Atiku and Obi part ways with 'owners of Nigeria'

Ovation editor Dele Momodu has popularized the phrase ‘owners of Nigeria’ to refer to a coterie of power brokers and influence peddlers who usually sit in conclave to teleguide the choice of political leaders , especially presidents, and towards whom ordinary Nigerians are powerless political captives.

Though they peddle influence and engage in elitist exclusion, "Nigeria's landlords" can sometimes be benign, even stabilizing. For example, following the death of MKO Abiola and Sani Abacha in the late 1990s and the debilitating turmoil that gripped the country, they decided that a Yoruba man, specifically General Olusegun Obasanjo, should be President. And it happened. This considerably calmed the national temperature.

After his two-term tenure in 2007, Obasanjo became a member of this informal and exclusive circle of power brokers whose visible members include General Ibrahim Babangida, General Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, General Abdulsalami Abubakar and General Aliyu Gusau.

The group supported Goodluck Jonathan's ascension to the presidency in 2010 when Umar Musa Yar'adua died. He also quietly lent his moral weight to Jonathan's election in 2011, even when most northern politicians felt another northerner should have been president, especially after eight years of a southern presidency and a presidency of the North truncated by 3 years.

But in 2015, the congress of former organizers who we call the "owners of Nigeria" took revenge on Goodluck Jonathan precisely because of his government's manifest incompetence to tame the growing malignity and growing terror of Boko Haram. They unanimously backed Muhammadu Buhari for the presidency. It must be a signal of the depth of their unease with Jonathan that they backed Buhari against whom many of the "owners of Nigeria" harbored deep-seated animosity and antipathy.

Buhari turned out to be worse than Jonathan. The "owners" turned against him in 2019 and backed Atiku Abubakar. Although Atiku Abubakar won the election with almost two million votes, Buhari and his guardians exploited the power of the incumbent - and the hold they had on INEC chairman Mahmood Yakubu - to outsmart the "owners of Nigeria". Buhari broke his winning streak.

Recall that no former head of state or living president except the tireless and gracious Yakubu Gowon has honored Buhari's inauguration for a second term. The “owners of Nigeria” collectively withheld their symbolic seals of approval from Buhari's fraudulent second term. There was no precedent for this in the democratic history of Nigeria.

Now the “owners of Nigeria” are in disarray. Their loyalties are split between Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi. While IBB, Abdulsalami Abubakar and Aliyu Gusau are decidedly on Atiku's side, Obasanjo and Theophilus Danjuma support Obi. Goodluck Jonathan also seems to favor Obi, but he's not quite a member of this exclusive club despite being a former president. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the pet peeve of "Nigeria landlords".

I cannot say with certainty what motivates the support of members of the "owners of Nigeria" for Atiku or Obi. I can only speculate that the northern Muslim members of the club aren't sold on Obi, have reservations about Tinubu's health and his association with Buhari, and probably think Atiku is a good fit because he's is committed to serving only one term if elected. Moreover, since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999, the South has ruled for 13 years. In May 2023, the North would have reigned for 11 years.

Obasanjo has publicly and privately stated that his support for Obi was based on what I have always called representative justice in my previous articles advocating for a president from the Southeast. But T. Y. Danjuma's support for Obi seems driven solely by religious solidarity. He spent the last years of his life supporting Christian causes and Christian politicians. He supported Yemi Osinbajo's primary contest in APC for the same reason.

T.Y. Danjuma, as I have pointed out in a previous column, embodied immense social and symbolic power in the North in a way that no modern Northerner did. Until he began to openly identify with the divisive causes, he was a northerner who had managed to capture the imagination of both the Christian north and the Muslim north.

Although the Tiv and Kuteb of Benue and Taraba have always considered him deeply involved in the deadly communal upheavals that erupt episodically between the Jukun and the Kuteb and between the Jukun and the Tiv (Danjuma is Jukun), he used to excite approving passions among Middle Belt sub-regionalists and Nigerian enthusiasts in the north of the country.

No northerner has ever come close to this kind of mutually exclusive attraction in the region. Now he has become a villain in Muslim northern Nigeria and a hero in Christian northern Nigeria. His support for Obi will certainly help galv...