The Cat-and-Mouse Game over Zoning
Where should the next president come from? In the unwritten code that guides matters of national politics in Nigeria, the answer is obvious. A northerner will have been president for eight years by 2023 and it is naturally expected that the next one will be a southerner. Ideally, where the next president comes from or where the commander-in-chief worships should not matter. Nigerians need a competent and patriotic leader who can unleash our enormous economic potential and tackle insecurity convincingly. But in realpolitik, ethnic, regional and religious sentiments are of significance in the Nigerian power game. That explains why power rotation and zoning are always on our lips.
But there is a game within the game and, to use a tired cliché, this is heating up the polity. Senator Abdullahi Adamu, the national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), recently poured water on assumptions that the ruling party had already decided to zone its presidential slot to the south. It had been presumed that since he, a northerner, has just been
chosen as the party chairman, coupled with the fact that the current president is a northerner, then presidency would go to the south. But Adamu came out to say the issue of zoning the presidential ticket had not been settled. Officially speaking, he was correct. On record, only the party’s national offices were zoned.
What is Adamu up to? His rhetoric, I believe, is influenced by the game going on in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The leading opposition party appears determined to get back power in 2023 and would be ready to adopt any strategy to achieve its aim. Some in PDP apparently believe that it would be to the party’s advantage to field a northerner. With the number of votes in the north, they probably did their maths and concluded that fielding a northerner against a southerner from the APC would boost their chances at the polls. The party that wrote power rotation in its constitution has, for all intents and purposes, jettisoned the principle in order to leave the APC on the backfoot.
In a sense, those pushing for a northern candidate in the PDP have their argument. Although the party was in power for 16 years — from 1999 to 2015 — a northerner was president for only three of those years. Even at that, it was a terminally ill President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua that was in office during which he was in and out of the hospital till he died. The pro-north group can, therefore, argue that the 16 years of PDP were overwhelmingly in the hands of southerners — Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan — and northerners in the party were short-changed. They can argue that the onus to zone to the south is on APC, not PDP. That would form a good debate.
Where do I stand? I have never hidden it: I am for power rotation. Why do I support rotation? I have my reasons, which I have been advancing in various tones and forms on this page for close to 20 years. One, in a diverse, multi-ethnic and multi-religious underdeveloped African society such as ours, there will always be fears of domination. People want to be assured that they would not be eternally disadvantaged because they do not have the numbers. Accommodation is partly assured when it is established that political power — which Nigerians perceive, rightly or wrongly, as the biggest dispenser of scarce opportunities — will not be monopolised by the biggest groups.
Two, our inability to address certain questions concerning our nationhood is