₦airaland Forum

All is set for the flag off of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential campaign for the 2023 general elections tomorrow in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital.

So far, the opposition party appears to have everything in place for a smooth take off of electioneering for the 2023 presidential poll. The 2023 election is the second time the PDP will be trying to regain the Presidency, which it lost in the 2015 general elections.

Incidentally, like in the 2019 elections, where the party made an unsuccessful attempt to unseat the All Progressives Congress (APC), former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is still the standard bearer of the opposition party for the poll slated to hold on January 25, next year.

Expectedly, the PDP has made all the preparations to ensure a robust campaign that will make it possible for it to win the next general elections. Already, the party has set up a Presidential Campaign Council led by the Akwa Ibom State governor, Udom Emmanuel, as chairman and Sokoto State governor, Aminu Tambuwal, as director general.

The opposition party also named former governor of Cross Rivers State, Liyel Imoke as deputy director general, Operations; former National Secretary of the party, Prof Adewale Oladipu, as deputy director, Administration; High Chief Raymond Dokpesi as deputy director, Technical and Systems, while Ekwesilieze Nwodo is appointed as deputy director, Research and Strategy of the National Campaign Management Committee.

Other members of the campaign council include former Vice President, Namadi Sambo, former Presidents of the Senate, Anyim Pius Anyim, David Mark and Bukola Saraki, as well as members of the National Assembly, former governors and former ministers.

However, amidst the preparations for the campaign, party stakeholders are apprehensive that the crisis currently rocking the party may throw a spanner in the works.

Sunday Sun gathered that the prolonged crisis in the opposition party has continued to unsettle a lot of PDP stakeholders; as many fear that it may affect the ability of the opposition party to stage a successful campaign, in some of the states across the country.

A source at the PDP secretariat told Sunday Sun that the greatest challenge confronting the opposition party as it begins the campaigns for the 2023 polls is the current division in its ranks.

“The 2023 poll is ours to lose. But we cannot afford to go to the election with a divided house. If we do, it may cost us dearly,” she stated.

It would be recalled that the PDP has been embroiled in crisis in the aftermath of the nomination of Atiku and Delta State governor, Ifeanyi Okowa as presidential and vice presidential candidates respectively. Supporters of the Rivers State governor, Nyesom Wike, who believed that the governor was unfairly treated by the PDP had drawn the battle be line with the opposition party leadership.

Since then, the Wike camp which include Governors Samuel Ortom, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, Okezie Ikpeazu and Seyi Makinde of Benue, Enugu, Abia and Oyo states have continued to insist that the PDP National Chairman, Iyorchia Ayu must be replaced with a Southerner, ahead of the election as a condition for reconciliation in the party.

Other members of the group include former PDP Deputy National Chairman, Chief Olabode George; former Minister of Information, Jerry Gana, as well as some former governors and former members of the National Assembly, among others.

Recently, supporters of the Rivers State governor announced their withdrawal from the PDP campaign council. The decision of Wike and his men from the campaign council is in protest over the refusal of the opposition party to replace Ayu with a Southerner ahead of the 2023 polls.

Incidentally, while Makinde was named the Vice Chairman (South) for the campaign council, Wike, Ortom, Ugwuanyi and Ikpeazu were named as members of the campaign council.

Segun Sowunmi, who admitted that the situation is a cause for concern, told Sunday Sun that all hope for all party leaders to collaborate to prosecute the 2023 election is not lost.

“All hope is not lost. I still feel that there is a room for all sides to come together in the interest of the bigger picture. And I am sure that the door is not completely shut. It is a bit concerning, because it seems to have dragged on longer than expected,” Sowunmi stated.

He added that “it will be interesting to see how the citizens, who are made up of more than 80 million registered voters, how they interpret what their own individual role is in terms of determining who will be the next leader of the country. So, all hope is not lost.”

Nevertheless, there have been frantic efforts by the leaders of the party, including the Board of Trustees (BoT) to broker a truce. So far, the many peace initiatives are yet to produce the expected result.

An inside source told Sunday Sun that with the decision of the Wike camp to withdraw from the presidential campaign until Ayu is replaced, it is likely to affect the campaign in their respective states. This is against the backdrop that the PDP has resolved to decentralize its campaigns to the grassroots.

The PDP National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba, had told journalists, in recent press briefing that the presidential campaign would be decentralized to the states, local governments, wards and polling unit levels, with the aim of taking the message directly to the voters.

“Clearly, it is a different arrangement. You will recall that INEC commended the PDP as the best digital compliant party. This campaign structure is tilted towards that. You will see more emphasis on communication, in terms of digital communication,” Ologunagba stated.

Sunday Sun gathered that the stance of the aggrieved governors may be a drawback for the PDP presidential campaign in their respective states.

Inside sources said that the challenge before the party is how it will effectively run its campaigns at the grassroots in affected states without the support of the five governors.

Eddy Olafeso, a former PDP national vice chairman (South), told Sunday Sun that the leaders of the party must bury the hatchet. Olafeso said that it would not serve any useful purpose for the feuding parties in the opposition party to continue to bicker.

According to him, “we don’t have to fight each other. Enough of the ugly mess. And abuses of one another. It will not augur well for anybody to continue to fight at this moment. The only people that we need to fight is the APC that has led a very backward governance and ruined virtually everything for the country.”

However, there are indications that the opposition party may have decided to move on without the five governors, in the event that they continue to maintain their hardline posture. Already, the party has gone ahead to roll out its timetable for the 2023 campaigns.

A member of the PDP NEC, who is pro-Atiku confirmed to Sunday Sun that the party would move on without the Wike group, as a resort, in the event that it is impossible to win over members of the group.

“We will keep talking to them (Wike group); hoping that they will reconsider their position. But if at the end of the day, they don’t shift ground. The party must will move ahead with and without them and brace up for whatever would happen at the polls,” he stated.

Several weeks ago, my 80-year-old paternal uncle, who is a community leader, called me to ask whom between Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu he should vote and canvass support for. That was a strange request considering that in 2019 he resisted my entreaty to him to not vote or campaign for Buhari because of the danger that a Buhari second term would pose for Nigeria.

He apparently sensed that I was hesitant to make any recommendations because the last time I did he balked. He was a true believer in Buhari even when overwhelming evidence had shown that Buhari wasn’t whom he had claimed to be. In response to my hesitation, he said he was asking because all I had told him about Buhari had materialized.

If I was right about Buhari, I might be right about the next president, he said. I don’t think that is accurate. I have no crystal ball to gaze at the future. I only predicted Buhari’s ongoing presidential disaster based on what was already happening, which his supporters like my uncle wore blinders over.

Anyway, I asked my uncle why he limited his choices to Tinubu and Atiku. He said it was because they were the only serious contenders in the race and that he had a hard time choosing between them.

I asked if he had heard of Peter Obi. He hadn’t. Not even remotely. And my uncle isn’t some uneducated, rural bumpkin. Although he lives in the countryside in retirement, he is a UK-trained medical professional who is politically active. At his request, I told him about Obi and said Obi’s name gets mentioned along with Tinubu and Atiku in urban Nigeria.

Like a typical Muslim northern Nigerian, he couldn’t get past the anxieties about an Igbo president throwing Nigeria into turmoil by using the instruments of federal power to declare Biafra, particularly in light of the recrudescence of Biafra movements and the mainstreaming of neo-Biafra sentiments in the Southeast.

I politely told him that he had his anxieties mixed up. The resurgence of Biafra movements and neo-Biafra sentiments in Igboland is the consequence of the feelings of exclusion from the center among the Igbo people. Electing an Igbo person as president would eliminate Biafranism—or push it to the fringes.

Given the wide geographic spread of Igbo people in Nigeria, I said, it isn’t reasonable to say that they don’t want to be in Nigeria. An insular, inward-looking people who resent the diversity of Nigeria and want to recoil into their own geo-cultural enclave would live only in their region.

Our conversation ended without any recommendations from me. Fast forward to last weekend. My uncle called to say he won’t only vote for Peter Obi but would campaign for him in the community. He said my siblings and cousins, whom he said had been influenced by my writing to become Obi supporters, had convinced him that Peter Obi was the candidate to support in the 2023 election.

(To be perfectly honest, I had not the remotest idea that my writing promotes the candidacy of Peter Obi because not a few Obi supporters have insulted me in the past over what I wrote about him. Although I’ve publicly stated my preference for an Igbo president in 2023 because I’m convinced that it’s the surest guarantee for Nigeria’s continuity as a united nation, I am entirely non-partisan in this election cycle.)

I’m bringing my uncle’s story because it exemplifies a trend I’ve been observing in the last few weeks. Although there is still a lot of indifference to—and, in some cases, resentment at—Peter Obi in the Muslim north, I am sensing a progressive acceptance of his candidacy.

Another person I spoke with from Kano who says he is now warming up to Obi told me several people he knows and interacts with in the Northwest are giving Obi a chance both because of the growing intensity of the hurt Buhari has inflicted on people in the region and the fact that the alternatives to Obi seem like Buhari.

Tinubu’s health scares, frequent medical trips to London, and struggles with communicating with the public are disturbingly redolent of Buhari. And although Atiku seems healthy and is evidently the most prepared presidential candidate, he is Buhari’s contemporary. So, his age counts against him, not to mention 2023 is the year for a southern president—as 2015 and 2019 were for a northern president.

I don’t think the easing of the apathy— and hostility— to Obi in the Muslim North will be sufficient to cause him to win the plurality of votes there, but it may get him surprisingly higher votes than most people are inclined to expect. Of course, in electoral politics predictions often have no more than a one-week validity, and this is particularly true of the 2023 presidential election.

There are broadly five voting blocs in Nigeria: the Northern Muslim bloc (which is sometimes not based on contiguous geography and can spread across the three subdivisions of the region), the northern Christian bloc (which is also not always based on contiguous geography and can encompass a wide stretch of the region), the southwest bloc (which is entirely Yoruba and customarily unaffected by religious identification, although this is changing), the southeast (which is entirely Igbo) and the southern ethnic minority bloc.

To win a presidential election, a candidate needs to win at least four of these blocs. No candidate, for now, dominates in four voting blocs.

Bola Tinubu appears to be dominant in the Southwest, although I sense that his health challenges are chipping away at his advantage there. Many people in the region who genuinely want him to be president have worries that he may die in office and allow the North to take over power again. Well, some northern Muslims had said that of Buhari (based on what happened to Umar Musa Yar’adua), and the man seems to be on the mend and looking way healthier than he has ever been.

Atiku Abubakar seems to be the favorite among Muslims in the Northeast (except in Borno and Yobe) with a potential to expand his reach to other parts of the Muslim North. His problem is that because he has always been liberal, cosmopolitan, and not delimited by religion, he doesn’t excite northern Muslims who define their identities in religious terms.

It’s precisely why he used to be more popular in the South (and in the Christian North) than in the Muslim North. But Peter Obi has stolen his thunder in his erstwhile electoral base, and this was the basis of a joke I saw on social media that says Atiku has in the bag all the votes he needs to be president in 2023—except that Obi is holding the bag.

Obi appears to have a lock on the votes in the Southeast, the South-South, and in such predominantly Christians states as Benue, Plateau, and even Taraba. Christians in southern Kaduna and Southern Kebbi seem more favorably disposed to him than they are to any other candidate. The major challenge of his popularity in the Southeast is that it may not translate to high voter turnout in light of the continuing violence and threats of violence by IPOB.

Muslims in the North-central and the Northwest appear to be the only noncommittal, persuadable voting bloc because they have no sentimental investment in any of the three major presidential candidates. They can swing in any direction.

Because Obi is making a mark, however imperceptible, in these regions where he was previously unknown, we should recognize that he is no longer the underdog that he once was. In order to avoid a repeat of Buhari, critical citizens should ask Obi hard, soul-searching questions because he could be president.

For example, why did he allow the Anambra State University branch of ASUU to go on strike for more than six months and even going so far as to sack the school’s vice chancellor “because of his alleged romance with the striking workers of the university,” according to the Daily Sun of January 19, 2011. How is he different from Buhari in this regard?

Why did he allow doctors in Anambra State to go on strike for 13 months, which led to many needless deaths? The doctors called off their strike without Obi meeting their demands. And he implemented the no-work-no-pay rule when Anambra civil servants went on strike to demand to be paid minimum wage.

While he was governor of Anambra, he played typical Nigerian politics of divide and rule. He played Catholics against Anglicans and even stigmatized political opponents as “Yoruba” people, according to Professor Okey Ndibe who wrote extensively on him.

“It is similarly appalling that a governor who reportedly has ambitions for higher political office could not restrain himself from disparaging Mr. Ngige as a Yoruba candidate,” Ndibe wrote in his April 18, 2011, column titled “Peter Obi, Akunyili and Political Folly.” “Even if we accepted the silly argument that the ACN was a Yoruba party – so what? Is the governor allergic to forging political alliances with the Yoruba? Is he not aware that such appeals to base, ethnic sentiments would return to haunt him if he ever seeks to be a political player at the national level?”

That was prophetic. This doesn’t make Obi any worse than his opponents. But because he could be president, we should interrogate him so we won’t be blindsided.

4teenblaq:
We don't want appointment, we want Nigeria to be working!

With all the appointment so far, we are still suffering. Our oil is not beneficial to us, no reasonable infrastructure in delta state. Most of us in Delta state, are always out of state. We are like vagabonds. No proper job creation, the only thing that strive here is YAHOO YAHOO business.

Onyi22:
Let it be unto them according to their Faith.

Corridon:
He didn't say anything at the end.

[i]Popular seer, Primate Babatunde Elijah Ayodele of Inri Evangelical Spiritual Church with headquarters in Lagos, in this interview, speaks on what Nigeria should expect ahead the 2023 election and Nigeria’s independence celebration, among other issues.[/i]

It is less than seven months to the 2023 general election, should Nigerians be concerned given the current situation of things?

Remember that I predicted that there would be a change of government in Italy, and if care is not taken, a female president would emerge. It has happened. I have repeatedly said it that later, women would take over the leadership of all European countries. I also warned that flood disaster would break out in Europe. These are some of the fulfilled prophecies. Also look at the issue of the change of name of Chelsea. I prophesied a long time ago that the name of Chelsea would be changed. I said this when nobody ever thought of a name change for Chelsea. This is not an issue to people like us.

The 2023 general election is almost here but I must tell you again that God is against the Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC). God will go against pastors who support the Muslim-Muslim ticket. God will cause bitterness permanently in their lives. God will not give any Christian rest who supports any Muslim-Muslim ticket. This ticket is not healthy for our nation. It is not good for Nigeria; it is not good for Christianity. There is a satanic agenda in that ticket which Nigeria will regret in the nearest future.
I am not against any political party. Any political party can win the election. I am not a politician and I can’t be in support of anybody. Politicians have ruined this nation. Those who have ruined this nation will not have rest in death. Mark my words.

Let me quickly add that Theophilus Danjuma, Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar, Kessington Adebutu, Edwin Clarke, Yakubu Gowon, Emeka Anyaoku, should all pray for their lives and health. Dangote group may have issues. BUA group companies will make progress; it would get some things right. These companies should pray for their businesses.

Nigeria is currently celebrating her independence. What is your assessment of things so far?

Nigeria has not achieved what it is supposed to have achieved. We have not gotten to where we should be. There is no independence to celebrate; it is just like Nigeria is in bondage. The Academic Staff Union of Universities is on strike. There is biting hunger in the land. We need prayers. This is a moment of sober reflection. I honestly pray that the Lord will help our government to put everything in place, appropriately. Our naira is depreciating in value. Nigeria is unhealthy and we have an unhealthy government. All of these have collapsed the structure of governance in Nigeria. One is bleeding internally.

So many people are focused on the various presidential candidates. Shouldn’t Nigerians be worried about the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)?

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) must produce for Nigeria a democratic system of government. INEC must not corrupt the system; if it corrupts the system, it will also witness the anger of God. Nigeria is not making progress at all; there is bitterness everywhere. People are in tears. Our nation is experiencing a very terrible situation. To be sincere and honest, ethnicity and religion are not answers to Nigeria’s problems. The answer is in a leader that is competent and capable; this is who we need. But if we are too sectional, 2023 will cause a lot for Nigeria; 2023 might create what we do not pray for. The nation might not explode in 2023 but it may cause us to lose our democracy if we are not careful. Let there be justice; let people’s voices be heard. I tell you honestly, the election will be tough.

I am not reading the situation of things politically. I am saying as said by the Lord. Among Tinubu, Atiku and Obi, one person must emerge. Sometimes we work against God’s direction. If I say A will win, people will use it against me. I am not bothered. I am only answerable to God. I said it in 2019 that it is only Saraki that will make Nigeria great but people were against me. They called me a PDP prophet. I told them then that it was impossible for Atiku to win against Buhari.

Let’s pray that the 2023 election would reflect our independence as a nation; let it reflect our maturity. This is so that the international community will not mock us. Some Nigerians want Obi; some sections want Tinubu; Northerners want Atiku. Nigerians will miss it if they go by religion and ethnicity. We need someone who is experienced, someone who will do it better, someone who will move Nigeria forward. God has revealed to me who will be Nigeria’s next president. But he has not said I should declare the name of the person. People’s opinions and comments do not add any value to my life. The only person that I am answerable to is God. Three people are struggling to govern Nigeria, but at the end of the day, only one person will get it. A lot will happen before, during and after 2023. Nigeria must not lose it before 2023. Forget about where the president is coming from, but what is the will and direction of God? We are talking about God’s direction. I was confident that a woman would emerge as Italy’s president. Look at the UK election, I told the world that a woman would emerge. It is the turn of women to reshape the world. It has a lot of meaning. If America is not careful, a woman may emerge as president; perhaps Joe Biden may not be able to function properly at the end of the day.

Everybody has their own features spiritually. The sovereignty of Nigeria is not negotiable and we have to really address this carefully. If we give power to the wrong person, Nigeria will suffer for it. This is the time that we need directives from Christian prophets and other true religious leaders among the Muslims. We need the best among these religious leaders. It is possible that the candidate that I want to support might not be the wish of God. If I say I want a particular person and God says no, what do I do? I can do nothing.

Nyesom Wike will regret his actions if he doesn’t take it easy. Those who are singing his ‘hosanna’ today will betray him tomorrow. He should calm down; let them go and fight for the victory. He must come back home. I am telling him as God directs. If he goes to any other party, Wike will be ridiculed politically. If Wike stays in PDP, there is no guarantee that the PDP will win; if he leaves the PDP, it does not mean that the PDP will lose. But if he leaves the PDP today for another party, he will pay dearly for it. He will be embarrassed; he will be put to shame. He should go and settle amicably with his party. He should not allow anyone to push him; he should stop all the noise. Seyi Makinde should put his house in order so that he would not lose his chances. The manner he is playing his politics would later affect him; let him desist right now and be focused more. He has a tomorrow politically; he should not allow any error to affect that tomorrow. I am talking as a father in the Lord. I am acting as the Lord has directed.

The Federal Government would create more poverty and unemployment with taxation and telecommunications.