Jostle for the 2023 vice president ticket has sparked fresh crisis among northern governors in the All Progressives Congress (APC) as they are locked in a bitter battle for the slot.
Daily Sun gathered that based on the zoning arrangement where all elective positions would be swapped between North and South, and the national chairmanship slot already zoned to the North Central, four two-term northern governors immediately revved up machinery to secure the vice presidential ticket in the 2023 presidential election.
With the South expected to produce the APC candidate for the 2023 presidential poll, the battlelines became drawn between North West and North East governors. Three North West governors, it was learnt, began to individually plot how to get the ticket.
But, information soon filtered out that a first-term governor from the North East was favoured by party apparatchiks for the VP ticket and the centre couldn’t hold among the five governors jostling for the slot from the region.
A senior APC chieftain, privy to the matter, detailed the genesis of the crisis among the APC governors.
“Initially, four northern governors were on the same page, but when the zoning formula was released, that the North would swap all elective positions with the South, things went awry.
“What happened was that, one of President Muhammadu Buhari’s associates from the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party and, also, the Congress for Progressive Change days approached the Chairman of the Caretaker, Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee, Mai Mala Buni, that he was interested in the position of Deputy National Chairman (North) and needed the president’s support before he could declare his interest openly. He begged Buni for support, and also, to get the support and buy-in of the president.
“Buni obliged him, and took him to the Presidential Villa and disclosed his ambition to the president. The president neither opposed nor endorsed the former lawmaker for the position.
“But, words soon filtered to his state governor, whose state borders Kano. The governor was peeved that Buni went to introduce his ‘arch-enemy’ to Buhari because the permutation is that if the president eventually endorses the former lawmaker’s ambition, it would affect the governor’s VP chances.
“Also, another cause of affront among the ranks of the northern governors is that two North East governors are being considered as vice president and the plan leaked to their North West counterparts. They felt it was time to move against Buni by aligning with governor-colleagues who were angry that the Yobe governor was not “carrying them along” as they believed ‘he could no longer be trusted.”
Meanwhile, indications that Buni would resume as CECPC chairman were premised on the twin fact that the alleged “directive from president Buhari for a takeover of the party by an acting chairman remains questionable. There was no official communication from the president to that effect and, secondly, there was no National Executive Committee meeting to that effect. When the CECPC was constituted, it was done at NEC level and not from any verbal directive.
