BY Sodiq Yusuff
It is all over. Muhammadu Buhari has beaten Atiku Abubakar to the presidential ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC). It was a fairly predictable outcome, but in politics 24 hours could make all the difference.
Fears in Buhari’s camp that Atiku could get the ticket had heightened as the convention approached, but any doubt about where the pendulum would swing disappeared on Wednesday when 12 governors met and endorsed Buhari for the ticket.
Atiku had his own strategy, hoping that his extensive nationwide tour and rounded experience in party primaries would swing the game in his favour ─ moreso as there are only 14 APC governors, meaning other states were there for the taking. But his strategy did not work out. Buhari carried the day.
Atiku did not even come second – that slot went to Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, governor of Kano state, who surprised everybody by his big showing.
How did Buhari do it? Or, rather, how did Buhari’s supporters do it? TheCable gives you a lowdown.
Bola Tinubu, APC national leader, played a major role in galvanising support for Buhari among thousands of delegates. TheCable had reported as far back as October that Tinubu had thrown his weight behind the retired general, and despite all the intrigues that eventually ensued ─ with the possible candidature of Aminu Tambuwal, the speaker of the house of representatives, showing up along the way ─ the former governor of Lagos state still stuck to his Plan A.
Tinubu and Atiku are battle-tested. They know each other very well, from the days of the Peoples Democratic Movement (PDM) led by the later Shehu Musa Yar’Adua. PDM were reputed as masters of delegate votes. Tinubu and Atiku needed to cancel each other out to determine whose camp would pick the ticket. The stage was set on Tuesday as delegates started arriving Lagos from different parts of the country.
To checkmate Atiku, Tinubu got all the governors in his camp to team up with the governors in Buhari’s camp. They met with him at his office on Adeola Odeku, Victoria Island, Lagos, till the early hours of Wednesday, where all the details were worked out. In the next four hours, Tinubu criss-crossed Lagos, holding meetings with key delegates, some via teleconference. In total, he held 10 meetings within four hours to finalise the voting in favour of Buhari.
Most of the meetings, which took place over the phone, were held at Eko Hotel, Lagos governor’s residence at Isaac John, Ikeja, Tinubu’s residence at Bourdillon Street, Ikoyi, and Lagos House, Marina, where key officials and delegates were gathered together for negotiation. Significantly, Atiku’s supporters were left out of the meetings.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is not a supporter of Buhari ─ they have been political opponents since 1999 ─ but he would prefer Buhari to Atiku, whom he took to the cleaners in his latest memoirs, My Watch. Obasanjo had nothing terribly bad to say about Buhari in the book, but he savaged Atiku ruthlessly.
Obasanjo’s first choice for APC ticket, TheCable understands, was Tambuwal. But when northern leaders persuaded Tambuwal to go for Sokoto governorship and not undermine Buhari in the race, Obasanjo wanted support for his ally, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the governor of Kano state. Again, he met a brick wall. It became clear to him that he had to live with either Buhari or Atiku ─ and the choice was not difficult to make, although he is not expected to openly campaign for Buhari because of his grudges against the Katsina-born retired general.
“We studied Obasanjo’s body language and came to the conclusion that Buhari was the only realistic choice for us,” a commissioner from the south-west told TheCable. “Obasanjo will never support Atiku, and Kwankwaso was not going to win. We concluded that he will not be able to launch an all-out attack against Buhari like he would do to Atiku or Jonathan.”
APC had been courting Obasanjo for a while, and several of its leaders pay regular visits to him in Abeokuta in trying to build the opposition party. Although he keeps saying he remains in the PDP and would never defect, Obasanjo is also at war with the ruling party’s hierarchy and has been openly criticising President Goodluck Jonathan.
Atiku is easily one of the richest Nigerians, and as a politician, he has never been afraid to spend money. Since time, delegate elections in Nigeria have always witnessed the sharing of money. The struggle to be a delegate is as fierce as contesting for an elective office because of the fringe benefits. The biggest fear in Buhari’s camp was that Atiku could get the ticket by his generosity to delegates.
However, Buhari’s supporters did not go to sleep. On Wednesday morning, a southern governor flew in raw cash, in naira and dollar, to dilute Atiku’s financial influence. Although some delegates were shielded from Atiku, the former vice-president had devised his own way of reaching them. But despite gaining access to most of them, he was outspent in the welfare department.
A delegate told TheCable that he got $2000 from one camp and $3000 from another, and even though he did not reveal who gave the money, he gave a hint: “Pro-Buhari governors were encouraged to take care of their delegates better than Atiku. Our governor took good care of us. To be fair to Buhari, he knew nothing about the welfare distribution.”
Tinubu is yet to forgive Atiku for abandoning the opposition ranks in 2010 and returning to the PDP in order to contest the 2011 presidential election after the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adau. When Atiku fell out with Obasanjo toward the end of their tenure in 2007, Tinubu provided him a platform to contest in the presidential race, having been completely blocked from the PDP.
Atiku joined the Action Congress, ran for the election, lost to Yar’Adua but stayed back in the party to build a credible opposition to the PDP ahead of the 2011 elections. However, when Yar’Adau died, Atiku went back to the PDP, perhaps calculating that his interests were better served by the party in power. But he lost to Jonathan in the primary.
He still remained in the PDP, maybe believing that Jonathan would do only one term, but when it became clear that Jonathan was going to run again, he defected to APC, but Tinubu was not impressed. In fact, the impression of Atiku worsened in the polity.
“He wants to reap where he did not sow. If he had remained with us in 2011, the party would have been built around him, no doubt about that. He would have had a fair chance. But we are also thinking he is a desperate politician by going up and down, back and forth. More so, Nigerians perceive him differently when it comes to corruption. It was always going to be a problem for us,” an APC chieftain from Lagos told TheCable, maintaining that Tinubu had nothing personal against Atiku.
Very key to the decision of the APC hierarchy to back Buhari is that he is a very popular politician in northern Nigeria: his name alone has consistently fetched 12 million votes in the north without any discernible political structure. It is thought that if he can get the necessary backing in the south, it would be a matter of cat walk to Aso Rock for him. With the south-west fully behind him, and with bits and pieces of votes from the south-east and south-south, Buhari will be primed to win the presidential election in 2015.
“We were convinced that Buhari could win the presidential election, but never convinced that Atiku could defeat Jonathan. It was a no-brainer at the end of the day. Buhari is the man for the job!” the chieftain concluded.
It was also noted among the party hierarchy that Buhari has been rebranded: less number of Nigerians now view him as a religious fanatic, while more and more southerners are now seeing him as a better alternative to Jonathan. The actual numbers will be determined on February 14, 2015, though.
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