If treachery is not second nature to Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State, then, the Pope is not Catholic. Since his early days in politics, Tambuwal has left a catalogue of broken friendships in his trail on the altar of inordinate ambition. Employed as a legislative aide in 2000 by Senator Abdullahi Wali who brought him from Sokoto to Abuja, Tambuwal would later lock horns with his benefactor in the 2015 governorship election.
Wali contested on the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, platform while Tambuwal was the All Progressives Congress, APC, candidate. He actually defected from the PDP when he saw that the party preferred Wali to him. He won the election. Meanwhile, his wife, Mairo is Senator Wali’s younger sister.
In 2015, when the Speakership slot of the House of Representatives was Lagos legislator, Femi Gbajabiamila’s to be taken, one of the forces he relied on was Tambuwal, the immediate past Speaker and his friend from their early days in the National Assembly as young, first-time legislators in 2003. Gbajabiamila supported Tambuwal’s ambition in 2011 to be Speaker and he expected the same from an old friend. Alas, Tambuwal bared his fangs and threw his weight behind current Speaker, Yakubu Dogara.
In the run-up to the 2019 general elections, Tambuwal sought but lost the presidential ticket of the PDP to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. He fancied himself as a potential candidate and had the support of other PDP governors who find him more accessible than Atiku. When Atiku won, the PDP rallied around him including all the losing presidential aspirants.
However, it has emerged that Tambuwal particularly only supported the Waziri as far as it would not hamper his own ambition. Atiku lost the election proper to President Muhammadu Buhari and he has been scrutinising two states in particular; Sokoto and Kano States. The former vice president is reported to be suspicious of the results from the state, believing that perhaps Tambuwal traded him away. It would be recalled that the PDP only mustered 391,593 votes in Kano and 361,604 votes in Sokoto State during the presidential election, while the party polled a whopping 1,024,713 votes in Kano and 512,002 votes in Sokoto during the governorship race.
Atiku’s associates believe that Tambuwal and former Kano governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, did not wholeheartedly work for his success in the presidential election because they were scheming for their own presidential ambition in 2023. The belief in Atiku’s camp is that Kwankwaso and Tambuwal preferred that President Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) won the election in the belief that he would quit the political scene after his second term while his domineering influence would vanish thus paving the way for them.
An Atiku presidency, on the other hand, would eclipse their influence and their say in the PDP during the eight years he would most likely spend in the office, while their popularity would wane considerably. For now, Atiku is ruing ever having anything to do with the Sokoto State governor.
