20100528
africa-confidential

An exciting election looms next year: no one knows who is going to run and, more importantly, who is going to win





President Goodluck Jonathan has a year to make good on his promises to tackle the electricity crisis, lead a credible anti-corruption campaign and implement the electoral and political reforms proposed by Justice Mohammed Uwais’s Commission (AC Vol 51 No 8). National elections are due by June 2011. By December 2010, it will be clear whether Jonathan’s government lives up to its promises. The combination of a sustained improvement in electricity supply and organising free and peaceful elections would give him something approaching heroic status. His associates say that he is serious about reform but complain that the government is undermined by vested interests and political deals.

The difficulty with pushing through reforms within six months is that the governing People’s Democratic Party (PDP) is due to hold its national congress in November to choose a presidential candidate. If Jonathan wants to run, he and his colleagues will be distracted by politics and the resulting deals could scupper serious reform. It is not clear how party rules on the candidacies will work. A careless official in his camp told journalists that Jonathan had every right to stand in next year’s presidential election and that he would vote for him. He later returned to insist he was speaking purely in a personal capacity.

PDP barons talk of a gentlemen’s agreement under which the party leadership, and so the presidential candidacy, alternate between north and south. Given that the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, from the north-west, served barely three-quarters of a term, the logic is that a candidate from the north should succeed him in 2011. Jonathan’s camp is quietly testing the waters.

As his Vice-President, Jonathan chose the little-known Mohammed Namadi Sambo, former Governor of Kaduna State. A day before the announcement, Sambo had led a group (including Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, the self-exiled ex-minister and Yar’Adua’s most vocal critic) to offer condolences at the President’s residence. El-Rufai has returned to help push the reform of the PDP. In Kaduna, the impact of Sambo’s promotion is unfolding. Patrick Yakowa, the new Governor, a Christian from southern Kaduna, has to choose a Muslim deputy. Several factions are competing and their squabbles may jeopardise security, Sambo’s most palpable achievement in the state.

The vice-presidency is a robust launch pad for a presidential bid and several ambitious politicians would like to see Sambo fail. Among them are Gombe Governor Danjuma Goje; Muktar Shagari, Deputy Governor of Sokoto State and son of ex-President Shehu Shagari; and Ahmed Makarfi, a senator and one-time Governor of Kaduna. In 2007, then President Olusegun Obasanjo backed Yar’Adua rather than Makarfi, who is seen by some as a closet Islamist and whose health is in doubt; he was flown abroad late last year for three months of treatment.

Given the squabbles within the PDP and the north, Mahmud Yayale Ahmed, Secretary of the Federal Government, would have been the safest choice as Vice-President. He is a true civil servant, unlikely to rock the boat – but not a card-carrying member of the party in power. National Security Advisor Aliyu Mohammed Gusau is preparing for a presidential bid in 2011. Michael Are, former Director General of the State Security Service under Obasanjo, is Gusau’s deputy. The presidential ambitions of Bukola Saraki, Chairman of the Governors’ Forum, are as strong as ever.

Yet the PDP has been changing, even in the three weeks since Yar’Adua’s death. Nigeria’s political commentariat believes that a clean-out of thieves and thugs is overdue. A deadlock among the northern candidates could position Jonathan as a trusted compromise candidate from the ‘South-South’. At a conference on Nigeria in Washington in late April, Obasanjo said, ‘There’s no arrangement that precludes any Nigerian from contesting or from becoming the President of Nigeria.’ In effect, he was supporting Jonathan’s right to run, calling for abrogation of the informal north-south pact and insisting that politicians of his generation must allow younger ones their chance.

Jigawa Governor Sule Lamido has ruled himself out as ‘too old’ and ‘too analog’. He insists, though, that the next president be from the north. Mu’azu Babaginda Aliyu, Niger Governor and Chair of the Northern Governors’ Forum, says the candidate can come from any part of Nigeria, as long as he’s not ‘riff-raff’.

The influential northern socio-political Arewa Consultative Forum seeks a credible, competent northern candidate, while for now supporting the elderly respected technocrat, Bamanga Tukur, a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee. He could serve as a stopgap. The ten-year-old Forum might then throw its weight behind Kano Governor Ibrahim Shekarau, a 55-year-old civil servant-turned-politician, who has just been blessed by the Sultan of Sokoto as the Sardauna of Kano, a time-honoured but now honorary title.

Shekarau, a two-term Governor from the All Nigeria People’s Party in a supposed PDP stronghold, ensured that votes counted, a policy which gave him an unprecedented two terms in office. He espouses A Daidaita Sahu (‘attitudinal change’), a concept that denounces lawlessness, corruption, almajiri (begging), talla (girl-child hawkers), maula (parasitism) and daba (thugs) as signs of the breakdown of ‘the attitudinal infrastructure’.