the Goodluck Jonathan administration to sanction the registration of APC as a political party, the unwillingness of the then ruling PDP to accept the use of card readers during the elections and the legal fight to have Buhari disqualified over his lack of a school certificate. But Buhari’s road to the presidency has been a long march spanning over a decade and has seen some of his staunchest supporters fall to the wayside while many new ones joined the bandwagon.
A handful of people were however responsible to creating the conditions that made the 2015 election different from the previous three that Buhari had contested in. Naturally, there are those that helped shape the election but will never be known to public, yet they are better known to the president. There are also those that the president himself will never know the efforts they put in, in making his election possible. While the roles of some of these men were not visible to the public, an attempt can be made to pick out the few whose impacts on the election are apparent. Here is a list of the top people in descending order that shaped the 2015 election:
1. James Entwistle He maybe the one most crucial person whose absence would have seen the election turn out in a different way or not take place at all. What most people would remember the United States ambassador for would probably be his role in getting US Secretary of State, John Kerry to stop over in Nigeria just ahead of the election and get both Buhari and Jonathan to sign a peace pact. In reality, however, he played a much larger role and without taking anything away from Attahiru Jega, Entwistle was in a way, the de facto organizer in chief of the election. The neutrality of the electoral umpire could be traced back to him. The use of card technology could be traced back to him. Most importantly, the support of the opposition APC got from the international community and the foreign media could be traced back to him. The views the embassy had of what was happening in the government, the political climate in the country and what was reported back to the State Department in no small measure contributed to the peaceful outcome of the election.
2. Prof. Attahiru Jega In the eyes of millions of people, Attahiru Jega was the hero of the 2015 election. It was not just his composure or emotional intelligence, while Peter Orubebe was acting out during the announcement of the 2015 presidential results that earned him that honour. In Nigeria, for someone holding a sensitive position like INEC chairman, while at the same time proclaiming his neutrality is tantamount to sabotaging the ruling party. That changed under Jega and he has now set the bar higher for all those that succeed him in office. It will no longer be acceptable for the INEC chairman to be a stooge of the ruling party. Prof. Jega’s willingness to remain neutral and stand his ground on the use of card readers was all it took to end PDP’s 16-year rule. The final election results showed that it was a close contest and the neutrality of INEC and the use of card readers was the difference between winning and losing. Changing the results in just two or three states would have been enough to keep Jonathan and PDP in power. Without Jega’s steadfastness in the face of intimidation and accusations of partisanship from the PDP, Buhari today would definitely not be president.
3. Bola Tinubu Arguably, Bola Tinubu should be on top of the list of those that helped make Buhari president. He was running a one-man show as political leader of the southwest. Many accused him of selling out to Jonathan during the 2011 presidential election. Tinubu for many years also had a Code of Conduct Tribunal charge hanging over his head. But as soon as he had the charges dismissed and the government had nothing to use against him, Jonathan’s fate was sealed and the mega party opposition leaders had dreamed of finally became a possibility. When Tinubu made up his mind to join forces with Buhari, merging the ACN with Buhari’s CPC, everybody in the region followed. Tinibu alone brought with him, the support of the media; something Buhari never had. Tinubu brought with him, a party structure capable of challenging the PDP for the very first time. PDP was not only rattled, it made the southwest the centre stage for the 2015 election. And to defeat PDP at the presidential election, all Tinubu needed was to hold them to a stalemate in the southwest. He went a step further and achieved something Buhari could not manage on his own, he delivered the region for the APC.
4. Umar Ardo After three bruising defeats at presidential elections, Buhari was close to losing interest in politics. At the 2011 election, he had promised not to challenge the election results at the tribunal and more importantly, not contest again. It was on the urging of Umar Ardo that he changed his mind and headed to the election tribunal. This singular act might just have been what kept the torch carrying the flame of Buhari becoming president one day from dying. Reading Umar Ardo’s Salient Issues In The 2011 Presidential Election Tribunal gives an insight to his deep involvement in the tribunal process. After the Supreme Court dismissed Buhari/CPC’s petition, Ardo was key in advising and drawing up the next plan of action; a merger between the CPC and ACN. To forge ahead with the planned merger of two political parties that would unite the north and the southwest, Buhari had to formulate a plan to protect his presidential ambition and not simply get swallowed up by a more organised ACN. And to achieve this, it was the Ardo plan that Buhari relied on. It might have been Bola Tinubu that made the ACN, CPC merger a reality and many still believe he was the brain behind it. The merger plan was conceptualised and drawn up by Umar Ardo and later left to Tinubu to implement. Step by step details were spelt out in the merger plan and how to approach the general election and all along, the plan was for Buhari to be the presidential candidate of the APC. Ardo was also key in planting the seed of disagreement in PDP, first in Adamawa and later snowballing into a national crisis.
5. Olusegun Obasanjo Nobody did more to damage and discredit the image of the Goodluck Jonathan presidency than Olusegun Obasanjo. It started with his resignation as the Board of Trustees chairman of the PDP, then came a public letter disparaging Jonathan, accusing him of dividing the country along ethnic and religious lines and questioning his governance style. Obasanjo reminded everyone of Jonathan’s promise not to seek reelection, then he went international with his anti-Jonathan campaign with more disparaging comments about a failing government and ended his crusade in a very dramatic fashion by publicly tearing his card and renouncing his membership of the PDP. A lot of the things Obasanjo did were symbolic but signalled to Nigerians that ‘the establishment’ was no longer united and the fabrics holding PDP together were torn. Rotimi Amaechi may have been the director general of the Buhari campaign, but no one campaign more for Buhari and against Jonathan than Obasanjo. Single-handedly, he broke Jonathan’s hold on the Church and it was not only with Pastor Enoch Adebayo and other southwest pastors. Obasanjo, for several days camped at his Kinkino Road house in Kaduna and brought northern minorities, particularly those with military backgrounds together lobbying them to vote Buhari. He was more than a thorn in Jonathan’s flesh, he was his nemesis.
6. Justice Mahmud Mohammed It might be that history simply conspired against the reelection bid of President Goodluck Jonathan. How else can it be explained that all the right people were at the right places at the right time. It was not only Attahiru Jega that was unbending when it to his principles. Had anyone other than Justice Mahmud Mohammed been the Chief Justice of Nigeria, the PDP would probably have succeeded in disqualifying Buhari from the election or creating that conditions that would have made the elections impossible to hold. Commentators had started to predict another June 12, but Justice Mohammed was not another bystander during the election. It was to his credit that the judiciary gave no ruling that would have compromised the electoral process. In public events and on more than one occasion, he warned judges against holding the electoral process hostage at a time when cases were being filed by the day. All it would have taken was for one judge to see merit in cancelling the election or finding Buhari ineligible.
7. Nasir El-Rufai El-Rufai has said himself; it took him two years to convince Buhari to take another shot at the presidency. Without El-Rufai’s persistence, Nigeria today would probably still be ruled by PDP. But getting Buhari to run again wasn’t all that he did. To succeed, he first had to expose the contradictions and inconsistencies of those that managed Buhari prior to 2015. Since 2003, two men were known to manage Buhari and his three presidential campaign failures; Sule Hamma and Buba Galadima. They were also responsible for restricting Buhari to north and the stopping Bola Tinubu from replacing Tunde Bakare as running mate to Buhari ahead of the 2011 presidential election. While none of them, not even Buhari has spoken about why and how sudden he fell apart with the two men, El-Rufai was partly responsible for getting rid of both men and forcing the president to look beyond the north and a small circle of advisers. Before the merger to APC, it was El-Rufai that held the CPC together.
8. The Five governors and Atiku Abubakar Initially, what the seven governors that forged and alliance against Goodluck Jonathan wanted was that he respects the agreement he made to serve only one term as president. They would have settled for a promise of an open and fair contest for the presidential ticket of the PDP, but it better served the interest of Jonathan to limit the space for a free and open contest in the party. The result was that for the very first time in its history, the PDP presidential primary was uncontested, Jonathan was unchallenged. When five of the governors, a good number of federal lawmakers and a former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, finally dumped the PDP, the party came crashing down. And for the first time, the opposition governed and controlled more states than the ruling party, controlled the House of Representatives and had the speaker in its fold. At that point, the election was all but over, only Jonathan and his men didn’t know it. Or more probably, they were simply in denial about how much the party had been weakened ahead of the election. Mr. President was being lied about the political reality in the country and the depths PDP had sunk to.
9. Goodluck Jonathan The 2015 presidential election was Jonathan’s to lose and incredibly, he lost it. Somehow, he had managed to pick a fight with virtually everybody and left open wounds even though he knew he wanted to be reelected. He couldn’t deal decisively with Amaechi and it didn’t turn out so well. He engaged in a public feud with Obasanjo and it was the former army general that had the last laugh. The only political adversary Jonathan managed to a deal a decisive blow was Murtala Nyako. But by then, the damage had already been done. The Jonathan presidency was so distracted by the political fights that had opened on many front, they forgot about the electoral umpire and whether or not Jega and his team had their back. In all, the election is a tale of a process bungled by the Jonathan administration. And all the fights, with Obasanjo, Amaechi, Nyako and even the internal wrangling within the PDP to remove Bamanga Tukur party chairman were nothing but distractions, and Jonathan took his eye off the ball. But as it turned out, his loss was Buhari’s gain.
10. Femi Fani-Kayode Right from his days as spokesman to former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, Femi Fani-Kayode had always been known to go to the extreme in the name of defending his principals. Attacking critics and saying the most vile things came easy to him. But with his campaign of hate, it was hard to tell whether Fani-Kayode was helping or sabotaging Jonathan’s cause in the build up to the presidential election. The one thing that was clear was that he made Buhari the victim and that was a role Jonathan had come to play so well and still wanted it for himself at the election. As spokesman for the Jonathan campaign, Fani-Kayode went such extremes as to question Buhari’s intelligence and why he was ever commissioned as military officer. The campaign was full of vitriol even members of the PDP felt alienated by it.
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