By Rotimi Fasan

ONE of the more troubling developments in Nigeria’s political life, one which has been addressed in this column in the last couple of weeks, is the consensus approach to the (s)election of office holders among the country’s politicians. It is an anti-democratic tool that has found favour in the hands of mere office holders and political journey men and women bent on bypassing even the limited trappings of democracy still to be seen in these parts.

This dubious trick of manipulation has been of concern for the simple reason that if the vote of the Nigerian voter is to count, if it is to be of any effect beyond the ballot on which it is cast next year, then the voter must be allowed the opportunity for an informed choice of their representatives in the next cycle of elections that will both precede and follow the expiry of the Muhammadu Buhari administration.

As things stand presently, the consensus option makes that difficult to achieve if not impossible. For all the advantages its proponents see in it, it constricts the democratic space, putting it under the control of a few players with the right connections, means and way.

The consensus arrangement that has stirred and excited our politicians are geared to ensure that nobody, except those belonging to particular cliques of political leaders and players, so-called godfathers, and by that very fact beholding to these cliques and not the voting public, come near public office whether elective or appointive. The two leading parties in the country, the misgoverning All Progressives Congress, APC, and their equally bumbling rival, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, have chosen to go the consensus way. And this is not surprising given the provenance of both political parties as products of the same misbegotten parentage whose dalliance was forged in the orgy of convenience.

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Leading members of both parties, indeed those with controlling powers over the management of the parties, have walked forth and back across the dividing lines of both parties’ membership and were at one time or another key players in both of them.

They are adept at walking both sides of the aisle, speaking from both sides of the mouth in justification of their lack of principle or commitment to the founding ideologies of the parties they belong in.

Which is why consensus has become a key tool of manipulating the political choices of Nigerians by politicians whose only concerns are for themselves. In both the APC and PDP, the motivation for the consensus option is self-interest disguised as national interest. Consider the case of the proponents of consensus among Northern presidential hopefuls in the PDP.

Bukola Saraki, a former governor of Kwara State and immediate past president of the Senate; Aminu Tambuwal, at present, governor of Sokoto State and former speaker of the House of Representatives; Bala Muhammed, governor of Bauchi State – these men got on the road with their consensus campaign a few weeks back and pretended they were all on the same page as they went about meeting so-called stakeholders of the PDP whose support they needed for the achievement of their goals.

 They did this apparently with the common goal of protecting the collective interest of the North in mind. But secretly each of them nursed the ambition to be and was working to ensure he emerges the sole beneficiary of the campaign. Together they travelled from one end of the country to another while each, it is emerging, worked behind his peers to be the choice of the North for the contest for the office of president in 2023.

They found no better umpire in this cloak and dagger game of power than the first and only military president Nigeria has so far had, the one who would annul an election that is adjudged to be the freest and fairest in the history of Nigeria, an election he spent all of eight years planning. Is it not curious that supposed democrats could only turn to a former military dictator to midwife a political process that would produce one of them as the candidate of choice for the North?  The Northern vanguard of consensus found no better way out of the bind in which they had locked themselves than to place their fate in the hands of Ibrahim Babangida and agreed to accept and support as their collective candidate whoever he told them was the choice of the North for the coveted prize. Or so one version of the story goes.

But no sooner were winners announced than the whole arrangement take a twist that was all but visible to every discerning Nigerian from the beginning of the failing campaign. All could see thus except the circus players who went on the cheerless merry-go-round that was meant to wrongfoot a hapless people. It is true the champions of consensus set about their mission with the aim of producing a candidate. But in the end, they returned with two candidates.

What should we make of this? Getting two for the price of one? Or a case of a consensus within a consensus? Clearly, the emergence of two candidates must have been a compromise deal to ensure nothing happens to fracture the contrived unity of the North towards 2023. It was a subtle way to zone the presidency to the two sub-regions of the North yet to produce a president under the current dispensation – the North-Central and the North-East.

This has, however, complicated a seemingly simple process. Babangida enlisted the support of the Northern Elders Forum (a claim now being contested) in the person of Prof. Ango Abdullahi, a leader of the group, and together they announced two candidates rather than one – Bukola Saraki and Bala Muhammed, leaving Aminu Tambuwal, from the North-West, the pain of disappointment.

 Tambuwal will not be denied his opportunity and so wasted no time in rejecting the outcome of the campaign, claiming all three campaigners had earlier on come to the conclusion that they were not making a headway with their campaign and that it would be better for each to travel solo with their presidential aspiration. But both Bala Muhammed and Bukola Saraki will have none of Tambuwal’s version of what transpired between them.

While both Saraki and Muhammed appear united at the moment against Tambuwal, there is no guarantee that things will remain so when either of them eventually loses to the other. Such loser will very much start singing the same song that Aminu Tambuwal is right now singing. But that is if the consensus deal does stay at all. The Northern Elders Forum, speaking through Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, has denied any link between the Forum and the deal midwifed by Babangida. What counts as loss for the politicians is gain for Nigerians.