By Palladium
Nearly every presidential aspirant in the newly adopted African Democratic Congress (ADC) is promising to do only one term if elected. This promise, each aspirant hopes, will help secure nomination. Would their fellow travelers believe them? It is unlikely. Would the country as a whole also believe them? It is even more unlikely. Power is an aphrodisiac, and its charm difficult to resist. The public may already see insincerity in the one-term promise, but the aspirants will make it anyway, for to do otherwise is to doom their aspirations even before they get off the ground.
Former vice president Atiku Abubakar was the first to make that promise in other to snag Labour Party’s Peter Obi. If nominated and goes on to win the presidency, he vowed, he would hand over to the former Anambra governor at the end of his first term. He presumes to have the power to hand over the presidency to his running mate or vice president regardless of what the voters think. More, Alhaji Atiku hopes not only to snag Mr Obi but also to corral the Igbo Southeast because they must believe that it could be their surest path to the presidency.
But in a different way too, former Rivers State governor Rotimi Amaechi is making the same promise to spend only one term in office if elected in order to complete the second term they hope the electorate would deny President Bola Tinubu in 2027. The presumptuousness does not end there. Mr Obi himself has declared magisterially that anyone who plans to contest the presidency against President Tinubu must know for a certainty that he would spend only one term. Even if the electorate would be dumb enough to believe Alhaji Atiku because of his age – he is 78 years old already – they would not believe both Mr Amaechi and Mr Obi.
Expect potential running mates, like former Kaduna governor Nasir el-Rufai, to join the one-term boondoggle. They stand to gain from a southerner spending one term in office should the ADC win the next presidential poll. The campaign, they have signaled, will not be about issues or ideologies or Nigeria’s political dynamics; it will be about one term or two terms. For now, however, that still leaves the advantage with the APC.
Culled from The Nation
