By Gimba Kakanda
Without the Bola Tinubu-led ACN bloc in the coalition that became APC, Buhari would’ve remained a political pariah in the South and Goodluck Jonathan would’ve had his way back to Aso Rock. You don’t have to be this man’s fan, but he wasn’t exaggerating the huge role he played in the 2015 elections.
So many analysts have underlined the roles other allies played to deliver the presidency to Buhari, which are also significant, but none is as critical as the political facelift Candidate Muhammadu Buhari had in the Southwest ahead of the elections. The region controls most of the nation’s media, and this was deployed to rebrand Buhari and market him beyond the shores of the country. Even for a lot of us promoting Buhari then, some of the public relations stunts designed to launder his image were extremely cringeworthy.
Some notable characters in the Southwest were even hired to write in influential international newspapers that, although Buhari jailed their parents or did something worse to them or their families and friends in his days as a military dictator, he was what Nigeria needed. These intellectual mouthpieces of the South shamefully glamorized the very human rights violations that once made them the harshest critics of the man—all in the name of branding.
The expensive perception management from the South’s PR machinery eased the task of selling Buhari to southern voters who, infected by aggressive media representation of the man, had had an unflattering image of him as a provincial demagogue with sensationalized disdain for them.
ACN, like Buhari’s CPC, was a provincial party, no doubt. None had the structural capability to win a presidential election before the merger. But they stood out because they were the two parties in the coalition in charge of electoral geographies. For instance, even without Kwankwaso, Buhari would’ve taken Kano. Kwankwaso couldn’t deliver the state for Atiku when, after they defected to the PDP, the latter ran against Buhari in 2019. Kwankwaso and his N-PDP soldiers, though, played a role other than delivering political geography—they weakened the then ruling party.
The growing temptation to play down Tinubu’s investment in the Buhari project as a result of his factual outbursts that he made Buhari president should be done without this historical revisionism. Agreed, his contribution shouldn’t make the party hand the presidential ticket to him, but ganging up against a key ally in such a fashion makes the work easier for the opposition party to take over next year. There are a thousand benign ways to tame a tiger.
We also need to establish that Tinubu’s outburst isn’t the fear of taking part in the APC presidential primaries, it’s the obvious attempt to scheme him out of the presidential equation. The party must create a level-playing ground for all stakeholders to run, but I get that it’s the fear of Tinubu’s advantage that makes that option seem risky. An outplayed and wounded Tinubu is the last enemy APC should make in their bid to confront Atiku.
• Kakanda is a newspaper columnist and public affairs analyst.