Oshiomhole: How northern elite trigger last crisis APC won’t survive

To rob the southwest and its champion of their chances in 2023, the northern oligarchs in the APC are ready to sacrifice anything, including their five-year-old toddling party

By Elijah Olusegun

APC National Vice Chairman Lawal Shuaibu has just vented his spleen on his boss Adams Oshiomhole in a classic you-can’t-do-nothing manner. He pointed out the chairman’s incompetence, high-handedness, and immaturity in a letter that got leaked to the press on Tuesday.

Shuaibu then demanded he resign.

Many political pundits have foreseen this, and are readying post-mortems they will give when the ruling APC expires—in 2023, along with President Muhammadu Buhari’s second term.

The death won’t be about the raft of iniquities Shuaibu listed against Oshiomhole; it will be the consequence of the power play between the north and the southwest for presidency in 2023. The chairman is just a collateral target; the main target is APC’ s national leader Bola Tinubu. And the architect many readily finger for the brewing crisis is Kaduna Gov Nasir el Rufai.

Former Sen. Shehu Sani just revealed the subterranean forces at work.

“There is a calculated plot to deny the Southwest or even the Southern part of the country rotation of power in 2023,” he told the Guardian in an interview.

“And the best way to ensure that materialize is by getting into fisticuffs, into political combat between the northern top ranks of the APC and the southwestern top ranks of the party.”

The governor gave himself away when he drew the first blood weeks ago. He came to Lagos to teach Lagosians how to end godfatherism with N2bn—the way he ended it in Kaduna.

Many analysts that know El-Rufai say he thrives in controversies, and this time the negative vibes he’s spreading against Tinubu is for a reason: the 2023 presidency which the governor is eyeballing.

Tinubu, too, has outed, saying he has been under pressure to contest. Many wouldn’t believe the “under pressure” yarn, though.

They know the APC national leader doesn’t fire at half-cock. Aso Rock is an ambition he has been nursing and watering for a while.

Sen. President Bukola Saraki blew Tinubu’s cover last year when he revealed the strong man of Lagos politics wanted to run as Buhari’s vice president in 2014. So it would have just been easy-peasy for Tinubu to step into the presidential race come 2023—because all the odds would be in his favour as vice president and next big thing from the southwest.

(The party’s presidential candidacy will rotate to the region in 2023.)

But when a Muslim-Muslim ticket was rejected in 2014, Tinubu was stopped cold turkey. He rested that gambit, but not the ambition.

According to Saraki, in the height of the APC crisis in 2017, when Buhari appointed Tinubu to reconcile the fractured party, the national leader dropped a hint: he stated the reason he was supporting Buhari despite the hard times the presidency gave him too after the party’s victory in 2015.

Obviously, his support for Buhari’s 2019 presidency was not only about fence-mending or party’s decision. It was for something loftier.

“Tinubu expressed a strong opinion–‘that he would rather ‘support a Buhari on the hospital stretcher’ to get a second term because in 2023, power will shift to the South-west,” said Saraki.

So as certain as it seems now that the ruling APC will yield the presidential ticket to the southwest, Tinubu is already rejigging his political machinery. He started from the party’s national level where he helped put his man Oshiomhole in 2018.

But most of the northern elements in the APC, including el-Rufai, don’t buy the idea of power rotation. Any region that feels up to it should contest, they say, confident that the north has always swung presidential elections in Nigeria. They also believe Tinubu is just being lionized in the southwest–that Buhari or any northerner could have won the Feb 23 election without Tinubu’s or the southwest support.

Demystifying the man many mostly credit for Buhari’s political success appears one urgent task for the wheelers and dealers in the APC. Spotting his ambition,again, has just worsened the situation, putting the Kaduna governor and his cohorts in fight mode.

As early as after the Feb presidential election victory, Kaduna’s state-owned radio stations began thrashing Tinubu in Hausa. Then a while later, el-Rufai took the battle to Lagos, at the gathering of Tinubu’s estranged godsons, and indirectly jibed at the APC national leader.

Then a little while later, a party chieftain from the north central took Tinubu down a peg. He admitted recently the former governor has contributed immensely to the success of the party. But that doesn’t matter. “Honestly he is not the kind of president Nigeria needs in 2023,’ Adamu Kuta, APC-Niger, said.

“Nigerians need someone that can continue with the achievements and the foundation that Buhari has laid.”

And, now, in a personal letter, a northern member of the party’s National Working Committee blindsided Tinubu’s plant at the national level, asking him to step down.

“I have nothing personal, except that I love this party and cannot keep quiet seeing it being brutally murdered,” Shuaibu said.

The vice chairman is only acting over-wrought. The party’s death is likely but not instant. Apart from the embarrassment the leakage of the letter to the media might have caused Oshiomhole and the APC, not more damage has been done.

It remains a personal beef between the chairman and his deputy. Left to fester, it has potential for spiralling into a national crisis any time soon.

And if Buhari lets things slide as he always does, the party might not even make it to 2023, many believe, because the APC was built around his personae.

Even if the president wades in, and makes his body language endorse Tinubu for 2023, some analysts say the president will still have el-Rufai to contest with. The governor’s loyalty to Aso Rock may not always count now that he, too, has won a second term.

After all, el-Rufai used to be loyal to Atiku Abubakar. The vex-vice president gave him a leg-up from being an accidental civil servant to a politician of note, a daring one who now has the balls to take on his party chairman and national leader.

For whom Oshiomhole is—a Marxist and strong-arm democrat—one will expect el-Rufai and other northern conspirators to get as much as they give in this looming war with Tinubu and his man. Problem is: the scale has been tilted against the party chairman. He has a corruption allegation dangling on his neck. It’s a weapon the adversaries can persuade the Aso Rock cabal, believed to be micro-managing Buhari, to use against him.

It is therefore unlikely he will bite back. Nor will his master. Tinubu, many say, won’t dare to put up a fight against a federal might. He is too smart to do that.

So the waves of crisis may continue, sweeping the APC away before its eighth birthday.