During the consultative meeting with Progressive Governors, on Tuesday, May 31, 2022, Your Excellency unambiguously conveyed the resolve to provide every needed leadership for our great party, APC, to remain strong and united to improve our electoral fortunes.
Highlighting some of the internal policies, which allowed ‘first term Governors who have served credibly well …to stand for re-election’ and ‘second term Governors …accorded the privilege of promoting successors that are capable of driving their visions’, Your Excellency solicited for ‘reciprocity and support of Governors and other stakeholders in picking’ your successor, ‘who would fly the flag of our party for election into the office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2023.’
This simply means that you want to exercise the same privilege, which is being exercised by Governors in determining who succeeds you as the standard bearer of our party, APC, for the 2023 Presidential election. Ordinarily, this should not be a problem. Both party members and leaders will always trust Your Excellency’s judgement.
However, the big worry is whether loyal party leaders and members should just reduce themselves to being ordinary observers when very sensitive issues with very high potential to diminish and damage Your Excellency’s revered status in the country is being considered.
Noting that the current phenomena of poor relations between predecessors and successor governors are largely a product of poorly instituted political succession arrangement in the country, which is impulsive and imposing, it will be highly risky to adopt the same succession framework as it can erode all your lifelong achievements as someone who contribute a lot to strengthen Nigerian democracy.
Perhaps, it is important to emphasise that your contribution towards strengthening Nigerian democracy should not be reduced to your emergence as the elected President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2015.
Your most important contribution has to do with the leadership role you played in facilitating the merger negotiations of opposition parties, which produced the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2013 and eventually also providing the highly inspirationally measured leadership, which defeated the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) in 2015. As President of the Federal Republic and leader of APC, you have continued to provide that measured leadership, which has been largely responsible for our electoral victories since 2015. More than anytime, at this point, when you will not be on the ballot in 2023, your measured leadership will be much more required to guarantee us sustained electoral victory.
Recalling the unfortunate third term agenda of former President Olusegun Obasanjo and how that eventually eroded all his achievements as a leader, it is necessary to caution against any transition initiative that risked being unpopular.
Any initiative that potentially took away the rights of party members to elect candidates would potentially mobilise Nigerians against the party and rubbish Mr. President. This was the case in 2007, which eventually pushed the PDP into wholescale rigging mode such that elections results were announced even before counting processes were concluded. It was so bad that even late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua who was the main beneficiary had to acknowledge that it was a bad case.
