Abuja Bureau Chief, LEON USIGBE, writes on the recent call by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar for the opposition to merge towards dislodging the ruling All Progressives Congress from power.
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has called on the opposition parties in the country to come together in a merger to enable them to successfully challenge the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). Having come through an election that was his to lose but for a fractious opposition, political watchers are of the view that he spoke from the point of deep knowledge as they believe that he has seen it all.
The final tally of the 2023 presidential election in which he bore the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) flag suggests that he would have coasted home to victory if the main opposition was not divided between him and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP). Check it out. Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) got 8,794,726 of the total votes cast, whereas Atiku and Obi scored 6,984,520 and 6,101,533 votes respectively. This means that the combined opposition tally would have been enough to upstage the ruling party had they not gone into the fray broken into pieces.
“The question of whether I would work with Peter or not or whether Peter wounded PDP, yes, to some extent, he did. Because all the votes he carried, they are PDP votes in the south-south and the southeast. That’s true. That’s politics anyway,” Atiku has since admitted.
Though a lot has been said about why Obi broke out from the PDP just before the election to align with the LP and the failure of the former vice president to reunite the party, but suffice it to point out here that Obi claimed lack of transparency in the running of the PDP where he was the presidential running mate in 2019, particularly the process leading to its presidential primary, which he saw as skewed in favour of Atiku from the onset.
But not wanting to accept any blame, Atiku argued after the election: “At the time Peter decided to leave PDP and join the Labour Party, I believe we had not begun our primary processes. So, the question of whether I was going to get the ticket or not did not arise. Yes, agreed that it is a fact that he took our votes from the southeast and south-south and that of course would not make him a president.” He went on to add that unlike him, Obi was scared away from the former ruling party by governors elected under the platform who had seized control of it.
For the former vice president, Obi’s exit at the time was immaterial as he was confident that he had the election in his pocket already. However, observers are convinced that his levity towards former Anambra State governor’s defection to the LP was borne out of his overconfidence which, with the benefit of hindsight, proved to be his greatest undoing at the poll.
Atiku is now afraid that the governing APC is being totalitarian and slipping Nigeria into a one-party state and he has started a new but familiar tune. “We have all seen how the APC is increasingly turning Nigeria into a dictatorship of one party. If we don’t come together to challenge what the ruling party is trying to create, our democracy will suffer for it, and the consequences of it will affect the generations yet unborn,” he said when he hosted the national executive committee of the Inter-Party Advisory Council Nigeria (IPAC) led by its national president, Yabagi Sani in Abuja.
“The project of protecting democracy in our country is not about just one man. You have come here today to say that we should cooperate in order to promote democracy. But the truth of the matter is that our democracy is fast becoming a one-party system; and, of course, you know that when we have a one-party system, we should just forget about democracy,” he further suggested
Therefore, the former vice president pressed the leadership of IPAC on the need for the opposition political parties to come together and create a more formidable front that will salvage Nigeria’s democracy from sliding into a one-party state.
With this call, he is back to familiar territory having participated in many mergers throughout his political trajectory. The latest of it was the coming together of disparate political groups that birthed the APC in February 2013 in which he played an active part. The former PDP presidential candidate and the other promoters of the opposition alliance recognized that the former ruling PDP behemoth could never be upstaged unless and until they became a single fighting unit. The rest is history.
The next presidential election is a few years away. Even though Atiku did not provide details of his perspective towards a possible opposition merger, being, arguably the undisputed leader of the main opposition, the question that observers will likely ask going forward will not be far from whether he will be pushing the PDP to lead the charge towards the objective in time for the next exercise?
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