Like an animal that has been in deep hibernation, the APC often wakes from its metabolic depression and general abdication of governance to frenetic, breakneck hyperactivity only to lapse into slumberous repose once again.
But there are times when the elements simply refuse to cooperate in defiance of the established laws of nature. A return to torpor is summarily ruled out. The hibernator in question must get on with it. Work is aplenty, and this is not to talk of unrest and widespread acrimony in the larger society. In order to maintain the illusionist fantasia, the factory of suspense and suspensions has to be kept working overtime.
The APC is like a smoke-filled, blood-splattered boardroom chamber after the last power mafia had been cleared out by force and by fire. The wailing of the mortally wounded and the weak moaning from the dying could still be heard in the distance. The odour of gore and smoking gunpowder pervades and persists.
The thunderous noise of artillery could still be heard in the background, suggesting unfinished business. The political remains of the men and women of power and substance who fell in the last uprising are being interred in the nearby Cemetery of Patriots. Curiously, a surviving parrot in the ante chamber is running a damning and subversive commentary on the men and women of timber and calibre.
It appears that the principal executioner, or Baba Mai Dumbu, is still very much around and alive despite exaggerated reports indicating otherwise. He may not be on top of actual governance, but those who accuse him of soporific lethargy or who believe that his indecision is final do not seem to appreciate that faking inactivity or even near death catalepsy is an old military ploy. Let us just say that Baba Mai Dumbu is a past master of the game.
The explosions rocking APC are like a cascading coup within an even bigger putsch incorporating the party convention and the actual presidential election itself, unless a superior force intervenes. Those who are not fit for purpose or are deemed surplus to requirement will be summarily defenestrated, never to be heard from in a long time. Political dirges will rent the air extolling the virtues of the faithful and asking their creator to grant them eternal repose.
It should be obvious by now that despite the appalling casualties and the collateral damage to the health of the nation and the whole notion of progressive politics, the civil war in the APC is set to continue. It is not a war amenable to compromise, consensus or conciliation. It is a duel unto death among hostile combatants with ruptured commonality. The modus operandi is political assassination and God marches on the side of the bigger battalions.
Despite the gore-filled boardroom floor with banana peels at every conceivable point, the new APC chairman might do very well. His not being a professional soldier notwithstanding, he must have taken some lessons from his father, Col Sani Bello, an old military governor of Kano State and former colleague of the incumbent head of state. The reticent and self-effacing elder Bello later made a seamless transition into the world of high-wire business deals and commerce upon retirement.
As for the outgone and outgunned former acting chairman, Mala Mai Buni and John Akpanudoedehe, the equally feckless and heedless secretary, they have had it coming for a long time. It was clear to all who could read the game that restless opportunism, immoderate ambition combined with sheer political obtuseness will push them in the direction of reckless self-help which must end in political annihilation.
For most of the time they chose to punch above their real weight, finally convincing themselves that they are invincible political heavyweights when they couldn’t even fight their way out of a paper bag. The real political heavyweights do not fight preliminary skirmishes with heavy artillery, preferring to lure their opponents into a false sense of strength and security until the sledgehammer descends.
Despite his quiet mien and reticent airs, Mai Buni’s conduct has been particularly repugnant and unworthy even in the zero-sum game of Nigerian politics. He was neither there to ameliorate his party’s image problem. Nor was he there to advance the cause of genuine democracy. Having virtually abandoned his constitutional duty as a serving governor, he was no longer distinguishable from an Abuja-based political huckster.
Akpanudoedehe was openly gaming to succeed the incumbent governor of his state while Mai Buni was said to have busied himself with securing an injunction to scupper his party’s convention and the very last chance of democratically electing its flag bearer in the coming presidential polls. With the nuclear bomb in his pocket, the Yobe state governor promptly disappeared into the bowels of sybaritic pleasure in Dubai to rendezvous with his latest wife while waiting for the appointed hour.
It was there in the paradise of torrid splendour that superior machinations met the flustered and self-deluded major domo while rehearsing his latest plot of party subversion. In the case of Akpanudoedehe, he had sealed his own fate by walking out on the new power supremoes before realising that the ground had actually shifted under him. His attempt to walk back his earlier rebellion was met with a stiff rebuff. The duo have been taught a memorable lesson in power play.
It is party politics as compelling movie. As we write, INEC has just put in the heavy boot even as APC objects. This column has averred many times that there has always been something surreal and intensely captivating about post-independence politics in Nigeria, particularly its post-military variety. It is a moveable feast of suspense and surprises; a cinematography of horror and intrigues in equal parts.
If this feels straight out of The Godfather, the film adaptation of Mario Puzo’s timeless classic, there is also a lot about it that recalls Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, a real life dramatization of the murderous exploits of a criminal and chronic offender who simply reverted to a life of crime and murder on being let off the hook by the state after a nation-wide campaign spearheaded by the great author himself.
Once criminality appears to be wired to the DNA, there is no point in bothering about restitution or correctional possibility. Unrepentant to the last moment on earth, Gary Gilmore famously fell to the executioner’s bullet cooing, “let’s do it!”
This is a gripping metaphor for the political class and the poverty of party formation in post-independence Nigeria. From what we are witnessing on a daily basis, and despite all the nonsensical babbling from those who put us in this mess, it is obvious that the poverty of politics has accelerated in post-military Nigeria, particularly in the last twenty years or so.
Once criminality and political delinquency are part of the genes of a dominant group, no amount of structural, systemic or institutional makeover can correct the anomaly until there is a collision of antagonistic forces which may lead to a higher reordering of human affairs through character remoulding.
It must be particularly galling to a lot of Nigerians that a party which proclaimed itself as a vehicle for change and national reformation cannot even get its own act together; not to talk of rolling up its sleeves to confront the rot threatening to overwhelm the entire nation. So critical and desperate has the situation become that it is no longer possible to proclaim oneself as a progressive without casting anxious and furtive glances across the shoulder.
Yet it has not always been like this. Despite the ruinous advent of the military in politics, progressive activism flourished in Nigeria after Obafemi Awolowo’s stellar performance in actual governance and his incandescent integrity out of it. It blossomed during the epic struggle to retire the military to the barracks.
Looking on from his grave thirty five years after he shed mortal remains for immortality, Awolowo would have struggled to acknowledge the claims of most of those who parade themselves as the heirs of his political tradition. Factoring into the equation the imperative of changing times and the necessity for evolving strategy, something still does not add up.
But despite not being able to make a significant dent on the nation’s problems, it will be unfair to cast the APC as the major villain in the national demonology. What we are dealing with may not be a party problem but a national problem rooted in institutional failure. As we have said in this column in the not too recent past, the progressive devaluation of politics leads to a gradual emasculation of progressive politics in particular.
This is the price we have to pay for the ruinous years under the institutionalised despotism of the military/feudal complex in Nigeria. Under feudal and military despotism, the progressive forces suffer grievously indeed. This is because their strange doctrine of equality, egalitarianism and economic freedom for all strikes at the root of authoritarian rule and traditional hierarchy.
The political persecution of the progressive tendency in Nigerian politics began under colonial rule, progressed with the First Republic, advanced through the Second Republic and finally reached its apogee with the annulment of the Abiola presidency in the aborted Third Republic. At the onset of the Fourth Republic, Obasanjo went after the progressive forces with maniacal fury and vengeance.
In retrospect, It would appear that the driving leitmotif of the Owu-born general was the political annihilation of those who had persecuted and electorally humiliated him even in his own polling booth. Unfortunately, progressive leaders on all sides of the political divide appear complicit in facilitating the destruction of their own group either out of vengeance-seeking or sheer political naivety.
By the time Obasanjo was leaving office, the AD had fractured so badly that it could no longer be regarded as a cohesive party. Given this background, we can now see why in the final analysis, the APC, or elements within it, as a self-advertised successor to a political tendency in grave historical crisis, is a victim of its own excessive rhetoric.
They became sorry captives of tropes and verbal flourish going beyond actual content and of a political shaman becoming a victim of its own sorcery. The dominant faction of the new party simply allowed these elements to entertain themselves with progressive drivels knowing fully well when they will pull the plug once they succeeded in capturing power.
As a conventional party in a semi-authoritarian post-military setup, there was no way the party could fulfil half of its promises without coming into terminal collision with forces of the status quo even within its own formation. It is a case of misplaced hope based on misbegotten expectation. The APC interpreted correctly the psychology of the Nigerian political crowd. The nation needed a bigger illusion to supplant the big illusion that was the PDP.
APC is a coliseum of contending forces so politically incompatible and mutually antagonistic that it requires an aloof, authoritarian figure at the apex to beat and bully it into shape. Thrice in a lifetime that is still less than a decade, it has had to rely on political assassination to effect a change of chairmanship. The only valid and valuable take away from this is of a warring conglomeration that can only be forced to do the needful by a superior authority wielding maximum force.
In the absence of shared political goals and a united vision of the country and its stellar possibilities, that superior authority itself will come under increasing peril as state largesse dwindles and hitherto manageable contradictions now become unwieldy and unmanageable.
This is why the return of the executioner may not mean much in the long run. He may succeed in forcing a consensual arrangement on the party in the choice of its presidential candidate. But if he tries to railroad the entire country to file behind his choice, that is where hostile internal forces will erupt in contention spurred on by external factors. The executioner’s song may turn out to be a dirge for the unforeseen and an elegy for the avoidable.