APC Consensus Candidate: Who is afraid of Tinubu?

By Effiong Bassey

The ruling All Progressives Congress APC is set to hold its National Convention on March 26 after it was moved from the original Feb 26 date.

And while the entire country looks forward to the political event to usher in a new set of party leaders, many APC supporters have for weeks been on the edge.

This is because of the uncertainty over the convention date, which was later replaced by apprehension over who among the contenders would get the nod of the party stakeholders in the run up to the delegates election.

But with few weeks to the original February 26 date, there were talks of consensus as the most favoured option for choosing the party’s next chairman with 76- year old former Nasarawa state governor Abdullahi Adamu touted as the preferred choice.

It soon emerged that the option may have been devised by certain elements within the party to checkmate the Presidential ambition of one of APC’s major founding fathers, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

The question then is how is the use of consensus to pick the party’s national chairman a threat to Tinubu’s aspiration?

There are two angles to view it as a keen watcher of the ruling party and the ongoing political intrigues.

Firstly, The consensus option may have been used before now to pick previous APC Chairmen including Chief Bisi Akande and Comrade Adams Oshiomhole in a less crowded field but the intention behind it, this time, is far from noble.

There is a strong likelihood that it may be used to select the party’s candidates for elective positions including that of the President with the excuse that it will be less rancorous in view of the timeline set by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)

So if consensus could be used to impose a figure as unpopular as Adamu as party Chairman inspite of his less than inspiring personality,then why won’t this gambit be stretched to Presidential primaries which are expected to be done in few months time to mess up Bola Tinubu?

Secondly, Senator Adamu is believed to be in on a plot to stop the former Lagos state governor in his track and those who tapped him for the position of APC National Chairman see him as their best bet out of all the contenders to carry out their dirty job.

He is known to have spoken up publicly against zoning the party’s Presidential ticket to the South at a time that the general mood of virtually every key stakeholder is that President Buhari’s successor would emerge from the Southern part of the country.

He is also not known to have a chummy relationship with Tinubu since their days as governors of their respective states especially as Adamu was a strong Obasanjo ally at a time that the former Lagos governor was seen as the enemy by the then Peoples Democratic Party PDP-led administration.

So the thinking of the so-called cabal may just be that the wily politician is the best man among the decent field of chairmanship aspirants to do a spoiler job on Asiwaju Tinubu.

So the onus therefore lies on the Jagaban of Borgu to be alive to this clear and present danger of imposing someone whose only job,as it were, is to stop him from picking APC’s Presidential ticket.

Bassey writes from Lagos