Ayorinde Oluokun/ABUJA President Jonathan mines the South west in a desperate search for votes Nigerians, especially those outside of the political loop of the country’s two leading political parties, have continue to imagine what could have been the outcome of the presidential elections scheduled for 14 February, 2015 had it not been shifted by six weeks. But the fact is that many chieftains of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, as this magazine gathered last week feared that their party’s candidate, President Goodluck Jonathan, may have been getting set to vacate the Aso Rock presidential villa by now if the polls had been held as scheduled. A Return to the Drawing Board Thus, the six-week extension in the date of the polls which many still believed was deliberately foisted on the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, by the ruling party with the support of the military chiefs is being seen as a golden opportunity to take the wind out of the sail of the momentum of the General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the opposition All Progressives Congress, APC. For the PDP, especially President Jonathan, it is a task for which there is no time to waste. Based on surveys which suggested an outright win for the opposition presidential candidate or a very close race if the polls had held as scheduled, the President had literarily returned to the drawing board immediately the window of opportunity became available to further sell himself to Nigerians. [caption id="attachment_20810" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Jonathan visited the Alaafin of Oyo, Obas Adeyemi.[/caption] The President had held an all night meeting with all the Governors elected on the platform of Peoples Democratic Party, PDP on how to reverse the impending defeat at the polls few days after the 7 February announcement of the shift in the date of the election by INEC. This magazine gathered that a lot of suggestions were made at the meeting on how to re-jig the campaign of the President within the six weeks window available as a result of the postponement of the elections. From what this magazine also gathered, the governors had suggested that postponing the polls would give the President more time to sell himself and his achievements to Nigerians while the advantage of the new window will also be utilized to tell Nigerians why the candidate of the opposition is not worth their vote in a no expense spared publicity blitz. Femi Fani Kayode, the Director of Communication of PDP Presidential Campaign Organisation told journalists after the poll shift for instance that the PDP presidential campaign will use the six weeks extension to publicise the achievements and further ‘expose Buhari.’ The other aspects of the plan include getting Professor Attahiru Jega, the Chairman of INEC out of office to pave way for a more pliable replacement, getting the courts to disqualify the opposition’s presidential candidate and campaigning against the use of card readers for accreditation purposes before voters are allowed to vote. This is to be completed with visits to the key geopolitical zones during which the achievements of governments in each of the zones will be highlighted and a meeting with key stakeholders in political, religious, commercial and other circles held. Some reports had indicated that the presidency had budgeted billions of Naira to buy the support of the various groups. In what seems an actualization of this claim, Vice President Namadi Sambo relocated to Kaduna, the capital of the old Northern region for most part of last week, meeting with different groups and opinion leaders in an effort to pour water on the raging popularity of the APC presidential candidate in the Northern part of the country. Staying ‘Put’ in Lagos The week before, President Jonathan had spent unprecedented five days in Lagos in a move designed to enhance support for his second term tenure ambition in the South West region for the election now scheduled for 28 March. The President who kicked off his visit to the region with the commissioning of four warships recently acquired by the Nigerian Navy did not mince words about his mission as he met with key traditional rulers, trade groups, and political leaders of different ethnic communities during the four days. Analysts said the commissioning of the warships was to deflect criticisms of the President’s handling of Boko Haram terrorism. This, they noted, was also to further justify the President’s claim that previous administrations, including the one headed by Buhari, his main opponent, failed to effectively equip the military, which led to the inability of Nigerian troops to respond effectively to the challenge of Boko Haram insurgency. “We believe that if you give us your mandate, at least, in the next two years, this epileptic power supply will be a thing of the past and it will be the basis for the growth of micro, small and medium enterprises in this country,” the President said when he commissioned the 750 mw Olorunsogo II Power Station in Ifo Local Government Area of Ogun State. He also assured his audience made up of members of Federal Executive Council, PDP chieftains, political and community leaders that with the privatisation processes almost completed, power failure will soon be a thing of the past in the country. He actually told them that he had lived up to his campaign promise of making the power sector a priority with the privatization of the sector and in the next two years, Nigerians can take power sector for granted as obtainable in other countries. The President also met with different groups whom he thought are capable of helping his chances of re-election. The groups he met with include the Yoruba Council of Elders, association of market women, Members of the Oodua Cooperative Alliance led by Asiwaju Adetokunbo Osisanya, the Igbo and the Arewa community leaders in Lagos. During the various meetings, the President enumerated his achievements to the various groups while asking for their support to return to office. The various groups also went away with various promises. For instance, the President promised the General Adeyinka Adebayo led YCE that if he is re-elected, he will run a more inclusive government by commencing a quarterly meeting with the six geo-political zones to further move the grassroots forward. And at a meeting with the market women resident in Lagos and environs, the President promised that if elected, the PDP administration in the state will provide the enabling environment for them to carry out their business: “Our victory at the polls will free all Lagos traders from oppression. You need to be free. We will remove Lagos from bondage,” he said while appreciating the women’s support for his re-election bid. The President also promised members of the Oodua Cooperative Alliance who promised to deliver over two million votes to him that he would establish Nigeria’s first University of Cooperatives if re-elected. The National Conference Bogey The President had also visited Epe in Lagos State, Oyo and Ogbomoso towns in Oyo State where he met with the traditional rulers to further sell his candidancy to the people of the region. The President met with Alara of Ilara Epe, Oba Akeem Adesanya; the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi III, and the Soun of Ogbomoso, Oba Oladunni Oyewumi Ajagungbade III, respectively. At the palace of the Alaafin, the President promised to fully implement the recommendations of the National Conference if given a fresh four-year mandate. He said he recognised how passionate the people of Oyo are about the implementation, even as he himself believes that 100 per cent implementation will bring the desired progress to the country. While the President was mining the National Conference for political gains in his meeting with the traditional rulers, some Yoruba leaders under the aegis of Afenifere, led by Govenor Olusegun Mimiko who is the zonal coordinator of his campaign in the South West converged on Akure, the Ondo State capital for a conference tagged: ‘’National Conference, 2015 Elections and the Yoruba Nation.” Those present at the event include Kunle Olajide, Biodun Olujimi, Makanjuola Ogundipe, Femi Okurounmu, Gboyega Isiaka, Jide Adeniyi, Yinka Odumakin and the Minister of State for Works, Dapo Adeyeye. Chief Ayo Adebanjo, an Afenifere chieftain and First Republic politician who chaired the occasion left no one in doubt that that Conference is all about Jonathan and 2015, though he tried, unsuccessfully, to dress it in a non partisan garb. “We are supporting Jonathan because of the consistency of the Yoruba to have this country restructured so that it can develop. People are calling for change. I want a change in the constitution of Nigeria. Only a change in the constitution can truly bring about the change that we need,” the octogenarian said in an obvious dig at the popular mantra of the opposition APC. Mimiko who is the convener of the summit added that the implementation of the National Conference report will create room for each state to have its own constitution, its own police force, its own prison service, create its own local government, build its own airports, sea ports and railways among others. “In the economic domain, solid minerals that had been the exclusive preserve of the Federal Government since independence, have now been brought to the concurrent list. States can now create employment and develop at their own pace. With all that, it liberates everybody; it opens up the political space,” Mimiko who accused those he said had been scheming “to hijack power so as to throw the Confab report to the dustbin of history,” said. [caption id="attachment_20812" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •L-R: Ondo State Governor Dr Olusegun Mimiko; Afenifere chieftain, Chief Ayo Adebanjo and the founder of Oodua People Congress, OPC, Dr Frederick Fasehun, at the post-national conference summit in Akure[/caption] Also, in their goodwill messages, Federick Faseun, the Founder of the O’odua Peoples Congress, and Gani Adams, the National Coordinator said the National Conference report remained a vehicle for actualising the Yoruba dream of a prosperous South-West and that the South West must support Jonathan’s second term ambition. In other words, this will, according to them, give him the opportunity of implementing the report. A similar forum was held in Ibadan, the capital of the old Western region last Thursday. For the President, the idea of the conference was like baiting the South West where he had become unpopular. However, most Nigerians were suspicious of the intentions of Jonathan when he first mooted the idea of organising a national conference late 2013. Mining the National Conference Report for Political Advantage For one, the President before then cannot be counted among the rabid supporters of radical economic and political restructuring of the country which the advocates of the idea envisaged will be the key outcome of the Conference. Indeed, the leadership of the then Action Congress of Nigeria, the party in control of the South West part of Nigeria where agitation for the conference had been most vociferous for several decades, did the unthinkable by immediately declaring that they will not be part of the initiative they had always agitated for. ACN which was just formalising its merger talks with other political parties to form a mega opposition that will bring the Northern and South West part of the country into a political alliance since the formation of Nigeria, believed that the idea of the Conference was a distraction to the new political marriage. The reasons for this are obvious. While key leaders of the defunct ACN, led by a former Lagos governor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, are strong advocates of national conference and had even spent their resources in promoting the idea, the Northern partners in the new political alliance now crystallized into All Progressives Congress, APC have been traditionally opposed to the idea which they believe was aimed at taking away some of the advantages currently enjoyed by their region in the present configuration of Nigeria. A wholesale embrace of the idea was therefore capable of causing a debilitating dissension among members of the new political union. This was why Bishop Matthew Kukah, the Catholic Archbishop of Sokoto Province, in an interview, described the idea of national conference by Jonathan as a coup against the opposition. “He has snookered the opposition. Jonathan has just successfully staged a bloodless ideological coup against the agitators and his enemies,” Bishop Kukah said of the National Conference while Tinubu himself described it as a Greek gift. [caption id="attachment_20808" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Bishop Kukah: Confab, an ideological war against the opposition[/caption] Thus, Governors which now belonged to the new party by virtue of the merger, including those of the South West initially said they would not participate in the conference. “They believe correctly that the proposal is largely popular with the Nigerian populace, moreso, the South West, and may therefore give the sponsor mileage and wind in its sail in the race towards 2015. The political advantage is actually greater than that. It has stolen the thunder of a major political peg on which the South West faction of Alliance for Progressive Change had anchored its legitimacy,” Akin Osuntokun, a former presidential aide and a member of the ruling party said while agreeing with those who argued that President Jonathan was set to benefit politically from convening the Conference. Afenifere Endorsement In further support of the assertions of those who claimed that the aim of the Conference was to set cats among pigeons, especially in the South West, the President had appointed Chief Femi Okurounmu, a leading member of Afenifere, the pan Yoruba social political organization, as the Chairman of the committee that drew up modalities for the organization of the conference. Though very much aware of the unstated intentions behind the convocations of the Conference, governors elected on the platform of the APC in the South West especially, grudgingly nominated delegates to the conference, so as not, in the words of an aide close to one of them, “to be left out in case of any eventuality.” The rancorous National Conference was concluded several months ago and its voluminous reports have been gathering dust in the confines of Aso Rock presidential villa. Most of the recommendations of the National Conference will require the approval of the National Assembly as there will be need for amendments to the Constitutions for their implementation. This was one of the key arguments by those who argued that the President should have forwarded the amendments he wanted to the National Assembly as bills to be considered for inclusion in the then ongoing constitutional amendment. [caption id="attachment_20811" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Jonathan: Receives Yoruba council of elders in Marina Lagos[/caption] Analysts argued that contrary to the argument of the Afenifere elders, the implementation of the report of the National Conference does not lie in the hands of the President, but on members of National Assembly. They also argued that the President has never demonstrated the capacity to push such difficult recommendations which will require the support of members of the National Assembly across party lines through. It’s all about baiting the South West for support by a President who is desperate to avoid a shellacking, an analyst told this magazine last week. While disassociating itself from the purported endorsement, the Ekiti State chapter of Afenifere in a statement by its chairman, Chief Ibidapo Awojolu said: “We expected to have seen the commencement of the National Conference recommendation by now. We have seen no evidence of President Jonathan ‘s plan to implement the recommendations.” Awojolu who added that the endorsement was needless argued that the Yorubas have suffered unprecedented neglect and marginalisation under the Jonathan’s administration:“There is nothing to show for the electoral support Jonathan got from the Southwest during the 2011 presidential election,” Awojolu stated. Jonathan’s South West Problems Analysts also said the support for Jonathan under the veneer of the National Conference is a way of getting back at Tinubu, the APC National leader, by elders who are green eyed by his emergence as a popular and influential leader in the region for selfish gains from Jonathan. Whatever the case, the truth however is that the President’s popularity is at the lowest ebb as the country heads towards the presidential election. This was unlike the situation in 2011 when many in the region voted PDP, caving in to emotion of religion and ethnicity of President Jonathan who was the flag bearer of the party. The President had won convincingly in all the States of the South West region, except Osun, though his party was only in control of one of the states then. However, the South West people also have their own specific complaints against the Jonathan’s presidency. This includes allegations of marginalisation. In the Ogun chapter for instance, former President Obasanjo had vowed that he would not have anything to do with the PDP, following the recognition of Buruji Kashamu, who is wanted in the United States on allegations of drug dealings as a leader of the party not only in the State, but in the South west region. Kashamu is the chief mobiliser for the President’s re-election in the region. Obasanjo’s loyalists either left or were forced out of executive positions in the chapters of the party across the South West by factions which claimed to have the support of President Jonathan while the former President also recently tore his membership card. Crises in some of the South west state chapters of PDP will seem to have somewhat simmered for now with uneasy peace prevailing among members. But the same cannot be said of Ondo State where Governor Mimiko who defected to the ruling party late last year is still engaged in the struggle for control of the structure of the party with old members, led by Olusola Oke, a former National Legal Adviser of the party. Also, the delay in the screening of Senator Musiliu Obanikoro who was instrumental to PDP’s victory in Ekiti State as reflected in the secretly recorded audio tape by an Army Major will be of concern to the Presidency. Obanikoro, alongside Jelili Adesiyan, the Minister of Police Affairs and Adeyeye, the Minister of State for Education, have been at the vanguard of Jonathan’s campaign across the South West. Obanikoro who was a minister of state for Defence resigned to contest for the gubernatorial ticket of PDP for Lagos State. He however lost to Jimi Agbaje in controversial circumstances. He challenged the result of the gubernatorial primary in court and his re-nomination as a minister was reportedly part of the agreement reached between Vice-President Namadi Sambo and the Lagos State branch of PDP so that Obanikoro could withdraw his suit against the PDP governorship candidate. But just as he was getting set for screening of the National Assembly, the audio recording in which the former Ambassador to Ghana was indicted as using the army to rig the June 21 Ekiti State governorship election was leaked to the media. This formed the basis of opposition to his screening and confirmation by the Senate by APC senators out of fears that returning Obanikoro to the Defence Ministry for the elections could be detrimental to their party’s chances. The three senators from Lagos as well as those from Ekiti have expressed opposition to Obanikoro’s nomination, effectively forcing the Senate President to put the screening process on hold. Why South West is Important to Jonathan Analysts who spoke to this magazine last week contended that though religion and ethnicity will play a significant role in determining the direction of voting in the general elections in 2015, they argued that he must repeat his feat of 2011 in the South West, which has particularly been described as the battleground in the 28 March election. The Christian majority in Adamawa, Gombe, Taraba, Plateau, Kogi, Kwara states voted as a block in their various states to give Jonathan victory in their areas in the 2011 elections while, as CPC candidate, Buhari also won massively, in the predominantly Hausa-Fulani states of Northern Nigeria, a situation that may repeat itself in 2015. President Jonathan is expected to win massively in South-South states, though the APC is also expected to put up a respectable showing in Edo and Rivers states which are under its control. For instance, the APC presidential candidate is expected to win in North east states like Borno, Yobe and Bauchi while Adamawa is expected to be the battle ground for the two parties in the North east. North-west Nigeria made up of Kaduna, Kano Katsina, Zamfara, Jigawa, Sokoto and Kebbi states has the country’s highest voters’ population figure estimated at around 18 million. But PDP suffered a reversal of fortune in the zone with defections of governors Rabiu Kwankwaso of Kano State and Magatarkada Wamakko of Sokoto State to APC late last year. Adamu Aliero, a former minister and strongman of Kebbi State politics also recently defected to APC with his loyalists and this is also expcted to further enhance the victory of the APC presidential candidate in the state. The APC presidential candidate is also expected to be victorious in the North West states of Jigawa and Katsina and Kaduna which are still under the control of PDP. Though Kaduna is the home state of Vice President Namadi Sambo, Buhari enjoys a huge support in the State, while Katsina is the home state of the retired General. Though he did not win any of the states in 2011, the President was able to get the 25 per cent of the votes required to avoid a run-off against Buhari, the leading contender who contested on the platform of Congress for Progressive Change with the exception of Kano. In the North-Central, Buhari and Jonathan are expected to fight for the soul of Nassarawa, Kwara Benue, Kogi and Plateau States. To be declared the winner of a Nigeria presidential election, a candidate must not only score the highest number of number votes cast at the polls, he or she must also obtain at least one quarter of votes in 24 states which is two thirds of the states of the federation. Buhari has never won any state outside the northern region of the country since he started contesting presidential elections in 2003. In 2011 for stance, over 90 per cent of the former head of state’s 12 million votes was from states across the Northern part of the country. But what was also true was that neither ANPP nor CPC, the two platforms he had contested on, was in control of any of the southern states then. The APC offered Buhari the chance to break this yoke in the South West. Going by the most simplistic of the calculations, Buhari who won 12 million votes in 2011 can win the 2015 elections if a significant percentage of the South-West votes can be swung in his favour by the Tinubu-led APC. [caption id="attachment_20813" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Tinubu: The Confab, a Greek gift[/caption] But unlike in 2011 and in spite of his increasing unpopularity in the region, Jonathan’s PDP is in control of Ondo and Ekiti States. Already, Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State had demonstrated in the past few weeks that he is willing to go to any length to ensure that Buhari is not elected. Despite the huge crowd that attended the APC presidential rally when it was held in Ado Ekiti many years ago, the Governor vowed that PDP will win all the available positions in the 2015 elections. In the same vein, Mimiko had not only been coordinating the presidential campaign of the President in the South West, he has repeatedly said the President will perform better than he did in 2011 in terms of the number of votes he will score in the region. The endorsement of the President by Afenifere can be counted as one of the successful efforts of the Ondo State Governor to sell the candidacy of President Jonathan to the people of the region. What is the Worth of Afenifere’s Endorsement? There are however questions on the worth of the endorsement. Critics argue that the Afenifere of today is different from when it was a vehicle for social mobilization by the Action Group government in Western Nigeria in the pre and immediate post independence era. It is even far different from the group which was able to form the Alliance for Democracy, AD, the party which went on to win elections in all the South West states, despite its formation just a few months before the 1999 general elections. The group, under the leadership of the late Chief Adekunle Ajasin and Senator Abraham Adesanya, were in the vanguard of pro-democracy and agitations for validation of the annulled 12 June, 1993 presidential election. Though the members and leaders of the group suffered various deprivations and harassments under the military rule, they refused to waver in their commitments to democracy and selfless service to the cause of the Yoruba nation. However, the group was thrown into crisis when, shortly before the 1999 elections, it endorsed Chief Olu Falae as the presidential candidate of AD over the late Chief Bola Ige, the deputy leader of the group. This led him to join the administration of the then former President Obasanjo without consultation with other members of the group. There was also a struggle for the control of AD structure in Lagos between the late Ganiyu Dawodu and Tinubu which led to the exit of the latter from the party. Though Ganiyu directed his supporters to vote for the late Funsho Williams, the PDP governorship candidate election in the 2003 elections, the former Governor still went ahead to win the election. [caption id="attachment_20809" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Jonathan commissioning Olorunsogo power station[/caption] The group finally split into two. After this, the influence of the group reduced drastically. It supported the re-election of the five governors of AD in 2003 while it opposed the second-term ambition of Tinubu. But all the AD governors, who enjoyed its endorsement, were defeated by PDP candidates at the polls. Also, the efforts of the group to install Jimi Agbaje as the Governor of Lagos State in 2007 on the platform of its then newly formed Democratic Peoples’ Alliance DPA ended in failure. The only exception was when Olu Falae, a member of the group supported Governor Mimiko as the candidate of the incumbent Labour Party in 2012. But critics argued that the Ondo State Governor could have won the election without the support of the old warhorse whose son later became a commissioner in the state. Members of the group who ironically were in the vanguard of agitations and complaints about marginalization of the Yoruba by the Jonathan administration have become frequent visitors to the Aso Rock presidential villa. Their efforts have yielded fruits with the appointment of Brig-Gen Jones Arogbofa (rtd), the younger brother of the General Secretary of the Afenifere, Chief Seinde Arogbofa, as President Jonathan’s Chief of Staff. There were speculations that the endorsement of Jonathan by the group was a trade-off to help Arogbofa keep his job. Already, a faction of the group, the Afenifere Renewal Group, ARG, said they didn’t support the endorsement of Jonathan. Some Oodua organisations based in and outside of Nigeria had also distanced themselves from what they described as the self-serving endorsement of Jonathan by the Chief Reuben Fasoranti-led Afenifere. In addition to this, just like it did in 2011, this magazine gathered that the Presidency will also be mobilising people of other ethnic groups living in the region to come out to vote en masse for Jonathan to further assure him of victory. There were allegations that the President doled out dollar gifts in an attempt to buy votes of the different groups he met during his visit to Lagos. However, the Presidency has said there is no iota of truth in the claim that Jonathan doled out money to the different groups that met with him during his trip. Reuben Abati, spokesperson to President Goodluck Jonathan who spoke to this magazine over the allegations said the rumour of the cash gift is being peddled by those who are afraid of the success of the President’s trip to Lagos and pledge of support for his 2015 presidential ambition by the different groups he met with. Abati, who described the President’s visit to Lagos and the South West as very, very successful said the President’s trip to Lagos was not ‘transactional,’ hence the issue of monetary gifts does not arise. While indicting the opposition APC and Governor Fashola for the rumour, Abati said the opposition party is jittery over the success of the President’s trip to Lagos and the South West as well as the offer of support he received from various groups during the visit. *The Afenifere members 1. Reuben Fasoranti 2. Chief Ayo Adebanjo 3. Chief Olaniwun Ajayi 4. Chief Olu Falae 5. Chief Dehinde Arowogbefa 6. Chief Duro Doyile 7. Chief Iyiola Omisore 8. Dr. Segun Mimiko 9. Prof. Akin Onigbinde 10. Mr. Yinka Odumakin 11. Mr. Segun Ojo 12. Otunba Gbenga Daniel 13. Dr. Femi Okurounmu 14. Mr. Jimi Agbaje