No Alliance

There will be no alliance between the CPC and the ACN, and no alliance between the ANPP and the ACN.

The ACN blames the CPC, but the truth is I never believed any such alliance had a snowball's chance in the Sahara.

If the parties (and individuals) in question were similarly disposed to any specific ideological, philosophical, political or policy orientation,they might been inspired to unite their forces to achieve their common aims.

It is not that their "ideology" was different.

It is that neither of them have much of an ideology to begin with.

You have two entities that formed for no other reason that to acquire power for their owners, same as PDP or any other Nigerian party. And that is the crux of the problem.

Tinubu created the ACN to place power in the hands of Tinubu.

Buhari created CPC to place power in the hands of Buhari.

Tinubu is intelligent enough to know Buhari wants all the power and doesn't want to share it.

Buhari is intelligent enough to know that Tinubu wants all the power and doesn't want to share it.

They both know that a fundamental tactic of competition for power in Nigeria and all over the Africa is convincing a rival to get his ethnic/regional/religious/factional supporters to support you in a fight for power. Once you get that power, you then use the security services to crush your erstwhile collaborator.

There is nothing that exists on this planet that would make Tinubu or Buhari trust that the other man would not turn around and dump him as soon as power was acquired. Our constitution is just a piece of paper that all governments ignore, our laws are fantastic but are never applied, our contracts are difficult to judicially enforce, and even a gentleman's agreement (like the PDP presidential rotation) can and will be broken as soon as power is tasted.

Yes, there was Olu Falae and Umaru Shinkafi in 1999, but add in Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar, and you are talking about four fingers of the same hand, operating under an Army-run election designed to produce a government that would ignore the crimes of the Babangida and Abacha regimes and allow the civilian and military beneficiaries of those regimes to enjoy their loot in peace.

With the likes of Tinubu and Buhari, you are talking about entirely counterpoised, power-hungry political giants, with electoral machines to match. In a Fourth Republic dominated by the big tent, Big Man consensus that is the PDP, men like Tinubu and Buhari are so driven by their own private, personal ambitions that they stand apart and still survive despite clashing repeatedly with the mass of Big Men called PDP.

The idea that one of them would bow down for the other? It was never gonna happen.