One distinct feature of Governor Mai Mala Buni’s political trajectory is that he did not actually choose public life but it was rather public life or service that chose him. It is hard to find typical Nigerian elite, already exposed to the trappings of city life of such mega metropolis like Lagos being asked by his people to serve, not in Abuja or even the state capital but in a local council headquarters as a ward councilor, who would not immediately rebuff such offer, to be beneath him as already city high flyer. But that is exactly where Buni, Chairman of the Caretaker/Extra Ordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC) of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) started a slow, but steady and rapid climb of the political ladder.
Elected as a ward councilor after being invited by his people, on the platform of the defunct National Republic Convention, his colleagues unanimously chose him for the leader or speaker of the (Gujba) legislative council of Yobe state, followed by a unanimous nomination and election as the state chairman of the Action Congress and Action Congress of Nigeria, respectively, at different times. Again, after the grand merger of political parties into the APC, he was again elected as its pioneer chairman in Yobe state.
In no distant time, the party hierarchy noting that the hallmark of his political trajectories is essentially driven by popular consensus brought him to the party national headquarters to manage its affairs as the national secretary. Managing an opposition party is no mean feat and because he represented the core values of the party and put the party’s very core interest above anything else, he was elected for the second term as the party national secretary.
Few months into his second term as APC national secretary, his home state offered him a ticket to contest the governorship election of Yobe state. Winning landslide, he defeated a heavy weight, Ambassador, Iliya Damagun of the PDP but something unheard of Nigerian politics and particularly Yobe state electoral politics happened for the first time. The defeated candidate of the PDP declared he would not contest the victory of Buni in court.
And when APC national leadership crisis reached a boiling point, Buni without lobbying as everyone knows that lobbying president Buhari is the easiest way to earn his contempt, was again called to the rescue.
With an explicit mandate to reposition the party and deliver on its national convention for the emergence of credible members of the central working committee, he set to work.
But as everyone knows, organising a political party national convention is not the same as organising a wedding, birthday party or naming ceremony. A party already dug into a cross road of existential crises with the then, immediate political outcome of the loss of the Edo state governorship election would not have just rushed into a convention, without bringing its members to reconnect to its values and opening its tent to be reinvigorated by the energy and enthusiasm of prospective new members.
It was not surprising that the Governor Buni went for the healing balm of reconciliation within the party and as well as casting the political net wide and far, to attract the more competent hands and fertile minds to the party. Of course, noticing that between organising a national party convention and restoring the health of the party is not a tea party, subsequent extensions were granted to the caretaker committee to tidy up things and deliver a convention that would re-energise the party to decisively win elections at all levels in 2023. As the Buni led committee toils to give the party a worthy national convention that would serve as the spring board for successive election victories in the future; impatient ambitious persons in the party began to weave stories of extra-ordinary ambitions of Buni, conveniently, ignoring the real facts of his political trajectory; that it was public life and popular call to serve has been the motor spirit which has driven his entire political career.
Because he is taciturn and unassuming, as many fertile minds and clear heads are naturally inclined to be, political nut heads, imposters and name-droppers swirled around, invoking and inventing tales of the moon-light of how Governor Buni has held the national convention to hostage, in order to scheme in, his ambition to be vice president and subsequently president. No one with clear mind and any discerning sense of history would desperately seek to be number two, after the infernal political nightmare of former Vice President Atiku who mistakenly or naively thought that number two slot is an express and bump-less way to number one. Even the existing political grid-lock of Vice President Yemi Osibanjo to openly state the status of his political next bus stop is enough food for thought that the entrance to the state house proper, does not necessarily start with a walk from the house next to it. Those who accuse Buni of scheming to be vice president do not even have respect for his profound sense of history and Intelligence in managing the political goodwill he has enjoyed from the lowest level to his current service at the national and state levels.
To give the ruling APC a deserving place as the prime party of choice for Nigerians, he has raised the party membership to more than 40 million, attracting strategic heavyweights of the main opposition party; a robust cache of three incumbent governors, senators and legion of states and national legislators. These are not just decampees who jumped the fence. They are convinced figures who brought their enormous political good will and organisational acumen to the service of the party. The main reason political parties exist is to aggregate the most active and decisive sector of the population into a disciplined and organised category with a view to engage their thoughts and views into political programs and platforms for the purpose of articulating actionable policies of government, formed through their joint endeavours for the purpose of delivering the greatest happiness to the greatest number of the people. The process of following the existential trajectories of why political parties exist, is beyond the arcane and linear convocation of national convention merely to feed the vaunting ambitious of persons.
Conventions, congresses or other platforms of party’s key activities, are not exclusively in themselves, the expression of the internal health of Party democracy, except if they are culminations of series of processes feeding on broad participations and extant engagements of stakeholders.
The event of the past few weeks in the APC was forbiddingly frightening to its faithful, especially the callous and reckless attempt to oust the Buni-led committee, but it demonstrated the resilience of the party to manage its crunch season before the bumper harvest of its national convention and party primaries.
Buni, true to his political epiphany of calmness, would through effective network deliver on the historic imperative to give the party a befitting and rancour free national convention that would enable the party to manage its affairs prudently as the condition for popular and national goodwill, indispensable for electoral victories.
Now, with the stern warning from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that as far as it was concerned, there is no change of leadership in APC and any decision taken and/or executed by any other acclaimed chairman is null and void and would be an exercise in futility.
The implication of INEC’s warning is that, any unknown leadership that conducts the convention is illegal is clearly that the products of such a convention are illegal and any programme including party primary conducted by products of the convention is equally unlawful and the candidates that emerged from the primary are illegal and any office won by such candidates in the forthcoming 2023 general elections are subjects of litigation which may end up with the re-enactment of the Zamfara episode of the 2019 election on large scale.
Charles Onunaiju,
Abuja
