As the APC held its much postponed party convention yesterday, many patriotic Nigerians waited with bated breath and muted expectations hoping that the party will cobble together a patchwork of compromise which will stay the executioner’s axe dangling over it and the Fourth Republic. The crisis of party formation is at the root of Nigeria’s inability to progress democratically or advance economically since independence.
There is a compelling nexus between shambolic parties and equally shambolic nations. Nations have the political parties they deserve and ultimately the fate that overtakes them. National character is national destiny. Twice in post-independence Nigeria, ambitious military rulers saw a chance to terminate wobbling civilian regimes. In the case of the aborted Third Republic, it was terminated in vitro by its own initiators. It was autogolpe or self-coup at its most bizarre.
If the Fourth Republic has so far survived the military’s asphyxiating bear hug, it is not because of the innate generosity of the institution. Military rule has two major factors working against it in contemporary Nigeria. First is the fact that except in circumstances of widespread anarchy and general state collapse, military rule is historically passé. Second is the dismal and appalling record the military themselves left behind in Nigeria.
But there is a limit to which people can press their luck. As the Yoruba people will put it, just because a person is named Folorunso (May God protect this child) doesn’t mean he should go about climbing a palm tree with banana fronds.
Given the dire circumstances in which the nation has found itself, all hands must be on deck to save the Fourth Republic from going under in an apocalyptic meltdown. This is the time for efforts of a bipartisan nature to prevent the operators and managers of the polity from pressing the self-destruct button.
Politics is often defined as the authoritative allocation of values and resources, that is determining who gets what and at what time. The crisis of party formation in post-independence Nigeria is mainly precipitated by the iniquitous and inequitable allocation of resources either through forcible hijacking of the process by devious antidemocratic means or through the feudalization of the means of allocation by people without any concept of the nation-state.
In a multi-ethnic conglomeration of mutually hostile nationalities aspiring to organic nationhood and a democratic normalization of competing visions of the nation, the idea of an authoritarian rather than authoritative figure presiding over the allocation of values and resources is bound to come into violent collision with egalitarian forces ostensibly fighting for justice and equity.
This crisis is everywhere in the Fourth Republic. If it is muted and neutered at the sub-national levels of governance, it is because sub-ethnic contradictions are often less frontal and often more subsumable under the generalised framework of class conflict rather than homicidal tribal vengeance. In some extreme cases such as we witnessed in the old west in the Second Republic, sub-ethnic tensions arising from political disputations and feelings of alienation may boil over into full blown intra-ethnic warfare and violence.
Towards the end of 1983, in an atmosphere of deep gloom and despondency, Awolowo’s party, the Unity Party of Nigeria, (UPN) converged on Abeokuta for the last gathering of the clan.
The despair was all pervading. The UPN had just been taken to the cleaners in an egregiously rigged election masterminded by the hard men of NPN in collusion with the police and security forces. James Ajibola Idowu Ige, one of the most brilliant and colourful leaders of progressive forces ever thrown up in Nigeria, was nowhere to be found on the high table.
Ige had earlier been steamrolled in an electoral coup spearheaded by Ibadan supremacists, security forces and those who simply hated his guts. In the case of Pa Michael Ajasin, he had barely survived by the skin of his teeth, having been thoroughly roughed up by an electoral blitzkrieg ably assisted by men of the notorious and infamous “Verdict ‘83″. The old man sat on the high table ruffled but still sedate and forbearing.
The case of Bola Ige deserves particular emphasis. He had earlier been stripped of his title of Aare Alaasa by the reigning Ibadan monarch over what was regarded as his contumely to his Ibadan constituency. The title was given to a local poet and Ewi exponent who gladly accepted.
Barely a year earlier in what has come to be known as the Yola Night of Long Knives, Ige was granted a reprieve by Chief Awolowo after his opponents led by LKJ tabled a motion that he should be expelled from the party for inviting a known political adversary, General Olusegun Obasanjo, to adjudicate in a political rift involving him and his estranged former deputy, S M Afolabi.
Awolowo, ever the calm rational philosopher and master dialectician of opposing historical forces, refused to entertain the gloom and despondency that seemed to have consumed his loyal colleagues and hero-worshipping lieutenants. He had famously posited his theory of synthesis adopted from Hegelian dialectics of history. By this theory, the best parts of the contending forces would eventually fuse into one and the struggle must resume in earnest.
It was a parting shot from the great man to a nation undeserving of his visionary gifts. Earlier, and having been subject to a daylight electoral robbery, Awolowo had vowed never to take part in any electoral contest again in his lifetime. If the nation still needed his services, it knew where to find him, the old man added.
His jubilant foes never realised that this was a complete disavowal of the democratic trajectory of the nation and of the Second Republic by extension. His vision acutely angled, Awolowo could have been reading from a horoscope of impending disaster. At the rational level, he had the weight of historical analysis on his side.
Awolowo knew that each time the progressive forces are forcibly side-lined and alienated by the security/ feudal complex, disaster always followed. This was what happed in the first and second republics and the aborted Third Republic which was eventually consumed by the annulment of Abiola’s presidential mandate. Needless to add that on the very last day of the year and having lost all legitimacy and authority, the civilian administration was sent packing by the soldiers. Nigeria had joined the league of abandoned toddlers in the orphanage of democracy once again.
Next year would be the fortieth anniversary of the UPN’s historic last gathering and Awo’s landmark intervention. Four years later Awo himself joined his ancestors. His initial comment on the new Buhari administration was as gnomic as it was brimming with oracular wisdom. “The omens are still not clear”, declared the Ikenne titan.
It was not clear whether the old sage was having a rethink about his theory of synthesis of the Nigerian political class. But with the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that the fusion had not happened the way the old man would have thought or anybody could have imagined. It was not entirely his fault. Reality is always more complex and disarming than elegant theoretical formulations.
Things have become more conceptually sophisticated. Advances in the study of dialectics suggest that contending realities do not fuse cleanly and clearly. Neither do they obey the Hegelian formula of cause and effect. Rather, it is a complexly interlocking procedure in which contending contradictions jostle for ascendancy in what is known as an overdetermined reality. What is right about what is left is what is left about what is right.
For example, it would have been entirely inconceivable for a right-wing recalcitrant like an Abiola to have emerged as a paradoxical hero of progressive forces and a martyr of democratic rule. Yet Abiola could only have emerged from the right and right-wing politics. Only conservative “business friendly” politics could have thrown up a man of his stupendous means, wealth of pan-Nigerian connections and sheer chutzpah.
But if anybody had thought that Abiola’s martyrdom was a divinely ordained sacrifice to lay the foundation of a progressive, genuinely democratic and egalitarian nation, such a person had better perish the thought. What is playing out in the Fourth Republic, first through General Obasanjo and now through Major General Buhari, is the consolidation of right-wing conservative dominion in alliance with the new monied class in a project of perpetual domination of the nation.
If anything, the way and manner the old owners and founders of the PDP were muscled out of contention in textbook military fashion ought to have indicated in what direction the wind was blowing. Famously, Umaru Shinkafi was known to have asked the former military hierarchs absconding from his APP whether their new posting was out.
The overwhelming presence of retired military barons, their siblings and their paramilitary subalterns in the affairs of the post-military republic attests to this new class formation. It is a fusion of contrary forces quite right but in a way even a man of Awolowo’s famed political wizardry could not have envisaged.
Sometimes, it feels like a diarchy, but not in the way good old Zik also envisaged. In its classical formulation, diarchy is direct military rule bolstered and boosted by civilian accessories. In 1972, in a celebrated intervention, the great Owelle of Onitsha, worried by the virtual and seemingly irreversible domination of the military in Nigeria’s post-war political arrangement, had advocated diarchy as a solution to the political instability confronting the nation.
But as we can see, what has happened is not diarchy in its classical sense but a militarized polity dominated by retired military personnel and the new civilian subclass they have created in their own image. Yet brutal ironies and paradoxes subsist. One of the core military annulers of Abiola’s mandate who objected to his presidential ascendancy based on a business deal gone awry made a successful transition to right-wing politics and greater national prominence.
It was not a bridge too far. On the other hand, you have the tragic case of a Bola Ige who, having felt betrayed by his colleagues, had tried to cross from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum before realising the perils involved. It proved a bridge too far. He was summarily executed for his contretemps.
After twenty three years of this right-wing conservative political engineering, the true profile of the Fourth Republic now appears before us in all its ungainly severity. The nation has stalled both politically and economically.
There is a spiritual and ethical darkness everywhere which makes the polity very vulnerable to hitherto unimaginable crimes and the manifestation of horrendous depravities. As a result of hunger, poverty and deep-seated feelings of political exclusion and alienation, escalating insecurity has become the new normal.
As a result of the crisis of party formation, the country is confronted by the phenomenon of politics without principles, parties without ideology or discernible position. Serial decamping and party crisscrossing has become the norm. Things have become so hilarious that many decampees are reported to be hurrying back to their original parties for fear of being asked to vacate their seats by hostile judgement. It doesn’t get more politically promiscuous.
After twenty three years of civilian rule and with the idea of military rule receding into remote antiquity, it is a great irony that the abysmal conduct of the political class now constitutes the greatest threat to democracy and the survival of the Fourth Republic. Once major parties cease to lack deep convictions and foundational beliefs, they can no longer function as vehicles of popular aspirations. It is the death knell of democratic rule.
Awo himself would have marvelled at the paradox of politics without strong convictions and political parties without organizing principles which is the hallmark of political prostitution as a national ideology. Throughout his life, the man from Ikenne strove to prevent the homogenization of the Nigerian ruling class by a rigorous differentiation of political platform. That homogenization is now upon us. It is not the kind of fusion Awolowo was expecting. But history moves in a strange way.