“Ribadu as far as we are concerned is not in the picture of the next governor of Adamawa for now. He has to join the queue. There are already about 14 contenders for the position on PDP platform. You don’t expect the party to just hand the position to Ribadu when there are many party loyalists, who have followership and have built the party both financially and morally. Things don’t work that way. By the way, how would such a decision place us before the Adamawa people? It would mean that anybody can just come in from nowhere and get the ticket. That would not encourage party loyalty. Never! When he was going for the presidential ticket in 2011 under ACN we advised him to moderate his ambition; we told him to stay back in PDP but he wouldn’t listen. He has to join the queue, because there are already many party loyalists eyeing that position,” the source said.
While it has become difficult to say exactly why Ribadu decided to ditch APC, fillers revealed that the former EFCC boss was not happy “about how some prominent APC leaders sold him out in the then ACN.”
Some associates of Ribadu said the politician was unhappy by the APC’s lack of ability to resolve the conflicts within its fold and the lack of internal democracy in the party.
He was also said to be bitter that some leading chieftains of the party are increasingly being sidelined in the race for the presidential ticket of the party.
But a pundit disagreed with such excuses, saying, “to carpet cross from APC to PDP on the promise of an automatic ticket is fraudulent and quite unlike Nuhu Ribadu, and the repercussion will be a lost character and bearing for such a brilliant personality. It would have served better if he had pocketed the dollars in the Ibori case. It also assumes that PDP is the winning party by hook or by crook, and watching what happened in Osun gives me hope that you do not have to be in PDP in order to win”.
“My worry is for Nuhu Ribadu who has held promise to succeed Muhammadu Buhari as a principled patriot, building for himself a clean and unblemished record of never compromising with fraud. It disturbs, to imagine a betrayed Muhammadu Buhari whose name alone guaranteed some governors in office today, the seats that they occupy, and Nuhu certainly, equally stands to benefit from the name,” the analyst said.
Death of ideology?
Since Ribadu joined the opposition, he has always accused the PDP of not having internal democracy. At rallies, he had claimed that APC was the party to belong to and a party that would take Nigeria to the dream land. The question many people are asking now is: what happened to the APC ideology he had so much extolled?
Critics believe that a person who believes in his/her ideology can never be bought over no matter what happens. Sometime ago, Ribadu, at a public lecture organised by the Students Representative Council of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, gave some attributes and definitions of a politician.
According to him, “a politician is a conscious citizen of a country; a politician is a thinker and volunteer; a politician is a humanist and patriot…”
Ribadu had also, at various times and several occasions, said that the late Gani Fawehinmi’s mentorship helped him in shaping his ideological stance.
He said he met the frontline human rights lawyer while serving as a pupil lawyer at the military Special Investigative Panel during the short-lived Buhari/Idiagbon regime.
According to him, Fawehinmi provided him with critical pieces of advice and mentorship lessons that continue to serve as his guiding light to this day. He also said that his tutelage under Fawehinmi sharpened his resolve to continue to fight the cause of the poor and subsequently join the Nigerian Police Force.
In reaction to his claim of following in the steps of Fawehinmi, a pundit doubted the truth of his claim in the light of his alleged latest move and some of his actions in the past.
A commentator recently observed: “Ribadu once said former Lagos State governor and APC chieftain, Bola Tinubu was a corrupt fellow, but later contested on his defunct ACN platform, running away from his initial claim. Fawehinmi legally fought Tinubu, especially for alleged forgery of school certificate by the former governor. Why did Ribadu not contest on Fawehinmi, his mentor’s political party (NCP) instead of ACN?