The creeping perfidy in Nigeria’s political arithmetic

However, the most stunning example of betrayal and perfidy in the recent political history of northern Nigeria, according to keen observers, is the one currently playing out in Nasarawa State between defeated governor of the state, Alhaji Aliyu Akwe Doma and his benefactor, renowned political tactician and strategist, Senator Abdullahi Adamu. Former Governor Doma, who […]

However, the most stunning example of betrayal and perfidy in the recent political history of northern Nigeria, according to keen observers, is the one currently playing out in Nasarawa State between defeated governor of the state, Alhaji Aliyu Akwe Doma and his benefactor, renowned political tactician and strategist, Senator Abdullahi Adamu. Former Governor Doma, who was one of the few incumbents displaced in the 2011 elections, succeeded Adamu in 2007. It is public knowledge that the odds were against Doma when he ran for the exalted office. For instance, it was obvious that he lacked the financial muscle to vie for the office of governor, having been drained by his earlier bids against Abdullahi Adamu in the 1999 and 2003 general elections. Besides, Akwe Doma’s rating had been low in view of his initial choice of the hugely unpopular All Peoples Party (APP), now All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) for his earlier contest, as against the PDP, which is Nasarawa’s most widely accepted party. Worst of all, age was not in his favour, having become a septuagenarian before that election.

To begin with, Doma’s four-year administration in Nasarawa State was a resounding failure in terms of developmental projects, socio-economic empowerment of the people and every other governance indices. That, more than anything else, led to his humiliating defeat by the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) candidate in the 2011 elections, Alhaji Umaru Tanko Al-Makura who started his bid under the PDP but decamped to CPC when it became clear that he will not get the ticket. Until then CPC had no following of any renowned personality in the state. Many months before that election, the people of Nasarawa State had publicly declared their resentment of Doma’s administration in view of its obvious failure to meet a third of their yearnings and aspirations. Virtually everybody predicted that PDP will win at all levels but would lose his bid for re-election. As is common knowledge in Nigeria and many other African countries, incumbents are rarely defeated in elections. Incumbents only lose elections through willful failures to fulfill their electoral promises and serve their people. And that was exactly what happened to Akwe Doma in Nasarawa State. Regrettably however, the disgraced former governor went all out groping for a scapegoat, and found no other than his benefactor, Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu. Doma did everything possible to humiliate Adamu during his tenure as governor, until the Nasarawa West senator finally landed in the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s (EFCC) net after making public his intention to run for Senate.

Subsequently, the immediate past governor refused to acknowledge Senator Adamu’s political capital and astuteness by excluding him from his second term bid campaign team. Yet, in spite of excluding Adamu from his campaign team, including refusing to invite him to participate in any of his campaign rallies outside the Senator’s zone, the Keffi-born political giant worked assiduously to ensure that he delivered his zone to the PDP in the senatorial election, as well as the governorship poll. During the governorship election, Senator Adamu ensured that Doma not only won but also got 40,000 extra votes in the zone, though he lost in his area and the Nasarawa North senatorial district. But to everybody’s surprise Doma could neither deliver his own senatorial district nor the Akwanga zone to the party. The PDP’s woeful performance in Doma’s backyard- the Nasarawa South senatorial district-where the party lost by a wide margin in the governorship election, many observers said, was clearly an indication of the disenchantment with Doma.

Things have now come to a head that ex-Governor Doma, recently made a spirited attempt to throw former Governor Adamu out of the Nasarawa PDP, a party the latter founded and promoted in the state. Doma, in cahoots with the party leadership in the state, which he had already cornered since he was governor, appeared to have personalized the party’s affairs to the extent that all meetings were transferred to his residence in Abuja. That was the beginning of the confrontation between the former governor and Senator Adamu, as the latter made it clear to the party leadership that every meeting of the party must be held at its secretariat in Lafia, and not the residence of an individual member. From then on, Doma and his co-travelers in the party leadership decided to exclude Adamu and his perceived associates from any meetings of the party.

At a recent stakeholders meeting convened in Lafia, the state capital, Doma, in concert with the state leadership of the party, ensured that Senator Adamu was not allowed into the venue of the meeting, the party’s state headquarters. Indications that things may not be well with the party emerged when information filtered that some thugs were ordered to bar certain stakeholders from being part of the meeting, which was convened on January 3rd. The only stakeholders allowed were Akwe Doma’s commissioners, permanent secretaries, former chairmen of boards and agencies during his regime, and his cronies. Of course Akwe Doma himself was not at the meeting. Since April, 2011 when he lost the governorship election he did not attend a single meeting of the party at its secretariat in Lafia. Every meeting of the party that he attended was held in his self-exiled residence in Abuja.

Unknown to Senator Adamu, he was one of those supposedly barred from attending. But some of the stakeholders at the meeting that couldn’t stomach what they saw as an attempt to smear former Governor Abdullahi Adamu and founding father of the party in the state forcefully broke the entrance gates to the secretariat to make way for Senator Adamu’s forceful entry into the meeting. This development, though disturbing to some stakeholders of the PDP in the state, was not entirely surprising to most who said it’s a bad character trait that had been predicted by Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) that: “you should beware of the treachery of your benefactors”, and re-echoed in contemporary Nigerian political history by no other than one of the North’s leading political lights in the First and Second Republics, Malam Aminu Kano.

Though it was expected that former Governor Doma, who is now ‘wounded’ and desperate would stop at nothing to stab his benefactor in the back, most keen observers say he should tread with caution because, like the late renowned Katsina-born musician, Alhaji Mamman Shata said, “Shi mai tona ramin mugunta ya tona daidai kwabrinsa; watakila shi zai fada ciki”, loosely translated to match the famous Shakespearean saying that: “The evil that men do lives after them,” but which has found expression in Nigeria’s political parlance and it would seem that ‘The evil that men do now lives with them’.

Ibrahim, a public affairs commentator, is a native of Mai’akuya, Nasarawa State