A founding member of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Osita Okechukwu, on Sunday, said former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s “Kasuwa Ndollar” primary election is an existential threat to Nigeria’s democracy.
Okechukwu made the remark while reacting to Atiku’s warning that Nigeria’s democracy is facing an existential threat due to the deliberate weakening of opposition parties by President Bola Tinubu’s administration.
In a statement he issued, the former Director General of the Voice of Nigeria, advised the former Vice President to dig deeper.
Okechukwu said a deeper and more honest introspection would reveal how Nigeria’s democracy descended into its present sordid state following Atiku’s breach of the rotation convention in the 2023 presidential election.
According to Okechukwu, “Atiku is at it again with his insistence on Kasuwa Ndollar presidential primary election. Nothing that non-adherence to the rotation convention and Section 7 of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Constitution contributed significantly to the destabilization of PDP and the alleged One Party State.”
He submitted that “Atiku Abubakar is, regrettably, one of the foremost culprits of this unforced error, which gravely cannibalised the PDP.
“Digging deeper will inform His Excellency Atiku Abubakar that the breach of the rotation convention, an elite consensus foundation of the Fourth Republic, played a decisive role in this sordid mess.
“My fear is that he is about to repeat the same mistake in the ADC. As no other ADC’s presidential aspirant has his war chest.”
He recalled that the rotation convention was consciously a formalised elite consensus in 1999 to promote unity, equity, inclusion, and national stability, based on turn-by-turn rotation of presidential power between the North and South.
Okechukwu further recalled that without this rotation convention, Atiku himself would not have emerged as Vice President in 1999.
He noted that had patriotic northern political leaders such as Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, Umaru Shinkafi, Adamu Ciroma, Bamanga Tukur, and Dr. Sola Saraki, among others, not honoured the zoning arrangement, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo—having just emerged alive from General Abacha’s gulag, where General Shehu Musa Yar’ Adua lost his life, might well have abstained from contesting.
Okechukwu also reminded Atiku Abubakar of his dramatic walkout from the 2014 PDP National Convention, protesting that it was the North’s turn to produce the President and that then-President Goodluck Jonathan was breaching the rotation convention, an action that culminated in Atiku joining the APC.
“Whereas one admits that my great party APC, has its own fault lines, is it not a calamity that the same Atiku Abubakar, widely acknowledged as the mastermind of PDP’s rotation breach and its resultant destabilisation, is now allegedly setting the stage for a similar breach within the ADC, when knows that our presidential primary is “Kasuwa Ndollar?
“Or should President Tinubu now be blamed for this fresh violation of the same zoning principle?”
He further noted that Atiku’s assertion that “the systematic weakening of opposition platforms represents a grave danger to Nigeria’s democratic future” deserves more rigorous self-scrutiny and contextual honesty.
Okechukwu posited that Atiku cannot harvest Buhari’s 12 million Vote-Bank, because majority in the north subscribe to the rotation convention and also they know him as Mai Kasuwa and among Nigeria’s less than transparent clan, therefore not Mai Gasakiya.