Ahmad
For political opportunists like Isa Yuguda, it does not rain, it pours! And it is clear Yuguda is getting his comeuppance SO soon. Sunday Trust two weeks ago reported the mass boycott of Yugudas Pro-Goodluck” rally in Bauchi just as the courts re instated the deputy governor removed for refusing to decamp into the PDP. A few months can be a very long time in politics.
Yuguda is fighting to save a sinking political career. It might be apocryphal, but the story goes that at the height of his political invisibility as a presidential son-in-law, Isa Yuguda used to simply ignore then vice president, Goodluck Jonathan. So worried was Jonathan, it is said, that he once sent people to Bauchi to help beg Yuguda if there was anything he did wrong. Then tables turned in Nigeria and Jonathan became lord of the manor. He is bent on removing Isa Yuguda from his perch, hence the appointment of Yuguda’s nemesis, Senator Bala Muhammed as FCT minister, to acquire the wherewithal to launch a bid for governorship of Bauchi. Jonathan is poised to extract a pound of flesh so a politically desperate Yuguda rubbishes zoning and supports Jonathan to run in 2011, adding that whoever opposed Jonathan opposes God! Last week, he named a road after Jonathan. Yuguda has become a political pariah disposed to also becoming an unguided missile. Massively elected to teach his old friend, Adamu Mu’azu a lesson for attempting to play God; Yuguda revealed his opportunism by returning to the PDP after taking a presidential daughter as wife. The emergence as president of the Goodluck Jonathan that Yuguda used to ignore has become his nightmare and by choosing to openly campaign against zoning, he also alienated himself from Northern Nigeria. Isa Yugudas fate is instructive; he has lost the people; abandoned the North and he won’t get favours from Jonathan no matter the number of “Pro-Jonathan” rallies he organizes. Let him even name all the streets in Bauchi after Jonathan and Madam Patience!
As the Americans say: that’s how the cookie crumbles! John Nwodo and the volte-face on zoning Zoning is tearing the North’s PDP. Goodluck Jonathan’s men are decimating the region using religion and ethnicity with the exhumation from political Siberia of long-term, despicable AGIPS, like Jerry Gana. Governors for second term like those of Niger and Zamfara are backtracking from zoning. It is a matter of time before a trickle turns into a storm.
Personal interest first! Do the main gladiators for zoning, IBB and Atiku Abubakar, have staying power? Can they take the heat of the political kitchen? Will IBB stay the course or dropout, suddenly discovering he is “related” to Goodluck Jonathan, somehow? New PDP chair, John Nwodo [of the National ID Card bribery scandal fame!] told BBC that zoning in PDP was already fatally compromised; but how did he emerge? Zoning! Can you sniff the crass opportunism?
