By Palladium
The much-awaited coalition of opposition political parties expected to give the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) a run for its money in the 2027 elections may have been birthed. The birth was, however, inauspicious.
Some of the key inspirers of the coalition were absent from the first media engagement purporting to have been carried out at the behest of the coalition. At the head of the coalition’s press engagement were former vice president Atiku Abubakar, former Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation Babachir David Lawal, and a representative of Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), Tanko Yinusa. The other names mentioned in association with the coalition, to wit, Kayode Fayemi and Rotimi Amaechi, reportedly took permission to be absent.
As this column suggested last week about the coalition, other than the glacial Alhaji Atiku and the imperious Mallam el-Rufai, the other political big wigs associated with the coalition would bide their time and hedge their bets in a clever demonstration of extreme caution. They would like to see which way the cats jump before leaping into the chasm. They have not disappointed. Going by the inauspiciousness of the coalition’s birth last week, and the damp squib it turned out to be, they would be glad they showed foresight. The coalition’s media engagement was fixated on the Rivers State emergency proclamation.
Predictably, the leaders launched into a tirade against President Bola Tinubu whose administration they described as autocratic.
The group called for the reversal of the proclamation. They said little else. They probably sensed that the emergency issue was the hot-button issue of the moment, and it would live up to its billing of serving to launch the coalition and impress its aims on Nigerians.
The coalition’s timing was awful. Not only are Nigerians largely ambivalent to the proclamation of emergency in Rivers, even those who oppose it have shown less vehemence than those who support it. If the coalition would oppose the proclamation, perhaps they could offer the public a less partisan and demonstrably clear-sighted analysis of an alternative way of managing a very bad and potentially explosive situation. Emotions and hysteria were unlikely to help the coalition strike a powerful public pose or convince Nigerians that they were not witnessing the antics of desperate power grabbers. In short, the coalition did not make an impression, certainly not a positive impression. They could of course address the subject matter, for it was clearly relevant, but they should have done it as concerned patriots and delinked it from any electoral coalition.
It was clear last week that the so-called coalition was inchoate. Does the country need a coalition or even a merger? Absolutely. The ruling party needs to be kept on its toes, and the public would appreciate any group that opens their eyes to credible alternatives.
Indeed, the problem last week was not that Alhaji Atiku and Mallam el-Rufai stoked the embers of discord or tried to present an alternative; the problem was that they chose a topic they were neither emotionally nor intellectually capable of addressing with conviction. They misjudged the country’s mood, having spoken to their inner caucus and listened only to themselves. The painstaking consideration and dissection of issues that should presage their press engagement was obviously not done. Having adopted a tunnel vision of the issue in contention, they went prematurely public on behalf of the coalition, making a hash of it that newspapers of the following day struggled to accommodate the news on prominent pages.
But perhaps the most damning part of the whole fiasco last Thursday was that the two or three eminent political personalities who conducted the media engagement – all of them controversial figures and perhaps long past their ideational prime – gave the impression that they did it on behalf of the coalition.
Some excitable social and print media analysts suggested that the coalition leaders who addressed the media spoke to a political storm gathering in the horizon, and palpable anger wafting through the atmosphere; but in reality, the men at the high table cut a dismal and isolated picture, nearly all of them wearing forlorn looks. The said analysts spuriously likened the coalition to the one that birthed the APC in 2013, a comparison that is so far-fetched that it is incredible any reporter could make that mistake. When the APC eventually went public, their outing had been preceded by hard and comprehensive cogitations about the aims and objectives of the coalition, its ideology, finances, and leadership. They were clear what they felt was impracticable: a coalition. They, therefore, opted for merger.
The Alhaji Atiku-led coalition has neither engaged in any such cogitations nor found an ideological or administrative fulcrum to balance the group. All the men at the high table last Thursday are expert joiners who thrive on other people’s foundations, not founders, and certainly not ideologues, despite Mallam el-Rufai’s vaunted oratory and academic brilliance.
It was only a few months ago that the group’s potential leaders considered the idea of merger. Many of them, including New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) leader Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso who was also approached, dismissed the idea as a flight of fancy. Worse, after many false starts and fainthearted attempt to retake the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a task now complicated by the judicial loss to the Nyesom Wike camp of the national secretary’s position, Alhaji Atiku has probably come to the conclusion that he seems partyless in the real sense of the word. He could, therefore, not influence or control the PDP. He might soon defect to another party, perhaps the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and join the fierce and unabating struggle for dominance and positions. Mallam el-Rufai was himself in the throes of migrating from one party to the mutant SDP, and was not well placed to inspire any merger deal. The former SGF, Mr Lawal, had been perpetually fulminating on the political sidelines, and was for all intents and purposes also partyless. They were, therefore, realistic enough not to contemplate a merger. They were all best suited for a coalition. Yet, a coalition needs abundant spade work by brilliant and gifted founders who could concretise a vacuum, men and women who could conjure something from nothing, leaders who could suckle, wean and nurture any organism. As it stands today, none of the so-called coalition leaders fits the bill.
As indicated in this place last week, except some phantom lightning strikes the primordial soup located in the imaginations of the coalition leaders, nothing of substance would emerge to present a serious, let alone formidable, opposition to the APC. The ruling party knows this, hence the party chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje’s sweeping and boastful assertions. The opposition coalition leaders also suspect this, and are dismayed by their own self-imposed impotence. Alarmingly, the public also know this and are mystified by the ineptitude of the hefty political leaders determined to unhorse the gifted equestrian, President Tinubu and his party, the APC. If Alhaji Atiku and Mallam el-Rufai wish to be taken seriously, they will need to return to the drawing board, assuming they can become what they are not built for, and manage their obsessions far better than they have done.
Culled from The Nation
