The planned return of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, may be long in coming following the emergence of a plethora of competing interests stalling the project, Sunday Vanguard can now reveal. In fact, nothing is yet cast in stone on the return of Atiku to the PDP.
It was gathered that the much talked about Electoral Reforms is a key factor in determining whether or not the former vice-president would return to PDP, because unless President Yar'Adua demonstrates beyond doubt that he wants true reforms, a return to PDP remains doubtful,
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar
Sources close to the former Vice President said that he was still weighing his options as pressures on him from the pro and anti groups were such that meetings were being held on a daily basis on the issue.
Those within his political family who insist that he has nothing to achieve by rushing back to the PDP maintain that unless the Yar'Adua government engages a true reform agenda for Nigeria's electoral process, a return to PDP is meaningless.
His associates say unless the electoral process is reformed an Atiku return to PDP would do nothing but "present the former vice president as an individual without scruples and one who has a vaulting ambition".
But Sunday Vanguard was reliably informed that the bulk of those who are eager to welcome Atiku back to the PDP are most of the former governors on the platform of the party, as well as a sizeable number of the present crop of PDP governors.
The governors are already working with a view to welcoming Atiku back to the party.
"Atiku was one of the founding leaders of this party and a return of such a prominent and popular personality would inject more life to the party", one of the sources said,.
He said "Atiku's return to our party would pour cold water on the opposition which is more content in just using his name for their own mischief".
The governors and leaders of the party rooting for Atiku's return are also insisting that in the area of electoral reforms, the vice president stands a better chance of engendering a reform process from within as a member and leader of the party than staying outside.
Such a process of internal democracy, they maintain, could then be translated on a larger scale to the entire polity for the benefit of Nigerians.
But holes are quickly being punched into this line of argument by some others, in the same Atiku camp, that the former vice president had been a victim of grand betrayal twice by a crop of PDP governors -first, just before the 2003primaries of the PDP and, second, during Atiku's bid to contest the 2007 presidential elections.
Sunday Vanguard was told that whereas there are those who see the AC a springboard to oppose the Yar'Adua administration, while at the same time creating a platform of control and dominance in their own geo-political zone, "the thinking of Atiku is that a local champion can not affect the fortunes of the Nigerian public".
"In fact", the source continued, "what the AC can do at best of times is to capture five states in Nigeria, three possibly from the South West, and another two scattered in the north".
The source then asked: "How does that make an individual with a pan Nigerian world view president of this country?"
It would be recalled that the talk about a possible return of Atiku to PDP gained so much fervency immediately after he went to Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, to hold talks with his former boss, former President Olusegun Obasanjo.