Why not Renewed Hope primaries?

In 1976, when the peanut farmer and former Georgia State Governor Jimmy Carter was running as a dark horse candidate for the Democratic Party’s ticket in US presidential elections, he published a campaign booklet to outline his vision and mission. It was titled, Why Not The Best? Carter subsequently won the election and became US President in January 1977. Months later, commotion erupted in the media with the publication of an audit report into his peanut farm, which showed there was sloppy accounting. Time magazine then did a story titled, “Why Not The Best accounts?”

I am just wondering. The comprehensive story in Weekend Trust at the weekend, titled APC consensus in crisis, indicated that the “consensus” anointment of governorship, senatorial, House of Representatives and state assembly candidates is already causing ripples in many states. Among the states mentioned in the report were Kano, Bauchi, Nasarawa, Yobe, Kwara, Katsina, Borno, Gombe, Ogun, Benue, Ondo and Delta, while other newspapers reported consensus crises in Plateau, Adamawa, Ebonyi, Oyo and Akwa Ibom. In some of these states, first term governors are up for re-election so there is little contest for their positions, but there is hot contest for the legislative positions between current MPs and those aspiring to supplant them.

Ordinarily, all aspirants should be out in the field by now soliciting the votes of party members or convention delegates, but the consensus option adopted by APC’s national leaders has introduced a spectre not previously seen in Nigerian politics. Sure, the Electoral Act provides that party primaries could be direct, indirect or by consensus. The most widely used method before now was indirect, where party members elect delegates, who then vote for candidates at a congress or convention. That method had many drawbacks, the most visible of them being bribing delegates. Soon after the 2022 APC and PDP presidential primaries, when Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar respectively emerged as winners, the social media scene in Nigeria was awash with skits about delegates returning home with heavy pockets and snatching all the locality’s eligible maidens.

Maybe APC’s national leaders wanted to correct that, so this time around, they opted for the other two options, namely direct primaries and consensus, to choose their candidates at all levels. Given that, in his days as ACN supremo and APC National Leader, Asiwaju was known to be a champion of direct primaries, such that he organized one in Lagos in 2019 in which party members lined up at the beachside and voted out Lagos State governor Akinwunmi Ambode, I personally thought that direct primaries would prevail in most cases and consensus will only prevail in a few cases.

Not that direct primaries are less prone to manipulation than indirect ones. Ahead of the 2019 election, then President Muhammadu Buhari opted for direct primaries and APC state chapters returned millions of votes for him. Party chieftains in several states told me at the time that the figures were just cooked up in order to please the leader.

The third option, consensus, is defined in the law as a situation where all the party’s aspirants for a particular position [i.e. those who paid for and obtained nomination forms] willingly agree to support one of them and sign an undertaking to that effect. Ideally, this could be achieved by convincing the others that this candidate stands the best chance to win the election for the party. Alternatively, other aspirants could be asked to withdraw in honour of an old zoning agreement. Or even, they could be persuaded to go for other positions.

Trouble is, according to some party chieftains, the meaning of consensus was redefined at a meeting that President Tinubu held with APC’s 31 state governors. There, it was said, it was agreed that all state chapters will adopt Tinubu as consensus presidential candidate; all first term governors will be adopted by consensus to run again; that Federal and State MPs will not get automatic return tickets but the president will anoint some of them who have been most helpful and loyal to his Administration; and then governors will be allowed to nominate all the other candidates “by consensus.”

If that is the case, then we are set to have the least exciting, least democratic ruling party primaries in nearly five decades of presidential system politics since 1978. As a person who over the years has been anointed by consensus as a Village Story Teller, I will like to recall today some of the most exciting, sometimes direct, sometimes indirect party primary elections we have had in this country since 1978.  NPN’s late 1978 indirect presidential primaries was spectacular; even though the ticket was zoned to the North, six titanic figures contested; three of them qualified to go for the second round; before second round voting, two of the three walked across the hall on live television and conceded, so Alhaji Shehu Shagari was declared elected.

NRC and SDP’s first, direct presidential primaries [with all party members voting] lasted most of 1992. In each party, a dozen titanic political figures contested; the whole country was enveloped in posters, tv and radio jingles and endless rallies. At the end of it, General Shehu Yar’adua won the SDP primaries on the first ballot while Adamu Ciroma and Umaru Shinkafi qualified for a run off in NRC, but General Babangida annulled both of them. The Option A4, indirect presidential primaries that followed in early 1993 were also spectacular; M.K.O. Abiola won SDP’s ticket at the Jos convention while Bashir Tofa won NRC’s at the Port Harcourt convention, both after very tough contests. Abiola won the subsequent election, which was annulled by the military government.

Next in spectacle was PDP’s early 1999 presidential primaries. Though the ticket was zoned to the South, some Northern aspirants jumped in and contested, but Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, fresh out of prison, secured the ticket at the Jos convention. PDP’s sixteen-year rule of Nigeria has been described as a disaster in many areas, but not in holding tolerably democratic primaries. In 2003, as sitting President, Obasanjo was still challenged by half a dozen aspirants at PDP’s primaries at Eagle Square. In 2007, despite outgoing President Obasanjo’s open support for Umaru Yar’adua, powerful party figures General Aliyu Gusau, Rochas Okorocha and Muhammed Buba Marwa still contested and made it really hot, lasting the whole night at Abuja’s Eagle Square. President Goodluck Jonathan might have overturned the regional power shift arrangement in 2011 and contested, but he still allowed a hot contest between himself and Atiku Abubakar. In 2014, APC held spectacular indirect presidential primaries in Lagos where a hot contest ensued between Muhammadu Buhari, Rabi’u Kwankwaso, Atiku Abubakar, Rochas Okorocha and many others.

In 2019, PDP held very hot, very open primaries in Port Harcourt, under the watchful glare of Governor Nyesom Wike. The ticket was zoned to the North; twelve aspirants contested; Atiku Abubakar won while Wike-backed Governor Aminu Tambuwal came second. And then, ahead of the 2023 elections, both APC and PDP held spectacularly open indirect primaries in Abuja. APC witnessed a hot contest between Bola Tinubu, his former protégé and sitting vice president Yemi Osinbajo and former Transport Minister Rotimi Amaechi, among many others. PDP too upheld its tradition of open indirect primaries with Atiku Abubakar beating a crowded field of aspirants, the most potent [and subsequently, the most unforgiving] being then Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike.

APC’s current consensus choice of party candidates may have produced a peace of the graveyard. Every serious guber, senatorial or other aspirant must have been working for many years to position himself or herself for what they thought was the upcoming contest. In Nigerian politics, that usually means spending a lot of money, attending every wedding and every funeral, visiting every sick constituent, donating to every cause worthy and unworthy, building many social and religious edifices, genuflecting before every power broker and every traditional ruler,  dining in the same bowl together with thugs and ruffians, listening patiently to the instructions of every cleric and babalawo and obeying his orders to bring everything from the urine of a buffalo to the eye lashes of a giraffe, sneak into a cemetery and insert your leg overnight inside a fresh grave, or even, sneak into a market square at midnight and rape a mad woman.

A person who has done all or most of these, is suddenly told at the last minute that he has been schemed out by consensus in favour of the son of a kingmaker, will he take kindly to it? How about the party activists who have been waiting impatiently for three years for the primary campaign season to begin, when they will eat their fill? You mean they should stand askance while many aspirants zip up their pockets and there is no money to splash around?

Why is it that this time around, the ruling party is holding almost all its primaries at all levels by consensus? Similar to Jimmy Carter’s Why Not The Best campaign booklet, a Renewed Hope campaign booklet was published in 2022-23.  To borrow from Time magazine’s story headline, Why Not Renewed Hope primaries?