Tambuwal: saint or sinner?

I had already completed the draft of this article when news came that Tambuwal had ‘withdrawn’ from the race. According to Tambuwal “Having consulted widely, taking into consideration the concerns of some elders of the party, I have decided to suspend my participation in the presidential contest for now. I have done so as a […]

I had already completed the draft of this article when news came that Tambuwal had ‘withdrawn’ from the race. According to Tambuwal “Having consulted widely, taking into consideration the concerns of some elders of the party, I have decided to suspend my participation in the presidential contest for now. I have done so as a sacrifice for the cohesion and unity of the APC. I am suspending my participation in the presidential race for now because I do not have any inordinate ambition to occupy any office” (Vanguard 19 November 2014). I took special note of the fact that Tambuwal talked of “suspending” his candidacy “for now”, not that he was withdrawing from the race.
 From the time he emerged as the Speaker of the House against his party’s directive, there have been some drama, colour and even mystique about Tambuwal:  He spoke his mind often against his (formal) party, the PDP; he was able to hold the House together despite the fact that PDP lawmakers were in the majority and that it was obvious to most people that he was a closet member of the APC.  The fact that the PDP was apparently unable to move against him when it had all the resources in the world (including of course loads of Ghana-Must-Go bags) made him larger than life.  It is the Speaker’s ability to hold the House together despite the thinly veiled animosity of his party and his skills in carefully avoiding any banana peel that might have been laid on his way that gave rise to suggestions that he might be indeed a good material for a higher office.
But shun of political proclivities – PDP and APC supporters will obviously have different opinions of him – how will Tambuwal really be remembered in this dispensation?
I believe for independents – those who are not leaning to either PDP or APC – their perception of Tambuwal will depend on their ideological and philosophical disposition towards politics.
Those from the school of Realism who borrow from the Machiavellian school that the end justifies the means, that obtaining political power, being able to consolidate it and using it effectively is all that matters, will see Tambuwal as a hero. For them morality should have no place in politics and no one should have any right to enforce his or her own version of morality on others. Realists will compare politics to a complex game in which different actors have different goals and follow different value codes to attain such goals.  Most Realists are likely to see Tambuwal as an extremely smart political operator who had to do the needful to get elected as Speaker and was able to remain in that position against all odds.
 Those who believe that politics should or ought to be driven by high moral principles will clearly see Tambuwal as a villain: they will frown at his  ‘party hopping as either evidence of lack of principle or of a tendency towards opportunism:  As   Mohamed Haruna  graphically put Tambuwal’s ‘party hopping’ activities in his column of  5 November 2014:  
“In 2003 he contested and won the House seat for Kebbe/Tambuwal on the ticket of the ANPP, one of APC’s three major legacy parties. He then defected to the DPP, founded by the state governor, Attahiru Bafarawa, ahead of the 2007 elections when the governor left ANPP due to disagreements within the party’s leadership. However, when DPP denied ANPP defectors automatic tickets he returned to his old party.
“He then moved once again to PDP when the ANPP governorship candidate, Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko, who had been Bafarawa’s deputy on the ANPP ticket, was persuaded by the PDP through some intricate manoeuvres to defect to it, ahead of the 2007 elections. The future speaker won again on PDP ticket in the last elections in 2011.
“His defection to the APC last month would not be the first time he would poke his finger in PDP’s eyes; he became speaker in June 2011 by defying the party’s zoning arrangement in the House when he contested and walloped the party’s candidate for the job, Mulikat Adeola-Akande, by 252 votes to 90 out of the 350 members that voted.”
Tambuwal’s critics would argue that having one foot in the APC presidential contest and one foot in the Sokoto governorship race is symptomatic of the same ‘opportunism’ that made him move from party to party. His admirers would however see his tendency to change party affiliation as another evidence of his pragmatism. Again the fact that Tambuwal was a closet APC member and refused to resign when he formally defected from PDP to APC would be viewed dimly by idealists. In essence Tambuwal could be a villain or a saint depending on one’s political party leanings or the person’s ideological and philosophical approaches to politics.
A very crucial question is how Tambuwal would have affected the contest for the APC’s presidential contest? This will remain a hypothetical question since he has already suspended his candidacy.  However it will have come as a surprise to me if the other politicians who had been labouring to build the APC from day one, investing their time and resources in it, would have gladly handed the presidential ticket of the party to a relatively new comer. Despite their public grandstanding, I do not believe that Nigerian politicians are driven by such sense of altruism. Most are in the game for power and lucre.
It will also be interesting to speculate how Tambuwal’s candidacy would have affected the permutations of the 2015 presidential race if he had picked the APC’s ticket.
In my column of 10 April 2015 entitled ‘Tambuwal will be the nightmare scenario for PDP’, I argued that Tambuwal’s presidential candidacy “will bring unusual excitement to the campaigns and will valorise the base of both parties.” I still strongly believe his candidacy would have done so.
In the same article I also noted that his greatest strength is that “while he has a national name-recognition by virtue of being the Speaker of the House of Representatives, he does not have the baggage that other potential presidential candidates, who have held high public offices in the past, have.  The PDP will therefore struggle to find a major attack line against him that can stick.”
I believe there are several voters who are supporting President Jonathan not so much because they believe in him as to the fact that they do not see those angling to replace his as credible alternatives. Tambuwal would probably have poached such voters.  However, had Tambuwal contested and won the APC presidential nomination against Buhari and Atiku, he would also have built a groundswell of resentment against his person from die- hard supporters of the two candidates in the North.  In fact at the time of the news report that the Tinubu camp had shifted its support from Buhari to Tambuwal several of Buhari’s supporters sent text messages to me swearing that they would do “anti-party activity” during the election if Buhari fails to emerge as the party’s flag bearer.  Based on this, it can be argued that by withdrawing from the presidential race, Tambuwal has chosen to preserve his integrity among those who supported him most.  He talked about ‘suspending’ his candidacy which could mean several things, including the possibility of his being a compromise candidate if the APC’s presidential primaries becomes stalemated.