By Segun Ayobolu
For many of those, particularly state governors, who have adopted a scorched earth policy to ensure the removal from office of the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, at all costs and by all means, they do not seem to have pondered the incalculable harm they are inflicting on a party that remains fragile despite its superlative showing in the 2015 elections that saw the dislodgement from power at the centre of a party, The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), that had exercised suzerainty over the polity for over a decade and half since 1999.
Seeming to drink from the same stupefying brew that had misled some chieftains of the erstwhile ruling party to dream and loudly proclaim its capability to wield power continuously at the centre for an unbroken period of six decades, the fractious, endlessly quarrelsome and bickering APC leadership appear to suffer from an inexplicable and ultimately self-destructive hubris. In striving with murderous intensity and perpetual surreptitious treachery and back-biting to undo and back-stab one another, arrow heads of these ruling party factions and fractions apparently do not realize that they are nibbling, chipping away slowly but surely at the clay feet of a giant statute with which they seek to achieve their higher future political ambitions.
In their wild and unbridled calculations and maneuvering towards 2023, these APC party top shots act as if the country runs a one-party or one party-dominant system and that victory in the next general elections is theirs for the picking on a platter of gold. Nothing could be more self-deceptive. The outcome of the vote in 2015 was as much a vote for the change espoused by the emergent APC as it was a vote of no confidence in the venality and industrial-scale non-performance of the bumbling Dr Goodluck Jonathan administration. Many of those who enthusiastically supported the APC’s assumption of office in 2015 had become thoroughly disenchanted and lukewarm in their affection for the party just four years after.
This is why, despite the grave moral baggage carried by the PDP as a result of the revelation of the relentless corruption of its top shots by an unsparing ruling party, the vicious psychological blows inflicted on the party by an often self-righteous APC and the ferocious damage done to the party’ image, the PDP still had every reason to be happy with its performance in the 2019 polls. Anyone who thinks the PDP is dead and buried is living in a fool’s paradise. Given the requisite visionary leadership and strategic re-branding, the PDP still has what it takes to bounce back meaningfully in Nigeria’s unpredictable political terrain.
It is thus important for the ambitious APC chieftains not to exaggerate either their moral superiority or more proficient performance ability compared to their colleagues in the PDP. A more sober self-assessment would certainly engender a more cautious disposition on the part of APC leaders in handling the various intra-party crises in which they are embroiled including the ongoing desperate attempts by factions within the party to do its National Chairman in before the next general elections all for selfish, partisan and pecuniary considerations.
Those who are today seemingly firmly united in their onslaught against Oshiomhole will be grossly mistaken to assume that the driving personal ambitions that motivate their actions today will not still further tear them further apart even if they succeed in their schemes and machinations to remove the National Chairman. They are lucky that they have a common foe in Oshiomhole today, which gives them the semblance of unity as a cohesive and impregnable front. Remove that common target and the same raw and naked passion driving their actions now with scant regard for the party or the overall polity will get further inflamed and uncontrollable. They will be horribly scorched by the flames of unbridled ambition and their party also severely damaged in the process.
It is all too easy for the party membership and leadership opposed to Oshiomhole to forget what the state of the APC was before the former labour leader’s emergence as National Chairman. The somnolent, indolent and indulgent leadership of the party under the watch of the Chief Odigie-John Oyegun-led National Working Committee (NWC), was about to profit from its own incompetence and lethargy. Contending that the 2015 elections were too close at hand for intra-party primaries to be held for party and elective offices, the Oyegun leadership was pursuing the path of all incumbent party and elective office holders to continue in office without what it perceived as being incommoded by distracting and largely self-defeating intra-party elections.
This position no doubt suited the whims and caprices of many governors seeking automatic tickets for a second term or those who had completed their two terms but sought to impose their surrogates to succeed them in office. It goes without saying that the Oyegun-led NWC had virtually surrendered control of the party to the all powerful and financially munificent state governors. Luckily, President Muhammadu Buhari would not be persuaded by such self-serving logic and insisted that intra-party elections must hold for all positions – party or elective. Each chapter of the party was given the option of adopting open direct primaries involving all duly elected registered members voting, emergence of candidates through delegates’ election or the adoption of candidates through consensus arrangement involving all party stakeholder at all levels. PMB himself chose to go through the direct primaries system, which is the most democratic and least prone to financial manipulations, through which he emerged as the presidential candidate of the APC for the 2019 elections.
Given the new wave of judicial activism by the courts in pronouncing on election petitions, the APC would have suffered most likely more of the kind of reverses it experienced in Rivers, Zamfara and Bayelsa states had the president not agreed with Oshiomhole and stood steadfastly for transparent and credible intra-party primaries in accordance with the party’s constitutional stipulations. There is no doubt that Oshiomhole had stepped on the toes of formerly all powerful party potentates particularly the governors. Even those governors perceived to have close personal relationships with PMB could not get Oshiomhole to accede to their machinations to impose their surrogates as successors. He was perceived in these circles as stubborn, petulant, intransigent and lacking in capacity for pragmatic leadership. What, however, emerged was a ruling party with greater organizational verve, institutional discipline and focus than hitherto obtained before Oshiomhole’s emergence as its chief helmsman.
Unfortunately, the frequent diversions and disruptive distractions by rebellious elements within the APC have made it impossible for Oshiomhole to proceed in any tangible way with the requisite ideological rebranding, philosophical reorientation and organizational re-tooling of the APC to transform it into a real and viable political party in every sense of the word. Matters have not been helped by the fact that right in his own home state, he faces the most vicious and vehement opposition from a governor, Godwin Obaseki that he did everything to install in office as his successor after two terms in office. But it appears to me that the major issue in Edo now is not the so-called ingratitude of the incumbent to his supposed political benefactor; it is the virtual legislative coup carried out by the governor through which he rules the state with a minority of House of Assembly members with 14 legislators forcefully emasculated and their constituencies disenfranchised. Surely, no governor who is a thoroughbred democrat, committed to the rule of law and due process would so enthusiastically preside over such brazen impunity.
I have heard it argued in some quarters that Oshiomhole has brought the temperament and supposedly intolerant disposition of a trade union leader to the performance of his functions as National Chairman of the APC. That, it is said, is responsible for his alleged inflexibility, stubbornness and lack of diplomacy or tact in handling problems within a political party. Those who reason this way betray a terrible ignorance of the nature and character of trade unions and particularly of the labour movement in Nigeria with its rich tradition of democratic, organizational practice except during some of the aberrant years of military rule.
The truth is that nothing prepares anybody better to lead a democratic, mass based organization like a political party than training in trade union leadership and management. Nigeria’s labour unions are better and more democratically organized than many of our political parties. Their organs are alive and functioning and no one can sit at the apex of the organization and take solitary decisions without following due process. It can only be hoped that the APC would not have cast aside the pearl it has in Oshiomhole before appreciating its true value. This is, of course, not to suggest that the APC National Chairman does not have to work hard on refining his modus operandi and alleged character flaws where such is warranted in the interest of the party and the polity. But then will a flawless National Chairman of the ruling party emerge from outer space?
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