Nigeria: From Buharisation to Tinubuisation. By Ochereome Nnanna.
4 min read
When a woman marries twice, she is better placed to know which husband treated her better. As a country, Nigeria has married two husbands since 1999: the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and the All Progressives Congress, APC. No doubt, we experienced a far better Nigeria under the PDP than the APC. This claim has nothing to do with partisanship. Whatever evil the PDP committed, the APC regimes have multiplied them tenfold and added fresh, vile inventions of their own.
The PDP was founded by political leaders who tried to use the outcomes of the Abacha Constitutional Conference to build an improved democracy and governance system. The PDP was built on the foundation of equitable power sharing and rotation, as well as the Federal Character Principle enshrined in Section 14(3) of the 1999 Constitution, as agreed at the Conference.
With this, the PDP ruled Nigeria for 16 years. We experienced prosperity and growth in the second term of President Olusegun Obasanjo, successfully avoided the worldwide economic meltdown under President Umaru Yar’Adua, and another prosperity under President Goodluck Jonathan. It was under Jonathan that Nigeria emerged as the largest economy in Africa.
The PDP was definitely not blameless in terms of corruption and electoral malfeasance. But its success story was built on the foundation of relative equity. The South-West, North-West, and South-South benefited from the power rotation formula. The balancing of federal appointments gave Nigerians a sense of belonging as envisaged by the Constitution.
Under the PDP, no section of the country was relegated as a result of its failure to vote for presidents. The South-West rejected the PDP, yet its son, Obasanjo, was supported by the rest of the nation to emerge as president in 1999 and 2003. Bayelsa is the smallest state in Nigeria by population, yet its son, Jonathan, was elected president in 2011.
PDP lost its glory as a result of two factors. By 2011, the party had become so large that it seemed indestructible. Between 2009 and 2011, the party governed 28 states. In fact, Obasanjo even forced a membership reregistration exercise in order to weed out those he saw as “undesirable” elements. The main reason the party fell was internal divisions. Six Northern governors and those of Rivers State rebelled against Jonathan. Five of them later joined the upstart APC in 2015.
The reason for the second fall of the PDP Leviathan was the party’s unwillingness to uphold its cherished principle of power rotation. In 2022/2023, it was the South- East’s turn to produce the presidential candidate of the party. But Atiku Abubakar and Governor Nyesom Wike’s vaulting but elusive presidential ambitions and the greed of some South-East leaders of the PDP led to the denial of the South-East a prize they had laboured for to the benefit of other zones. If the party had united behind Peter Obi in the 2023 elections, it would have been much more difficult for Mahmood Yakubu’s INEC to award victory to the APC.
APC has failed to make a desirable impact because of the primary momentum that drove its leaders: power. Muhammadu Buhari wanted power by all means. He contested the presidency three times and failed. He even cried publicly and threatened bloodshed. Bola Tinubu also wanted federal power after pocketing Lagos. He approached Buhari, and they forged an alliance fuelled by the lust for power. They struck a “turn-by-turn” agreement.
Tinubu helped Buhari into the presidential office twice. When it was Tinubu’s turn, Buhari tried to betray him by bringing someone else to succeed him. When Tinubu outwitted his political partner and grabbed the APC presidential ticket, Buhari tried to use the federal might against him. But he eventually gave him the full support of Mahmood Yakubu’s INEC and the state agencies of coercion. Tinubu achieved his ambition of becoming Nigeria’s president.
The APC regimes of Buhari and Tinubu have no regard for equity or constitutionality. They have personalised power. Buhari made it clear he would favour those who voted for him. Since his main support came from the North, he inserted Northerners, especially his core loyalists, in most of the juicy, lucrative, and powerful offices. His apologists applauded him, saying he needed to work with people he knew and could “trust”.
What did we get in Buhari’s eight years? Unlike the PDP’s two peak moments of prosperity, we had two recessions under Buhari’s nepotistic, incompetent and draconian rule. His kinsmen and core loyalists, whom he surrounded himself with, failed to help him produce results. Rather, they stuffed their pockets without fear of retribution.
Buhari’s family member, Hadi Sirika, publicly boasted that the APC had the money to “win” the 2023 elections. His Attorney General, Abubakar Malami, also bragged in a video shared by the People’s Gazette and published on many media platforms: “They have been reporting that we shared over 200 Mercedes-Benz cars; if Allah gives us the opportunity, we will share hundreds of airplanes, not just cars”.
Today, Malami, who handled the Abacha loot repatriations, is a free man, as are the rest of the Buhari parasitic crowd.
Under Tinubu, the same pattern is emerging. This shows it is an APC thing. Buhari’s nepotism was often coined as Fulanisation. Some have similarly monikered Tinubu’s emerging formation as Yorubanisation. But I think it goes beyond tribalising the Federal Government.
It is more of a tinubuisation. Tinubu has put all the “heavy” portfolios – Petroleum, Army, Police, Customs, FIRS, Finance, Justice/Attorney General, CBN, Communications, Solid Minerals, Blue Economy, and a host of others – in the hands of his core loyalists and Lagos and Osun kinsmen. The federal character provision is trashed.
*Nnanna is a commentator on public issues.
