Barely one year since he was welcomed into the All Progressives Congress, Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State has largely invested his time in attempts to undermine the structures of the Party in the Southeast, in defiance of the President and other key leaders of the Party who have been there, and to whom the Party owes its success. The Enugu governor tells anyone who cares to listen that he has been friends with the President for as long as the President has been in politics.
This claim should fall flat on the face of verifiable history. Mbah is in no way, a contemporary of President Tinubu. His boss, Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani is the one who could correctly claim to be an ally of the President, having served at the same time with him (1999-2007) as governors of Enugu and Lagos States respectively. In 1999, Peter Mbah was still an undergraduate in London, before he returned to the country to serve as a Commissioner and later as Chief of Staff to Governor Nnamani.
Given the President’s nature of nurturing and mentoring younger ones and supporting his contemporaries, it is not out of place that Mbah might have enjoyed some business or political relationship with him later on in life. However, Mbah’s fidelity to that relationship is something that he might not be able to prove.
If anything, the Enugu governor has been obviously too self-entitled and bullish in his suspicious attempts to undermine the President’s allies, especially in the Southeast. He has failed to align himself to the existing political structures in the Southeast, preferring instead to impose his acolytes on the Party. His antics in the Southeast might be forgiven, but his attempts to distort the winning structure which was painstakingly set up by the President is an affront to the President’s authority and should be suspicious.
In my study and practice of politics, I have understood that the politician who is most desperate to take over structures set by others, is the one that should be trusted the least. No one can claim to love the President more than the President loves himself and no one can seek the preservation of the President’s political dominance more than those who set out with the President and weathered all the storms and uncertainties with him before he became President. If anything, the President must be careful in trusting those who disrespect and continually try to undermine those who he has entrusted with very sensitive assignments and who have continually delivered.
Coup planners do not start by directly attacking the Commander-in-Chief first, they begin their sabotage by trying to weaken the structures of the President’s political fortress. They try to make the grounds slippery by either buying off those close to the helmsman or removing them from around him so that they can have an easier access to harm the President.
There are people who argue that some of the recent moves being made by some politicians are just normal political horse- trading that are common with the electioneering season such as we are in, but I beg to differ. Any horse-trading that aims to disrupt already constituted structures that favour the President must be treated as an act of sabotage. Nobody who truly cares about the President and the continuous victory of the All Progressives Congress would focus most of their political energy and resources towards unraveling the President’s trusted political architecture.
There is a black sheep in the Progressive Governors Forum who has been working, since the first day he defected to the APC, to undermine the established power structures in the Party, and that individual is a traitor, whose sole interest is to serve as an undertaker in the Party. He might claim to be working for the Party or pretend to be merely playing politics and trying to raise his own political stakes in the coming dispensation, but the President must handle him carefully. It is clear that his actions question the President’s judgement. By working to displace those whom the President has trusted all these years, he is simply telling the President that he doesn’t have wisdom to choose his lieutenants well.
