Idowu Akinlotan
At least three newspapers and most online media quoted President Muhammadu Buhari’s admonition to his party during the last All Progressives Congress (APC) National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting as suggesting that he could henceforth afford to be reckless since he would not be seeking a third term. Other newspapers, this newspaper included, quoted him as saying he could not afford to be reckless. It is not clear who was right, or whether the president’s elocutionary difficulties were responsible for what many thought was a gaffe.
Here is how this newspaper, in one breath, quoted him from his November 22, 2019 statement to his party’s NEC: “I’m not going to make the mistake of attempting a third term. Besides age, I swore by the holy book that I would go by the constitution, and the constitution said two terms. I know that I’m in my last term and I cannot afford to be reckless because I’m not going to ask for anybody’s vote.”
On the other hand, The Cable online, The Guardian and many other media outfits quoted the president as saying he could afford to be reckless, while The Nation and Daily Trust were, in another breath, undecided, even ingenious. On November 22, Trust quoted the president as saying he could not afford to be reckless, while Nation quoted him as saying he could. But on November 23, Trust quoted him online as saying he could afford to be reckless, while Nation on the same date quoted him as saying he couldn’t. Perhaps this is all due to elocutionary difficulties, or maybe it has nothing to do with any difficulty. Indeed, putting the statement in context, it is inconceivable that he said he could not afford to be reckless. It had to be that he said he could. In any case, his media team has not alleged contradictory or inaccurate reports. Like The Nation and Daily Trust, they prefer to leave the reader puzzled.
This column will, however, not guess. The president, by his actions years before and weeks after the NEC meeting in question has shown a contradictory, unenviable and unhealthy view of his party’s politics in office. He wonders whether the party can survive him, whether it will continue to be strong, and whether it can last for a very long time. He probably has the fate that befell the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in mind, a party which held sway for 16 years and thought it would last for at least another five decades, only to implode spectacularly in 2015. The scale of the defeat, not to say its unexpectedness, has so traumatised the former ruling party that its politics and bureaucracy have become deeply stultified. President Buhari is, therefore, right, like Nebuchadnezzar, to wonder what would happen after his tenure. It is a legitimate concern, and the president must be applauded for thinking aloud.
But any applause ends there. The president’s instincts are sometimes flawless, it must be admitted. For instance, he knows instinctively that corruption stymies development, and that Boko Haram should be defeated. What he lacks in effecting his purpose are discipline, despite his military background, depth, and intuition to enunciate the right panaceas for many of the problems Nigeria is contending with. At 77, it is pointless expecting him to acquire some of those virtues when most of his adult life and the two periods he has ruled Nigeria were almost completely shorn of those desperately needed qualities. Indeed, in the light of the Department of State Service (DSS) invasion of the Federal High Court in Abuja on December 6, and despite his team’s desultory explanations and his own comments during his party’s last NEC meeting, it may be time to ponder what fate awaits the APC after President Buhari’s second term.
Four major planks will determine the party’s life and survival after the Buhari presidency. Already the presidency is wobbling very badly, is completely ideologically vacuous, and is increasingly despised locally and doubted internationally. It may be too early to say it is unravelling, but it is clear that more observers are beginning to understand that the Buhari presidency as well as his party lack finesse, discipline, and vision. By pondering whether his party could survive him or not, the president was merely giving expression to his fears. He knows that all is not well with his party; but why he does not equally appreciate that he is largely responsible for the problem is hard to explain. The problem is not the party’s chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, regardless of what those close to him say; and the problem is also not the party itself, for it was strong, cohesive and imaginative enough to deliver the presidency to him, despite being unqualified to win a pan-Nigerian mandate to lead a secular and multiethnic country.
The four planks are national and party unity; the economy; democracy and the rule of law; and partisan politics and elections. The problem of party and national unity is huge and, given the puny talents and weights of the presidency and party leaders, difficult to surmount. If the APC is to outlast the president’s meretricious influence, it must respond well to these props and gradually put ideas and structures in place to whittle down his influence and elevate the party to respectability within and outside its four corners. That will not be easy. Moments after winning the presidency in 2015, the president had indifferently placed the party in the hands of outsiders, a group of men whose talents and worldviews appear inimical to party growth and cohesion as well as national unity due to the extremeness of their insularity and machinations. To ask the president to retake the levers of control from the hands of these men, given his abjuration of his own talents and ability, is to force him to self-immolate. He is unlikely to contemplate any such revolutionary approach to power and politics.
To further muddle the hazy and abridged opinion of national unity enunciated and given wing by this small group of men is the president’s own fallacy about party and national unity. He fails to comprehend the dynamics of the personalities and ideas cobbled together to birth the APC, and still prefers to run or view the party from the perspective of how his former party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), was rendered ineffective. His excessive demand for deference, and his preference for operating like a camorra are at variance with the robustness, boisterousness and debates that hallmark successful political parties. The feisty Mr Oshiomhole is accustomed to the steroids that drive political parties; but the often distracted president is enervated by them — indeed he finds them repugnant. Peace within his party, like peace in the country, will come only through justice, compromise, principles and ideology. It will not come by diktat. And it will certainly not come by the enormous pressure being brought to bear on the president by his close friends who have various agenda to foist.
But far more than the crises in the APC, the president must find ways of dealing with his own intrinsic divisiveness and the centrifugal policies his government continues to enunciate and implement. Again, this will require his self-immolation. He has concentrated most security appointments to his own side of the country, almost as if his mind wanders back and forth to the past century, unwisely allows the setting up of needless and expensive universities by security agencies, again in his own part of the country, and seems very casually to be inured to social and economic policies that drive inclusiveness and unity. Can he make amends in the next two years before he becomes lame duck? Maybe the question to ask is whether he is persuaded that these problems even exist, and that they do not conduce to party and national unity?
On the question of democracy and the rule of law, the president fares much worse than on the subject of party and national unity. He wants the APC to survive him. Good. But what are his and his party’s opinions on democracy and the rule of law? He takes umbrage at a newspaper, The Punch, for describing him as trapped in dictatorship, and prefixing his name with his military title. But has he asked himself whether he fits the mould of a democratic president? In nearly five years of the Buhari presidency, the president has neither said one genuinely kind word about democracy nor isolated the subject of the rule of law to embellish it. Instead he has repeatedly sought ways, including nebulous and dishonest interpretations of the law, to subordinate the rule of law and democracy to extreme reactionary interpretation of national security, and encouraged security agencies to treat both concepts disdainfully through court invasions, disobedience to court orders, mistreatment of travellers at checkpoints, and the institutionalisation of a climate of fear at state and federal levels. The atmosphere is so bad and stifling that the president now seems to be increasingly uniting the people against his person, party and government. How he expects his party to survive this bad image is hard to see.
The APC itself has taken a cue from the president and has spoken only briefly and incoherently about democracy and the rule of law. Nobody remembers where they stand on both subjects. Instead, the party is now viewed with suspicion for its replication of PDP-style politics and governance, a style pockmarked by misgoverned states, extreme castration of state legislatures, imperial governorship, weakened judiciary, and cowed populace. Neither the president nor the party has answers to these anomalies. In fact, within the APC itself, a battle is still raging. Until that battle is fought and won, it will be difficult for them to speak one way or the other of what they think of democracy or the rule of law, or whether their positions on both subjects are qualitatively different from those of the party they edged out of office in 2015. It is also doubtful whether in three years the president and his party can get democracy and the rule of law exhumed and entrenched. If they had started in 2015, perhaps there would be a ray of hope. But now, after they appear set in their ways, and after they have been rewarded with a fresh term despite their loathing and mistreatment of both concepts, there is little or no incentive for them to foster any democratic virtue. As the president himself said, and has begun to practicalise, he could afford to be reckless. Yes, he can; but he must not also hope that the party would survive him after not having imbued it with anything virtuous or lasting.
- To be continued
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