Ayomide
Last Friday, an agitated member of the All Nigeria People’s Party [ANPP] made a very angry call to me. He complained that contrary to expectations, the much-vaunted effort to effect ‘regime change’ in the leadership of the ANPP has ended as a big charade. The incompetent leadership of Edwin Ume-Ezeoke and Sa’idu Kumo, has not only survived all the efforts that were purportedly in the works to sack it, but it seemed to have been emboldened by their fizzling out. Edwin Ume-Ezeoke and Sa’iduKumo,like cats of many political lives, are sitting pretty; they are consolidating themselves and working assiduously to the benefit oftheir PDP minders. Longlive incompetence; fare the well quislings! The crumbs from the tables of the PDP will continue to feed thee!
The story of the effort to remove the ANPP leadership dominated pre- NEC discussions in several caucuses of the party.Aforum ofANPP Gubernatorial/Senatorial candidates has issued a well circulated release that enumerated the woeful state of the party under the current leadership as well as the serial betrayal it has suffered in the past, in the hands of other leaders working at the behest of the PDP. ITthat forum’s position was canvassed dearly in the public space, even more clandestine manoeuvrings were taking place at other levels. Itwas said that the Kano State Governor, Ibrahim Shekarau, actually financed the meeting in the first place. It was a move read to be part of an effort to seize the leadership of the party, in preparation for a shot at the presidency in 2011. Other governors, led by Ali Modu Sheriff of Borno would not allow Shekarau’s hijack of the party apparatus.
On the other hand, Edwin Ume Ezeoke’s son was also said to have mobilized party members from the South East, to avert his father’s disgrace from party leadership. Shekarau was not politically man enough to accept that he was the financier of the push for a change in the party leadership and therefore backed down. It was this clash of ambitions which ensured, the survival of Edwin Ume-Ezeoke and Sa’idu Kumo. The hopes for a change of direction was scuttled, and for the umpteenth time, the ANPP was left with greater paralysis and a deepening of its irrelevance as a party which can somehow engineer or even be part of building an alternative political platform for the Nigerian people. Many of its leaders are working strenuously to weaken it further before eventually crossing into the only ‘mega party’ in town, the PDP; yet others are sworn to ensure it denudes so much that it cannot be a credible platform for General Buhari to run as presidential candidate in 2011.
Those who run the ANPP have made a uniquely negative contribution to Nigerian politics; they took what started out as the most vibrant political party of this dispensation, and became its undertakers, bleeding it to death gradually in years of dishonourable service as agents’ provocateursof the PDP.In the states under its control, the PDP’s authoritarian method is also replicated Itis treachery which has no parallel in contemporary political practice, but a disreputable record out of Nigeria. If the truth be told, those who believe the party can still be rescued delude themselves, because the Don EtiebetUmeEzeoke attitude has eaten too deep into the party. It is very lucrative business for those who betray the party; they get a lot from their minders in the PDP. Besides, those who want change have not done the painstaking work of mobilization to galvanize cHangewithin the comatose structures of their party. That is why the ANPP will always be locked into an interminable crisis! The ANPP died a long time ago, and what the undertaker-leaders do, is to present the embalmed body of the party in the public place, once in a while. That is
