Fresh facts emerged yesterday that contenders for the presidential
ticket of the All Progressives Congress, APC, have intensified their bid
to get the endorsement of Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The five
contenders – former military Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari; former
Vice President Atiku Abubakar; Speaker of the House of Representatives,
Aminu Waziri Tambuwal; Kano State governor, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso; and
publisher of Leadership Newspapers, Sam Nda-Isaiah – are said to be
appealing to various sentiments with a view to getting the former Lagos
State governor, who is the most prominent APC leader but who is yet to
come out openly to any of them.
As the deadline for the
presentation of a presidential flag-bearer inches closer, Sunday
Vanguard learnt that all the contenders for APC’s ticket are now pulling
all possible stops ranging from family linkages, to political
alliances, business relationship as well as sentiments bordering on
contemporary realities.
In fact, aspirant by aspirant, Sunday
Vanguard was made to understand that the pre-eminence of their
relationship with Tinubu would play a major role in determining who gets
the ticket.
Most importantly, leaders of the APC are agreed on a
common possibility: That managing a post-presidential convention
rancor could cost the party more, than having a house where interests
are subsumed for the larger good of the party.
For instance, the
Buhari camp is said to be banking on the very obvious fact that, without
Tinubu and the former military head of state, there could never have
been any party in the first instance because “it was the merger between
the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, and the Congress for Progressive
Change, CPC, that gave birth to the APC”. An aide to Buhari said, And
you cannot talk of APC without talking about Tinubu and Buhari. How
that important relationship would today be sacrificed on the altar of
mere exigency is unfathomable”.
For Kwankwaso, it was learnt that
the relationship between Tinubu and the Kano State governor did not
just start in APC. “Mind you, both men were in the National Assembly
during the turbulent days of the Third Republic. And both men are
united in pursuing the need to ensure that the APC wrests power from
Jonathan next year because they both have come to realize that the only
way to rescue Nigeria from total collapse is to remove Jonathan from
office. The feeling is mutual and the respect is also mutual. Both men
are in talks and nothing is etched in stone regarding where the
interest would swing”, a Kwankwaso ally said.
Sam Nda-Isaiah’s
decision to pitch his tent with the APC, sources said, may not be
unconnected with his progressive ideals which he continues to propagate
in his column. But beyond that, a Tinubu confidant said that “people on
the outside seem to forget that Ashiwaju has a way of keeping his cards
close to his chest and, just as Babatunde Raji Fashola emerged from the
blues and became the Lagos State governor in 2007, all the contenders
for the presidential ticket of the party today stands almost an equal
chance of getting Ashiwaju’s nod”.
The most interesting of the permutations is the relationship between Tinubu and Atiku.
In fact, Sunday Vanguard gathered from a Tinubu insider that “Atiku’s
decision to finally dump the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, for the APC
was never a flight of fancy”. The insider added: “Recall that the fight
to stop Olusegun Obasanjo’s impunity as President which Atiku
spearheaded got the support of Tinubu. And whereas both men were in
different political parties, their relationship dates back to their days
in the Social Democratic Party, SDP. The Tinubu that some people do
not know is more potent that the Tinubu that people see at political
rallies or social gatherings. What the Turaki and Tinubu have agreed on
is that a level playing field is a condition-precedent to having a
united house”.
In the case of Tambuwal, APC sources said that
unlike others who went for the purchase of the presidential nomination
forms, the Speaker of the House of Representatives had the form bought
for him. “That in itself speaks volume of the goodwill he has. But he
has himself said he is still consulting. And he knows that quicksand of
politics makes the game a very dicey one so nothing can be cast in
stone”, one of his aides said.
Indeed, Tambuwal’s emergence as
Speaker against PDP’s zoning arrangement could not have been possible
without the support of opposition reps in ACN and CPC.
Last
night, one of Tinubu’s very associates disclosed to Sunday Vanguard that
even as the APC National Leader keeps his card close to his chest, “one
thing is paramount: The overall interest and success of the party
supersede anybody’s ambition”
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