Strategic calculations: Why Kwankwaso wants to be Obi’s running mate in 2027

Lord Palmerston, a 19th-century British Prime Minister, famously coined the saying: “There are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.” He was talking about relations between nations. However, Nigerian politicians have unashamedly hijacked the maxim to justify their utterly unprincipled and chameleonic behaviour. Nigeria is a country where politicians go to bed saying one thing and wake up saying the exact opposite without so much as blinking an eye, a country where political relationships are defined not by principles but by self-interested calculations of “what’s in it for me”. Civilised societies frown upon such behaviours, but Nigeria celebrates them.

Take Bola Tinubu, the grandmaster of self-interest politics. In 2014, he led the then newly established All Progressives Congress, APC, to visit former President Olusegun Obasanjo in Ota to solicit his help in stopping then President Goodluck Jonathan’s re-election. “We are determined to rescue Nigeria,” Tinubu told Obasanjo. “We want you to lead the mission. We want you as the navigator.” Recall that Tinubu, as Lagos State governor, and Obasanjo, as president, were sworn enemies, and that Obasanjo “diabolically double-crossed” Tinubu’s old party, Alliance for Democracy, AD, and defenestrated all its governors, except Tinubu who escaped by a hair’s breadth. But on this occasion, united by the shared interest of removing Jonathan from power, the past didn’t matter. Tinubu said in Ota: “There are no permanent friends or enemies in politics, but permanent interests.”

That philosophy, needless to say, defines Tinubu’s politics. As governor, old friends and benefactors who crossed him were sidelined and humiliated while old enemies who became useful were accommodated. As president, Tinubu gave arch-enemies-turned-pugilistic-loyalists plum ambassadorial jobs while treating long-standing-allies-turned-critics as cast-aways.

Consider this. When Reno Omokri turned 50 in 2024, President Tinubu sent him a gushing congratulatory message but uttered not a word when Professor Pat Utomi turned 70 this year. Tell me, who’s more deserving of a birthday greeting from the president, if he must send one, is it Reno Omokri or Pat Utomi? But, thanks to the principle of no permanent friends or enemies but permanent interests, Omokri trumped Utomi in Tinubu’s estimation. Why?

Well, Professor Utomi used to be Tinubu’s friend and was the intellectual mind of the APC in its formative years. But in 2023, he disagreed with Tinubu politically. In contrast, Omokri was Tinubu’s bugbear who, in countless viral videos, called him unprintable names, castigated his integrity and character, and said “he is not a fit and proper person to occupy the office of the President of Nigeria”. But once Tinubu came to power, Omokri opportunistically ingratiated himself with him. His reward? An ambassadorial posting to Mexico!!! Meanwhile, Professor Utomi, who never said one-hundredth of the incendiary things Omokri mouthed and wrote about Tinubu, is gratuitously insulted by Tinubu’s aides!

So, what happened? Put simply, Tinubu’s interests and Omokri’s are aligned, while Tinubu’s interests and Utomi’s are diverged. Hence, Omokri is Tinubu’s “friend”, Utomi his “enemy”. Lord Palmerston must be rolling in his grave seeing how Nigerian politicians have bastardised his famous aphorism.

But Tinubu is not the main subject of this piece. I started with him because he’s the patron saint of the “no-permanent-friends-or-enemies-but-permanent-interests” school of political thought. All Nigerian politicians belong to that school; they are birds of a feather and flock together; hence they change parties at the drop of a hat, and yesterday’s inveterate political foes become today’s cherished allies.

Which brings us to the main subject of this intervention: Dr Rabiu Kwankwaso, former Kano State governor and presidential candidate of the New Nigeria People’s Party, NNPP, in the 2023 presidential election. Dr Kwankwaso’s recent decision to join the Nigerian Democratic Congress, NDC, alongside Peter Obi, former Anambra State governor and presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 presidential poll, and his willingness to serve as Obi’s running mate in next year’s presidential race is a classic case of self-interested strategic calculations. Yet, truth is, unless driven by high ideals rather than mere self-interests, the Obi-Kwankwaso (OK) collaboration may store up trouble for the future. So, question: is this another self-serving case of “there are no permanent friends or enemies but permanent interests”? Or is it something much deeper? Some are rightly sceptical.

In 2022, Kwankwaso said he could not serve as Obi’s running mate because he was older, more experienced and better educated. Kwankwaso, now 69, is a former deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, former minister of defence, former governor and former senator, with a PhD in civil engineering, while Obi, 64, has only held one political office – governor – and holds only a first degree. Thus, in 2022, Kwankwaso argued that Obi should be his running mate, not the other way round. But Obi countered then, and repeated it recently, that while he did not have a PhD and had not held many political offices, his experience as a “wealth creator”, who “built reputable businesses from scratch locally and internationally”, trumped Kwankwaso’s political and academic experience. These are radically different perspectives on governance, one based on intellectual and political experience, the other on business acumen. But can two politicians who hold such diametrically opposed philosophical positions about the qualifications for political power work harmoniously together as boss and subordinate in power?

Indeed, in 2022, Kwankwaso made a more fundamental point that it would be difficult for core Northerners to vote for a presidential candidate from the South-East even if he was the running mate. He said the South-East “are good in business and are well talented but they should learn politics,” adding that “in politics, they are at the bottom.” But if Kwankwaso held those views about Obi and the South-East in 2022, what changed so dramatically to justify an alliance in which he is now enthusiastically willing to serve as Obi running mate in next year’s presidential poll?