The long-awaited outcome of the series of meetings between the Northern Elders Political Forum led by Malam Adamu Ciroma and President Jonathan which was meant to be made public yesterday, Sunday 27th of February, 2011 was not. Many eager followers of this romance of questionable value were disappointed once again when it was announced that the result of the consultations will be made public sometime this week. The reasons for the delayed or postponed announcement of the outcome of the meeting varied from the absence of former President Atiku Abubakar, the Forum’s Consensus Candidate for the PDP, to the failure of the two sides to agree on some basic issues.
The series of meetings between President Jonathan and his campaign team and members of the Northern Political Elders Forum have their roots in the desire of President Goodluck Jonathan to whittle down substantial Northern resistance against his ambition to win the elections. They are also fuelled by the desire of the self-styled Elders Forum to be seen as relevant and central to the political fortunes of the North. The meetings have been given much publicity, and on a number of occasions, both sides have attempted to gain an upper hand by using the media and adopting under-handed methods. From the publicized reluctance of Atiku Abubakar to meet one-on-one with President Jonathan; to the reported reluctance of Malam Adamu Ciroma to agree to any meeting at all; to the leaked visits and discussions which took place between the two camps, these meetings had all the hallmarks of grand deceptions.
The two sides reportedly could not get over the issue of zoning and rotation, a matter long settled by the refusal of President Jonathan to accept it, and by the PDP itself which completely destroyed it by making him its Candidate. Both sides reportedly set up teams to further negotiate thorny issues, such as the support of the North for President Jonathan, and the fate of the North under his possible Presidency. The teams have been meeting for the past one week, supposedly in secret, but the public is daily fed with different versions of both the issues and the progress being made, or lack of it.
At this stage of the political campaigns, many keen observers would have arrived at some well-informed conclusions. One of these is that both President Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP Elders Forum are involved in a grand scheme of fooling each other and the nation. The Elders Forum knows that it cannot deliver the North to President Jonathan because it lacks political clout or legitimacy. Its efforts to create a so-called northern consensus around Atiku Abubakar was comprehensively defeated by President Jonathan, with the active collaboration of PDP Governors in the North. If they could not prevent his emergence as a candidate, what gives them the power to determine how the North relates to him? More importantly, how do these elders stand in relation to PDP Northern Governors, who made nonsense of the Elders claims that they represent the soul of Northern PDP?
President Jonathan is also going through the motions of securing the endorsement of these self-appointed leaders of the PDP in the North merely to show that he values northern support. He knows that he and his Party will have to work very hard to convince many voters in the North to support them, but he is talking to the wrong people. He defeated their consensus candidate with the active collaboration of Northerners; why should he expect that they can do the magic of delivering the North to him?
Both the Elders and President Jonathan are also involved in an elaborate ploy to fool the North into thinking that between the two of them, the political interests of the North can be protected and guaranteed. The Northern political space is much wider than the PDP; and the North has many interest outside what happens in the PDP. To create the false impression that a few PDP elders and President Jonathan alone can decide the political future of the entire North is to engage in deception of the lowest type.
Whatever the elders and President Jonathan agree, it will not alter the fact that the PDP has a candidate who has emerged from the ashes of the bitter fight to keep the zoning and rotation policy of the PDP. It will not alter the fact that political elders from the PDP North have been humiliated and made impotent by the cynical combination of crass opportunism, incumbency and use of massive State resources. It will not alter the fact that Northerners, like all their fellow citizens in other parts of the North have choices to make on the basis of their own assessments of their interests.
The elections of April 2011 should be an opportunity for all Nigerians to make choices. Whether the opinion of a few people with limited influence and a huge, unsubstantiated claim to speak for the entire North will matter at the elections remains to be seen. For now, what is important is that Nigerians are allowed to make choices freely, and that their votes will count in the elections.
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