Today (Wednesday), no fewer than 8,000 delegates of the All Progressives Congress [APC} will gather in Teslim Balogun Stadium in Lagos to pick the party’s flag-bearer for the February 14 presidential election. The delegates, both elected and statutory, drawn from the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, will choose from the five aspirants who are asking to be elected as the party’s candidate for a presidential election that bookmakers believe might be the most competitive since 1999, when Nigeria transited from military dictatorship to representative democracy. Whoever of the five is selected at the primaries will slug it out with President Goodluck Jonathan, who is being ratified later today in Abuja as the candidate of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party [PDP]. The APC presidential aspirants are (in alphabetical order) a former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar; a former Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari; governor of Kano State, Rabi’u Kwankwaso; his Imo State counterpart, Rochas Okorocha and the founder of Leadership newspapers, Sam Nda-Isaiah. The sixth aspirant, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, who late in October left the PDP for the party, has since withdrawn from the race soon after some of his friends and colleagues in the House bought for him the Expression of Interest and Nomination Forms worth N27.5 million. He opted instead to run for the governorship of his home state of Sokoto, and he won the party’s ticket Thursday. In the last three months, Messrs Atiku, Buhari, Kwankwaso, Okorocha and Nsa- Isaiah have traversed the country selling their programmes to party faithful ahead of today’s presidential primary. So far, their campaigns have been decent, apparently in adherence to the party’s stern directive asking them not to engage in mudslinging and character assassination. Discreet attempts by some party leaders to pick a consensus candidate among the aspirants were unsuccessful. All five contenders preferred to go into today’s contest, believing they could secure victory in a credible primary. According to the Chairman of the 24- member National Convention Committee, Kayode Fayemi, the party’s candidate will emerge by secret ballot. He also said the five aspirants signed an undertaken to abide by the outcome of the primary. Part of the agreements was that the losers in today’s contest will not only strongly back the winner that emerges, but will also not defect from the party. “We use all sorts of names for these things – undertaking, consensus, understanding and so on. The important thing to us and the aspirants, which they have demonstrated, is that we don’t want to play into the hands of our opponents who are just waiting to see the collapse of the party,” Mr. Fayemi, a former governor of Ekiti State, said. “That would shock Nigerians if we played into their hands. Nigerians want a credible alternative, they want this democracy to endure and the only way it will endure is if there is a fair competition and not a one- sided one.” How The Candidates Stand Atiku Abubakar: The former vice president, and one of Nigeria’s smoothest political operators, is not new to presidential contest. In 2007, he ran for the first time for the nation’s topmost political job on the platform of the defunct Action Congress, AC, but came a distant third, behind the then Governor of Katsina state, Umaru Yar’Adua and Mr. Buhari. In 2011, shortly after he returned the PDP, the party on whose ticket he was VP, he ran against Mr. Jonathan at the primary election, but lost. He had much earlier, in 1992, showed interest in running the country on the platform of the defunct Social Democratic Party, SDP, in the Third Republic. He came third in the presidential primary of the SDP at the time. While formally declaring his fresh presidential bid to run on September 24, Atiku said one of the reasons he never gave up on Nigeria was because Nigerians had never succumbed to despair and hopelessness amidst difficulties and growing anxiety. “This never-say-die attitude gives me immense hope and it is one of the reasons why I can never give up on Nigeria,” he said. He lamented the poor state of the nation’s economy even as he recalled that the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, under which he served, successfully reformed some critical sectors of the economy such as telecommunications and the capital market. Atiku, 62, prides himself as one of the most experienced in the race going by his credentials as vice president for eight years, a successful businessman and a retired civil servant. With a largely successful political career spanning about 24 years, Atiku has clearly built bridges and political structures which he could deploy to dislodge Mr. Jonathan from power next year.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 03:54:06 +0000
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