Ibadan summit, not coalition but mere talks
Sir: For quite some months, some political leaders have been accusing the incumbent president of leading Nigeria towards a one-party state, although they have yet to prove their stance with
Sir: For quite some months, some political leaders have been accusing the incumbent president of leading Nigeria towards a one-party state, although they have yet to prove their stance with cogent evidences. These people, instead of resolving the internal wrangling in their parties continue to drag the ruling party into their unsettled affairs. Have they ever paused once and asked whether or not they’re on the right side of the law?
One of their missteps was the recent ‘jamboree’ they organised in Ibadan. The gathering was tagged ‘National Summit of Opposition Political Parties’. They claimed it was a summit for coalition, but many saw it as a summit for mere talks. What was the essence of a coalition without a defined purpose?
At the summit, they proposed to field single presidential candidate against the incumbent president, Asiwaju Tinubu, but people wondered how this would happen in the midst of the gladiators like Atiku Abubakar, Rabiu Kwakwanso and Peter Obi - whose desires are to rule Nigeria by all means. Can any of these people act like Asiwaju Tinubu who agreed to surrender his mandate with a view to saving the All Progressive Congress (APC), an alliance of some political parties, in 2015?
Hardly had the Ibadan Summit ended when factions in some political parties came out to dissociate themselves from the gathering. They claimed that they were not part of the summit. They said that those who attended did so without approval from their parties. This denouncement undoubtedly rendered the summit inconsequential.
If the Ibadan Summit was truly the gathering of political leaders from many parties, where did the issue of one-party system emanate from? Who is really leading the country to the system of narrowing the electoral process? Is it Asiwaju Tinubu, the APC presidential candidate, or the leaders of the opposition parties who proposed to field one presidential candidate? What would happen to the ambitions of the other presidential aspirants in other parties?
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Recall that former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, alongside 21 governorship candidates out of 36 won the presidential and governorship elections respectively on the platform of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 1999. The remaining 16 governorship seats were shared between the AD/APP and ANPP. Before the end of Obasanjo’s first term, some governors from the opposition parties defected to the PDP. The defection of the governors and many legislative members undoubtedly rendered the opposition parties weak and incapacitated; it made the ruling party formidable to the extent that the erstwhile PDP national chairman, Vincent Ogbulafor, boasted that his party, PDP, would rule Nigeria for 60 years.
In spite of the mass defection to the then ruling party, the opposition parties did not resort to blackmail that Nigeria was running into a one-party state; they rather came together and designed a strategy to put a stop to the PDP’s hegemony. The parties’ leaders entered into a serious alliance and formed a coalition that eventually sent the PDP out of power.
One of the then opposition leaders is the current president, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who, despite being a lone governor in his party then, planned his party’s way to reckoning. Tinubu neither engaged in a desperate or unethical tactic to gain power nor accused any one of manipulating him or his party, for he understood that power could only be gained by ballot not by violence or blackmail. Tinubu understood that the only way power could be wrested from the PDP was to enter into a true coalition with other serious, like minds. He realised early that the coalition wouldn’t see the light of day if he wasn’t ready to sacrifice his ambition and personal interest for the common goal of putting a stop to the PDP’s domineering status and giving way for good governance.
•Ademola ‘Bablow’ Babalola, babalolaademola39@gmail.com
