Wamakko’s convention, APC’s contention

Oyegun is not merely a progressive by word of mouth: he is a progressive in deed as well. He was among the NADECO henchmen that due to the heat of the June 12 struggle rode out of this country on horseback, canoes, motorcycles and donkeys through bush paths to scamper to safety outside Nigeria. Another […]

Oyegun is not merely a progressive by word of mouth: he is a progressive in deed as well. He was among the NADECO henchmen that due to the heat of the June 12 struggle rode out of this country on horseback, canoes, motorcycles and donkeys through bush paths to scamper to safety outside Nigeria. Another is Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu also today’s chieftain of the APC. The result of that exodus was the overrunning of the political firmament by reactionaries.
The reign of reactionaries, in any part of the world, is always fraught with inferior development statistics sometimes to the extent that insurgency and strife characterize the country, like now. It is saddening to see that social services are hardly available to those who are not known to the figures in power. Employment is only for relatives of governors and kinsmen of the president. Start-up businesses are not supported, except for a showmanship that is skewed to campaign for the president’s 2015 aspiration.
Is there any wonder therefore that our democracy has stagnated and not yielded any concrete dividends all the while as other countries of the world with fewer development potentials are growing in leaps and bounds?
That is why the convener of this APC national convention Alhaji Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko, Governor of Sokoto State, must be applauded for the success of his achievement. The event came and went without rancour even though some blowhards on Nigerian politics are screaming to high heavens, that there were mere selections and no elections. In fact these complaints are coming largely from PDP sympathizers who expect that the APC would deviate from the known norms of our domestic sensibilities in politics to something that would bring large scale disharmony and chaos in the APC that would ultimately lead to its disintegration. In their horse-sense, they had predicted that the APC was an accident waiting to happen.
But why is everybody else celebrating this convention? First it is that many had speculated that the APC would crash like a pack of cards if its henchmen do not have their way in the scramble for the control of the party’s machinery. It is from there that the machinations of the opponents of the party brewed and circulated the notion of a Muslim-Muslim ticket. They told the story that General Buhari will settle for nothing less than the presidential ticket of the party with Bola Tinubu as his running mate. They had also concluded that to have the script shoved willy-billy down the nation’s throat, the Muslim party, which APC had become to those who fear it, would also anoint Mallam Nasiru el Rufai as its national secretary. These stories which the ruling party had planted in varying degrees in the media had become so entrenched that even informed quarters began to contemplate their veracity.
True, when it comes to religion, Nigeria is a mess with no end in sight. Many Nigerians are openly religious but covertly non-compliant to religious dogma. So those who believe in the pull-down syndrome had summoned that religion would wreck APC faster than lightening would strike a tree.
But with the handing of the convention by Wamakko any possible drawdown was nipped in the bud. A fly on the wall of the party, Mohammed Sani Umar of SOLID had predicted in a write-up in the Daily Trust prior to the convention that the APC would get a taste of the “Alu Spirit”. Well, it did.
By the end of the convention Governor Wamakko had secured his place in history for organizing a convention that left the PDP with nothing to talk about but the age of who became APC’s youth leader. The Wamakko Convention Committee had skilfully addressed the grey areas which would have resulted in a conflict and appealed to each candidate’s soft underbelly to allow peace and progress to prevail. Perhaps it is important to state that the consensus formula had served the APC better than it had done the PDP. It turned out to be a win-win situation for the APC. Consequently, those anti democratic forces who opposed the consensus formula for the APC are shy of reason for their position. In the words of the former Interim Chairman of the party, Chief Bisi Akande, the party survived anti-democratic forces and became a formidable opposition, against the expectations of its detractors.
Akande said the party does not seek power for its sake but for the sake of the people. He added that while the party was born solid and strong, the process leading to its birth was not altogether smooth; all sorts of obstacles were strewn on its path just so that the country would remain a one party state. So the complaints are actually unfounded.
No matter how one looks at it, consensus is a sad fact of Nigeria’s democracy. That perhaps is why INEC insists that voting must take place even where a consensus has been reached. “The Alu Spirit,” which has drawn many aces in this regard, especially having enjoyed overwhelming consensus in different parties through his sojourn in the All Nigeria People’s Party, the PDP and now the APC, believes that the progressives in Nigeria  must depart from idle sloganeering to pragmatic realism if they are to seize power and use it for the benefit of the people. This convention has therefore domesticated consensus even among the progressives and made the opposition more virile towards inching closer to the presidency of this country. The next step is to draw the battle-line not with the other contenders in the APC but with the power mongers in the PDP if they are to keep their faith in the “Alu spirit” and redeem their hunt for national relevance and power at the centre.