Will APC implode?

Implosion for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is easily predictable, mainly because of the way the party was formed in the first place. This is not a political party that was formed by any ideological conviction of the members other than for the wresting of power from the hands of the then ruling Peoples […]

Implosion for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is easily predictable, mainly because of the way the party was formed in the first place. This is not a political party that was formed by any ideological conviction of the members other than for the wresting of power from the hands of the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In 2015, the PDP faced its own crisis and denied some politicians their ambitions mainly from fear that they would not support President Goodluck Jonathan win his primary for a second term. Rebels departed.

President Muhammadu Buhari then was a viable candidate, of impeccable credentials, but without a viable political party. The APC itself was an opposition party without a viable candidate. The twain consummated a marriage and added to its swelling fold, rebels from the PDP, and this determined the outcome in 2019. It accounted for the Buhari victory. A contraption of strange bedfellows can only implode when the one binding tie loses its elastic value. In this case – the APC is living the reality that President Muhammadu Buhari, with each day that passes, is burning up as the lighthouse candle of the party. The hot molten candle wax is dripping down on to the APC Chairman’s (Oshiomhole) head head. His fate is sealed, and Party Leader, Ashiwaju Bola Tinubu, put it brutally when he was reported to have said that jostling for the presidency come 2023 were killing the party more than the coronavirus. Brutal because, truly, political wrangling has taken government attention off the awesome impending coronavirus, including anything else. We should be discussing ways to contain the pandemic given the advantage of the country being relatively free of it, but instead post-Buhari Nigeria is the preoccupation of most government functionaries; tragic.

One can say any day that to many a Nigerian politician, nothing matters like political power. It is not service to the nation, not succour to the common man, but power itself – how to grab it and having grabbed it, how to hold it, and having held it, how to transit to its next pedestal. A governor or even president spends his first term working for the second term. When he, in the case of governor, gets the second term, he spends it working for transitioning to the senate.

President Olusegun Obasanjo, as much as he denies it, is believed to have sought to extend his tenure. The Nigerian politician hugs political power like life support luggage. Thus, with President Buhari in his final lap, even with three years to go, his successors are jostling in battles that now threaten Oshiomhole’s leadership of the party and indeed the survival of the party as a united entity.

Only President Buhari’s rare stepping into a party feud saved Oshiomhole from being removed and possibly, the party itself from imploding. That the president and some governors of the APC resolved to postpone the emergency National Executive Council (NEC) slated for yesterday, saved the day. While it gives Oshiomole and his supporters a breather, it is just a breather. The governors who agreed with the president are mostly first-term governors. But as time goes and Buhari’s tenure wanes, many governors will jump ship to their seniors who will be crucial in determining the post-Buhari era in 2023.

Look at the bizarre but familiar chronology of facts. Oshiomole as he finished his second term in 2016, installed a protégée Godwin Obaseki, in Edo State as his successor. If he wanted to continue to rule the state using Obaseki, the ploy failed. Obaseki became his own man. Now Oshiomole will not have Obaseki run a second term, and Obaseki will not have Oshiomole as party chairman if he hopes to succeed when he seeks his second term. The tragedy of Oshiomhole is that with so much ahead of him, he has no wisdom moving ahead and looking only at his rear-view mirror. Of greater import is a strongly unified party helping President Muhammadu Buhari deliver on mandate – a mandate that lost six months to the Ahmed Joda study of the national status, more months to the president‘s health challenge, slowed speed owing to a belligerent National Assembly and of course, corruption also striking back at the regime’s anti-corruption effort. These were not issues that Oshiomhole should have taken for granted and therefore did not need the feud with his home state Edo where his wall cracked. His ward suspended him from being a member and hence took away the grounds for his being chairman.

Given the impending struggle of the APC to ensure an APC to APC transition in 2023, many experienced second-term governors worry that Oshiomhole’s debacle in 2019 is a weighty burden on their future. He “happily” lost some APC stronghold states: Adamawa, Bauchi, Zamfara and Sokoto to PDP, one of the 10 sins of Oshiomhole as listed by Chief Osita Okechukwu, an anti-Oshiomhole Chieftain of the APC. Okechukwu did include Oshiomhole’s vacillation between direct and indirect primaries along his whims and preferences of outcome in states as unforgivable. These may have robbed him of the stoicism required for achieving a positive end of tenure for President Buhari. A positive end of tenure is one in which the Buhari collective not only emerges victorious and in continuity with a desired successor to the president.

In dropping calm and calculated Oyegun, many did not bargain for an Oshiomhole chairmanship that was too radical and a maverick that rammed decisions down the governors’ throats. Yet governors controlled the grassroots checked only by President Buhari’s mass following there.

Will APC implode? It may not do so for now given the remaining powers of the presidency where Oshiomhole is presently cocooned, but it sure will when its senior governors fail to have their way in the transition and any of the opposition parties pick up some viability and strength.

Having been bruised, Oshiomhole will rise with a vengeance, his bites, venomously lethal. The confusion now is that while the appeal court has ruled in Oshiomhole’s favour to continue as chairman, a Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court has also granted an interim order declaring Chief Victor Giadom to act as the party’s national chairman. The struggle continues.