2023, Buhari and the Succession Battle
To adapt House Leader Alhassan Doguwa’s method of announcing the census result of his immediate family, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has, at the time of writing this, 25 aspirants that have procured the party’s presidential nomination forms at the princely fee of N100 million. Some personally bought the forms, some had the forms bought for them by friends or political associates, and yet some others had the forms procured by groups and coalition of groups. On this (un)enviable list of presidential aspirants are the party’s co-founder, the vice president, five governors, five senators, five ministers, a former Senate president, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, a former national chairman of the party, a popular pastor who had long self-prophesied himself as No.16 in presidential historical order, and two or three others whose name recognition is nil.
How lucky the APC is! When the party fixed the fees for its presidential nomination forms at N100m, there was a general condemnation, particularly in the media. Some APC officials made spirited defence of the party’s decision, saying the high nomination fees was meant to discourage unserious aspirants from wasting the party’s time and resources. The party may as well not have bothered explaining away its decision. The expensive presidential nomination fees didn’t seem to have spared the party from having a deluge of aspirants seeking its ticket for the 2023 elections. At no time in the electoral history of Nigeria have so many aspirants sought the presidential ticket of one party. What is the catch? Why would so many people be aspiring to preside over the affairs of a country so weighed down by general insecurity, huge debts, high unemployment, crippling inflation, and unstable foreign exchange crisis; and on the platform of a party whose administration in the last seven years has collapsed the country, to borrow a popular presidential expression, “from top to bottom”?
Has the Nigerian presidential office now become an all-comer affair? Is it because the performance of President Muhammadu Buhari has been so pathetic that every
Rochas and Ben and Yahaya and Sani now bets at doing a better job; something like, “If Buhari could be president, why can’t I?” Could that be the reason why a couple of the aspirants who are barely known beyond their streets, and who have no hope in hell of getting the vote of a single delegate outside of themselves, also bought the presidential nomination forms? Or is it no more than an investment with profit motif in mind as the party primaries draw close; a game for political visibility; a gamble on being the beneficiary of a likely stalemate between the top aspirants; an expectation of possible Buhari endorsement; a contest for supremacy and positioning in different zones; a hired gun to undermine the prospects of one or two serious contenders; or mere tools for continued domination of one region?
In December 2014, only five aspirants contested the APC presidential primary in which Buhari picked the party ticket. Since his victory in the 2015 general election, through his re-election in 2019, Buhari has in his utterances, actions and appointments shown himself to be more a regionalist than a nationalist. Those he appointed to oversee some critical ministries like Justice, Defence, Power, Finance, Humanitarian Affairs, Labour and Education are either self-serving or ineffectual or incompetent or overwhelmed. Strangely, the president, who enjoys delegating responsibility but shuns supervision, hardly sanctions his aides and appointees for bad behaviour. Buhari appears so disinterested in the actions and inactions of his ministers, so unperturbed about the disconnect between his administration and the people, and so scornful of the concerns of a critical segment of the populace on the direction he has taken the country that it wouldn’t be totally out of place to say he’s content in being the president, for its own sake. Yet this president, more than any of his predecessors since 1999, has had every support to be a force for the good of the country. He has had total control of the party, which, without internal opposition, had been run since its formation in 2014, to satisfy his every whim. The National Assembly has, since his re-election in 2019, servilely approved