Amaechi And Governors’ Forum Election: Tipping the balance of presidential control

Dateline, Addis Ababa, about 48hours ago: At about the time Asishana Okauru, Director General, DG, of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, NGF, was announcing Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi as the elected Chairman of the body, one of the aides to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan whispered to the President that Governor Jonah Jang of Plateau State had been elected as Chairman of the same body.  Minutes later, Jonathan, who also held a secret meeting with former President Olusegun Obasanjo in Addis Ababa (ostensibly over the multifarious political challenges besetting the former), was made to understand that the earlier information he got was not true in every material particular.

Back in Abuja, Nigeria: Meanwhile, the state governors, who had assured President Jonathan that they would deliver to him a malleable NGF Chairman, had to re-strategize on how to make the best of a very bad situation.  Therefore, the panic mode and the hasty frenzy that the governors engaged was with a view to ensuring that by the time Jonathan returned to the country, they would have something credible to present. The presidency has, however, strongly distanced itself from the politics of election of the NGF.

Indeed, Sunday Vanguard gathered, yesterday, that the inability of the pro-Jonathan governors, led by Godswill Akpabio, to exorcise the ghost of Babel from their midst led to their greatest undoing.

Between Governors Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State and Ibrahim Shema of Katsina State, the election was lost before it even took place.  The massive pressures piled on both men by their colleagues in the Northern Governors’ Forum to reconsider their ambition to become the NGF Chairman was no more than a fool’s errand as both men refused to step down for one another.

The concatenation of events did not stop there as even the earlier intervention of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Governors’ Forum to get  each to step down failed.

This was how Jang came into the picture. Sunday Vanguard discovered that the choice of the Plateau governor did not go down well with a few of the PDP governors.  But he was the one presented at the end of the day as a compromise candidate to contest against Amaechi. But with its 23 state governors, the PDP group could not stop Amaechi as he polled 19 votes against Jang’s 16 – the Yobe State governor was not available to vote.  Abubakar Yari of Zamfara was elected Amaechi’s deputy.

Of the 16 votes for Jang, Governors Peter Obi of Anambra (All Progressive Grand Alliance, APGA) and Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo (Labour Party, LP), helped to shore it up, meaning only 14 core PDP governors voted for Jang and, by implication, are sympathetic to Jonathan.

What this also implies is that even within the PDP itself, the governors had not been on the same page.  One of the errors of the pro-Jonathan group made was to construe an endorsement for the real election.  Another was the walkout staged by some governors even before the results were announced.

Gov. Amaechi and President Jonathan

The argument that Amaechi should have stepped down before the election (something unknown to their constitution) is tantamount to asking a sitting President to vacate office because he is seeking re-election.

Also intriguing is the fact that Jonathan, Akpabio and Amaechi are all of the South South stock.

Therefore, when, yesterday morning, all manner of tricks in the book were being played out by Jang and his additional convert-governors at the Benue State Governor’s Lodge, it had become obvious even to the blind that these were concerted efforts in mere damage control.

A communiqué which suggested that, just as there emerged a putative PDP Governors Forum in the early days of the face-off between Jonathan and Amaechi, another faction of the NGF group had emerged came to light.

And just as the PDP zoning arrangement was thrown into the dustbin during the election of a Speaker for the House of Representatives, the president’s wing of the NGF suffered yet another defeat – this, coming after the House had indicted the Ministry of Aviation in its handling of the documentation of this self-same Amaechi’s aircraft.

During the meeting, Jang, while addressing the media after the inaugural meeting which he presided as the ‘Chairman’ thanked Nigerian Governors for the confidence reposed in him to serve them as the Chairman of NGF and pledged to work for the interest of the Forum and country.  The group’s communiqué was read by his Deputy, the Governor of Ondo State, Dr Olusegun Mimiko. They vowed to unite members of the NGF, and work for the unity of the country.

The implication of Friday’s event is that either with Jang or Amaechi,  Jonathan has unwittingly allowed some fat cats around him to open him to the opprobrium of the public regarding his handling of the politics of the face-off between him and Amaechi.

In addition, handlers and strategists of Mr. President would need to device better ways of enthroning effective control of the political space beyond the braggadocio of presidential swagger and gubernatorial peregrination with a view to endorsing hokum.
All attempts to extract a response from the Amaechi group failed.

A source close to the Rivers governor told Sunday Vanguard that the feeling in the camp is the “pleasure of watching old men dance naked in the open believing that the people are not seeing their nudity. He added: “ Nigerians are intelligent people and they know the charade being passed off as protestation”.