Chief Tony Akhakon Anenih, Peoples Democratic
Party, PDP, Board of Trustees, BoT, Chairman, has
launched an offensive into the stronghold of Major
General Muhammadu Buhari, All Progressive Party,
APC, presidential aspirant, reconciling leaders of the
PDP there, explaining to them the dangers of going
into next year’s election as a divided house. He has
recorded considerable progress; and he pushes on.
Anenih and Jonathan
It was very successful, the
meeting in Kaduna, the capital of Kaduna State, last
week, between the team led by Chief Tony Anenih,
PDP BoT Chairman, and some leaders of the party in
the state.
Seated in the hall filled to capacity with chieftains of
the party were, among others, Ramalan Yero,
Governor of Kaduna State, and Senator Ahmed
Makarfi, who had held that post before.
They had come to listen to their BoT Chairman speak
truth to leadership in the state. Why this meeting
was very critical cannot be overstated because of the
strategic importance of Kaduna in the affairs of
northern Nigeria. That is the state of Vice President
Namadi Sambo.
Therefore, when Anenih delivered his sermon of
peace and unity anchored on party discipline,
apportioning blames where they were due and giving
commendation where they were deserving, the
meeting had a good end.
Instructive was the commitment extracted from
Makarfi, that he must deliver the state to the party.
For a politician who believes in the sanctity of the
state and its machinery, perhaps many have come to
confuse the role and personality of Anenih. But to
those in the leadership of the party, he epitomises
experience and loyalty. Since 1998 when the party
was formed, Anenih remains, perhaps, one of the
very few – very, very few –leaders who have never
contemplated decampment as a directive policy of
politicking.
Anenih, who has the traditional title of Iyasele (Prime
Minister) of Esanland, had set himself some targets
when he took over as BoT Chairman.
Concerned about the widening chasm in the party,
especially between members and leaders on the one
hand, and the damaging consequences of the
ceaseless bickering among members of the National
Working Committee, NWC, of the party, on the other,
Anenih had set for himself targets.
In private meetings at the very highest levels, Anenih,
information available to Sunday Vanguard suggests,
made it clear that he would be focusing on the
following:
Unity & fairness
Oneness
Progress
Rancour-free party
Assisting the NEC in bringing everybody together
Assisting the NEC in resolving the challenges and
crises confronting the party in the state chapters
Working with members of the BoT to live and act the
spirit of the conscience of the party
Re-positioning the party for the challenges of 2015
Ensuring adherence to strict party discipline
Keeping faith with the legacies of the founding
fathers of the party
Sunday Vanguard gathered that at the time of his
emergence, the agenda was not codified; but it has
since become Anenih’s agenda for development and
repositioning of the party.
“The reason is simply because when you look at the
happenings within the party, a wise leader like chief
would be interested in and committed to what you
have in the 10-point agenda’’, a top party chieftain
anonymously told Sunday Vanguard.
“In fact, it even becomes more pressing now with the
rampaging opposition threatening to dislodge the
PDP from power.
“The BoT Chairman believes that if every member
and leader of the party at the different levels key into
these points and make them cardinal objectives to be
achieved, the party would be better positioned to
silence critics”.
All attempts by Sunday Vanguard last week in Abuja
to get Anenih to talk ran into a stone wall.
But feelers from the camp loyal to the BoT Chairman
indicated that the old and tested political warhorse is
determined, in the face of burgeoning opposition
against Jonathan by the APC, to give the president’s
2015 re-election bid his all.
The strategic importance of making peace moves in
Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi, Jigawa and Sokoto States
flows from the fact that these are states of the North
West where the APC hopes to capture considerable
votes.
The merger between the Action Congress of Nigeria,
ACN, and the Congress for Progressive Change, CPC,
was built on a possible coalition of votes between the
former’s South West geo-political zone, and the
latter’s North West area.
Therefore, sensing the danger in allowing relations
among PDP stalwarts to go to the dogs North West is
no more than sleeping while the roof is on fire.
To a large extent, the peace moves were considered
successful
Politics, thy name is Anenih
From his days in the National Party of Nigeria, NPN,
in the defunct Bendel State, Anenih’s politics has
been variously described as one of pacification.
However, beneath that pacifist paradigm of his
resides a very strong vice-grip mentality of loyalty to
the general cause of party position.
An example can be drawn from the very turbulent
days of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, when the
party was forced to agree to go for another
presidential election. The pillar of the then SDP, the
late General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, had agreed to
another election as a way out of the emerging crisis
of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. Indeed, the
leadership of the party at that time had seen the
hands of General Sani Abacha, eager to wrest power
and, therefore, had hoped that an early resolution
would checkmate Abacha’s adventure.
But the gale of antagonism to that decision, coupled
with the short-sightedness of a section of the political
class, first gave way to an Interim National
Government, ING, which was made to look all the
more interim by Abacha’s dismissal of Ernest
Shonekan, the then head of ING. But Yar’Adua and
Anenih’s position for another early election, which
was pooh-poohed, led to Abacha’s five-year disaster
as Head of State. True an annulment was anathema
to Nigeria’s growing democracy. But another
election would have seen MKO Abiola win by an even
bigger margin had it held.
During the February 1999 National Convention of the
PDP in Jos, from where former President Olusegun
Obasanjo emerged, the victory recorded by
Obasanjo over Alex Ekwueme, his closest rival, was
made possible by a combination of factors from
which you cannot divorce Anenih.
In fact, as early as 6:45am on voting day, apart from
this writer, the only person who sat in the VIP section
of the Jos Township Stadium that Sunday morning
was Anenih. Clad in his now familiar blue jeans jacket
and trousers, he kept making sorties between the VIP
section of the stadium and the delegates’ stands,
each time to nip suspected emerging crisis in the bud
when voting was about to commence.
In 2002, at the height of the burst-up between the
National Assembly and the rambunctious Obasanjo,
it was to Anenih the latter turned.
Working tirelessly with a handful of other committed
leaders of the PDP, Anenih became the arrow-head
of that rescue mission, negotiating, conciliating and
making compromises with a view to saving a
situation which had pitched the North against the
South. That Obasanjo could survive the onslaught,
and later serve out his first term and even secure a
second term, was due, in part, to Anenih’s role.
Worse for Obasanjo, on the eve of the PDP National
Convention in January 2003, when a majority of the
state governors in the party almost threw him to the
dogs, preferring, instead, the then Vice President
Atiku Abubakar, it was the same Anenih who again
threw himself into the battle to save Obasanjo.
However, between the selfsame Obasanjo and
Anenih, the centre could not hold when the issue of
Third Term began to gain fervency. The latter
objected to the move and this angered Obasanjo.
And whereas the former president recruited some
political upstarts to drive his Third Term project, the
effort ended as a fool’s errand. Had Obasanjo
adhered to good sense and wisdom, he might have
spared himself and his presidency the odium of the
embarrassment that trailed his failure to secure the
Third Term, which still haunts him till today.
Presidential watchers insist that when the issue of
zoning became very contentious in the run up to the
2011 presidential contest, it was Anenih who brought
out data, showing how zoning had almost always
been breached since 1999 whenever the party
wanted a presidential convention, citing the instances
of the late Abubakar Rimi in 1999 and 2003 (when the
slot was supposedly reserved for the South); and
2007 (when some southerners contested against
Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, a time when the slot was
supposedly reserved for the North).
For the BoT Chairman, he accepts the praises where
due and takes the bashings which are sometimes
caustic with quintessential equanimity when they
come – as they often do, especially in his home state
of Edo, where a political party other than his own is
in control. Some may never agree with his politics,
but for a man steeped in his ways, some phrases
commonly used by Anenih in the face of party
indiscipline are, ‘Things are not supposed to be done
this way’, ‘You cannot behave like this’. Anenih has his
multitude; and he still leads. It was in 1992 that the
late Shehu Yar’Adua christened Anenih, “The Leader”.
The title has since stuck.
That he is moving round to cool otherwise heated
climes in the North West is not by accident, especially
at a time when the PDP needs leadership with
character to confront the challenges of 2015. Anenih
was 81 in August.
