The emerging reality within the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is an intriguing one. The arrowheads of the party, President Muhammadu Buhari, and Bola Tinubu, appear to be working at cross purposes. The romance between them appears to be fading too fast.
We have a telling instance on our hands. The race for the emergence of the leadership of the National Assembly is a ready reference point.
What is the issue here? Two fellows – Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara- have, against the wish of the national leadership of the APC, emerged as President of the Senate and Speaker of the House of Representatives, respectively. The party, we were told, held a mock election over the weekend where Ahmed Lawan and Femi Gbajabiamila were tipped to emerge as Senate President and House Speaker, respectively. However, the party’s choice was repudiated by a sizable majority of members of both chambers of the National Assembly. They threw the party’s position overboard and went ahead to see to the emergence of Saraki and Dogara on the floor of the Senate and the House.
The lawmakers of opposite tendency, who saw to the emergence of Saraki and Dogara, did not stop there. They also made it possible for a member of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Senator Ike Ekweremadu, to emerge as Deputy President of the Senate.
The ruling party, obviously thrown into blue funk by the development, is raking up muck. The national leadership, goaded on by Bola Tinubu, has thrown its hat into the ring. It is set to do battle with those it has described as treacherous lawmakers within its fold. The leadership has described what Saraki and Dogara have done as the height of indiscipline. It has vowed to invoke the supremacy of the party against them.
But there is a snag. President Buhari does not share their sentiments. He has, contrary to Tinubu’s position, accepted the emergence of Saraki and Dogara and has expressed willingness to work with them. Unlike the Tinubu tendency within APC, which believes that leaders of the National Assembly must be anointed by the bigwigs of the party, Buhari’s position, at least, on the surface, is that members of the National Assembly should be allowed to choose their principal officers. These differing tendencies have automatically introduced a divide within the APC.
Indeed, what transpired this Tuesday was no happenstance. The plot looks properly choreographed. Buhari, the leader of the party, was scheduled to hold a reconciliatory meeting with the opposing tendencies within the party to harmonise their positions before the inauguration of the National Assembly. But the man did not make himself available for the talks. His absence stalled the meeting and paved the way for what transpired at the National Assembly that day. It is, in fact, intriguing that one group was waiting to meet with the president while the other was in the chambers of the senate, with the full complement of the principal staff of the National Assembly, electing leaders of the senate. The president could not have been unaware of the goings-on. But he must have chosen to look the other way because the development, obviously, did not go against his interest. This emerging reality tells a lot of story about the famed Buhari-Tinubu rapprochement.
But the cordiality of their relationship appears to be taking a nosedive. Buhari, the man for whom Tinubu staked almost everything to see to his emergence as president, is set to be his own man. He does not want the Tinubu brand of politics where power flows from only one source. And to demonstrate his rejection of the Tinubu approach, the president is quietly shielding himself away from the Tinubu influence.
Perhaps, the first major indication that signposted the way Buhari’s mind was working was in the choice of his media team. The president chose his own men. He would not be bothered that Tinubu deployed his entire media machine and machinery to fight his (Buhari’s) presidential battle. The president does not appear to want strange bedfellows around him. He wants to know, as Chinua Achebe would say, when the rain will begin to beat him.
The immediate impression a discerning observer will run away with in all this is that the APC, which managed to emerge victorious in the recent general elections, was united by only one thing – the resolve to end the reign of Goodluck Jonathan, as Nigeria’s president. The APC easily achieved consensus in this just as Nigerians, again according to Chinua Achebe, will always achieve consensus only in one thing – their common resentment for the Igbo. Beyond that, the party is a very divided house. Since the only agenda that brought the party together has been taken care of, the party can, as well, implode and even explode. This appears to be happening already.
Another scenario that should interest observers is the consensus that a tendency within the APC in the National Assembly reached with their colleagues from the opposing PDP. Both parties, in what looks like a seamless exercise, came together to decide on who their leaders should be. The rapprochement even made it possible for an opposition party member to emerge as Deputy President of the Senate. What this means is that in the absence of the President of the Senate, the minority PDP will have one of its own control proceedings in the senate. It will be interesting to see how this will play out.
This intriguing development would have mattered were we in for real politics where the ruling and opposition parties have different persuasions and ideologies. But here it does not matter because APC and PDP are one and the same thing. In fact, APC is usually taken to be a waste basket of the PDP. That is why both have no difficulty flocking together.
But the real interesting angle to all of this appears to be what Saraki and his supporters within the APC represent. Saraki was one of the henchmen of the PDP, who defected in droves during those hectic moments to the APC. Those were people who were part of everything that PDP had been since 1999. When they left the party, they were not, strictly speaking, against the party. They were against the situation in the party at that time that appeared to be strangulating them. What they did was to revolt against that tendency, using the instrumentality of another platform, in this case, the APC. Having achieved their objective, they can, as well, assert themselves. This is what they have begun to do.
Ordinarily, President Buhari, who has never been in league with the Saraki tendency in politics, is supposed to be uncomfortable with the coup hatched and executed by these former members of the PDP. But he is not. Having become president, Buhari is very willing and ready to free himself from the stranglehold of the tendency within the APC represented by the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). Therefore, if he had to look the other way to ensure that the ACN tendency is sufficiently weakened, so be it. That appears to be the Buhari attitude to the emerging scenario within APC.
If what has happened at the National Assembly is sustained, we will come to see a situation where a sizable number of APC lawmakers will tend towards PDP. In fact, majority of them will not mind returning to PDP if that is what has to be done to ensure that the ACN tendency does not dominate the affairs of the APC. Nigerians should expect more of such twists in the years to come.
But now that a segment of the APC which represents its national leadership has received an upper cut, what does it do about the situation? Will it and can it unseat the leadership that has emerged on both floors of the National Assembly? The true test as to who owns the party resides in the way this Gordian knot will be cracked.