A Vote For A Coalition Against Bad Governance And Inept Leadership (3) -By Hajia Hadiza Mohammed

Nigeria political impasse requires urgent and drastic action in order to salvage the nation from the brinks and that is the major reason for me to applaud the move by some of our political bigwigs under the African Democratic Congress (ADC) to form for a coalition to challenge the inept and corrupt All Progressives Congress (APC) regime under Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And as I stated in my earlier essay, I made it clear that members of the new democratic coalition should eschew personal differences and pursue the goal of wrenching power from the current clueless regime that has overturned the democratic fortunes of Nigeria if they are genuinely interested in saving the nation from total collapse. I also did mention that they should be mindful of the APC government trying to infiltrate their ranks in order to destabilize the coalition. And most importantly, I recommended that new political platform should take careful steps to select the most credible and experienced person in its fold as its standard bearer in the forthcoming presidential election in 2027 if it truly desirous of taking power from the APC.

Indeed, the advantage of picking the right candidate as the presidential candidate of any political party cannot be overemphasized especially in our political environment where political ideology is a non-issue and where people vote based on personality and other primordial considerations. Thus, picking a candidate with good personality profile, experience, charisma, strategy and general acceptability is a sure way of getting victory at the polls.

And that is why I recommended His Excellency Atiku Abubakar, GCON, as the right candidate to drive the party as its presidential candidate in the forth-coming election as I stated in the last essay on this heading.  Atiku is more experienced politically having been in politics for over four decades and having occupied the second highest political office in the country for eight years at the dawn of the nation’s nascent democratic experiment. Moreover, Atiku knows the Nigeria’s political turf very well and how to navigate round it. He has the political structure and the spatial spread of supporters that will work for his electoral victory, all things being equal. Again, he has the financial war chest to match the All Progressives Congress group.

One critical factor in electoral victory sometimes is about getting block votes. And this cannot be overlooked in this instance. If the coalition succeeds in getting all the other political parties to endorse its platform, it means that it will likely be two presidential candidates that would contest in 2027. And if this is the case, the most strategic thing for the party would be to field a candidate from the North being that Bola Tinubu who is representing the APC is from the South. So, here Atiku being from the North will be the most suitable candidate for the ADC. And as a Northern Muslim, he would get the block vote required from the Northern political bloc that is predominantly Muslim dominated.

Again, Atiku has contested for the highest office in the land on three different occasions (2007, 2019 and 2023), and has never done badly. In 2019, he came second behind the incumbent, Buhari, against the expectation of the people who believed that he was rigged out, polling a total of about 11,262,978 votes and winning in 18 states out of 36. In the last presidential election in 2023 Atiku garnered the second highest number of votes as officially allocated by the INEC, coming second behind the incumbent president Tinubu in a gravely flawed election fraught with all forms of malfeasance and fraud. And many observers believed that this fourth time which might be his last shot at the presidency that he would clinch it.

The members of the ADC party should be more realistic and practical in making this all-important decision of choice of presidential flag bearer. Reliance of media popularity may be counterproductive. Social media platforms are filled with many hack writers that don’t understand what politics and winning elections entails. Many of them the social media commentators don’t even have voters card and even those that have many of them don’t come out to vote, more so, as many of them are resident outside the country and may not vote.

Hajia Hadiza Mohammed 

hajiahadizamohammed@gmail.com

An actress, social activist, politician

London, UK