Dr. Reuben Abati has the copyright to this phrase borrowed to caption this essay. Dr Abati had deployed this metaphor to describe the step the Peoples Democratic Party apparatchik and indeed Atiku Abubakar, its presidential candidate, should take to appease Mr Wike who lost PDP presidential primary election for the 2023 general elections. Mr Wike had campaigned hard to clinch the position but lost to Alhaji Atiku. Most painful to Mr Wike was Governor Aminu Tambuwal’s unwillingness to reciprocate Wike’s unalloyed support for Tambuwal’s presidential bid to be nominated as PDP candidate in 2019 general elections.
Wike had hardly healed from the political wound inflicted by Tambuwal’s betrayal when Alhaji Atiku picked Governor Ifeanyi Okowa as vice presidential candidate against Wike and his allies’ expectations. But what angered Wike most was Atiku’s speech at the unveiling of
Okowa as PDP vice presidential candidate that appeared to denigrate the integrity and political worth of Wike. To add salt to injury, the Arise TV interview anchored by Dr Abati and others featured Atiku trying to explain the reasons why he chose Okowa instead of Wike.
Displeased with the Arise TV interview, Wike condemned it as “lies.” Dr Abati’s alleged unprofessional handling of the interview incurred Wike’s condemnation which infuriated Dr Abati to dismiss Wike’s anger and attack on him as the ranting of the typical egotistic Nigerian politician. By way of closure of the spat with Wike, Dr. Abati gratuitously counseled Atiku and PDP to provide Wike with “a lollipop” to divert his attention like a child beaten by its parent or minder to assuage his sense of loss from Atiku and PDP apparatchik’s political intrigues and political battering the source of Wike’s political injuries.Lollipop is palliative given to children who felt injured by its minders to divert its attention. This metaphor of a lollipop for Mr Wike is a powerful dismissal of Wike and a slight on the ego of this all powerful governor who was the one-man-riot squad that rescued PDP in its hour of need. The messianic effort of Wike in rescuing PDP rightly endued him with a sense of entitlement but the PDP partisans did not appreciate Wike’s historic role in saving PDP when the stalwarts abandoned it to the buccaneering politics of APC that cannibalized it and took away several of its strong men including inducing some of its governors and senators to defect to APC. As preparations for 2014/2015 general elections were on, the PDP had been betrayed and sabotaged by its Northern stalwarts such as Atiku, Saraki, Tambuwal and
Kwankwaso who insisted President Jonathan must step down to allow zoning the presidency to the North or nothing. PDP refused. Expectedly, these Northern PDP stalwarts defected to newly formed APC to defeat PDP’s Goodluck Jonathan in 2015. After 2015, political wrangling in APC forced these former PDP stalwarts to return to PDP and were warmly received as if their betrayal and sabotage in 2014/2015 did not matter. As these Northern
politicians returned to PDP, the party bent backwards to enforce the zoning formula which was these stalwarts’ reason for betraying and sabotaging the party in 2014/2015. This zoning system benefitted the North whereupon Atiku, Tambuwal and Kwankwaso contested to be nominated the PDP Presidential Candidate. Atiku got nominated and chose Peter Obi as his vice presidential candidate but lost the 2019 presidential election. After the election, Atiku’s failure to galvanise PDP laid it open to APC to poaching by offering its partisans political
offices as prebends. It was during this period that Wike deployed resources (material and leadership acumen) to sustain the party and keep it afloat against all odds. For providing PDP leadership, Wike failed to leverage this leadership acumen to displace these Northern PDP turncoats which actions would have positioned him as PDP’s undisputable leader with capacity to shape its ideological content, praxis and loyalties. Against the backdrop of this chequered history, the PDP while being repositioned became a plaything in the hands of these Northern PDP politicians who while the war with APC raged maintained studied silence. Towards the 2023 political season the debate across the two main political parties was the issue of zoning the presidency to the South after the
tenure of President Buhari. The Southern Governors’ Forum ably led by Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State held several meetings whereby they resolved that every Southern politician must work within his party to uphold the zoning formula that assures the South of the ticket. While the Western politicians led by Governors Akeredolu, Governor John Fayemi, Governor Jide Sanwo-Olu, Governor Dapo Abiodun and Governor Gboyega Oyetola maintained this Southern article-of-faith in APC that power must shift to the South in 2023 their SouthEast and SouthSouth counterparts were dissembling and got themselves sold to the facile, facetious and fatuous permutation that it is only a Northern candidate of Hausa-Fulani ethnic origin that can win a presidential election against the APC led by President Buhari.
Seeing this train of thought of Southern politicians that flows from their political tradition inherited from the Azikiwe school of thought this writer wrote several essays (The Follies of Southern Politicians, A Letter to PDP Chairman, Iyorchia Ayu) to warn Southern politicians that they risk political rejection in Nigeria that has been radically changed by fundamental dynamics unleashed on Nigeria by the fact of Buhari’s disastrous governance with ENDSARS protests signaling Nigeria’s social ferment and a boiling cauldron seething with social discontent and anger. By the middle of 2021 and early 2022, it was clear from the controllers of the two main political parties (APC and PDP), all northerners that they were not inclined to zone the presidency to the South. In PDP and APC, Southern politicians strutted the political landscape campaigning to be nominated but APC high-command had a different agenda ofkeeping the Presidency in the North while PDP played hide-and-seek. The haywire politics started with APC National Convention to elect national officers of which the president and his cabal succeeded in installing Senator Abdullahi Adamu, a politico whose tour of duty has traversed PDP and APC and was sold to the Northern agenda to retain the presidency. In APC, it was more or less a fait accompli for the North to retain the presidency after President Buhari succeeded in foisting Abdullahi Adamu as APC national chairman. But the Rubicon to be crossed was Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, another redoubtable politico from Yoruba land who remained stubbornly fixated to rule after Buhari. But for him, the APC would have foisted Northern presidential candidate on APC but he fought gallantly to foil this agenda and they were forced to cede the APC presidential ticket to him to avoid scattering the party. On the other hand, the PDP danced round the issue and having exploited the naivety of Eastern and SouthSouth political leaders of the party, refused to zone the position to the South but threw the ticket open to all aspirants. Against this political injustice for which
Northern politicians in PDP in 2014 led by Atiku, Kwankwaso, Saraki and Tambuwal never
tolerated but rebelled to betray and sabotage the party in 2015, these lily-livered Eastern and
SouthSouth politicians accepted the political hemlock and got consumed by their lack of
political knowledge. Instead of insisting that the party zone the ticket to the South, the
SouthEast and SouthSouth politicians were eager to enter the contest in which they were least
prepared to manage. From the southeast, Peter Obi, Pius Anyim, from Southsouth, Governors
Wike and Emmanuel Udom picked the PDP nomination forms but all got trounced at the
presidential primary election largely managed by Northern PDP apparatchik and acolytes of
Northern presidential aspirants Atiku, Saraki and Tambuwal. Governor Wike deployed
enormous resources and banking on his political capital garnered when he picked the broken
pieces of PDP and stitched them back, and had hoped to win but lost gallantly. Peter Obi
being ‘an outsider’ seeing what fate awaited him pulled out and entered the Labour Party.
As argued in the essay ‘Follies of Southern Politician’, Southern politicians are
greedy lot and shortsighted and have refused to learn from their past experiences and from
history. They refused to learn that they usually most importantly lacked the structure and
organisation necessary to control a party and to lesser extent lack or refuse to deploy requisite
resources (especially funding) to overwhelm their opponents. An average Southern politician
is most concerned and motivated to access political offices and not power and whoever will
give him that has his loyalty. That mindset is contrary to his Northern counterpart whose eyes
are set on the political goal of acquiring power which gives political offices, control of state
authority and much more. It is now too late for Governor Wike to remedy the error as his
anger will only plunge him to the vortex of volcanic politics of Nigeria that may adversely
affect him if Atiku or Tinubu wins as both cannot trust him. If with the same energy he had
used to rescued PDP, he had deployed same to insist on PDP zoning the presidency to the
South, the PDP would not have toyed with such Southern standpoint. But Wike was being
clever not to argue for zoning to South because he selfishly guessed that zoning to the South
would spring up agitation for micro-zoning to the Southeast which might not favour him as
most PDP people would have insisted on justice entailing that Southeast produced the
candidate instead of SouthSouth. So, for being selfishly clever, Wike lost the prize and may
pay a heavy cost. So, the only saving grace available to him is to clutch on the national youth
movement that has picked as its bet for 2023 and properly align with the ruling sentiment by
rallying his political resources behind Obi – thereby riding the crest of current wind of
change in Nigeria. This way, he may survive not only ‘the war but also the peace’. Post 2023
promises a change of cataclysmic proportions no matter whoever wins the presidency. But
can he summon the courage to actually play the hard tackles he promised during his
commissioning of one of his projects of which APC’s Federal House Speaker Femi
Gbajabianilla was his special guest and had urged