15 hours Ago By ANAYO EZUGWU
Akin Osuntokun was the Director-General of the Peter Obi Presidential Campaign Council in the 2023 general election. In this interview monitored on Arise TV, he speaks on the move by opposition parties to form a coalition ahead of the 2027 general election and other issues. ANAYO EZUGWU writes There’s a lot of talk about coalition and it almost feels like the talk just before the last elections, when people were getting excited about the Labour Party and Peter Obi.
Do you see a situation where all of these political parties can come together as one to challenge the ruling party? What I can say is that it’s not going to be a walk in the park. If you are trying to replicate what happened in 2015, the person who led that coalition and the merger is now the president. So, he has lent his ropes, you know, he’s probably more strategic or competent in floating that kind of opposition.
Now that he’s incumbent; what the incumbent usually does is infiltrate the camps of those who are coming together to destabilize them. Now, one critical area in which we cannot say what happened in 2015 was that those who left the Peoples Democratic Party (P DP) to form the new PDP and then later marched to form the All Progressives Congress (APC), were quite critical figures, about five or six governors. So, for you to be able to replicate what happened in 2015, will have to depend on several things, the quality of the people who are coming together to form it and the capacity to resolve what will come to be the dialectics of irreconcilable inter-regional differences.
For instance, one, two or three persons may have presidential ambitions, and you never know what they will do if one or two are unable to get it. So, there are these calculations to what is coming. Nigeria has always tended towards two grand political alliances, especially when the election is coming.
The trend started in 1964, 1983, and 2007, in reality, there were two dominant parties, PDP and All Peoples Party (APP). Then in 2011 and 2015, it was more pronounced that this was going to happen. Now, the character of the incumbent also matters.
President Goodluck Jonathan said ‘my victory and my political objective are not worth the blood of any Nigerian.’ So, some would describe him as a chicken. Now, you cannot say the same thing for the incumbent.
The incumbent is a bit ruthless in the pursuit of his ambition and he came to be president by overcoming so many obstacles. So, I guess somebody who can do that on his way to the presidency will not find it difficult to subvert the opposition. The only thing that can happen is that, which is also a feature of Nigerian politics, is that the core of the opposition to him is coming from the far North.
Now, in the regional oppositions or formations, they are not very vulnerable to destabilization. So, if there is going to be any hope or any projection, it will have to come from there. Those people, almost universally among them, within their ranks are not happy with President Tinubu at all, and they are going for broke.
So, these are the kinds of projections and what we see ahead but let’s watch. My fear is that potentially the number of individuals whose purpose or wanting to join the coalition is to seek the presidency. Some critics are worried that this call for an opposition coalition is driven primarily by revenge and a desperate attempt by some of those politicians to grab power.
What are your thoughts on that? First and foremost, the practical purpose of politics is the attainment of power. First, you have to attain that power before what you want to do with it. So, in the pursuit of the attainment of that power, your life is permissible for you to do real politics.
In other words, whatever it can take to do what you want to do is fair game. So, it is after you have secured the path to the presidency that you then start with a manifesto. I mean, the extent of the political poverty of Nigeria does not allow us to talk a lot about the manifesto.
Manifesto is a very critical part of it. And then the behaviour of political actors like this All Progressives Congress (APC) government that has been there, I’m sure they have observed their manifesto in the breach. There are more things that they have not done.
They have abandoned their manifesto. If you look at the number of things that are going on in the budgets, what they do is prioritization of corruption and all that. Look at the one that is going on between the Senate president and the lady there.
I only mention it because the Senate president has a history that ordinarily should have disqualified him from getting that position. At the time he was made the Senate president, he had at least two Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) cases going. And if you look at what he did as governor and minister and so on, he ranks high.
He was going to go for president; along the way and when it was outside the deadline, he diverted to the Senate, subverting the system. And since he became Senate president, what has gone on under him is typical, buying Jeeps of N500 million for one person in Nigeria of today and all manners of perks that they have contrived amongst themselves. He has been consistent with the image that he had before he became Senate president.
About the other party, the lady, her personal life is nothing to write home about but that is quite different. It’s quite different from the merits of the case we are probably confronted with so far. You’ve been quoted as saying the only condition that will make Peter Obi consider returning to the PDP is if he’s given the presidential ticket.
Given this situation, where is Peter Obi leaning, and what is your current relationship with the Labour Party? I was not appointed by the Labour Party to the position that I held. The Labour Party that we inherited is not too much of a political consequence. What happened was that they found a candidate, who was a new kid on the block, using their platform to pursue his presidential election.
Now, if there had been provision for independent candidacy in the constitution, we would have had no such need. That is the truth of the matter. But I don’t know if that’s a critical thing that you have touched on.
He’s almost caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on him to be a running mate to somebody from the North. At the same time, from my random discussion with young people, the Obidients doesn’t want to hear that.
So, that is a problem that is there. Some people have been promoting the idea of having somebody new altogether to come up as a candidate of the potential coalition. So, this is a problem they are going to face, how to solidify that coalition.
What you have is a potential sore point. What do you do with somebody like Peter Obi, for instance? I’ve told you that it’s a big dilemma. They will tell you that real politics says that, okay, the same argument they used the last time around, go and run with Atiku Abubakar or something like that and that is a sure way to get into the presidency.
Some people are going to make that kind of argument and it’s a very good argument. But in the process, he is going to lose a lot of credibility with the young people. If I were him, I would be prepared to step down my presidential ambition to create a movement, not seeking office for office’s sake.
That is one pressure and another kind of pressure that he is going to face. I don’t know, but he is going to come under that pressure. And whichever way he does it, he’s not going to satisfy everybody.
If he says he’s not going to join the coalition and goes ahead to form the Justice Party, he’s not likely to go far this time around. The last time he caught the establishment by surprise. He was an unknown quantity.
But now, the other figure that is controversial and polarizing, is also Atiku. Atiku is a prominent member of the Northern political establishment. So, I can’t see him showing interest.
He’s showing interest in politics today and not knowing that he’s running for the presidential ticket. So, he will tell you the argument that if they zone it to the South-East, who’s going to zone it? I mean, that’s the decision. That’s it, but again, anything can still happen.
Chibok School incident that did so much damage to Jonathan’s administration, nobody anticipated it, but the way it played out, you can have something of the same nature, because as they used to say, 24 hours is a long time in politics. Nasir El-Rufai has suggested that Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar should join hands with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to defeat APC. What are your thoughts on SDP being the platform for the coalition? Well, I believe that somebody from the South should get a presidential ticket.
The argument, many people are not like me. I mean, they are realistic and so on. So, but for me, if it comes to a case in which it is a candidate from the South versus another candidate from the North, that candidate from the North will have failed my test of eligibility.
At the end of the day, if you want to build a nation, you must work consistently towards it. The instrument of power rotation serves that purpose. Whatever you may think of Tinubu, if he fails to get re-election that is going to create another problem.
Now, when it was the turn of the South, it didn’t allow them to complete eight years. So, this is going to create a lot of problems, and the last time it happened, because I had a lot of friends from PDP, was okay PDP come and do this, come and that. I said, look, I can’t.
We have to, there’s no way, and I cannot even campaign. Now, if you ask me to be the campaign manager of a Northern candidate, I will be a failure, even if I accept it because it will be going against what I believe. So, I will not be able to make the argument.
Fortunately, many people are not like me..
