In those days up to 1999, it used to be the triumvirate of Atiku Abubakar, Bamanga Tukur and Jubril Aminu that determined the political direction of Adamawa State. The three musketeers with political pedigrees stemming from the Ibrahim Babangida dispensation had seemingly come to the realization that it was better sharing the spoils over the dinner table than to transverse the hard terrains of the Northeastern State in search of electoral gain.
Boni Haruna, a former journalist who worked for one of the media establishments owned by Atiku Abubakar, would chronicle the deliberations of the triumvirate. That was until the latter made him his running mate in the 1999 gubernatorial election.
Haruna would go on to become the governor after Atiku was plucked to higher duties to become the running mate to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.
Interestingly, when Obasanjo wanted to choose his running mate for the presidential election, all three musketeers were under consideration.
Obasanjo, despite the alleged entreaties of the ruling military which preferred Aminu on account of his long standing relationship with Babangida, chose Atiku.
The choice was obviously helped by the age factor. Atiku’s was then in his early fifties well younger than Obasanjo. Aminu and Tukur were in the sixties age bracket and of comparable ages with Obasanjo.
Of more consequence in the choice, however, was Atiku’s command of the Peoples Democratic Movement (PDM), the influential political movement inspired by Major-General Shehu Yar‘Adua, a former military Vice-President who was murdered in prison by agents of the Sani Abacha regime.
In Obasanjo’’s first term, Aminu was compensated for his loss with the plum job as Ambassador to the United States. Tukur, a businessman, on his part, took it upon himself to give inspiration to the African Business Roundtable (ABR), a forum for the articulation of the business interests of the private sector in the continent.
As governor, Haruna, has faithfully remained a committed disciple of Atiku.
While there are suggestions that Atiku had a political advantage in the control of the PDP structures in the state even before he ascended to the vice-presidency, Haruna’’s continued faithfulness to him inevitably made him the political lord in the state.
So when Aminu returned home from the United States in 2002 and won (opponents say was offered) the senatorial ticket of the PDP, it was definitely not because of any serious political capital or structure he had on ground in the state.
It was merely in acknowledgment of the past relationship between the triumvirate.
The relationship obviously continued in Abuja after Aminu became a senator as he would go to visit the Vice-President on Fridays on his way home from the mosque.
The dynamics of the relationship changed last September after an award presentation by a student body to some eminent Nigerians.
Among those so honoured were Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, the former military President now Atiku’s keenest rival for the presidency in 2007. Also to be honoured were Aminu and Prof. Jerry Gana. Babangida did not show up at the occasion leading to some little joke between Gana and Aminu, both of whom served his government, over who of the former ministers should collect the award. Aminu did.
Inevitably, word got to the Vice-President’’s camp that their beloved Senator, had "represented" Babangida at the ceremony, giving the impression that he was working in cahoots with the alleged plan by the former military President to destroy Atiku in his home base.
Matters got worse about that same time when the Northern Senators Forum held a retreat in Sokoto.
The retreat which was an innocuous effort by the Northern Senators to straightedges towards lifting their lot in the polity soon became a subject of political innuendoes.
All the known 2007 presidential aspirants from the North were invited to attend the summit.
Sources told Sunday Vanguard that Sokoto was chosen to host the retreat on account of the fact that it was one of two States in the Northwest where the venue was zoned to that had easily accessible direct flight.
Besides, the state governor, Alhaji Atthairu Bafarawa, had also agreed to host the summit, meaning that he was ready to write off most of the expenses of the retreat, a factor that leaned the retreat organizers to apparently choose Sokoto over Kaduna, the other city with a functional airport in the zone.
But Bafarawa’’s involvement in the retreat fueled insinuations that it was a Babangida affair.
For whatever reason, Atiku sent a middle level officer to represent him at the retreat while Babangida made himself a show during the summit. Gen. Buba Marwa did not come and Gen. Muhammadu Buhari did not come following a mix up in the invitation to him.
Senators from Atiku’’s home base in the Northeast were instructed not to attend the summit. Governor Ali Modu Sheriff (SAS) of Borno State, a known sympathizer of the Vice-President, according to several accounts, instructed Senators from his State not to attend the summit and not one of them went to Sokoto. It is not known if Haruna gave any instruction to Senators from Adamawa, but the Atiku loyalists, Senator Jonathan Zwingina and Senator Iya Abubakar, kept themselves away from the retreat. However, the third Senator from the State, Aminu, went and actively participated.
Three weeks after he returned from Sokoto, the noisy effort to recall him from the Senate was launched at a press conference by some "PDP Elders". Aminu is not the only ‘‘victim’’ of the Sokoto retreat. Senators Farouk Bello and Sani Sanmi both from Kebbi State have also been recently threatened for recall by their different electorate on account of alleged political misdeeds.
Bello was accused of haughtiness while Sanmi was accused of failing to award contracts to his constituents.
Interestingly, the move to recall both men came after their attendance at the Sokoto retreat of Northern Senators.
Kebbi State Governor, Alhaji Adamu Aliero, even though a card carrying member of the ANPP, is also known to be a staunch supporter of Atiku and an arrow head of his 2007 presidential quest in the Northwest.
While the recall effort against Bello and Sanmi has since ground to a halt, that against Aminu is proceeding with a feverish pace that his associates say gives credence to an active facilitation of the process by the Vice-President.
Following their press conference on 23rd September 2004, the PDP leaders from his Central senatorial zone had pledged to immediately launch a signature drive to facilitate the process. Rallies supposed to mobilize the electorate for that effort on the 2nd of October were reported to have failed as not much enthusiasm was said to have been shown by the electorate. But the leaders did not fail as exactly a month later, they submitted a letter to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) headquarters in Abuja their petition seeking the recall of Aminu.
The unsigned letter to which was reportedly attached a register of the voters in the constituency accused the Senator of poor representation accusing him of creating a brick wall between himself and his constituency.
The three page letter concluded by affirming that they had lost confidence in the Senator.
"Unfortunately all efforts to make Professor Jubril Aminu appreciate our genuine feelings have fallen on deaf ears. As a result, we have completely lost confidence in him as a Senator representing us in the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
We have therefore resolved to exercise the rights conferred on us by Section 69 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 to recall Professor Jubril Aminu as a Senator representing Adamawa Central Senatorial District in the Senate." The letter to the INEC chairman was dated 2nd November 2004 but received at 10.45 a.m the following day.
Interestingly, the INEC chairman acted on it on November 3, the same day it was received and passed it on to the INEC secretary who also acted on it the same day and caused a letter of notification to be dispatched to Aminu the same day, 3rd November 2004.
The swiftness of the response of INEC to the petition has since moved Aminu’s camp to allege pressures from the Vice-President’s office on the electoral body to act on the matter.
Though the petition did not make any reference to the Atiku, in the first press conference of September 23, the ring leaders of the recall campaign had so much as bemoaned Aminu’s alleged indifference, if not sabotage against Atiku’s presidential quest.
Then they had said among other reasons for their plan to recall Aminu that he was collaborating with a governor from the North West (read Bafarawa) to support a presidential candidate from the North central (read IBB).
"Prof. Jibril Aminu’s alleged political romance with an ANPP Governor from the North West who is believed to be a strong supporter of a presidential aspirant from the North Central is a conscious attempt to undermine the collective aspiration of the people of Adamawa State and indeed the entire North-East sub-region for the presidency. We find this not only embarrassing but disgraceful and will not be tolerated by anybody in PDP from Adamawa Central much less by Prof. Jibril Aminu who through the good will of the Vice-President, our 2007 presidential hopeful, Governor Boni Haruna and the entire people of the Adamawa Central Zone got elected into the Senate with ease", they had said. Aminu has himself specifically accused the Vice-President of being the patron of the campaign to recall him acting through the state governor.
"This thing goes higher than the governor, it is something to do with the Vice-President’s 2007 ambition. So, it all came out, that is why the Hausas say, they have allowed their witchcraft to come out," Aminu told Sunday Vanguard in an interview last month.
The Vice-President has, however, washed his hands off the recall process, saying that he has kept quiet on the matter because Aminu had not asked him to intervene.
"He has not been asked to intervene, the Senator has not asked him, if he had asked him, he probably I would have done it,"" the Vice-President told Sunday Vanguard through his Senior Special Assistant (Public Affairs), Dr. Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo.
"As a political leader it is not everything that the Vice-President dabbles into, especially when it has to do with feelings of constituents, so it is the constituents who brought him into the Senate that the issue rests on."
With the nation still grasped by the Aminu-Atiku face-off, the dramatic re-emergence of Governor Joshua Dariye and the reinstatement of democratic structures in Plateau State has suddenly threatened Senator Ibrahim Mantu’s commanding lead of the political arena on the Plateau.
Mantu by all accounts got back to the Senate through the active collaboration of Dariye even though their relationship suddenly deteriorated soon after the 2003 elections.
As Deputy Senate President, Mantu is widely alleged to have been pivotal in the imposition of emergency rule in his native state and has often expressed pride in his action, if not, but for the fact that it helped to halt the deterioration of law and order in some sections of the state.
However, his undoing perhaps is the wide insinuation that he actively worked to ensure that the emergency rule was sustained and if not, that Dariye was not returned to power.
Even though he has repeatedly denied it, he is also fingered as the facilitator of the series of revelations about alleged financial misdemeanors of Dariye that supposedly led to the arrest of the governor in Britain.
Somehow, Dariye slipped the British Police and returned to Nigeria and assumed power at the expiration of emergency rule on November 18. Perceived ill-feelings against Mantu was immediately conveyed by Mr. Gambo Nbilamut, Chairman of the Information Committee of the Plateau House of Assembly, who said Mantu’s constituency was ready to recall him.
"Now that democratic structures have been restored and political activities are commencing, let him come home and brief us on why he has been so far away from us his constituents and if we are not satisfied by his explanations, we will not hesitate to start a recall process against him," he told Sunday Vanguard in Jos.
Adding cannon to the threat was Mr. Simon Lalong, Speaker of the State House of Assembly, who told a press conference just days after he regained his position that Mantu should come home to address allegations of abandonment of his constituency and his role in the imposition of emergency rule. Mantu, not known to shy away from battle, has since responded, debunking the claims by the two men.
In a statement issued by his Chief Press Secretary, Mr. Sylvanus Namang, Mantu asked Lalong to join Dariye in pleading for forgiveness for past misdeeds as he warned him not to see himself as a victor in the state of emergency saga. The threat of recall has always been a weapon wielded by state governors to unbend headstrong federal legislators.
Four years ago, it was the Benue State government that wielded the threat against Senator Joseph Kennedy Waku, then representing the Benue North West senatorial constituency. That threat never went much. The farthest any recall effort has gone far was the recent effort against Hon. Chinnoyerem Macebuh (PDP, Ukwa East/Ukwa West) of the House of Representatives.
An unforgiving and caustic antagonist of Governor Orji Kalu, Macabueh even though sobered by the process repeatedly alleged to all and sundry that the recall effort was an initiative of his governor. After all, he was not on the governor’s list for re-election until the presidency waded in to ensure that he was rewarded for his role in the anti-Na‘Abba crusade.
The recall move against him collapsed two weeks ago after INEC ruled that the petition did not meet constitutional requirements that at least half of the electorate in the constituency of the federal legislator should sign the petition.
Not only did Macabueh’s antagonist not meet that requirement, INEC observed that at least 22,000 of the signatures were forged.
Section 69 which lays the guideline for the recall of a member of the National Assembly states thus:A member of the Senate or of the House of Representatives may be recalled as such if – there is presented to the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission a petition on their behalf signed by more than one-half of the persons registered to vote in that member’s constituency alleging their loss of confidence in that member; and the petition is thereafter, in a referendum conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission within ninety days of the date of receipt of the petition, approved by a simple majority of the votes of the persons registered to vote in that member’s constituency.
With the constitutional provision requiring more than half of the electorate to sign the petition for the recall of a member of the National Assembly, it is thus not difficult to see the near impossibility of such a process. Regarding the well known manipulations of the voters registers in the country and the fictitious names grafted in by the lawmakers to enable them get elected, getting them out could as well be as easy as producing the ghost persons on the voter’s registers!
Interestingly, politicians almost always say their stay in public office was in obedience to their people’s call to service. Ironically, they never seem to obey the people’s recall from public office!
