Adamawa Political complexities: As Bindow Bows To Fintiri, Difficulties for A Christian Emerging Governor X-rayed
The Oasis Reporters
April 5, 2019
The Adamawa governorship seat is one strategic position the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC would have loved to keep. It is the homestate of President Muhammadu Buhari’s wife, Aisha, and for bragging rights, taking and keeping it would rub it in the nose of Atiku Abubakar, People’s Democratic Party, PDP presidential candidate in the recently concluded general elections who is an Adamawa chieftain, and largest employer of labour.
Unfortunately for the ruling party , the APC governor of Adamawa State has been presented as lacklustre in performance. In almost four years, people still need a lot more time to scratch their heads and think of one major developmental stride he brought to one of the poorest states, yet with one of the largest land mass, and a fertile one for that matter in Nigeria as a whole.
Therefore when it seemed that Governor Jibrilla Bindow was losing, the noise in the streets of Yola, the state capital was,
“O ji pa tan” in Fulfulde or “Ya sauka kowai”, in Hausa language, meaning, “he should just come down” in a literal translation. They said he served with a less than average effort, leaving the state slightly worse off than he had met it.
So when the election was strategically forced into a rerun to give the APC a fighting chance to upturn the looming PDP victory, the people rose like never before to vote Bindow out. They heaved a sigh of relief when Fintiri of the PDP emerged winner.
Besides Bindow’s utter lack of performance, one of his greatest undoings was his reliance on the Buhari bandwagon effect. The magic worked for Bindow to win in 2015. He’s ethnic Fulani from Mubi local government. And he was backed at home in Adamawa by fellow Fulani kinsman, Atiku Abubakar, then of the APC.
It is said that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar asked him how much he needed to prosecute his gubernatorial bid. He requested for 300 million naira. Instead Atiku gave him 500 million naira, to remove all doubts that he would win.
He won, and also appointed an Atiku Abubakar daughter as commissioner.
Two years down the line, Atiku Abubakar parted ways with APC and went back to the PDP. Rather than follow his godfather, Bindow stuck with Buhari, yet another Fulani kinsman in the hope that an encore of the 2015 magic would work again and free him from the political indebtedness to Atiku. Unknown to him, the Buhari mystique had lost its appeal in Adamawa and Bindow lost his seat and his goodwill.
In picking the PDP gubernatorial candidate for Adamawa State, Atiku Abubakar this time around, looked beyond his ethnic Fulani stock for fear of a possible stab in the back since his opponent, Muhammadu Buhari is himself, Fulani as well.
Atiku chose Ahmadu Fintiri, a minority tribesman. But equally a Muslim like himself, in a state where roughly 3 out of 4 citizens are Christians.
The very many tribes of Adamawa State are largely Christian, like Plateau and Benue states, but inter tribal rivalries have often prevented them from coming together and rallying behind one candidate to win as governor.
The politically savvy Fulani tribe see this, and exploit it, tapping from their tribal advantages in other states and the financial muscle they can muster, to win elections in a state where they are a tiny minority, found mainly in Yola and a few other settlements scattered in few other local governments.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo saw all that when Atiku Abubakar emerged as governor of Adamawa State in 1999, before the presidential election. So he picked Atiku as Vice presidential candidate, leaving him with no other option than to openly back the deputy governor elect, Boniface Haruna, a Christian minority to be governor. That was how a largely Christian state managed to get a governor who is Christian, for the first time.
This is to say that Boniface Haruna became governor due to external influence orchestrated by Obasanjo. Just as all the other governors in Adamawa State who are either Fulani or Muslim, emerge due to external factors, like Admiral Murtala Nyako.
But largely speaking, Adamawa always produces self centred, drab governors who lack the intellect to prosper a state that could have easily matched or surpassed the agricultural economy of either Israel or California, a state in the United States that produces the most food (by value), despite being a desert state with little water. Joined by Iowa, Nebraska and nine other states, generate over $10 billion in agricultural cash receipts.
When Admiral Murtala Nyako was making preparations to run for political office as governor in 2007, he appeared on an NTA network television program talking about his experiences while visiting the Indian Chief of Naval Staff as then Nigeria’s Chief of Naval Staff and interestingly, both had passion for agricultural crops and animal husbandry. Despite postulating how Adamawa agricultural production could be made world class, he ended up as the sole exporter of mango fruits while the state agriculture was left in a quagmire, just as he made the state economy comatose, and made it a family business.
The man who never governed Adamawa State, Atiku Abubakar therefore picked what he never had in his state, a superlative governor in his choice of a running mate by promptly choosing Peter Obi, who took a state from deficit to surplus in 8 years of governing Anambra State.
Written by Greg Abolo
