PDP PRIMARIES - Analysis

JONATHAN-ATIKU: Between Competence and Entitlement
By Jaro Akpobome

The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has entered the crucial phase of selecting its candidates for next year’s elections but the national attraction will be the presidential primary where President Goodluck Jonathan will square off against former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. The competition will also be a contest for the immutability of the policy of zoning political offices by the party, and essentially about the moral fibre of the party. President Jonathan represents one end of the zoning divide and Atiku the other. While the president is pitching his campaign on being the best man for the job, Atiku is campaigning on the basis of entitlement. The former vice president to President Obasanjo who jumped right back into the party from the Action Congress after President Umaru Yar’Adua’s illness took a turn for the worst, claims that the party is duty bound to respect an agreement to rotate the office of president between the north and south after the return of civilian rule in 1999. President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Southerner, held the post for eight years between 1999 and 2007, Yar’Adua, a Northerner, inherited the office, with Jonathan as his deputy.
The northern oligarchs of power want President Jonathan to respect the agreement and step down at the end of this term without running for office, the reason being that he is from the south, even though his own zone of the south, the Niger Delta, has never produced the president. The president and his foot soldiers contest the zoning policy, saying that zoning of offices applies only after the president has emerged. The arguments have gone so elliptical that even Atiku has come to agree with the Jonathan position. Adavancing the zoning policy Atiku was quoted as saying that zoning has been a national policy even from the First Republic. So, all offices including the prizes claimed by coup plotters were zoned? So, how come no Niger Deltan got a military head of state position all these years? Obviously, like the Jonathan camp claims, the zoning comes into play after the head of state emerges! At the end of the day, this is a fight for power to obtain the proverbial ‘daily bread’, couched in noble legalese, employing national and tribal sentiments; a desperate battle for power. I wonder, if Yar’Adua were alive, what Atiku and IBB would do knowing that the ethnic card would be baseless? Stay back and wait 12 more years before it comes to the north or four years hence take the position Jonathan now canvasses?
Well, the Federal High Court in Abuja may have put paid to the zoning argument, with the judgment that it cannot enforce such an agreement, even where it exists. The trial judge had also noted that though a document was submitted by the applicants, it was not signed by the two principal officers of the party, the national chairman and national secretary. Thus, the coast may well be clear for Jonathan to contest the primary. But the contest so far has been in the public space, with allegations and counter allegations of bribery. The Atiku camp may have realized that the one thing the president does not have aplenty, but which their principal has a surplus of, are allegations of corruption. President Jonathan has managed to maintain a relatively clean public profile. If he is correct then he must be a patriot when he says that none of his children attends school abroad, neither does he have bank accounts, houses or businesses abroad. I had reasoned that Jonathan was one of the same kind of corrupt politicians that have dominated the nation’s political space; men who are not content with being thieves but are rapaciously greedy, but the statement credited to former EFCC chairman Nuhu Ribadu claiming that as boss of the anti-corruption body he never had a report on the president who was Bayelsa governor then, nor on his wife, Patience, who was the first Lady of the state then, despite several reports to the contrary, throws fresh light. Said Ribadu: “I never handled any case against Mrs. Patience Jonathan. It was a case involving one lady who was reported by a bank, there was lodgment of about N70 million, and while we were investigating it we discovered that she did a contract in Bayelsa”. Nuhu Ribadu is a respected Nigerian not just for his fight against corruption, but for his boldness in confronting authority. After he returned from exile and everyone expected that he would join the Jonathan government, he declined on principle, preferring instead to join the opposition Action Congress. It is interesting that though Ribadu was recruited by Atiku for the EFCC job he has been unflattering in his assessment of the former vice president, labeling him as corrupt. Atiku’s houses in the expensive Maryland area of Washington, U.S., are well publicized. This, for a man who has been a public official for much of his life! So when he says of himself that he made his money from hard work, wise investment and luck, with an initial investment of N31, 000 in the 1980s, he reveals a miracle worker who is now able to command such dominant companies as the logistics firm Intels, which for several years had the concession to run the Onne oil and gas port in Rivers State.
Perhaps aware of the challenge he faces in defending his stupendous wealth and his expensive lifestyle, the former vice president has tried to steer the campaign away from himself to ‘issues’. The Atiku campaign has made some forays into economic policy, criticizing some of the current policy decisions as faulty. I agree with the campaign that spending is on the rise, with the foreign reserves being depleted, but we must situate the reasons for what is going on else we run the risk of misinforming Nigerians on the true state of affairs and we must enable them to make informed decisions at the primaries. Nigeria’s dominant export is crude oil and Atiku says the government has been getting record income form its sales but this is only partially true! Crude oil prices tanked at the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 and are only now going back up. In fact the prices now were common during Atiku’s time as vice president. For much of the last several months, prices have been low, dipping to about $30 in 2009. As cold weather runs through Europe the demand for energy for heating is rising and so prices are up, at about $85 now, which is good. However, the basic problem with the federal budget, which the candidates have not addressed, is the huge cost of maintaining public officials, and that is what drives expenditure. The current federal government inherited a humongous bureaucracy that feeds on the nation’s wealth. There are a plethora of ministers and aides to political office holders at all levels, gulping huge amounts in legitimate expense and corruption. What we should be addressing is how to scale down the government, else yet another promise of Atiku’s, political I guess, will come to naught. The PDP aspirant says he will reduce company tax from 30 per cent of profits to 10 per cent. I believe that to attract investors we need to address the issue of not just company tax, but of multiple taxes. I want to see a candidate tell me practically how he will utilize existing revenues to improve infrastructure, not score cheap points by making grandiose statements that may well be ditched once he gets power. One way to make possible Atiku’s promise to reduce taxes is to check the waste in government by pruning offices and curtailing corruption.
Atiku promises that he will tackle corruption headlong but everywhere I have seen people discuss this ‘promise’, it has come across more as a joke, more like ‘tell us some thing else! The problem is if Atiku cannot sell himself as capable of curbing Nigeria’s biggest cancer, how can he realistically be seen as a change agent? It is in this contest that opposition politicians are excited at Atiku’s emergence as the consensus candidate of the Adamu Ciroma kitchen group of the PDP. If its best candidate to face Jonathan in the PDP primaries is mired in corruption allegations at a time Nigerians want change, the decision will be if the party can afford to gamble with an issue as volatile as this, especially given the comments of opposition politicians like Balarabe Musa that Atiku will be a ‘softer target’ for the opposition? With Atiku as PDP candidate, the opposition will have been gifted the presidency.