HOW APC RENEGADES SOLD OUT IN ADAMAWA-Hunohashi
The outcome of the presidential and national assembly elections of Adamawa State will certainly remain in the media spotlight and the minds of pundits for a very long time.
This is predicated on the seeming paradox of the inability to secure the state for the re-election of President Muhammadu Buhari and two senatorial zones that were conceded to the opposition PDP.
It should be fresh in the minds of political observers how Sen. Bindow surmounted the impediments that were put on his path by a group of renegades within the APC to deny him a second term, for no apparent reason other than personal and selfish ambition.
The political battles Sen Bindow has fought, and literally surviving all of them, began with his ambition to run for the nigerian senate in 2011.
He contested against former governor Boni Haruna and rtd, Gen Mana. He defeated the two political heavy weights for the senate seat.
When providential opportunity presented itself in 2015, he took a direct shot at the governorship seat and won convincingly, but not devoid of a logjam that saw him contesting the primary election two times, against the candidate of former Vice President, Alh Atiku Abubakar.
Sen Bindow took the oath of allegiance to deliver the much needed and never-seen-before dividends of good governance, which he has demonstrated with tangible projects that dot the landscape of the rural agrarian state.
Perhaps embarrassing to a few that have coveted that office in the past and failed, they constituted themselves into a cabal of sorts with the sole aim of casting a slur on the integrity of the amiable governor and the ultimate selfish desire to deny him a second term, exacerbating a needless in-fight.
In the run up to the 2019 general elections, Sen Bindow has been unrelenting in drumming up support and re-election of President Muhammadu Buhari and the ruling APC.
But the self seeking renegades would not see any modicum of reason to work in tandem with the governor; rather they constituted a worthless cog in the wheel of progress in the state.
Firstly, the likes of Gen Buba Marwa rtd, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, Sen Mo’Allahidi, the disgraced SGF Babachir Lawal, Markus Gundiri and Halilu Modi, led the renegade group to make vituperative comments on the person of the governor, using the media.
It would be recalled that in the run up the election that produced the governor as the standard bearer of the APC in the state, they resorted to blackmail and the handy might of Abuja to shift the polls twice. Sen Bindow took the affront with equanimity and won his primary election convincingly.
But the bubble would not burst for the renegade group until the outcome of the presidential and national assembly elections that saw Sen Bindow delivering his polling unit, ward and local government with over 26 thousand votes, defeating PDP that got 23 thousand.
Leaders of the renegade group, Gen Marwa, Ribadu, Gundiri, Babachir could not deliver their units.
Sen Mo’Allahidi lost because he has never been on the same political page with his constituency of southern Adamawa, while Sen Binta Garba had to taste the bitter pill of defeat because things have fallen apart between her and the people of her ancestral home of Michika.
This spectacle of loses might perhaps be different if all the APC political giants had eschewed bickering and pulled resources together as well as forged a common front to work for the common good of the people of Adamawa State.
The party would have been basking in the euphoria of a convincing victory and not celebration of a pyrrhic victory.