The group further exposed the antics of a serving governor in the north as the promoter of the plot to make the vice president a political casualty in the build-up to the presidential primaries of the Peoples Democratic Party, where President Goodluck Jonathan is expected to emerge as the party’s candidate.
It is easy for any Aso Rock observer to see that in the last three and half years Arc. Namadi Sambo has remained a fiercely loyal and very supportive deputy of President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, employing a style strange to his predecessors.
Political events in the last two weeks have further exposed the shenanigans. If by now they have not sufficiently decoded the president’s political body language at two critical events recently as to whether he will fly with Namadi Sambo or not, surely they will have to wait forever.
It is clear that because the president did not want to leave anyone in doubt, he asked the Vice President, accompanied by the senate president, deputy speaker, PDP governors, senators and ministers to submit his completed expression of interest and nomination forms to the party secretariat last Friday.
Now let us attempt a deconstruction of the lies and falsehood about Namadi Sambo’s place in history. If truth be told, were the VP as politically weak as his traducers have tried to portray him, he would not have won the governorship election in Kaduna State in 2007 and would have won a second term easily in 2011 if he was not appointed Vice President.
Besides, it is on record that he led the PDP to victory in the governorship election in 2011 and mobilised the highest votes for PDP in the 2011 Presidential Election in the states of the North (1,190,179,000 or 46.9% of total votes) against Gen.Muhammadu Buhari’s 1,334,244,000.
Recall also that a huge turnout of leading political leaders and stakeholders of the PDP in the northwest paid a solidarity visit to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan on Thursday, January 9, 2014 at the Presidential Villa. The team was led by former PDP national chairman and former Defence minister, Dr. Bello Haliru Mohammed.
At the occasion, the former PDP chairman had said: “The vice president is working hard to reinvigorate the party and to maintain its vibrancy in our zone in the North generally. For him to mobilise all these people at short notice is an indication of what he has been doing to galvanise the party in our zone and the north in general. Let me assure Mr. President that the Vice President is very much on ground and is holding the forte for you in our zone and the north in general”.
Lest we forget too, a huge delegation of South-South leaders from Mr. President’s Bayelsa home-state led by Governor Seriake Dickson paid a similar solidarity visit to the Vice President on Friday, January 31, 2014 to publicly acknowledge, commend and encourage him for what they described as his unflinching support and loyalty to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.
This public acknowledgement of the Vice President’s loyalty is significant and unprecedented taking into account the strife and squabbles that characterized the office in the days of President Olusegun Obasanjo.
If there is anyone who best understands the grim fortunes of a deputy, it is none other than Mr. President who has variously been a deputy governor, Vice President, Acting President and now President. He knows what he sees in the Vice President.
Loyalty is everything in a relationship. It is bottom-up and top-down. This explains the Jonathan-Sambo chemistry. The current presidency is firm, focussed and far-reaching as it is powered by the touch of loyalty which also goes for its politics, policies and programs.
The Dr. Bello-led solidarity team wasted no time in pronouncing that the President is not anti-North, saying that Federal Government’s projects in the North were “more than enough evidence of the priority and pride of place that the entire northern states and people command in the policy, planning and project implementation programmes of this good PDP government of Goodluck- Sambo”. How profound!
Emeka Louis Nwapa, a governance/public affairs commentator, wrote this piece from Abuja
http://leadership.ng/opinions/391283/namadi-sambo-north-history
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