the statement by APC’s deputy chairman Aminu Masari, who said every APC governor is the party leader in his state. Among the men who may see that statement is showing them the door are Ibrahim Shekarau in Kano, Ali Modu Sheriff in Borno, General Buba Marwa and Markus Gundiri in Adamawa as well as Mohamed Dele Belgore in Kwara.  
Anyone in these men’s position will be angry with the turn of events in APC. APC was a merger of ANPP, CPC and ACN. Since its registration last year, APC’s take off has been very slow mostly on account of the difficulty of fusing these three parties into one. Matters are now compounded in five states by the influx of PDP governors; APC’s national leadership could ultimately reap this whirlwind as well.  
Details of the agreement under which five PDP governors flocked into APC was not made public. We may not have to wait for the memoirs of key actors in the deal to find out its details because in politics, the beans will one day be spilled as a result of squabbles. There must have been a deal because top APC leaders visited the five PDP governors one by one prior to their defection. Now, you don’t send a team of your party’s top leaders to invite a state governor to join your party without promising him something.
What quickly became apparent was that APC leaders in the affected states were neither told what was going to be offered nor were they included in the wooing delegations. As a result, after APC leaders finished the rounds of wooing, they had to set up another committee to go round the same states and placate the aggrieved party leaders, notably Bafarawa, Marwa, Gundiri and Shekarau. This was strange, considering that APC’s hyper-active publicity machine led by Alhaji Lai Mohammed has often made the most of PDP’s impunity and lack of internal democracy. One would have expected a party made up of democrats to have subjected a serious matter such as the offer to be made to the G7 governors to internal debate and a NEC decision. If that had happened, major APC figures such as Shekarau and Bafarawa would not have been taken aback by it.
The consequence of all these is that so early in its life, APC is about to suffer embarrassment with leading figures moving out of it to PDP. Malam Shekarau said after hosting thousands of his supporters in Kano last week that a decision would be announced soon. If the mood of those supporters at the meeting was any guide, he will soon leave APC too.  Such a rash of high-level defections, if they occur, will not be to the APC leaders’ liking though they savoured and relished the defection of PDP governors to their own ranks. It is a common saying in Hausaland that the barber does not like the feel of a sharp blade on his own scalp.
In terms of real politik, it could be said that APC made a useful trade off by giving up former governors in exchange for serving governors. The governors who flocked into APC had all defeated the original APC leaders’ machines at the polls in their states. To that extent, they are politically more potent. But what about the morality of it? Only a short time ago, APC leaders were castigating these same men and alleging that they were elected fraudulently. They contested all these men’s victories in court. How they now discovered otherwise? By pursuing a policy of wooing sitting governors into the party without regard to their antecedents or political principles, the pragmatic APC element led by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu has completely won over the idealistic Muhammadu Buhari element. The only problem with that strategy is that APC will soon become indistinguishable from PDP. Nor has it learnt lessons from CPC’s handing over its state branches to PDP defectors in 2011.
Returning to Attahiru Bafarawa’s case, the bad blood that flows between his camp and Wamakko’s is such that Bafarawa had to leave once APC leaders installed Wamakko as the state party leader. To that extent Bafarawa has morality on his side but that is not to say that he is occupying a moral high ground. At the height of his political power ten years ago, Bafarawa showed as much impunity as any PDP potentate. As ANPP’s national chairman in 2002, Bafarawa chased Borno State Governor Mala Kachallah out of the party by handing over its structures to his friend, Ali Modu Sheriff. Nor can Bafarawa frown at Wamakko’s change of parties because he himself serially defected from APP to DPP to ACN, back to ANPP and on to APC. That he joined PDP is remarkable because he showed a distinct dislike for it since 1999.
Bafarawa can also not say he does not believe in hijacking a party because as soon as he entered ACN in 2010, he made a bid to become its presidential candidate. What was that if not high-level hijack? Bafarawa might say this is the second time that Alu is pushing him out of a party. He once told me that he left ANPP in 2006 when its then chairman Edwin Ume-Ezeoke handed over the Sokoto State chapter to his deputy, Wamakko at the behest of Governors Ahmed Sani and Muhammed Aleiro. It could be true; Yariman Bakura once told me how they retaliated against Bafarawa because he tried to replace him as Zamfara governor with Senator Lawali Shu’aibu. Therefore, Bafarawa could be another barber who does not like the feel of a sharp blade on his own scalp.
PDP is also scrambling to get back the defected governors. New party chairman Ahmadu Mu’azu made it his top goal to woo them back and already, PDP governors have formed task forces to go and lure back their colleagues. Mu’azu was touted by Jonathan himself as the man who could build bridges and woo back aggrieved men. Can he? Six years ago, Mu’azu epitomized impunity. Everyone thought Malam Isa Yuguda was his close friend but Mu’azu went to great lengths in 2006-07 to scuttle Yuguda’s bid for the PDP ticket. Policemen tear-gassed Yuguda’s rallies and Mu’azu arranged for the PDP screening committee to screen out Yuguda on the grounds that he didn’t produce an indigeneship certificate. [He did; I saw a copy].  In late 2006, when armed men attacked Isa Yuguda’s house in Abuja, Mu’azu got the party chairman Ahmadu Ali to go to Bauchi and declare at the Government House that Yuguda lied, that no shooting took place even though the FCT police command said there was an exchange of fire.
Now, in his eight years as governor of Bauchi, Mu’azu was credited with executing many projects but he became so unpopular by 2007 that the stoically conservative people of Bauchi famously staged the A kasa a raka a tsare phenomenon. With thousands of volunteers guarding polling centres, the PDP governorship candidate was defeated while Mu’azu himself was defeated by Senator Bala Mohamed for a senate seat, the first sitting governor to suffer such indignity. All because Bauchi people thought he personified impunity; now he has been selected by Jonathan to end Bamanga Tukur’s reign of impunity.
Here we are, witnessing a contest between PDP and APC to woo governors and ex-governors back and forth. No one is doing so on the basis of ideology or party program. People are going into and out of parties on the basis of grievances and personal promises. None of them likes the feel of the blade on his own scalp.