Why Northern governors backed Jonathan

Written by Stephen Gbadamosi Sunday, 24 April 2011

GOVERNORS of northern states on the ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had to throw their weight behind President Goodluck Jonathan in penultimate Saturday’s presidential election in their bid to establish a new crop of leadership for the region, Sunday Tribune has authoritatively learnt.
Sources disclosed that this agenda had begun even as parties were making preparations for presidential primaries and it cut across party lines.
It will be recalled that delegates of the party to its presidential primaries in January shocked the Northern leaders, under the aegis of Northern Political Leaders Forum (NPLF), who backed the Northern consensus candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. The delegates, believed to have been under the influence of the state governors, overwhelmingly voted for Jonathan to emerge as the PDP candidate.
However, investigation has shown that the decision to back Jonathan all the way was arrived at to relax the clutch of those considered to be the old order on the leadership and politics of the region.
Sunday Tribune sources revealed that governors of the region considered that supporting Jonathan to be president would demystify leaders like Generals Aliyu Gusau and Ibrahim Babangida as well as Atiku, all of whom indicated interest in the Presidency at the outset.
This, they reasoned, would add four more years to the ages of the said old order politicians and that by the time next election comes in 2015, most of them would have become too old to take active part in the political process, apart from the fact that the new crops of northern politicians would have stamped their authority on the politics of the region by then.
President Jonathan had promised that he would not go for more than one term, a promise upon which the permutations of the Northern governors were based.
Investigations further revealed that the agenda of the emerging leaders of the North also largely affected the fortunes of defeated presidential candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), General Muhammadu Buhari, at the poll two Saturdays ago.
It was learnt that the so-called young political leaders in the North did not consider General Buhari as the face of the current generation of the region.
It was, therefore, calculated that Buhari, who is already 69 years old, would also have been ruled out by age when the next presidential election comes in 2015. Besides, the gap-toothed general, himself, had said while rounding off his campaign in Abuja that it would be the last time he would vie for the Presidency of Nigeria.
A governor of one of the North-Western states who is an in-law to a prominent family confirmed the development, claiming that it is the emerging political leaders’ means of bouncing into the centre stage of power equation in the North.
He noted that by the time Jonathan’s tenure would have ended in 2015, the influence of the old order politicians in the region would have waned further and that some of the ‘new boys’ would have been in position to control power firmly.

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