It is not quite clear if the ruling All Progressives Congress party has indeed withdrawn the membership list of its Presidential Campaign Council for the January 16, 2027 elections. What is not in doubt is that the list has run into a storm of criticism in which certain members of the opposition parties have taken the lead. There is a lot to quarrel with in that bloated, unworkable list in which every APC official wants to be, or is made, a member. Not the least of this is the inclusion of one or two public office holders, like Dr. Zacchaeus Adedeji, the chair of the Nigerian Revenue Service. His position, it could be argued, ought to place him above partisan politics. Many people would view him as a technocrat who should be accountable to all Nigerians irrespective of their political affiliation. But that is as far as it goes. Otherwise, he is not your everyday civil servant who, theoretically, is supposed to serve any government in power without consideration for its political connections.
Which is to say that he is, in a sense, a political appointee who would be expected to defend the interests and ensure the survival of the government in which he serves. It would be naïve to think that his appointment to the fund-raising committee of the campaign automatically means he would turn Nigeria’s revenue purse over to the APC. It would take an extraordinary level of administrative insouciance and lack of oversight, as was witnessed under the Muhammadu Buhari-led APC administration, when then CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, flung aside all caution and threw his hat into the politics of that time, for this to happen. If Zacchaeus Adedeji could hand over Nigeria’s revenue till to the APC simply on account of his appointment to the fund-raising committee, it means he could very well do it without the appointment.
All the same, it makes good sense to exclude him from such partisan undertaking. It amounts to an overkill of sorts for the APC to have included his like on the campaign list. He could still have offered his fund-raising expertise as a member of an APC-led government, if not a card-carrying member of the party, without the scrutiny of a publicised announcement. But it would seem that some people in the APC can’t just be mild in their attempt to intimidate the opposition. They must always go overboard, falling over one another, in order to prove what in practical terms amounts to nothing. They exhibit the winner-take-all misbehaviour of the average Nigerian politician and convey the impression of a despotic authoritarianism that is intolerant of others. It was the same mistake they made during the just-concluded Osun state governorship poll when some APC governors and leaders of the National Assembly flooded Osogbo days to an election in which their principal, President Bola Tinubu, had practically conceded victory to the Accord Party candidate and incumbent governor, Ademola Adeleke, based on objective factors of dominance and an earlier understanding to work together.
The Abuja invaders and their counterparts from the states, the governors, had clearly convinced themselves that they could intimidate their main opponent by that ‘show of force’, as our security agencies would say, with the sheer number of high-level APC officials that swooped on Osogbo in the few hours before the opening of polls. That gamble took them nowhere and is responsible for why many Nigerians and opposition party elements have misread what led to the outcome of that election while engaged in the mistaken extrapolation that what happened in Osun is a rejection of ‘federal might’ and the APC reforms, which would be replicated on the national stage in 2027. Nothing can be more mistaken.
On the other side of the campaign council debate are individuals whose public activities in the past ended in very controversial circumstances even when they have not been found guilty of any crime. The optics of their inclusion, which suggests an attempt at rehabilitating them after public humiliation, simply do not look good. This is where the likes of Betta Edu, a former minister of humanitarian affairs, come in. She was relieved of her position, although never prosecuted, following corruption allegations and counter-allegations in her ministry. Her appointment raises moral as opposed to legal questions. Opposition parties’ criticisms of her inclusion are mostly political. Many of them would have looked away were she a member of their parties. After bearing the liabilities of her public service misconduct, or whatever it was the action that led to her dismissal was described as—having lost her position as minister on account of it (there is no record that she helped herself to public funds, as did her successor—the worse for us all that she was never prosecuted)—does it then mean she cannot function in a private capacity as a member of a political association? Is it that once a person is damned, then they are forever damned no matter the degree of infraction? That is a foreign culture, largely western, that we can do without.
This is why all cases or allegations of the misuse of public office should be meticulously investigated and prosecuted to conclusion. Once guilt is established and necessary sanctions have been paid, either in monetary or prison terms, or both depending on the nature of the offence, then the guilty person should be free to return to society. Even where they could sometimes raise moral concerns which should be assessed on their merit, appointments to a party committee are the business of the party concerned. It is not, and should not be, a matter of national debate much less the business of opposition parties. Where are the campaign councils of the other parties, if they care to have any? Which leads me to the curious way the present opposition parties have been playing politics, spending too much time minding the business of the ruling party, frequently criticising its policies and decisions, without offering Nigerians workable alternatives.
What do the opposition parties propose to do differently in the face of their united rejection of the APC reforms and other policies? There is hardly anything they are offering that could inspire a meaningful debate. Nothing until Atiku Abubakar’s recent volte-face to return the fuel subsidy, a position that reeks of desperation and which many have rightly read as an attempt to mislead the gullible among Nigerians. Why should our opposition politicians get worked up over the internal matters of the APC? We saw this in the Osun governorship election where some of them whose candidates stood in the election derived greater pleasure in the loss of the APC than in the performance or success of their candidates. What type of witchcraft is this?
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