By Segun Ayobolu
Rising from an emergency meeting of its National Executive Committee (NEC) On Thursday, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) called on President Muhammadu Buhari to immediately convene a national conference to deliberate on and proffer solutions to the country’s current grave security crisis. One would expect the PDP to go further and offer its own concrete proposals on how to more effectively secure lives and property across the country. For, the crisis we confront transcends partisan, ethnic, religious or other sectional colorations. In the final analysis, all of us are potential victims and there is no way we can play politics, worship, work, play or do any worthwhile thing without a safe, secure and stable country in the first place.
But the PDP at least deserves commendation for addressing its mind to the security challenges and adding its voice to the calls for urgent action. Pray, where is the voice of the national leadership of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in all of this? It is all funereal silence on the APC front even as President Muhammadu Buhari is under fire from all sides including APC lawmakers for his perceived failure to rise to the occasion and stem the daily regression to anarchy.
Will the few overly ambitious elements in the APC, who exploited their closeness to and professed affection for President Buhari to manipulate the presidency into agreeing with the plot not only to destabilize but to illegally sack the comrade Adams Oshiomhole-led National Working Committee (NWC) of the party, agree that they did not just the incumbent administration but the entire country a great disservice? It is unlikely. For them, it does not matter that the attendant intra-party instability is a key contributory factor to distracting the Buhari administration from focusing on decisively addressing the grave security crisis that, consuming scores of innocent lives across the country on a daily basis, casts a heavy pall over the otherwise impressive achievements of the government in the areas of infrastructure renewal, diversification of the economy and poverty alleviation for the most vulnerable segments of the populace.
At a time like this when the country is to all practical purposes on a war footing, the National Executive of the ruling party must be at the vanguard of mobilizing and coordinating its members in both the executive and legislative arms of government to respond coherently and productively to the crisis at hand. Alas, the APC has at its helm at this critical moment an unelected, unconstitutional and illegitimate Extraordinary Caretaker and National Convention Planning Committee that has, in the last few months, dissolved elected party structures at all levels and embarked on re-registration of old members and admission of new ones.
Of course, going by the party constitution, membership registration is not rocket science. It is a routine affair that goes on continuously at ward levels as new members are registered and exiting members are delisted. This should surely not consume the enormous time, money and energy that the APC interim national executive has expended on the exercise at a time when all hands should be on deck to effectively tackle challenges that threaten the country’s very existence.
Since the forthcoming utterly unplanned, unanticipated and unscheduled ward, local government and state congresses as well as National Convention of the party are part of deliberate machinations by particular fractions and caucuses to seize control of its structures to place their members in prime position to fly the APC’s flag for various electoral positions in future, the next few months will predictably be further distracting and enervating for the party at a time of grave national emergency. This is particularly so as the intra-party crises in some of the states have indeed deepened since the new developments in the party.
Just how costly is the ongoing focus on politicking rather than governance by a ruthless caucus bent on seizing control of the APC to further their future political aspirations? A good answer to this question can be found in the invasion and capture by fighters of Boko Haram and the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) of Geidam, a town in Yobe state, on Friday, 23 April. The terrorists reportedly attacked and took control of the town in eight trucks, cut down masts of communication companies, murdered several residents and caused over 2000 people to flee the community. Some may wonder what exactly is strange about this kind of incident that, after all, has become routine across the length and breadth of the north. The point is that the governor of Yobe State, Mr. Mai Mala Buni, no matter how much he denies it, has been distracted from focusing on his job and the single-minded implementation of his electoral mandate by his tasking appointment as Chairman of the APC’s interim national caretaker committee.
The unsavory situation in which the APC finds itself today is needless. Forging the legacy parties that merged to wrest power from the PDP into a cohesive and coherent whole is no easy task. It will require all the mental energy, focus, organizational and strategic ability of the party leadership particularly at the early phases of the party’s existence as is the case with the APC now. Mistakes will naturally be made and feathers ruffled as coalition partners strive to understand each other and evolve better organizational coherence and philosophical resonance. Rough edges of programmatic as well as ideological platforms must be continually strengthened and harmonized. The difficulties and hiccups that arise cannot be resolved through unconstitutional power grabs as currently being attempted, but by allowing the continuous exercise and institutionalization of intra-party democratic structures and processes.
No governor in any part of Nigeria today, no matter how peaceful and stable his state may be, must be saddled with the additional burden of performing the role of leading his party as interim national chairman – not even for a minute. The masterminds of the present contrived crisis within the ruling party clearly did not rigorously think their action through. If they had, they would not have picked a governor from the North-East, the epicenter of the current terror and insurgency, to preside over the affairs of the party for what is turning out to be an indeterminate period. Governors particularly in that region must be alert on their duty posts round the clock.
In addition to the security challenges that have taken a heavy toll on the economy particularly the fertile, agricultural food basket regions of the north, the coronavirus pandemic has severely affected the country’s major revenue source, crude oil exports. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has given notice to states that, as a result of the crippling burden of the oil subsidy it bears, its humongous contribution to the Federation Account may drop to zero for some months. Every governor must thus be fully preoccupied with making his state financially viable in order to continue to enhance the wellbeing of the people. At a time of national security and economic emergency as we have now, the ruling party cannot afford to allow petty politicking, driven by selfish ambition, to override serious and purposeful governance. Despite Yobe state’s immense agricultural and natural endowments, she is one of the poorest states in Nigeria and the ruling party should ensure that Mai Mala Buni can speedily begin to concentrate fully on the job he was elected to do.
After two decades of unbroken electoral governance since 1999, it cannot be confidently asserted that Nigerians are materially better off today than they were in the preceding military dispensation even though it remains true that the worst democratic rule will always be better than the best despotic governance. One of the reasons why democracy is so far not being the handmaiden of development we expect it to be is the continued prevalence of what the late Professor Claude Ake described as “the overpoliticisation of social life” even though he used this term within the context of despotic rule in post-colonial Africa.
As Ake put it with characteristic vividness, “Because of their insecurity, the political class placed a high premium on power. They accumulated power by all means, did everything to secure it and to prevent others from gaining it. As rulership became permanent, politics became Hobbesian: power was pursued by all means and kept by all means and the struggle for power became the overriding concern”. This attitude and disposition to power has not changed even within the framework of the democratization of politics and it is the fundamental reason for the current ongoing attempted hostile takeover of the APC by a faction of the party. Incidentally, it was the crisis engendered by this kind of attempted ‘totalizing’ control by a hegemonic faction of the PDP that ultimately led to the end, in 2015, of its 16-year hold on power at the centre.
Thus, intra and inter party electoral contests are difficult to distinguish from warfare. Hardly does one election end before politicking for the next one begins leaving scant room for governance. Whether they are bandits, terrorists, insurgents or secessionists, those committed to the ruination of Nigeria have a common purpose and work in, admittedly unintended, concert. Ironically, those who have the most to gain by the continued existence of the country, as the elected custodians of state power, do everything to undercut, undermine and repress one other in the quest for power dominance with scant respect for the constitutive and regulative rules of the game thus greatly aiding the destructionists in achieving their objective. Until ceaseless and lawless power mongering ceases to be a distraction from and an obstacle to focused, productive and purposeful governance, politics will continue to underdevelop rather than develop Nigeria.
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