Contrary to public opinion that Sokoto State Governor Aliyu Wamakko would be disqualified from seeking return to government house on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ticket, the party cleared the governor and two others, FRANCIS AGBO reports.
Nigeria in the reckoning of political analysts is indeed a rumour mill and our politics thrives on chitchats and tales! Sometimes they are real but oftentimes, they are mere figments of the imagination of those who carry rumour around.
This precisely was the case with the ambition of the incumbent governor of Sokoto State, Alhaji Aliyu Wamakko. The story in town was that President Goodluck Jonathan was angry with Wamakko for working against his ambition at the PDP presidential primary and had endorsed Senator Abubakar Gada as his replacement. When the promoters of this view failed to establish a nexus between Gada and Jonathan, they turned 360 degree to say the president asked his Minister of Sports, Alhaji Yusuf Suleiman to resign to wrest power from the governor. The media was awash with different permutations of how Wamakko would be dropped and the most popular position was that he would not be cleared by the screening panel sitting in Kaduna.
But the PDP at least for now, proved pundits wrong last week in Kaduna. The Sokoto State Governorship Election Screening Panel headed by former Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Alhaji Tijani Yahaya Kaura gave clean bill of health to the governor, Gada and Suleiman. Other members of the committee are Hon Zakari Mohammed, Chuks Azuka and Baba Lawal.
The implication of the clearance analysts argue shows clearly that the president is indifferent as far as the election in the caliphate is concerned. The thinking is that if really Jonathan was against Wamakko, it wouldn’t have cost the PDP to disqualify Wammako.
The governor and his supporters celebrated the clearance with pomp in Kaduna and Sokoto. Alhaji Aliyu Sokoto, Wamakko’s staunch supporter captured the happiness of the governor’s camp more tersely. ‘‘We are very happy and eternally grateful to our great party. Jonathan is a listening president. He enjoys good working relationship with the governor. The governor ensured that PDP got 100 percent of the vote in the state in 2011 and I don’t see how Jonathan will plot the down fall of Wamakko.’’
Another school of thought believes the clearance of the governor is temporary as both the Kaura panel and the yet- to- be constituted appeal panel will thoroughly peruse the litany of petitions hanging on Wamakko like the sword of Damocles.
Though all the petitions against the governor are damning, the most detailed of them so far is the one written by a group known as Concerned Original PDP members. The memo which was signed by Alhaji Abubakar Babangida and others accused the governor of anti-party against the PDP and called for his disqualification.
Wamakko was believed to have sponsored the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) in Kebbi State to help his benefactor, Alhaji Adamu Aliero who was a senatorial candidate on the platform of CPC. For Wamakko, the petition added, it was pay back time and he paid Aliero in kind and cash for helping him to be governor in 2007. ‘‘The Governor Wamakko sponsored CPC in Kebbi State and that is the genesis of PDP nightmare in Kebbi. Those of us who are the original PDP can not forgive him.? The PDP can not allow a man who destroyed the party in a sister state to fly its flag in Sokoto State,’’ a PDP chief told LEADERSHIP.?
It will be recalled that Aliero drafted Wamakko to be PDP governorship candidate and supplanted Alhaji Muktari Shagari who was the party’s original candidate for the 2007. This dramatic change happened many weeks after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had closed nomination of candidates.
At the time Wamakko was forced on the party, he was already the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) governorship candidate in the same election. Even though double candidacy was a contravention of the Electoral Act 2006, the federal government through the intervention of Aliero, then powerful FCT Minister ensured that Wamakko remained in office. The only attempt by the judiciary to condemn what Professor Itsay Sagay a charade was the cancellation of Wamakko’s election on grounds of double qualification yet the same court allowed PDP to field him in the re-run.
Curiously too, the Supreme Court seemed to have legitimised the governorship of Wamakko with the perpetual arrest of the suit challenging the candidature of the governor and the legitimacy of his contesting the re-run.
Aside anti-party, the governor is said to have given juicy appointments to only those who decamped with him from ANPP to PDP thereby marginalising the original PDP members. These former ANPP politicians according to the petition are having a field day with a five- man cabal christened ‘five alive’’ calling the shot. Members of this cabal according to investigations are former ANPP politicians. The original PDP men consider Wamakko’s politics of appointment as contrary to the spirit and letter of the pact they had with Wamakko before he joined the umbrella party.? For example, they had agreed that Shagari should remain Wamakko’s deputy and the original PDP should produce the Speaker of the Sokoto State House of Assembly but the governor reportedly ‘‘catapulted’’ his former special assistant, Alhaji Lawali Zawwanu to the exalted position and many lawmakers especially founding members of the party have sworn not to forget this episode in a hurry. The thinking of observers over the weekend was that the political sins of? Wamakko and his stained relationship with Shagari remain his cross. They say if anything these deficits may stop the governor from getting the return ticket and not Jonathan as bandied around by the governors spine doctors.