9th National Assembly: Why zone leadership positions to individuals?

Abake Fakunle

As expected in a democracy, after the general electione, the
battle ground has shifted to the sharing table. Of course, the
National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Comrade
Adams Oshiomhole and the party’s National Publicity Secretary,
Lanre Isa-Onilu, had warned their party men and women that the game
was a winner-takes-all affair, thus making it clear to the
opposition parties in the legislature that there will be nothing to
share with the APC in the Senate and the House of
Representatives.

If you think that the apparatchiks in the ruling party are
vehemently fighting to protect the interests of their members in
the legislature, you are dead wrong. And if you believe that this
post-elections hysteria and even the paranoia for the Peoples
Democratic Party in the build-up to the inauguration of the 9th
Assembly is down to the experience of the last four years, you miss
the plot too.

There is really nothing altruistic in the insistence of the APC
leadership that Senator Ahmed Lawan must be elected the next Senate
President. In the same vein, there is no overriding national
interest in recommending Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila as the next Speaker
of the House of Representatives. Both men are qualified for the
different positions – just like their other colleagues. In fact,
emerging feelers from the senators-elect, for instance, seem to
contradict the tyrannical imposition of Senator Lawan on his
colleagues. If the APC leadership does not have ears to the ground,
they might be rudely shocked again. As it appears, many of of the
APC senators – even PDP senators – for different reasons think that
Ali Ndume rather than Lawan has defended the APC position in the
Senate with all his might and everything in his possession.
Therefore, they prefer him to be elected as Senate President. This
is the kind of danger inherent in zoning to an individual rather
than to geo-political zones or regions.

If the APC leadership can pretend that it zoned the Senate
presidency to the North-East and not to Ahmed Lawan, there is no
room for such pretence in the alleged zoning of the speakership to
Gbajabiamila. And the reason is quite obvious for even a blind man
to see. Whereas the entire North-East has nothing to hold on to so
far, the South-West already has in its kitty the office of Vice
President. And when it is considered that President Muhammadu
Buhari in his second term has exhausted his constitutional
opportunity for re-election to the same office, the import and the
opportunities in the exalted office that Prof Yemi Osinbajo holds
in the name of the South-West cannot be over-emphasised. Now, how
anyone can justify overloading the South-West yet with another
position of speakership when zones like the North-Central and
South-East have nothing in the national power-sharing formula?

Therefore, any mention of Gbajabiamila in the race for the
position of Speaker in the 9th Assembly not only offends the
principle of equity and justice, but it also offends the logic of
winner-takes-all as declared by the APC leadership. It offends the
logic in the sense that regions are partly rewarded on the basis of
the votes they contributed to the victory of the ruling party.
This, perhaps, explains why a large zone like the South-East, even
in the face of obvious inequity, is only making a half-hearted
demand in the APC zoning formula. Yet, the same cannot be said of
the North-Central that played a key role in the first coming of the
APC to power in 2015 and has remained steadfast, even in the face
of mistreatment by the Federal Government, especially in the
several deadly herders-farmers clashes. Even in the just-concluded
general election, the North-Central geo-political zone gave more
votes to Buhari and the APC than the South-West.

Let nobody be deceived by the propaganda that there are
precedents in the past justifying the simultaneous holding of the
offices of Vice President and Speaker by a particular zone. Yes, in
1979, Chief Alex Ekwueme, a native of Anambra State, was the Vice
President, while Chief Edwin Ume-Ezeoke, who is also a native of
the same state, was the Speaker of the House of Reps. The truth,
however, is that there was a power-sharing accord between the
ruling National Party of Nigeria and its alliance partner, the
Nigerian Peoples Party. So, whereas, Ekwueme was of the NPN,
Ume-Ezeoke was of the NPP, and the emphasis of the sharing formula
then was between two parties. Now it is among regional zones. Even
then, the country was not as divided as it is now, with all manner
of fault-lines crying to be attended to.

Let it be known that the greatest danger of what the APC has
done in zoning to individuals rather than groups is that it
undermines national solidarity and even group interests. What is
the APC afraid of in allowing a zone to arrive at a consensus about
who it has chosen to occupy a particular leadership position?
Surely that is more democratic and a political party in power has
the added responsibility of showing good democratic examples by
following the due process.

All this talk that “it must be Lawan or it must be Gbajabiamila”
by the leadership of APC may, in fact, be a
euphemistically-designed plot to allow only one individual to
decide for a whole nation of over 200 million people who becomes
President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House and logically
afterwards, the committee chairpersons in his bid for the
presidency in 2023. This same powerful individual has already
conquered the APC by planting his vassal as party chairman. So the
‘next level’ is to conquer the government. Who noticed that someone
is already grandstanding publicly as an alternate President
advising on policy matters? Our country is certainly too big to be
reduced to a footstool of one man, no matter how powerfully he
looms.

Fakunle wrote in from Ilorin, Kwara State