It is time, at last, to speak the truth about preparations for the 2019 governorship contest in Kaduna State, and the truth is this: Nobody wants to openly admit it, but vivid images of politicians eying Nasir Ahmed Elrufai’s job after the first tenure are becoming visible. Offstage intrigues, moving onstage, are already making the present occupant of the Sir Kashim Ibrahim government house ill- at -ease. The reasons for the unease might not be far fetched – failure of governance and broken promises.
Every politician knows that the key to winning elections is to make great promises and the key to maintaining power is keeping those promises.
In 2015, elrufai and his campaigners promised to cure the ills of society including illiteracy, disease, unemployment, and poverty. Many supporters and independent voters alike got caught up in a sort of mass delusion of inflated expectations. They hoped for urgent results from his administration. When the results failed to materialize, they began to react with outrage and contempt, and here’s why:
About two years after he was elected, he has failed to bring about the promised vast improvements in health, education, employment, infrastructure, the civil service and the economy. Kaduna was recently rated as the most indebted state in Nigeria along with Edo and Lagos – sad indeed.
He has failed to deliver even at the local level, from where he extracted most of his votes after promising to improve specific problems that the people care about the most. Consequently negative climate in politics has gotten worse in the elrufai years, with voter discontent fast becoming a phenomena in the state.
This is shown in the manner each of his many inconsistencies now go viral within minutes of their discovery. Instances of his reluctance to strongly relate with the grassroots, his obvious contempt for workers, his reckless and hurtful statements about politicians (the infamous Kufena hills metaphor) and his general bully persona are impacting the state for the worse.
Without the need to further detail his many broken campaign promises that have accumulated throughout the last one and half years, it suffices that Kaduna is no longer set up for eight years of an elrufai administration. In many ways in the past, voters in the state have proved they are not the optimists who can’t learn from experience. Politicians likely to challenge him are therefore sure to capitalize on the growing angry mood of disillusioned voters in the state and to simply base their candidacies on the premise that they would fulfill a new set of realistic promises.
So far, about four blocs are believed to be in the fore for the Kaduna top job, emboldened by elrufai’s latest public gaffe that governing a state is the worst job in Nigeria, interpreted as a veiled admission of failure to cope – perhaps rightly. These blocs represent the interests of former Governor Ramalan Yero, Senator Shehu Sani, Alhaji Isah Ashiru and Dr Muhammed Sani Bello. It does not take much effort to see that Yero’s threat is of little or no significance.
In the present circumstances, it will require much more than Yero’s political ingenuity (which he does not have in abundance) to be able to turn the PDP’s fortunes around. Next is Senator Sani who is widely viewed as a non-starter as far as calculations for the Kaduna governorship go.
His reach is basically limited to confined areas of just one out of the three senatorial districts that define the state’s political landscape. That brings us to Dr Bello: though he may have an impressive CV, Bello’s chances are as gloomy as elrufai’s in view of his elite background. The typical Kaduna voter is quite unlikely to risk another chance with a politician that is seen to be out of tune with grassroots realities after his bitter experiment with elrufai. Hence, like elrufai, Dr Bello is also categorized among those labeled Abuja politicians – and this will be his undoing.
By reasonable analogy, elrufai, Yero, Sani and Bello will be run out of the match and out of the cup even before the start of the game. This leaves us with Isah Ashiru, fondly called ‘Mai Solar,’ who is by every definition, a grassroots player actively involved with both rural and urban politics. Each and every politician possesses their own political style, and most of these styles are attained with strategy in mind. By his style, Ashiru is best known in his career through his success in people-oriented politics.
From the earliest stages in his career, Ashiru took his constituency one person at a time with the capacity to convince people that their concern, no matter how small it might seem to other people, was the most important thing in the world to him. Ashiru’s mastery of grassroots politics proved to be very helpful to his political career at a later point.
He started as member of the Kaduna State House of Assembly where he made it a point to get to know everyone he could. His unique style of getting to know people on the most personal level that he could,paid him off greatly in his climb to the top. This personable attitude therefore helped Ashiru immensely in the Federal House of Representatives. He joined the National Assembly in 2007, and by 2008 he was already a top federal legislator.
Here, Ashiru typically found out who was most powerful, and became friends with these persons, or allies if you will. In politics, it may not be fair, but it is about who you get to know, and Ashiru had without a doubt mastered this art, and made it a trademark to his political styling.
He always keeps track of people’s differences, and knows exactly who he is talking to, so that his good relationships with the people who made up the other branches of government really helped him to get many of the things he wanted, especially in the legislature. He was able to gain approval of some of the most massive and historic federal government programs for Kaduna State; medicare, social amenities, education, and employment.
These were all stepping-stones to the growth and prosperity of the state and are bound to count in his favour when the chips are down. With this intimidating record of achievement and his growing personal acquaintance with, and concerns for the people – big or small- Ashiru has certainly worked himself into the position of the man to beat in 2019.
Written by Abdul-Azeez Suleiman
