PT State of the Race: Intrigues as APC, PDP brace for presidential primaries

About seven weeks to the deadline for the submission of the lists of candidates for next year’s General Election to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the two major political parties are yet to decide on two niggling issues that may shape the presidential race.

From which parts of Nigeria will the presidential candidates of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) come from, and how will they be nominated?

These are the elephants in the room as the PDP concluded the sales of expression of interest and nomination forms, and the APC began its own.

Section 29(1) of the Electoral Act states that political parties shall hold a primary and submit the list of candidates no later than 180 days before the general election. INEC has fixed June 3 as that deadline.

In response, the PDP will conclude its primaries with the nomination of its presidential candidate at its national convention scheduled for May 28 and 29, while the APC will hold its own convention from May 30 to June 1.

Mode of Primaries

Neither of the parties has confirmed which of the three options allowed under the electoral law it would use in nominating its presidential candidate.

Section 84 (2) of the Electoral Act states that: “The procedure for the nomination of candidates by political parties for the various elective positions shall be by direct, indirect primaries or consensus.”

Consensus

Over a few weeks, four PDP northern presidential aspirants went around the country urging party leaders to support the choice of the presidential candidate by consensus. After being largely rebuffed, they settled on choosing a consensus candidate for the North.

On Friday, a former vice-chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Ango Abdullahi, curiously announced in Minna, Niger State that northern elders had chosen Bauchi Governor Bala Mohammed and former Senate President Bukola Saraki as the consensus candidates. One of the four, Sokoto Governor Aminu Tamuwal, promptly rejected the decision, saying the aspirants had earlier agreed to drop the campaign, having realised that it could not work. Even before the consensus campaign of the four ended in fiasco, aspirants appeared to have all accepted the inevitability of a contest at the end of May in an indirect primary.

In the APC, the issue is not that straightforward. There, the word consensus is a euphemism for the imposition of a candidate by President Muhammadu Buhari or those who can use his name to do so. The party had last month selected its national chairman deploying the mode, after which it emerged that other candidates were coerced by some government officials and a security agency to step down for Abdullahi Adamu, a latecomer into the race.

But on Wednesday, the president warned against imposition of candidates, reiterating remarks he made in an interview with Channels Television in January where he said he has no interest in who succeeds him.

Yet, at the meeting of the party’s NEC where Mr Buhari gave the warning, the APC neglected to end the suspense on the mode it would choose for the presidential primary. Instead, the NEC delegated its powers, including the power to make that decision, to the National Working Committee of the party. The governor of Kebbi State, Abubakar Bagudu, who is the chairman of the forum of APC governors, later said party leaders were leaning towards indirect primaries but were yet to decide.

Zoning

The other issue on which suspense remains is whether the presidential tickets of the two parties would be zoned to aspirants from any particular section of the country or not.

There has been a clamour for the rotation of the presidency to the South, as the North would have held the position for eight years at the end of President Buhari’s second term in 2023. Prominent among those who have made the calls are the Southern Governors Forum, which members cut across three parties; regional associations like Afenifere of the South-west, Ohanaeze Ndigbo of the South-east, PANDEF of the South-south and the Middle Belt Forum, and the Christian Association of Nigeria.

The South-east is particularly demanding the position because the Igbo are the remaining of Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups yet to produce the president.

Indications in the APC suggest the party has conceded the presidential ticket to the South. All the aspirants that have declared, except Kogi Governor Yahaya Bello, are from the region, supporting a claim by Kaduna Governor Nasir El-Rufai in February that party leaders had agreed on an arrangement in which North and South would swap the national offices they currently hold.

“We have agreed on a zoning formula for all the six geopolitical zones and essentially, we swapped, northern zones will take positions that southern zones had in the last eight years and vice versa. So very simple, equitable and fair formula,” the governor said, although with specific reference to party offices.

Ortom Committee

On its part, the PDP may have quietly thrown open its presidential primaries to aspirants from all parts of the country. The party had set up a 37-member committee headed by Benue Governor Samuel Ortom to recommend a position on the issue, but several weeks after the committee submitted its report to the NEC, the party has not said a word about it.

This is probably because the issue has become a hot potato in the party, one that party leaders fear could mar the party’s chances in the presidential election if not carefully handled. After the Ortom committee submitted its report with the media initially reporting that it recommended open primaries, governors of the party from the southern states again met and insisted on zoning the presidency to their region. The party’s leadership has not responded to their demand, and aspirants like former vice president Atiku Abubakar, who was the party’s candidate in the last election, and the consensus-seeking four have refused to accept the zoning proposal.

Seventeen aspirants from across the country eventually picked the PDP’s presidential expression of interest and nomination forms before the sales closed on Saturday.

As things stand, the main opposition party may present a northern candidate against the candidate of the APC from the South, thus reenacting the scenario in the June 12, 1993 election that General Ibrahim Babangida whimsically annulled. A good point from that ill-fated election though was that Nigerians voted across regional and religious lines, with both Moshood Abiola and Bashir Tofa, winning states outside their hemispheres.

The Aspirants

At the close of the sale of the expression of interest and nomination forms of the PDP on Thursday, 18 aspirants had picked the forms, including 17 men who paid N40 million each, and a woman who paid only for the expression of interest fees.

The aspirants who took the forms are Mr Abubakar; former Senate President, Bukola Saraki; Sokoto Governor Aminu Tambuwal and a former President of the Senate, Pius Anyim.

Jonathan may join contest

On Friday, former President Goodluck Jonathan seemed to confirm a stubborn rumour that he had been wooed to join the race for the APC ticket. A day earlier, he had received supporters in his home in Abuja urging him to run. The Punch in a report on Friday said his condition for accepting to run for the APC ticket is that President Buhari should assure him of his support.

Minor Parties

Not much is in the open in the other parties. These parties usually play a patience game, waiting to feed on disputes within the two major parties by selling their tickets to implacable losers in their primaries.

Among the minor parties are those positioning themselves as the Third Force, the viable alternative to the big two. The New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP) seems to have stolen a march on its rivals in that respect. NNPP has been receiving new members, including prominent politicians, since a former Kano governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, left the PDP for the party. Most of this is happening in the North, sending observers excited about the impact the party could have on the presidential poll with Mr Kwankwaso as its candidate.

2023 election

INEC has fixed the presidential and federal legislative elections for February 25. That means the presidential candidates face a gruelling nine months on the hustings, during which governance at the state and federal levels would take a back seat for those of them who are incumbents.

The election will be the sixth in the Fourth Republic, but the tenth overall, including the 1993 poll whose winner the military threw into jail. It will also be the second election in this dispensation where an incumbent president will not be a candidate.

At the end of his final term on May 29, 2023, President Buhari will become the second president in Nigeria to complete two terms, after becoming the third to be reelected. President Shehu Shagari was overthrown by the military three months into his second term in December 1983 while President Olusegun Obasanjo completed his two terms in 2007.

Improving electoral process

Nigeria is in its longest period of regular elections. One of the main benefits of this is the progressive improvement in the electoral process that has made elections conducted by INEC more transparent and largely competitive, even though only two of the 18 registered parties are considered to stand a chance of winning the presidential poll.

Although the two main candidates are widely expected to be former or incumbent elective officeholders who have been around from the beginning of the Fourth Republic, due to the high cost of electioneering, the youths are increasingly asserting themselves in the process. The internet has given them louder voices and enhanced their visibility and capacity to mobilise among themselves for political actions.

In 2020, the #EndSARS protests, which were launched and coordinated by Nigerian youth on social media, shut many parts of the country down and forced the government to scrap a controversial police unit among other concessions. The Not Too Young to Rule Act, assented to by President Buhari in May 2018, has reduced the age of eligibility for political offices while parties are seeing the need to encourage their participation.

For instance, the APC has offered aspirants below 40 years a 40 per cent discount on the costs of the expression of interest and nomination forms for all offices.

Elections for the moneybags?

However, Nigerians on social media during the week widely condemned the high costs of the nomination forms of the parties. Aside from the APC and PDP that asked presidential aspirants to pay N100 million and 40 million respectively for the forms, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) also fixed N35 million for its forms.