With the rise and rise of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), bookmakers can bet on the prospects of General Muhammadu Buhari’s victory in next year’s presidential polls. But that is after the party has cleared all besetting intrigues that have tied its wings.
Alhaji Abdulkadir Shehu Nafuntua speaks with pride when he talks about the phenomenal growth of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) in Niger State. “Not less than three million membership forms have been sold by our party in this state,” he told Sunday Trust. “We made earlier arrangements for three million membership cards, but, today, as I speak with you, we have run out of cards as people keep trooping into the party from different parts of the state.
Alhaji Nafuntua’s position is replicated in several states of the North, where the CPC, a party that General Muhammadu Buhari (retired) formed after he pulled out of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). The new party came to Niger State only in January and it is making so much wave, like the tyhoon.
“With the growing trend of politicians scaling off the fence of their parties in favour of the CPC, we will soon have problems managing the crowd before the 2011 general elections commence in full swing,” Alhaji Nafuntua noted.
What is striking about the CPC’s growth in the state is actually the fact that it is an offshoot of the ailing ANPP, under which platform General Buhari contested the presidency in 2003 and 2007. Alhaji Nafuntua was a chieftain of the ANPP until the CPC was formed.
In Kano State, with the latest entry of Mohammed Abacha, political observers say the chances to record success in the forthcoming 2011 elections are high.
Mohammed Abacha had led thousands of his supporters to pay homage and seek the blessings of the party’s leader, General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd) in his Kaduna home last Friday.
In a number of fora, General Buhari had said that Kano was his political base, given the level of unalloyed support he receives from the people of the state.
No sooner had General Buhari indicated interest to join the CPC than many political associates of the former Head of State began leaving the ANPP in droves in order join to the general in his new political abode.
Former deputy governor of Kano State and one-time National Chairman of the defunct National Centre Party of Nigeria (NCPN), Engineer Magaji Abdullahi, and one-time Political Adviser to Governor Ibrahim Shekarau, Alhaji Ahmadu Haruna Zago, are some of the early entrants into the CPC.
Other politicians who left the ANPP and joined Buhari are the current National Chairman of the party, Senator Rufa’i Sani Hanga and former members of the House of Representatives, Balarabe Wakili and Alhaji Umar El-Yaqub.
Ever since Buhari’s departure from the ANPP, politicians from many other parties in the state have been joining the CPC.
What is happening in Kano and Niger States is also being echoed in Kebbi State where, in one day, the entire state congress of the ANPP and its supporters in the 21 local government areas decamped to the CPC. As the 2011 elections draw nearer, many politicians in the state who have indicated interest to contest elections have continued to outdo one another in their attempt to be identified with Buhari and be referred to as his men. The majority of them, under the platform of the CPC, have their pictures put side by side those of Buhari to seek acceptance and sympathy from the people who see the former Head of State as a worthy candidate for the 2011 presidential election.
At present, some notable former governorship aspirants under the platform of the PDP in the last election, have defected to the CPC to recontest the gubernatorial election slated for next year. One of the notable PDP governorship aspirants who has shown interest to seek peoples vote under the CPC in Kebbi State is Alhaji Kabir Tanimun. Also, speculations are rife over the possible defection of Senator Adamu Aliero and his sympathizers to the CPC. Last week, one of the chieftains of the factions of the PDP loyal to the former Governor, Alhaji Sani Zauro, let the cat out of the bag when he said their group was making plans to leave the PDP because of Dakingari’s over-bearing influence on the party. Immediately, people began to speculate their move to the CPC. But a supporter of Aliero who spoke to us said the group was still consulting on a possible move to the CPC or the ANPP. “But I can assure you CPC will be better for us because of Buhari’s influence and popularity among the people,” he added.
Success creates infighting in Kaduna As the party continues to grow in many states, the story in Kaduna state, where the CPC has been rocked by a leadership crisis, is taking a sad dimension. As a result of the infighting, the police sealed the state’s secretariat since last week. The crisis reached its peak on September 6, when the state executive committee met and suspended Alhaji Abubakar Hayatudin for activities that were inimical to the party’s membership drive.
Alhaji Adamu Coca Cola, the deputy chairman, was made acting chairman and the decision was communicated to the national headquarters. However, Hayatudin protested his suspension, arguing that a caretaker committee, going by the party’s constitution, could not suspend him and he also took his case to the partys headquarters. The situation was calmed pending the intervention of the national body but on September 18, the bubble burst when Hayatudin attempted to enter the state secretariat. Party members, according to reports, prevented him from getting in and the situation was becoming chaotic. Hayatudin called the police and the cops chased everyone and cordoned off the place.
Significantly, Hayatudin’s appointment, from the beginning, has been contentious as the likes of Hajiya Hafsat Baba and Alhaji Sani Iliyasu, the duo who led the rebellion against Alhaji Kabiru Umar, the ANPP Kaduna state chairman, were sidelined in the new order. Hafsat and Ilyasu were made deputy chairman and ex-officio member respectively but the latter, who is a state legislator, declined the offer. Specifically, Iliyasu had used both his position and resources to fight for Buhari’s interest in the ANPP and for this reason, he wanted to call the tunes in Kaduna’s CPC. However, he couldn’t realise his dream and in anger, the lawmaker decamped to the PDP where he plans to re contest his seat. Similarly, Hafsat has now pitched tent with ACN but her political aspiration remains under wraps.
The question is, why did Buhari ditch his loyalists who have stuck to him through thick and thin? Buhari is not to blame as CPC, according to a source, is a party that builds consensus and plays by the rules. Hayatudeen, he pointed out, is a neutral figure as he is neither of the Iliyasu camp, nor the Shehu Bawa Garba United ANPP group that makes up the CPC. Each camp nominated names to the national headquarters and names were picked from both camps while constituting the caretaker committee. Hayatudeen, according to the source, is non aligned hence he was chosen as protem chairman, particularly to wield the party together and build a formidable platform. However, this is proving a hard nut to crack but in spite of this crisis, the party is very popular with the masses in Kaduna.
Consequently, a lot of aspirants have sprang up, seeking for one post or the other and most of them print their posters with their photographs and Buhari’s. Alhaji Haruna Saeed, the former Accountant General of Kaduna state, defected from the PDP to the CPC in order to realise his gubernatorial ambition. Similarly, Alhaji Sani Shaában, the ANPP factional gubernatorial candidate in the 2007 election, has just crossed over to Buhari’s party. Also, retired Air Vice Marshall Aliyu Ahmed Rufai has left the ANPP with Buhari and on the CPC platform, he is gunning for the governorship. In addition, Alhaji Garba Attahiru, former chairman of Kaduna South, has ditched the ANPP for the CPC, just as Alhaji Ali Mu’azu who cross carpeted from the ACN, where he had contested the House of Representatives in 2007.
In Yobe and Gombe States, there is so much noise about the CPC, but this has not translated to reality.
To many political observers in Katsina state, nowhere has the former ANPP presidential candidate, General Buhari’s CPC grown faster than in his home town of Katsina state as the build up to the 2011 general elections becomes more intense in the country.
At a recent occasion, the party’s chairman, Dr Yusha’u Armaya’u, claimed to have received 39,000 supporters who defected from the PDP, ANPP and Action Congress of Nigeria. Among the biggest catch are the former speaker, House of Representatives, Aminu Bello Masari and his entire supporters, Senators Abdu Yandoma and former Senate leader, M.T Liman, as well as the erstwhile secretary to the Katsina state government, Dr Mustapha Mohammed Inuwa; Abubakar Saddiq Yar’adua, with the likes of late Yar’adua’s in-law, Alhaji Dikko Radda, among many past local government chairmen and legislators in the state.
This was after the former deputy senate president, Mamman Abubakar Danmusa, and other political heavy weights like Senator Abu Ibrahim, Engineer Nura Khalil, Mannir Yakubu and former federal legislators, such as Lawal Garba Daura, Hadi Sirika and most of politicians announced their exit from the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) to follow Buhari to the CPC.
Our correspondent reports that only last week, the serving Senator from Funtua zone, Senator Yakubu Lado Danmarke, dumped the ruling party for the CPC and declared his intent to vie for the governorship.
While the popularity of the party grows, there’s the fear that the crisis of interest that crippled the previous ANPP may repeat itself in the CPC, and this might lead to the inability of the party to translate the support it has garnered into votes in 2011 polls.
a fresh outreach
Consensus candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) Muhammadu Buhari breezed into Lagos Wednesday and met with Pastor Enoch Adeboye, head of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), one of Nigeria’s biggest church groups. Adeboye was one of the several leaders of various groups whom he consulted during the weeklong visit down south.
Buhari needs to make friends with christian leaders. He wears the garb of a muslim hardliner, ‘created for him by his adversaries,’ as his supporters argue.
Speaking on Buhari’s political adventure, the spokesman of Kano State Governor, Malam Sule Yau Sule said the retired general may never go far.
He argued that, when Buhari left the ANPP early in February after years of a sojourn that failed to get him Nigeria’s presidency on two occasions, 2003 and 2007, he got into the CPC. If anyone wondered then about whether the CPC was born specifically for him to keep his presidential ambition alive, the truth of it has since become general knowledge. The CPC has increasingly come to rely on the persona of Buhari, a reality considered unsafe for enduring electoral success.
“We felt, from the beginning, that General Muhammadu Buhari should have remained in the ANPP as the party he had come to know so well,” the Senior Special Adviser on Media to Governor Ibrahim Shekarau of Kano State, Alhaji Ya’u Sule Ya’u, told Sunday Trust, Thursday on the phone: “It is dangerous to weave a party around a single individual the way the CPC is around Buhari. Remove Buhari today and the CPC would come crashing. Parties that would live long are built around people as a collective backbone.”
Ya’u rejected the assertion in many quarters that Buhari’s CPC has gained much ground at the expense of the ANPP, the ruling party in Kano, Borno, and Yobe states. He said, “It’s a political statement. The reality is different. Remember what happened when Atiku Abubakar moved to newly formed Action Congress in 2007. As I said, you can’t do much in a new party. Take the by-elections in Bauchi State (where senatorial by-elections were done last month to replace two senators who died). The CPC should have at least won one of the seats to demonstrate its strength there.”
Speaking earlier in the year, Yau had blamed Buhari for ‘diminishing’ the fortunes of the ANPP and leaving it for the CPC. “With all due respect, Buhari has added value to the cause of the ANPP; but it costs us more than what he brought in,” Yau said in April in reaction to insinuations that the ANPP will be dead without Buhari.
“ANPP started in 1998. Buhari was not there, so how can he be the strength of the party?” he asked. “By 1999, nine governors were sworn in from ANPP. Buhari was not a member of our party by then. But by 2003, we lost two states while Buhari was in the party. By 2007, we came down to three and a half and Buhari was still in the party. Not even a single councillor from Daura nor Katsina, where Buhari hails from, won election under the ANPP.”
Buhari is seen, rightly or wrongly, as an individual who cannot fit into a team work and is therefore, a wrong choice for the position of president, particularly in a democracy.
An academic and political analyst, Omo Omoruyi, said this much about Buhari in a critique in 2007, “It is my honest view that this lone ranger (Buhari) who was like this as a distinguished General and Head of State would persist in his obstinate course.”
The impression that Buhari is ‘obstinate’ is shared by many. Speaking in an interview published by Sunday Trust on May 23, 2010, former governor of Sokoto State and leader of the Democratic Peoples Party (DPP), Alhaji Attahiru Bafarawa, said of a plan he had with Buhari and former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, to form the famed but unsuccessful Mega Party: “Atiku and Buhari were the first to meet before bringing me into the mega party business...We agreed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), amongst the three of us. We said we would sign an agreement to the effect that anybody who picks the ticket, even if that person is not any of the three of us, we will support him. We waited but none of them signed the MoU. If you agree there is a problem in the country, you have to keep your personal ambition aside…. If you have a party with a good manifesto, whoever becomes the leader implements it. But you have a blueprint and you say if not you, nobody can implement it. How can we move forward?”
‘A candidate most credible’
Taking a positive look at Buhari, former governor of Kaduna State and leader of Nigeria’s oldest political group, the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP), Alhaji Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa, told Sunday Trust towards the weekend that Buhari is the most credible politician among the lot aspiring to the position today.. Although he expressed the reservation that he could be misunderstood to have endorsed Buhari, he nonetheless presented Buhari as the king who deserves the crown.
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Balarabe said, “what I can say, of all the politicians whom have appeared so far and all the aspirants whom Nigerians expect would appear, Buhari is the most credible and has the largest support throughout the country. Buhari has the will power to unite the country and register progress. Everyone knows his performance when he was head of state and when he ran the PTF as its chairman.”
Balarabe Musa who headed the coalition of opposition political group, Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP), in its heyday, says the trouble in the governing PDP over zoning will give Buhari a vital edge should he find himself face to face with President Goodluck Jonathan in the 2011 presidential election.
Balarabe said, “ Of those who say they want to be president, only Jonathan can threaten Buhari. Jonathan has the advantage of incumbency, but even this is reduced by the circumstances of Jonathan’s aspiration. PDP’s zoning wahala will stand in Jonathan’s way”
‘Zoning debacle will boost Buhari’s chances’
The fiery debate over zoning, it is widely believed, will count against Jonathan when the PDP conducts its presidential primaries and at the general election should Jonathan beat the odds to obtain PDP’s presidential flag; in which case, the PDP could have a major crisis in its hands as it faces other parties during the general presidential election.
“Should the emergence of Jonathan not be tidy enough within his PDP, then the North may just as well rally behind Buhari,” a forecaster asserted recently.
Even this possibility is not such a sure guarantee for Buhari, however. Buhari’s reputation for going after corrupt past office holders could as easily work against him. The elites now in power might start wondering about a Buhari presidency and their safety after office and refuse Buhari their support.
Failure to utilize mass appeal: ‘Buhari may be another Abiola’
Balarabe Musa said Buhari has often failed to translate his mass appeal into an electoral victory because powerful opposition elements have often seen to it that Buhari fails. Balarabe explained, “there was no election in 2003 when Buhari first contested. There was none in 2007 when he also contested. We would soon be hearing about Buhari and rigging by opposition something similar to what we have been hearing about Abiola (over the June 12 saga). After some 17 years, we’ve had from the chief electoral officer of the 1993 election, Professor Humphrey Nwosu, confirming that, indeed, Abiola won the June 12, 1993 presidential election. We would be hearing in the near future that, really, Buhari won both the 2003 and 2007 elections, if you could call them elections; because, really, we had selections, not elections.”
Buhari tries fresh alliance
Balarabe spoke of moves for a new alliance which he said has a great chance of overcoming past failures. He said 11 political parties which had already agreed to be a part of the alliance met Wednesday and agreed on the strategy to give it vibrancy. He would not reveal the strategy, neither would he mention the party that the alliance might support as consensus candidate. He said the time that the party coalition would come up with its candidate would depend largely on how soon the controversy over when exactly the 2011 general elections will eventually hold.
Membership of the political union, named Coalition for a New Nigeria (CNN), Balarabe disclosed, include his PRP, Buhari’s CPC, the Justice Party (JP), the Nigeria Advance Party (NAP), the Labour Party (LP), the National Conscience Party (NCP), the Progressive Action Congress (PAC), the Peoples Mandate Party (PMP), and the Peoples Salvation Party (PSP).
The national Chairman of the CPC, Senator Rufai Hanga, who confirmed the emergence of the coalition in an interview with Sunday Trust, Friday said the coalition is targeting 11 other political parties to take the CNN membership to 22.
Seeking to absolve Buhari from the blame of failure to successfully pair with other notable politicians for electoral success, Hanga said, “It’s true we have had meetings aimed at forming an alliance but it wasn’t Buhari who truncated it. They wanted him to join their party and abandon his own. He couldn’t do this because we had already gone far with the CPC. We are ready for any alliance but we are not going to merge or fuse into any other party. We had a previous experience which makes it unwise for us to go fully into any other party. We have built an ideology which no other party has.”
He said however, that talks for a loose alliance are on: “Alliance is a normal thing the world over. We are not against it. We can have alliance one week to the elections. Even two, three days ago when we went to INEC for an interactive meeting, I had a talk with the national secretary of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). I had a talk with him and the talks will continue. Opposition parties have no alternative working together to ensure that the masses of this country don’t continue to suffer.”
On the speculations that, specifically, the Buhari camp was in moves for a joint ticket between Buhari and a notable politician from the South West, namely former Lagos State governor and leader of the ACN, Bola Tinubu, Hanga said, “in politics such a thing is very possible. If you say Tinubu will be Buhari’s running mate, I will say amen. We are talking but I won’t pre-empt anything here.”
Discounting claims by many that Buhari is a religious fanatic, Hanga said it was the makeup of a few ‘mischievous’ detractors and fanned by others who were uncomfortable with Buhari’s ‘rising’ political status.
He said, “there was that stereotyping of Buhari, but its effect is wearing off now. The understanding of his sincere intentions is growing. His popularity has increased steadily from when he started the aspiration to lead this country. He was more popular in the South in 2007 than he was in 2003 and he is more popular today than he was in 2007. Buhari has moved on a lot.”
Dismissing the allegation that Buhari destroyed the ANPP, Hanga asked ANPP to thank Buhari for being counted as a party today. He said, “these people sold the ANPP to the PDP Federal Government. Many in the party were surrogates of the federal government and were sabotaging the party. Many others in the party were scared of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). They were so corrupt that if they had any mention of the EFCC, they wetted their pants. They joined the PDP to keep the EFCC away.”
