Banana Peels in Yilwatda’s Path
VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA
VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA
Should Mr. Nentawe Goshe Yilwatda, who out of the blues grabbed the biggest chairmanship there is on Nigeria’s political scene last week, be celebrating with home-grown Plateau potato and radish, or should he be looking over his shoulders and casting a wary eye on his future steps, lest he slides away on banana peels the way many of his predecessors did in the last five decades?
Yilwatda abandoned his lucrative position as Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development after only ten months in office to become National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC. It was not said that he resigned from the cabinet position but he may likely do so this week, partly because no minister that I ever know of in Nigeria ever served simultaneously as Chairman of a political party.
Did he make a wise choice? Being chairman of the ruling party is a very big deal. The Presidency, 23 governors and counting, Senate and House of Reps leadership, nearly two-thirds of National Assembly members, nearly fifty ministers, at least 23 state assembly speakers, several hundred state assembly members, hundreds if not thousands of chairmen and board members of federal parastatals and companies, hundreds of local government chairmen and councilors, and some one hundred ambassadors and high commissioners if and when they come on board, will all defer to you and say, “My Chairman!” Many other closet members of the ruling party, such as federal agency heads and security chiefs, will bow and tremble before Yilwatda and say, “My Chairman!”
He may still be pinching himself and wondering how he got here, the way one minister in the military era used to stretch his arms and legs every thirty minutes, pinched his body and asked himself whether he was the one in the ministerial chair or he was dreaming. Even though Yilwatda has been a federal minister for nearly a year, he was not very visible in the newspapers. His Ministry in its earlier form, which was created by the Buhari Administration with agencies nixed away from Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s office, was once extremely visible, and quite controversial, under Hajiya Sadiyya Umar Faruk. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Buhari made a national broadcast and said her ministry will provide relief to Nigerians. The very next day, Minister Sadiyya appeared post-haste at a village on Abuja city outskirts, NTA cameras in tow, placed huge piles of money on desks, and proceeded to distribute it to anyone in the long queue. Yilwatda did no such thing during his ministerial tour; nor did he approve transfer of ministerial funds to a private account as his predecessor was alleged to have done.
He got his ministerial portfolio because ex-governor Samson Bako Lalong abandoned Plateau State’s seat in the cabinet only a year after he got it. Maybe Lalong was not grateful that he was made Minister in charge of the troublesome Labour sector, even though he was Director General of the Tinubu/Shettima 2023 campaign and did what he could to cool tempers generated in the Middle Belt against the Muslim/Muslim ticket. So when the courts suddenly disqualified the elected PDP senator and handed him the seat, Lalong abandoned the cabinet and grabbed the senate seat with both hands. It was politically well thought-out; if he didn’t take the seat, there would be a bye election and with PDP controlling the state government, APC will most likely lose it. No such danger with Yilwatda abandoning the ministerial seat, because another person from Plateau must get it back.
Why wasn’t Lalong made the party chairman? It would be logical because all previous APC national chairmen were ex or even serving governors. Bisi Akande, John Odigie-Oyegun, Adams Oshiomhole, Mai Mala Buni, Abdullahi Adamu and Abdullahi Umar Ganduje were [and in Buni’s case, still is] state governors. There must be a reason why governors were always preferred as APC chairmen; they have a lot of political and administrative experience, they know how to win elections, they are familiar with protocol and security matters, they have handled a lot of money, they are media savvy, and they are not easy to intimidate.
The curious thing is, how are APC chairmen chosen these days? Virtually no aspirants emerged before the last APC National Executive Committee [NEC] meeting where Yilwatda was chosen. There were no public campaigns, no screening of candidates and no publication of manifestoes. Which raises the suspicion that the President alone decided who will be party chairman, rammed it through APC governors, and NEC then rubber stamped it. It wasn’t the first time this was happening; the former chairman Ganduje was chosen in much the same manner, and Ganduje’s predecessor Abdullahi Adamu was removed in exactly the same manner, which has set a dangerous precedent. Nor did APC even state that it was re-zoning the chairmanship to North Central, as some party leaders from the zone had agitated for long.
If the president single handedly chose the chairman, he was not the first to do, because President Obasanjo single-handedly brought his military colleague Colonel Ahmadu Ali out of retirement and installed him as PDP chairman. President Jonathan did the same with both Alhaji Bamanga Tukur and Ahmadu Adamu Mua’zu [both of them ex-governors again, incidentally] and President Buhari did the same with both Adams Oshiomhole, Mai Mala Buni and Abdullahi Adamu [all three of them governors, former and serving]. This style of choosing party chairmen by presidential fiat, which emerged in the Fourth Republic, means presidents do so based on their personal political calculations. In the case of Yilwatda, the primary consideration is to calm Middle Belt sentiment against the Muslim/Muslim presidential ticket. While President Tinubu appeared to have given some thought to the idea of changing it, he might have backed away lest he throws away all far Northern votes. Making a North Central Christian the party chairman is the least he can do in the circumstances.
Is this system the best for politics? Party chairmen in this Republic are decidedly less powerful in relation to the Presidency than was the case in the Second Republic. In 1978, NPN chose its chairman in an open contest at the Lagos convention, having zoned the seat to the South West. Chief Meredith Adisa Akinloye, who was national chairman of the ruling NPN throughout the four years of the Second Republic, was extremely powerful. An old politician in Kaduna once told me that during their NPN days, if you got a note from Akinloye and went to deliver it to any minister, the minister will come running out of his office. It was unknown in NPN, he said, for a party chairman to spend hours in the waiting room of a governor or even the president, as he observed is the case in this Republic.
While Yilwatda and his close associates are busy celebrating his rise, they must also spare some thought for the manner of his eventually leaving the seat. This position is very slippery, what former Senate President Dr. Chuba Okadigbo once described as walking on a banana peel. For starters, we are yet to hear why former chairman Ganduje was unceremoniously forced to resign. There are many rumours, but nothing official. If it is to placate the Middle Belt, APC could as well have waited until its convention scheduled for later this year. In any case, given the tremendous help and personal loyalty to Tinubu that Ganduje exhibited during his days as Governor of Kano, up to and including describing then President Buhari as Habu Na Habu [the character in Hausa music who ruined what he built], the shabby treatment he got will make many loyalists to ponder.
Even if, as some newspapers reported, that state security chiefs visited Ganduje in the dead of night and forced him to sign a resignation letter [wasn’t that an undue mix-up of state and politics?], it was still short of what President Obasanjo once did to Chief Audu Ogbeh. For a man known for his staunch Africanist posture, it was very unAfrican that Obasanjo appeared at Ogbeh’s house uninvited, demanded to eat pounded yam [since Ogbeh’s home state of Benue State is the home of pounded yam], washed his hands and then brought out a resignation letter for the PDP chairman to sign. At gun point, according to some people.
Look, even the chairmen who got their positions after the most rigorous campaigns, got thrown out shabbily. I am thinking here of four party national chairmen of the Third Republic, namely Ambassador Babagana Kingibe, Chief Tom Ikimi, Dr. Hameed Kusamotu and Chief Tony Anenih. The first two, national chairmen of SDP and NRC respectively, were thrown out by General Babangida when he cancelled the party presidential primaries of 1992 [the prelude to annulling the June 12, 1993 election]. Anenih and Kusamotu, who succeeded them at hotly contested party conventions in Jos and Port Harcourt respectively, were thrown out by General Sani Abacha when he seized power from the Interim National Government [ING] in November 1993. Before them, Akinloye’s eventful tenure as NPN chairman was also ended by soldiers in December 1983. So, there are many ways of booting out party chairmen.
Yilwatda may have been appointed essentially to assuage Middle Belt sentiment. If it is not assuaged and the clamour for a Muslim/Christian presidential ticket re-emerges next year, it will be a big banana peel in his path. An even bigger peel is that he must remain in sync with the president’s personal desires, first of securing a second term, secondly of keeping the party completely on his leash, including singing “On Your Mandate We Stand” as the party’s anthem. It is a contradiction in terms because the chairman is expected to be fair to all party members and maintain a level playing field for other aspirants that may emerge in the party.
The trouble with totally aligning with the president’s aspiration, such as this wave of endorsements by party organs and branches, is that APC governors who are aspiring for a second term will soon demand the same treatment. Shortly afterwards, followed by senators and MPs’ demands for automatic return tickets. It is precisely the kind of stuff that drives some people out of the party when their own aspirations are blocked. People will then turn around and blame the party chairman, saying his “style of leadership” created crises and factions in the party. What is a man to do, when he is being chased by a leopard and he is running towards a hyena’s den?
