FOR a while, it never seemed like the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) was capable of getting its act together. Every time analysts were tempted to write off the party, it carried out feats of derring-do that mystified political enemies and enabled members to heave sigh of relief. That they will keep up their brinkmanship is no longer in doubt, given their appalling inability to organise themselves in the truest tradition of partisan politics; but how long they can keep flying in the face of everything they stand for, without their feathers being singed, is not known. Their dazzling determination to tempt and tame the shrewish Nyesom Wike, Governor of Rivers State, caps seven incredible and exasperating years of disorganisation and entitlement, both designed to sustain the ruling party in power.
Last week, after an initial rumour of the APC presidential candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu meeting the Rivers governor in France, some three APC governors met Mr Wike in Port Harcourt ostensibly to win him over to their party, seeing how badly and shamelessly he had been treated in the past few months. The Rivers governor exemplifies the demons both the APC and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to which Mr Wike belongs, are contending with. In confronting its demons, the PDP was always quicker from the starting block as their chairmanship election illustrated, and the APC slower; but midway into the race, as the presidential primaries indicated, the APC not only caught up, it surprisingly became fleet-footed. However, regardless of which of the two leading parties is making hay, both are battling demons that appear poised to affect them in the long run, in fact long after the next presidential poll. It is not certain whether Mr Wike will lend the APC more than a listening ear, though the visiting APC governors would be tantalised to welcome him into their fold; whatever decision the Rivers governor takes will affect both parties in the short and medium run, and also accentuate the demons they must take down in order to prosper.
The APC never looked like it would successfully carry out a party convention to elect their national officers, particularly after the PDP made short work of emplacing its own executives. It took a botched coup, intervention from President Muhammadu Buhari, and a mixture of sagacity and docility to produce their party leaders. After that, however, and notwithstanding the fact that it barely sustained its unity to produce a chairman they were not sure they had confidence in, the APC proceeded quite optimistically to plan its special convention to elect its presidential candidate. Accustomed to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and flush with exuberant interest in defying thunder, the party once again attempted demoniacally to impose rather than elect a candidate. It took some party leaders rallying together to play the exorcists to defeat that notorious imposition. After that, it has been smooth sailing for the party, a voyage they hope would culminate in their retention of the presidency.
They struggle to downplay the significance of their inevitable Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket, and look like they will get away with it, not because tempers are not fraying, but because the alternatives are even more reprehensible. To finally defeat their demons and lock the gnomes in bottomless pits, the APC, once they win the presidency for a third time, will have to reorganise their party, structure and make it function like a real political party unencumbered by the distractions of meddlesome governors and presidential aides, and extricate it from the suffocating hold of incompetent party administrators and vested interests. Their only chance of doing that rests on the twin pillars of their candidate, Asiwaju Tinubu, a consummate politician and connoisseur of partisan politics, cohabiting expertly with the emerging and counterbalancing class of progressive governors and stakeholders who clearly played a key role in taming their party’s dangerous predilections in early June just before the primary. But should they lose the February 2023 presidential poll, the party, already fraying at the edges and buffeted by legions of quiet but seething demons, will sunder uncontrollably.
The outlook for the PDP is, sadly, more dire. While the party still retains enough amperage to scald the ruling party’s head and torso, its failure to reorganise itself after its 2015 loss, its lack of interest in purging its ranks and refining and streamlining its ideology, and its inability to discipline its footloose leaders who had been traversing different political parties like a yo-yo, have all considerably weakened the party and made victory in the coming polls difficult, if not impossible. Seven years out of Aso Villa has proved enough time to dull the party’s senses and fighting instinct. If that time is not to become elongated, party leaders must find a way to rekindle belief in the party, its worldview, and raison d’être. The party was founded on altruism and collegiate leadership. But right from infancy, those principles were abjured by the clique that stole and bastardised the party’s soul. The theft attracted no punishment while the party remained in office and dispensed patronage and quietened revolts using all manner of clever bureaucratic artifices. Once it lost power, however, its leaders became easily disoriented, and the principles upon which so ambitious a party was founded simply withered. That disorientation has produced presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar, who in turn has selected, against the run of play, Ifeanyi Okowa, Governor of Delta State, as running mate.
It is thus not surprising that after deftly electing their party chairman and conducting a special convention to elect a presidential candidate without rancour and acrimony, the victories had suddenly and quite easily turned pyrrhic. The repudiated and scorned Mr Wike, who came an admirable second, has now become a thorn in their flesh. They disowned him, but have found out how sorely they still need him. The Rivers governor professes himself a party man to the core, but he has lately begun to wonder why his loyalty has gone unrequited, why his joie de vivre is deployed as an idiosyncratic insult to his person, and why he keeps holding the short end of the stick. There are many demons predisposing the party to defeat, but none holds the candle to the Wike weapon. Should he leave them, he would demand his pound of flesh. And for a party already trimmed down to lean meat, that would be disastrous.
As things stand today, if the APC gets its running mate saga resolved sensibly and without leaving a bitter taste in any party leader’s mouth, it is hard to see them losing. Their demons are more clement and benignant, and their hobgoblins meek as mice. The PDP, on the other hand, will need close to a miracle to avert defeat next year. Should they lose Mr Wike to the bargain, they will need God. Had they been men of prayer, their enemies would quake in their boots. But unfortunately, not only do they objurgate prayer, they seem increasingly atheistic. Now, all this would be inconsequential had they also by dint of inexplicable brilliance become excellent organisers or managers. They are neither. Worse, in their 16 years in office – from the presumptuous Olusegun Obasanjo to the lethargic Umaru Yar’Adua and on to the cavalier and flip-flopping Goodluck Jonathan – the party had laboured to empty itself of anything describable as a soul. How to muster a soul, therefore, and imbue it with enough resolve to give a good fight next February will remain uppermost in their minds.
Kuje attack should never have happened
IF Nigeria’s security system was as integrated and responsive as officials had led the country to believe, Kuje Custodial Centre should never have been attacked, at least not as successfully and extensively as it was pulverised by Boko Haram militants who freed all 64 of their members incarcerated in the facility. President Muhammadu Buhari, who visited the ransacked prison a day after it was sacked, bemoaned the absence of intelligence. He also asked a number of pertinent questions about the state of readiness of the prison to ward off attacks against the facility, the quality or presence of surveillance systems, and the role of security personnel in defending the facility. But it is not clear that there was no intelligence about the impending attacks, given that multiple sources had suggested that information about a planned attack was passed on to the authorities. Whether the government wants to hear it or not, and as Senate President Ahmad Lawan has suggested, the attack was less a consequence of intelligence failure as it was probably the product of collusion.
The successful attack indicates quite clearly administrative and organisational failures. High-risk prisoners were incarcerated in the facility; there had been massive attacks and jailbreaks in some states; and Boko Haram in association with bandits were negotiating for prisoner exchange using their comrades in Kuje Prison as bargaining chips; yet the security measures emplaced to secure Boko Haram prisoners were not only tenuous, they were, for a medium security custodial centre, obviously desultory. The past few years have not shown a readiness by any public agency or official to accept responsibility for failures, let alone offer their resignation. So, there is nothing to suggest that despite the president and other officials taking umbrage, the country will sometime in the future get to the bottom of what led to the Kuje debacle and who were responsible. There is indeed no precedent to suggest that someone or a group of individuals will be punished for the global embarrassment the successful attack caused Nigeria and its obviously flatfooted security agencies.
By now, no one doubts that the insecurity nightmare Nigeria is contending with has grown into an octopus. It will get worse because there are no coherent, intelligent and effective measures to tackle the crisis. The country and its leaders wail over the Kuje embarrassment; but they had shed crocodile tears and wringed their hands over similar and sometimes more catastrophic failures in nearly all parts of the country. By excusing previous failures on the grounds of Libyan collapse, economic distress, and other feeble and futile explanations that seem to connive at killings by favoured groups, the government was either inadvertently or deliberately opening the gates of hell. Officials cannot pretend not to know that the country is today engulfed in near chaos. It is not only engulfed, it is in fact drowning in violence. The Kuje attack is nothing but the most recent manifestation of the virtual total breakdown of the country’s security system.
It is disrespectful to Nigerians that government officials have waffled over the Kuje attack. The Internal Affairs ministry suggests that prisons were not designed to ward off external attacks. This is piffle. Prisons harbouring high-risk detainees, particularly terrorists, have a duty to put in place foolproof measures to secure their facilities. Kuje is a local government in the nation’s federal capital city, Abuja. It is not in a remote part of Nigeria. It is a dot in a circle. It obviously took extraordinary planning, logistics, and daring, perhaps anchored on internal complicity, to pull off this incredible attack. If the ministry had anticipated this attack because of the high-risk detainees in the facility, it had the leeway to draw on the services of better armed sister agencies. Failure is not an excuse. Surely, as the ministry must have now discovered, there is more to running prisons than name changes. Nigerian Prisons has become Correctional Service. The name change has done nothing to enable the facilities to be better run or, from all indications, better equipped or defended.
Police Affairs minister Mohammed Dingyadi told the press after Thursday’s Security Council meeting convened by the president that the Boko Haram/ISWAP attackers came better armed and in overwhelming number, which some sources put at about 300. He did not say anything about why it took more than an hour or two to mount any coordinated response to the attack, nor did he say just how many security agents combated the militants. Worse, there is no estimate of the number of Boko Haram attackers killed or injured other than suggesting that the insurgents probably took away their fallen members. Yes, the Police Affairs ministry needed to say something urgently to douse speculations and encourage the country that those saddled with the responsibility of keeping the country safe knew what to do and had the courage to carry out their duties, despite failing the nation repeatedly and in nearly all the 36 states. But it was more necessary that he shed light on the attack than obfuscate it.
The president was right to visit the Kuje Correctional Centre, and it is curious that he was shocked by what he saw – a prison system that appears derelict and bereft of modern equipment. But whether his outrage will amount to anything or lead to far-reaching changes, especially in light of similar outrages producing no fundamental changes in the past, remains to be seen. He immediately convened a security meeting, as he should. But similar convocations in the past have ended a damp squib, with him resisting needed changes and sticking loyally to his underperforming security appointees. Many critics expect him to sack some of his security chiefs. There is no proof he would make that choice, assuming he can even quickly establish guilt and apportion blame. Nor is it desirable that he should rush into judgement until investigations are completed. Perhaps things will still get to that point. It would have helped the president tremendously if by now some officials had honourably tendered their resignations. But culpable officials are unlikely to take that noble path.
Ultimately, the president must realise that he bears final responsibility for the Kuje debacle as well as the nation’s collapsing security system. When the insecurity crisis intensified a few years ago, his administration did precious little to curb it. Now the problem has metastasized, especially in the face of official paralysis and general lethargy and incompetence. If he is to be trusted to do something about the Kuje attack, and by extension, the nation’s insecurity nightmare, he must take firm and remedial measures in consonance with his newfound zeal in quickly responding to other national challenges. He will need to seek urgent explanations from his men, ease out those who came up short, make short shrift of their incoherent excuses, and repackage and retool the security system entirely. They have failed him and the country in the past few years; as they are currently constituted, they cannot be trusted or relied on to keep the country safe.