In exactly four months, those elected in 2023 will be celebrating their second year in office. Shortly after, the politics of 2027 will increasingly occupy the attention of politicians and Nigerians as a whole. Such is the dialectic of politics and government in a democracy.
I was prompted to address this topic by the utterances of some Northern politicians and activists, especially those threatening to snatch power from President Bola Tinubu in 2027. On this topic, the North (the heavy political, Muslim North, that is), are still divided. To be sure, this bloc, with the South West and state power in tow, played the leading role in putting Tinubu in power in 2023.
However, some are already regretting their action due, partly, to Tinubu’s draconian hunger and poverty-inducing economic policies, subsisting general insecurity, extreme nepotism and Tinubu government’s self-isolation from the realities that the ordinary Nigerian faces daily.
To add salt to their injury, Tinubu’s bold and revolutionary tax reforms (especially the derivation-rewarding VAT component), have brought out many Northern leaders and politicians across party lines in face offs with the president. I will take as my samples two voices that have gone so far as to threaten the president’s second term ambition with the North’s electoral power. One is a professional noisemaker and rabble rouser. The other is a tested politician. The tested politician is Governor Bala Mohammed of Bauchi State. He said the North will show Tinubu their “hue” in 2027.
Bala is the Chairman of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) Governors’ Forum. He contested in the PDP presidential primaries in 2022 and lost before hurrying home to retrieve his second term ticket from his carefully handpicked placeholder, Ibrahim Kassim, whom he promptly rewarded with reappointment as Secretary to the State Government. Funny, Kassim resigned on 14th December last year over his rumoured
governorship ambition in 2027, which generated rancour between him and the Governor.
It is generally believed that Bala Mohammed will present himself on PDP platform as the North’s arrowhead to unseat Tinubu. Bala is also a slick political dealmaker. As an All Progressives People’s Party (ANPP) Senator, he supported the “doctrine of necessity” that enabled former Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to assume power when President Umaru Yar’ Adua died. Jonathan rewarded him by appointing him Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) on 6th April 2010.
Shortly after, the senator decamped to PDP. Since then, he has been the major pillar of the party in Bauchi State and the North East. Despite his perceived sabre-rattling, nothing stops Bala Mohammed from making a deal with Tinubu before 2027 and going back to his original party, now called the All Progressives Congress (APC). Tinubu is the kind of president who can bring people like Bala over if he deems it necessary. The current sabre-rattling could merely be Bala’s positioning for 2027, one way or the other.
Now, the noisemaker, Yerima Shettima. He operates under the platform of Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG, sounds like compressed natural gas) and Arewa Youths Consultative Forum (AYCF). Yerima is threatening Tinubu, yet he has no electoral value. But he sure packs plenty of nuisance. The most annoying thing is that because he shares the name: Shettima, with our amiable Vice President, His Excellency, Kashim Shettima, many people, especially Southerners, often mistake them for each other.
It was this Yerima and one Abdulaziz Suleiman that fronted the laughable “Igbo quit notice” issued by CNG and others in August 2017. Ironically, it was Kashim Shettima, as Governor of Borno State and Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum that cornered Yerima and his group and made them swallow their ultimatum. VP Shettima is a notable friend of the Igbo nation. Yerima was also made to lead a delegation of his fellow
attention seekers to Owerri to sign a “peace pact” with Ralph Uwazuruike’s MASSOB, which had nothing to do with Mazi Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), the group actively pushing for Biafra exit from Nigeria at that time.
It was also Yerima’s voice that was captured in an apparent viral telephone conversation with former Governor Adekunle Amosun of Ogun State. Yerima was spewing his usual trash against the Igbo, buccally haemorrhaging about how the Igbo should be “cut down” in Nigeria, while Amosun did his best to persuade Yerima to tame his outburst. Till today, many Igbo still erroneously believe it was Kashim Shettima that perpetrated Yerima Shettima’s Igbophobic outbursts in 2017. Yerima cowered and never came out to own up.
You will never see this fellow involved in the search for a lasting solution to the North’s millions of out-of-school almajiri children, tackle the deep-seated poverty there which makes Nigeria the “poverty capital of the world” and end the multi-faceted insecurity, Boko Haram and herdsmen terrorism, banditry and mass abductions for ransom which threaten not just the North but the whole country. You will never see him among groups strategising to foster peace and unity among Nigerians, which will also benefit the North. All Yerima does is weaponise the North against the rest of Nigerians in the dumb belief that he is promoting Arewa’s interest. He and his cohorts are mere attention seekers and should be ignored.
No region has the sole power to grab power. It was possible for the North during the military era. But under democratic dispensations, there must be alliances between the North and at least, one major bloc, such as the six states of the South West or the eleven states of the South East and South-South. Secondly, no region is capable of electorally unseating an incumbent president, unless certain conditions exist in the polity to aid them. Finally, Tinubu is the last political leader you can expect to deny his second term, his abysmal performance in government notwithstanding.
These are issues I will discuss in the second and final take of this article.
