Memo to the ‘third force’: Everybody is crying!

The leaked audio tape in which Rotimi Amaechi, the Minister of Transportation, offers an insightful critique of President Muhammadu Buhari, renews the challenge for those political outsiders who say they want to rescue Nigeria.

I refer to the ‘third force’ as correctly described early last year, but subsequently betrayed, by former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

That dysfunction includes the Peoples Democratic Party, the candidate of which, Atiku Abubakar, is Buhari’s strongest challenger.

Only four months ago, President Buhari named Amaechi, the former governor of Rivers State, the Director-General of his re-election campaign.

Amaechi had served in the same capacity in the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Organisation (APCPCO) in the last election, playing a pivotal role in Buhari’s victory.

Last week however, Amaechi, one of the most powerful people in the cabinet, was quietly supplanted in the campaign as Buhari enthroned the party’s National Leader, Bola Tinubu, as his “co-chairman” in the Presidential Campaign Council.

In organisational terms, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo ought to be co-chairman, as he is the one running with the president.  But Buhari was doing a different, non-WAEC mathematics.

He pledged that in the campaign effort, neither governance nor his work—as though they were different matters—would suffer, and that Tinubu “will be fully in charge.”

Fully?

Buhari offered this explanation: “The operational buck of this campaign stops at (Tinubu’s) table, and I therefore urge all of us in the leadership of this campaign, in the field operations on the campaign trail and in the secretariat to consult with Asiwaju whenever guidance is needed.”