Three opposing truths Category: Monday column Published on Monday, 10 June 2013 05:00 Written by Mahmud Jega Share Trying to find out who is telling the truth with respect to the on-going controversy in the Northern States Governors Forum [NSGF] is a dilemma similar to the one that confronted a local judge when two very eloquent men appeared before him in a civil case. I have told this tale before on this page, but we can as well recall it now. The litigant laid out his case very eloquently and when he finished, the judge involuntarily said, “You are telling the truth.” The respondent however jumped to his feet and said, “Judge, you only heard his own side of the truth but you have not heard mine, yet you said he is telling the truth.” The judge then asked him to state his own side of the story. It turned out that the respondent was as eloquent as the litigant and he laid out his own case very persuasively. Involuntarily the judge said, “You are also telling the truth.” At which point a neutral observer of the case jumped to his feet and said, “Judge, you said that first man was telling the truth. This second man said something contrary to what the first man said and you also said he is telling the truth. It is not possible for both of them to be telling the truth.” The obviously confused judge sighed and said, “You are also telling the truth.” As the reporter of the story in last Monday’s Daily Trust in which Bauchi State Governor Malam Isa Yuguda announced his exit from the Northern States Governors Forum [NSGF] as a fall-out of the May 24 Nigeria Governors’ Forum [NGF] leadership contest, several people called me to express their opinions on the story. One of them said I should know that Yuguda was not telling the truth and that anti-Amaechi governors such as Yuguda were only doing the bidding of President Goodluck Jonathan. The part about doing Jonathan’s bidding is my own suspicion too, but I think that what Yuguda said contains some grain of truth. By now Nigerians have heard a lot about what happened in the build up to the NGF’s ill-fated leadership election. The aftershocks of it have now spilled over into the NSGF, with Yuguda saying he no longer trusts what transpires there. He said a solemn agreement was made at the forum to field Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang as the Northern consensus candidate and to thereafter prevail on Southern governors to accept him as NGF chairman since it is the turn of the North to produce the leader. However, several Northern governors backed away from this agreement and cast the majority of the 19 votes that Amaechi got. There is self-evident proof of this because Jang got only 16 votes when 18 Northern governors were present at the May 24 meeting. In fact, most of the 16 votes that Jang got were from PDP’s South East and South-South governors as well as from Ondo State’s Labour Party Governor Olusegun Mimiko and Anambra State’s APGA Governor Peter Obi. This means that up to 10 Northern governors may have voted against Jang. A Northern vote cast for Amaechi would have been okay if everyone had agreed beforehand that the vote for NGF chairman should be based on party affiliation or on individual conscience but not as a pan-regional project. Trouble is, some pro-Amaechi Northern governors pretended to be committed to a Northern consensus candidate and used the NSGF to produce one only as a ploy to divide the anti-Amaechi camp. Every Nigerian probably believes by now that politics is dirty and treacherous, but I think this particular ploy carried things a little bit too far. How did this happen? My own reading between the lines was that Akwa Ibom State Governor Godswill Akpabio, the arrowhead of President Jonathan’s fight to unseat Amaechi, sold the idea to the Northern governors that going by NGF’s tradition, it was their turn to produce the forum’s chairman. Akpabio’s real aim was to get Amaechi out; otherwise the basis of his suggestion was true. The history of NGF chairmanship shows that there is a tradition of North-South rotation, from Abdullahi Adamu to Victor Attah to Bukola Saraki to Rotimi Amaechi. Akpabio’s proposal was accepted by NSGF, or so it seemed. The forum under the leadership of Governor Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu then began a search for a candidate that it will sponsor to take over from Amaechi as a matter of regional right. Within that search however, a secret plot was hatched by pro-Amaechi forces to dupe and hoodwink their pro-Jonathan colleagues. At the centre of the plan to double-cross colleagues were PDP governors Babangida Aliyu, Rabi’u Kwankwaso, Sule Lamido, Murtala Nyako and Aliyu Wamakko, with the secret collaboration of opposition governors of Borno, Zamfara and Nasarawa States. Yobe’s Ibrahim Gaidam, who should ordinarily stand up with the APC governors, had been made by Jonathan to sign the open-ended pledge to support an anti-Amaechi candidate. Perhaps to avoid embarrassment, he left the country. Katsina State governor Ibrahim Shema thought he saw an easy picking and began campaigning to become the Northern consensus candidate. However, his colleagues from Jigawa, Kano and Adamawa opposed his selection. They then persuaded Governor Isa Yuguda to vie for the post instead. This was all part of the ploy to engineer a crisis in the pro-Jonathan camp. The pro-Amaechi men wanted neither Shema nor Yuguda to emerge as consensus choice because a far Northern candidate could shift just enough votes to accidentally defeat Amaechi. Shema played into the plotters’ hands by refusing to step down for Yuguda, so at an NSGF meeting held on the morning of May 24, both men were asked to step out. This is what Germans call planmaezig [according to plan]; the plot then unfolded with the nomination of Jang as consensus candidate. Jang, whose state has been consumed by inter-communal turmoil since 2008, was hardly an ideal choice for NGF chairman. He had just arrived in the country from a foreign trip, drove straight into the NSGF meeting and was unaware that his choice was a ploy. Now, the reason for the plot within a Northern plot was not so much love for Amaechi as distrust of President Jonathan and his politically aggrandizing ways, feelings that a lot of Nigerians appear to share. APC governors too had an agreement to support Amaechi as an anti-Jonathan statement. In this they were now joined by up to 7 rebel PDP governors from the North. The plan then went ahead at the 3pm meeting of the Akpabio-led PDP Governors’ Forum, where the NSGF chairman presented Jang as the Northern consensus candidate and it was ratified by the 14 Northern governors present as well as the PDP governors of Ebonyi, Enugu, Imo, Delta, Cross River, Akwa Ibom and Bayelsa. They also had pledges of support from Obi and Mimiko, so Akpabio calculated that Jang would score 18 Northern and 9 Southern governors’ votes, a total of 27. When they got to the Rivers Lodge the real plot unfolded, the “Northern consensus candidate” was abandoned by his own constituents, a vote was forced and Jang lost. To that extent, I think that Isa Yuguda is right when he asks, how can he sit again at the NSGF to discuss and agree on any matters when he is not sure that others have plotted something else? Many Nigerians who were pleased with the humbling of President Jonathan at the NGF election may however believe that the end justifies the means. There is the added matter that Malam Isa Yuguda is a problematic messenger for political honour and loyalty, having cross-carpeted from ANPP to PDP after the landmark 2007 election in which Bauchi State voters did the revolutionary A kasa a raka a tsare [vote, escort and guard] by which Yuguda spectacularly defeated the PDP candidate. That is why I think that the stance of each side in this controversy has a ring of truth, and a whiff of untruths as well.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:17:20 +0000
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