Love him or hate him, like him or despise him, there is something inscrutable about President Bola Tinubu, and it stands him out. It’s not bombast. It’s not swagger. It’s not bravado. It’s not braggadocio. And it’s nothing quixotic. Maybe it’s even more than just one thing. Perhaps the man is a package of surprises.
Tinubu may not exactly be taciturn like his late predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, but he allows his work to speak for him. In other words, we hear the president’s voice in the efficiency and effectiveness of his political outcomes. And nowhere is this voice louder than in the political space where his party, the APC, has become the preferred political formation for the ruling class. And they go in all colours and shades of the ideological or political spectrum.
The truth is this: Even before Tinubu’s advent, the ruling APC had long replaced the PDP as Nigeria’s party of first choice, opening its doors to executive governors and political exiles, reformers and refugees. Nigeria had seen ex-PDP juggernauts seek and find cozy accommodation within the APC fold. These juggernauts included former Senate presidents, former national chairmen, ex-governors on PDP/opposition platforms, and senior senators, etc.
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So, the newcomers were not gambling or taking reckless leaps into the dark – they liked what they saw, and they saw what they liked. The APC, as a party, had extended cozy welcome mats to the newcomers, making them ministers, governors, ambassadors, heads of parastatals, etc. But President Tinubu has upped the game and taken APC’s appeal in a different direction: he has done what no other Nigerian president has ever done. And we can go back to the Second Republic or even the First Republic, but we’ll not find any parallels.
He has adroitly increased the APC’s tally of governors from 20 to 25, and he has done this without the instrumentality of elections! Plus, he has achieved this feat without the underhanded help of state agencies like the EFCC! If there are any underhand pressures, they are very much below the radar. He has, thus, become the first Nigerian president to increase his party’s tally of governors even before elections are held. He came on board with 20 governors. Today, the tally stands at 25 governors!
This is a glaring testament to his mastery of what the late philosophic Chuba Okadigbo would call “the arithmetic of politics” were he still here with us. Conventionally, political parties increase their governorship seats majorly only after elections, but this president has not waited – he has blazed the trail by breaking out of the traditional mold.
The closest example to what people are calling “the Tinubu phenomenon” was the NPN (National Party of Nigeria) “landslide victories” of 1983. That was when late President Shehu Shagari expanded the NPN family from seven states in 1979 to 12 in 1983. But even then, he achieved the feat only after the 1983 general elections. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say even then, it was a Herculean task, with tremors in the old Anambra State and earthquakes in the old Oyo and Ondo States.
President Olusegun Obasanjo also tried for the PDP by redrawing Nigeria’s political map: he increased his party’s governorship seats from 21 in 1999 to 27/25 in 2003/2007, respectively. However, it was also only after the electoral outcomes of the 2003/2007 general elections. Even with his alleged style of “garrison democracy,” Obasanjo could not just increase PDP governors by fiat! He had to wait for the elections.
President Tinubu, therefore, stands in a class of his own as a pathfinder, political mathemagician, and master-strategist, perhaps, of the Churchillian school. Through a combination of confounding ambidexterity, political gamesmanship, and a firm grasp of statecraft, he has comprehensively restructured our political space and redrawn Nigeria’s political map, perhaps permanently so.
The political market is virtually shut, and the votes market looks sealed. 2027 is looking like a year of coronation, not competition. Incumbent governors, with immunity to boot, keep streaming into the president’s party, sometimes, with their entire executives and council chairmen! In fact, it is being alleged that more opposition governors would have joined the APC by now had their defection plans not been torpedoed by domestic forces opposed to such moves!
So, what’s really happening? Is it Tinubu’s personal allure? Is it the accommodation style of his politics? Is it the magic of his presidency, bringing on board yesterday’s enemies and seemingly implacable critics? Or is it APC’s magnetism as a political party? What’s pulling the governors (even with their immunity), as well as senators, House of Representatives members, and opposition heavyweights
into the APC? What pushed PDP’s presidential running-mate into the APC fold, a party he valiantly sought to displace from power only a few months earlier?
Questions and questions. Still, I ask in the hope of getting answers. Why are even ordinary Nigerians staying faithful to the APC or boosting its membership even in the face of economic hardship? Is it because even in the middle of the debt restructuring and the economic pains arising from the bold reforms, they see a future of shared dreams, shared values, and shared prosperity? (As I write, Rivers (PDP) has started evacuating her political waters into the APC)!
There must be something the president or his party is doing that explains the jigsaw. Or, perhaps, there is something those outside the APC family are seeing from where they stand? What is it, exactly? It is true that these defections are strengthening the ruling APC, but do they necessarily weaken the opposition or even threaten democracy? One objective way of answering this question is to rely on the facts of history. In 2013, both the APC and ACN had just about four governors each, with APGA having one governor or so. It didn’t look too good. PDP was then the biggest deal.
Still, the opposition was pragmatic: they midwifed the birth of a merger party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). The rest, as we say, is history. PDP may not have been formed to be in opposition, but with recent happenings there, the party is willfully cementing its feet in the valley of opposition! I believe rather than whining, flailing hands, giving up, or investing in excuses, the PDP should lead opposition parties (PDP, ADC, LP, NNPP, APGA, etc) into a merger; and if that’s too late, then into a coalition.
If they don’t, then 2027 will be President Tinubu’s easiest win, a win that will see the grand old PDP moving from the valley of opposition to the political mortuary, and then cemetery! A fractious and factionalised opposition (PDP, LP, NNPP, ADC) that’s talking about 2027 presidential victory is, in fact, only campaigning for Tinubu! Excuses can do only so much. They can confer victimhood. They can buy sympathy. But excuses can’t buy victory or win elections. Only pragmatism does.
One only hopes it’s not too late.
Imobo-Tswam, a public space contributor and erstwhile media adviser to a former PDP national chairman, writes from Abuja.
