CALL it the Sheriff shocker – that was what it was to most people. Olisa Metuh, the National Publicity Secretary of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) airily announced last week Tuesday, that in addition to the candidates who had earlier lined up to contest the vacant position of National Chairman of their party, “moves” were made by the party’s leaders to “bring” four others into the race and that two of them had accepted.
His body language spoke volumes. The naughty smile on his face said it all: PDP power brokers were up to something sinister. A couple of hours after, former two-time Governor of Borno State, Senator Modu Sheriff Ali Sheriff (alias SAS) was sworn-in as the substantive National Chairman of the PDP, subject to his ratification by a national convention of the Party.
We were later to hear that the governors of the party, supported by former President Goodluck Jonathan and the National Executive Council (NEC) had shoved aside those nominated by the state chapters of the Party in the beneficiary North East Zone to impose Sheriff.
Among those dazed by this “order from above” was former Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, Alhaji Mohammed Abba Gana, who was the nominee from the same Borno State where Sheriff comes from. Alimodu Sheriff Many PDP sympathisers were taken aback by this choice by the PDP top hierarchy. While newspapers reported that 20 Senators, 50 members of the House of Representatives elected on the Party’s platform, as well as 15 former ministers who served under Jonathan signalled their intention to leave the PDP unless this decision is rescinded, former spokesman of the PDP presidential campaign in last year’s election, Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode, summarised his own deflation by simply saying the party “needs prayers”.
The question on everybody’s lips was: why would PDP, a party that lost power last year and has faced a withering barrage of demarketing by the incumbent All Progressives Congress (APC) Federal Government through the anti-corruption drive, install as its leader at this juncture, a man widely perceived as the “godfather” or “sponsor” of Boko Haram? Well, that is what they say. But why has Sheriff never been arrested and put on trial like other accused “sponsors” of the Islamist Jihadists such as Senator Ali Ndume and the late Senator Ahmed Zanna? He is now in the opposition against the Federal Government APC, so it can no longer be said that he is being protected for political reasons.
Perhaps, the security agencies know more than those who are accusing him? Otherwise, why would he be walking free and become so emboldened as to take up the mantle of leadership of the opposition party and openly boast that he would lead it to dethrone the ruling APC? Perhaps, we need to examine how Sheriff got mixed up with Boko Haram. He was elected to the Senate in 1999 from the All People’s Party (APP) which was renamed the All Nigerian People’s Party (ANPP).
In 2003, he decided to run for governorship.
Following a factional split in the party, Sheriff, who is seen as a gifted grassroots politician, was able to snatch the party’s governorship ticket from the then incumbent Governor Mala Kachalla, who was making a re-election bid. Sheriff reportedly achieved this feat by allying with Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf, the leader of the Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad) or simply the Boko Haram sect which, like many Islamic groups in the North at that time, believed that Western education and lifestyle are sinful. Governor Kachalla, sensitive to this yearning, had followed the herd and introduced the criminal aspect of Sharia law in 2001 as other states in the predominantly Muslim North had done. Both Kachalla and Sheriff were for Sharia and yet Sheriff defeated the governor for the ANPP governorshop ticket.
It must have been because Sheriff was a more popular politician whose alliance with Boko Haram was the game changer. When Sheriff was sworn into office as governor in 2003, he made good his deal with Ustaz Yusuf and appointed one of the Boko Haram chiefs, Alhaji Buji Foi, as the Commissioner for Religous Affairs.
However, somewhere along the line in Sheriff’s eight-year reign, he fell out with the radical Islamic group, and Foi left his government to rejoin Ustaz Yusuf. By 2009 when Boko Haram became ever more recalcitrant towards the laws of the land and increasingly confronted the police and other agents of state security, Sheriff, as second time governor, was seen to be involved in the events that led to the arrest, detention and extra-judicial killing of Ustaz Yusuf in police custody in July 2009. It was from this moment that Boko Haram went ballistic. They started attacking police, military and other uniformed government agencies’ barracks, institutions, checkpoints and outposts. They also targeted Sheriff, his family and political associates.
Among those they assassinated were Sheriff’s younger brother, Alhaji Goni Mustapha Sheriff; former Borno State Chairman of the ANPP and Sheriff’s townsman, Alhaji Awana Ngala; the late governorship candidate sponsored by Sheriff for the 2011 election, Alhaji Modu Fanami Gubio and Sheriff’s bosom friends, Alhaji Mustapha Fulawama and Bukar Goni Kols. When, in September 2014 Australian Negotiator, Dr. Stephen Davis, came to Nigeria and accused Sheriff of being a Boko Haram Sponsor, Sheriff debunked it, saying: “I am ready to face any panel in the world that is set up to clear my name. I am ready for any investigation”. What must have happened was that Sheriff went into an unholy pact with Boko Haram, used them to shoulder aside Kachalla and become governor.
When they became troublesome and created security problems for him, he turned against them. In revenge, they turned their guns on his closest allies, including his in-law, Fanami Gubio, whom he had anointed to succeed him. When Gubio was killed, SAS anointed Alhaji Kassim Shettima, an astute banker and the brilliant and most promising commissioner in his cabinet, to replace him. The fact of the matter is that the tag of SAS as “Boko Haram sponsor” has managed to stick till date. In politics, public relations and marketing, perception is everything.
When Sheriff was still with the APC as one of their topmost leaders and outstanding facilitator of the merger between the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), All Nigerian People’s Party (ANPP), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and eventually the “new” PDP, the then ruling PDP stridently booed him as “Boko Haram Sponsor” and “founding father”.
Now that that leaders have made him their National Chairman, you cannot blame the APC if they equally boo him as such. That is fair politics. Nmodu Sheriff as the National Chairman of the PDP might do the party more harm than good. A party that is picking the pieces and trying to rebrand from its halcyon days of majesty charcterised by impositions and impunities cannot afford to approach its political recuperation with an imposition that could cause its disintegration. It can ill afford to be led by a man stimatised as Sheriff is.
My guess is that the PDP governors chose to see Sheriff’s political sagacity and close their eyes to his public perception. It is a very pregnant and delicately poised gamble. Time will tell if SAS will be PDP’s messiah. Or its undertaker.
VANGUARD
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