*Emefiele, Amaechi & Sylva caught in the web
*Why there is now a crowded field of APC presidential aspirants
There are at least three people who have now bought the All Progressive Congress, APC, presidential forms on the pretext that President Muhammadu Buhari wants them to be the next president after himself, impeccable Aso Vill sources reported last night.
Quest Times is reporting today that all the three might have been lied to after all.
First on that list is the Central Bank Governor, Mr Godwin Emefiele, who has been practically running helter-skelter in the last couple of weeks on the issue. Last Wednesday, he was said to have held a meeting with a top APC chieftain in the middle of the night to ask for more time to make up his mind and get the form.
The next day, the party announced an extension in the sales of the Presidential nomination forms. It is believed that this was meant to buy more time for the CBN Governor who has now gone to court to rule on his right to vote and be voted for considering that he is deemed a public servant who is expected to first resign before embarking on a partisan political journey.
Informed sources said Emefiele managed to pay his way through the party hierarchy, although some in the leadership were also stunned about the sudden extension of time for the sales of nomination forms.
While the party Chairman Senator Abdullahi Adamu is believed to be in the know about the extension, National Secretary Sen Iyiola Omisore is believed to have been completely unaware of the extension until right before the announcement.
But that is not the most interesting part. It is the belief that Emefiele holds that the President is the one pushing his candidacy. Aso Villa sources confirmed that the agitated CBN Governor has not had a one-on-one meeting with the President recently until the photo-op of last week Sallah Homage at the Villa.
Precisely, the President has not had a word with the CBN Governor on 2023, the sources affirm, but one of the President’s influential Personal Assistants nicknamed Tunde after the late Tunde Idiagbon is said to be the one giving assurances to Emefiele about the President’s support for his 2023 presidential dreams.
It is interesting that the second person who has bought the APC presidential nomination forms in the belief that it is the President that instructed it, is Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi. A famous nephew of the president, sometimes simply called his initials, sources said, is the name being bandied as having given the Minister the assurances that President Buhari wants to hand over to him.
It would be recalled that it was Amaechi who was the Director-General of the Buhari presidential campaigns both in the 2015 and 2019 elections. In fact, Amaechi had wanted the President to pick him as running mate in 2015 but lost out to Professor Yemi Osinbajo.
Unrelenting in seeking the President’s endorsement, Amaechi has been spending and diverting resources to Daura, including a Transportation University, and recently got a notable chieftaincy title from the respectable Emir of Daura from where the President hails. It was all part of the package.
The third person who has collected the form on the belief that President Buhari is supporting him is the Petroleum Resources Minister of State Timipre Sylva. Certainly, the President has a liking to the Bayelsa State political gladiator and he has actually been the one to determine who it was that represents the oil producing state on the cabinet both in 2015 and 2019.
In 2015, Sylva nominated Heineken Lokpobiri who was named then Minister of State for Agriculture and Rural Development, but the buzz in FG circles was that Sylvia sold the spot for N500m and Heineken paid an advance of N250m and refused to pay the balance because he was made a Minister of State and not a substantive federal minister.
So in 2019, Sylva decided to keep the slot for himself and got the juicy cabinet post. Since then, he has been known as a favourite of the President. But according to a FG source: “Is that enough reason to think the President wants him to succeed him as President?”
Well, the answer is that yet another very senior aide of the President is responsible for assuring Timipre when he divulged a draft list of potential successors drawn for the President by his Chief of Staff, Prof Ibrahim Gambari. Sources say the list had the name of Timpre on it, as it has six others.
Finally, while this seems to reveal a seeming confusion about what is real, it can be deduced even if arguably, that the President may not have sent any word through his aides and those close to him to any of these aspirants since he couldn’t have in mind all the three at the same time.
But the President has a favourite and that much he said himself in an interview earlier in the year. Is it any of these three or is it someone else who is not making a show of it?
Time will tell.