Mr. Peter Obi, former Anambra State Governor and LP (Labour Party) presidential candidate in the 2023 election, recently pledged he would serve only one term if elected president in 2027. Essentially to reassure political leaders from a section of the country of his commitment to the zoning arrangement. “Longevity in office is not a mark of success; rather, it is purposeful, accountable service — however brief — that defines true statesmanship,” Obi wrote last week, in a statement reaffirming his pledge while also referencing the late South African icon, Mr. Nelson Mandela and former American Presidents Abraham Lincoln and J.F. Kennedy, as worthy examples. “My vow to serve only one term of four years if elected President is sacrosanct.”

Before we proceed to the practicality of Obi’s promise under the current dispensation in Nigeria, it is important to first put it in proper context. While there is nothing in the constitution that precludes any politician from seeking the presidency of Nigeria based on which part of the country they hail from, there is an unspoken arrangement that guides presidential elections every season. It is within this context that Dr. Goodluck Jonathan has suddenly become the darling of the same politicians who conspired to upend his presidency in 2015, after failing to prevent his elevation to the office four years earlier in 2011.

Perhaps we should take the story from May 2010. Following the death of my principal, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, there was a strong agitation in the North that only politicians from the region should contest the 2011 presidential election on the platform of then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). That proposition—based on the zoning arrangement that the presidency should rotate between the North and South—was meant to foreclose the aspiration of Jonathan who was then the incumbent president. The stake was raised higher on 21st November 2010 when the Northern Political Leaders Forum (NPLF) led by the late Mallam Adamu Ciroma endorsed former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as the ‘consensus PDP presidential candidate’ from the region. Other northern aspirants, including General Ibrahim Babangida and Dr. Bukola Saraki, were encouraged to withdraw from the race for Atiku. And they all did.

In accepting the PDP ‘northern mandate’ at the time, Atiku called on Jonathan to perish his presidential ambition. “The unity of this country, equity and justice require that existing agreements freely entered into by individuals and groups be respected,” Atiku stated while canvassing the same argument that is now being used to attack his aspiration for the presidency. “We are a diverse people who recognized early in our history that national unity, fairness and equity require that we share positions of power among our diverse peoples. That is what we call zoning/rotation of public offices.”

Although Jonathan contested the PDP presidential primaries where he defeated Atiku, the support he enjoyed from a section of the northern political establishment, including then serving governors, was said to be conditional: He would spend only one term in office. His attempt to renege on that ‘agreement’ ended in defeat when he sought re-election in 2015. Ironically, this same cold calculation that worked against Jonathan in the past has now made him the most preferred politician when it comes to which southern candidate should challenge President Bola Tinubu in 2027. The main attraction for the hegemons behind the idea of a Jonathan-for-president campaign is that he and Tinubu are the only two southerners who are statute-barred from seeking another term in office should they win the next election.

While it is easy to see the sectional machination behind the lobby to have Jonathan run in the 2027 general election, aspiring under such a compromised arrangement has dire implications for him and the ambition of Peter Obi. That is because the only platform under which the former president can run is the PDP whose leaders are already openly pleading with Obi to come back and possibly become their presidential candidate for the 2027 election. Even if Obi contests on the LP ticket or on another platform, a Jonathan run would create another crowded field that can only be to the advantage of President Bola Tinubu. But the real issue at this point is whether ‘the North’ (interestingly, that is supposed to include me) would trust the promise of Obi to spend only one term in office if elected. The permutations that go into such high-stakes political conversations in Nigeria are about ‘sharing the national cake’. Apparently, the political elite in each of the major ethnic groups do not feel satisfied unless the man doing the sharing is one of their own. Considering the pattern in the distribution of opportunities, especially under the All Progressives Congress (APC) administrations since 2015, it is difficult to fault their concerns.

Meanwhile, Obi’s promise is based on appeasing group aspiration, in this case, the desire of the North to produce the 2031 president based on the oscillation of power between the two regions. That is precisely where the problem lies. In the event Obi wins, the compelling argument from his kinsmen in 2031 would then be that the Southwest held the presidency for 12 years with another eight years in the number two office, while the North held it for about 11 years plus 17 years in the vice presidency. Even the South-south held the presidency for five years plus three years in the vice presidency. Why then would a president from the Southeast spend only four years in Aso Rock and leave?

On Monday, Mr. Oseloka Obaze, a respected retired international diplomat who served as Secretary to the State Government when Peter Obi was Anambra governor, responded to that question. In his treatise titled, ‘Imperatives of single-term presidency’, Obaze explained that “the one-off single-term presidency debate is what Nigeria requires to move forward… it will address several distressing and persisting concerns, some subliminal and others, transparently concrete.” But he also admitted that Peter Obi’s declaration was “necessitated by political realities well beyond his control.” The ‘core North’, Obaze further argued, should support Obi’s plan in its enlightened self-interest “since their unfettered support for a Muslim-Muslim ticket in 2023 in a secular state like Nigeria has yielded less than the desirable dividends.” In what he described as “applying the Doctrine of Necessity” to give effect to Obi’s proposition, Osaloka highlighted what he considers the benefits, and they are worth rehashing here:

First, it keeps the North-South zoning arrangement intact. Second, it offers common grounds for the political opposition to rally to a consensus and form a formidable bloc capable of unseating the incumbent President. Third, it guarantees the North (whether monolithic or not) the uncontested assumption of the presidency in 2031, for an eight-year term, just as was the case in 2015. Fourth, it guarantees the South that their zoned eight-year tenure, 2023 to 2031, will be respected. Fifth, it reassures the progressive elements within the South-West, especially those in political opposition, that in seeking to unseat their kith and kin they will not be accused of breaching the zoning arrangement due to ethnic considerations. Sixth, and perhaps the most salient, it compels the South-East to make a huge sacrifice to serve only one term; to vouch to do so and indeed to do so as an affirmation that they can be trusted as integral players in Nigeria. This aspect will also bring to closure residual discomfitures from the Nigerian-Biafran civil war. Such a guarantee is one the entire South-East zone has to make, regardless of whether the presidential candidate is Peter Obi or not.

Before I conclude with my take on the substance of Obaze’s thesis, I believe he overstated his case with the idea that “the ultimate selling point” of Obi’s proposal “is that a President committed or constrained to one term will not be saddled with re-election responsibilities and will inevitably focus on his or her legacy projects and programmes, and other good governance deliverables and dividends.”

I beg to disagree. In the United States from where we copied the presidential system of government, the idea of a single term tenure was vigorously debated at the 1787 constitutional drafting convention in Philadelphia. Although Thomas Jefferson—the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and third president—initially canvassed a single seven-year term, he later became an advocate for “service for eight years with a power to remove at the end of the first four.” But it was Gouverneur Morris—often described as the ‘Penman of the American Constitution’ for writing the Preamble—who reportedly persuaded the convention that the one-term limitation would “destroy the great motive to good behaviour.” And he was backed by another Founding Father, Oliver Ellsworth who argued that a president “should be re-elected if his conduct prove worthy of it. And he will be more likely to render himself worthy of it if he be rewardable with it.”

From 1830 under Andrew Jackson to 1913 under Woodrow Wilson and 1983 under Ronald Reagan, this same idea of a presidential single term has elicited interesting conversations. In fact, in 1947 under President Harry Truman, during the debate on the 22nd Amendment which eventually culminated in limiting a president to two terms of four years in 1951, the American Senate defeated a single six-year term proposal by a vote of 82 to one. So, there is really nothing special about the idea. Besides, a constitutionally enshrined single-term tenure will not work for us in Nigeria. In fact, it could work against our democracy as has happened in some of the jurisdictions where constitutional change on tenure of the president has occurred. The argument could then be that since such a law cannot be retroactively applied, the incumbent president would take the first shot! We have seen such political mischief at play in many African countries in recent years.

What the foregoing suggests is that the real selling point of Obi’s pledge is not that a single term is better than the current renewable term of four years but rather that he (Obi) has decided that, to assure the North of his commitment to the zoning arrangement in the country, he would spend only one term in office if elected president in 2027. This may be good politics, but the bigger challenge for Obi is that with a multiplicity of opposition platforms and presidential aspirants, I am yet to see a serious commitment from the opposition to defeat the incumbent in a presidential election that is just about 17 months away. I also believe that there is merit to Obi’s aspiration beyond the narratives being pushed by his army of online supporters. In my January 2023 column, ‘How far can Peter Obi Go?’ in the days preceding the last presidential election, I alluded to this issue:

…Peter Obi’s aspiration ticks some important boxes. There was a revealing exchange last week in one of the WhatsApp chat groups to which I belong between two respected Igbo professionals during a discussion on what President Olusegun Obasanjo’s endorsement of Obi means. The first one wrote: “One nation, two oracles. One in Minna and the other, in Abeokuta. One North. One South. Balanced Republic!” Not long after came this riposte from the second person: “Typical! Once again, the Southeast is being marginalized… not even half an oracle. God dey!”

Although the interactions were in a lighter mood, I believe the second post sounded truer than the writer may have intended. If one were to extrapolate, the only reason why we have an ‘Oracle’ in Abeokuta and another one in Minna is because they have led Nigeria at different epochs. To the extent that we have not had a democratically elected civilian president (or military leader with sufficient time in office) from the Southeast, Nigeria has also not been blessed with an ‘oracle’ from the region. Given the tripodal (as in WaZoBia) nature of our political arrangement in Nigeria, one can then surmise that there is a value in Obi’s aspiration that transcends his personal ambition…

While we cannot continue to run our nation based on elite-fuelled manipulations that have nothing to do with the welfare of the downtrodden of our society, we must also confront our demons. The psychological exclusion of an important ethnic group from presidential power poses a serious problem that needs to be resolved by members of the political elite. I don’t know whether Obaze’s thesis will move the needle in the ongoing conversations about 2027, but it is nonetheless significant within the broader context of the North-South power rotation that has, even if by default, become an elite consensus in Nigeria.

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