The endemic crisis of party formations in Nigeria bears an organic relationship to the crisis of the post-colonial state in the nation. In other words, the originating crisis of the post-colonial state, its inability to manage and resolve contradictions arising from elite contestations for allocation of privileges and resources, finds an eloquent testimony in the inchoate and incoherent nature of party formations, particularly in the post-military polity. What was designed to resolve a conflict has in effect become an integral part of, and party to, the conflict.
Fifteen years into post-military civil rule, the democratic project in Nigeria is showing signs of deep stress and strains. There is democratic regression and the recession of civil rule everywhere. All the indices of the failure of the democratic process are here with us, thumbing at our face with impudence. From the failure of periodic elections to coincide with the real wish of the electorate, the abridgement of the right to free association, the curtailing of free movement during elections, the draconian imposition of the will of the minority on the wishes of the majority to the abrogation of the doctrine of the separation of authority.
But even more importantly, with the phenomenon of executive outlawry in which the state violates its own sacred authority by becoming a violent nuisance to the rest of the society, we are witnessing a new strain of state delinquency. Anarchy looms everywhere and the state itself, reeling from the hammer of a vicious armed critique, is better surveiled by non-state combatants than it is capable of the surveillance of society. The hunter has become the hunted.
Many optimists find this scary situation as consistent with the teething problems of democratic rule particularly after a long incubation in authoritarian rule. Whether the imminent death of a perpetual toddler is the same as its teething problems remains to be seen. There are those who take a less sanguine view, and who look at the current developments as the inevitable death throes of fledgling democracy. If we have achieved anything at all in the Fourth Republic, it is the fact that we have kept the military at bay, and for the longest period in our history.
But the absence of military rule does not equate to the presence of a truly democratic dispensation. This past week, a noted lawyer and civil rights campaigner, painted a dire picture of an impending collapse of civil rule in Nigeria. Judging by the responses from the internet and the social media, it was clear that the current democratic charade would not be missed.
To make things even more ominous, it was the same week that General Olusegun Obasanjo, the man who bequeathed Goodluck Jonathan to the nation and who could be held mainly responsible for the limited successes of the Fourth Republic as well as its hideous failures, opened what is in military parlance a multiple front against his own protégé. For the Jonathan administration, it is an endgame of some sorts.
Obasanjo is a brilliant past-master when it comes to strategic stripping of legitimacy, and the clouds are pregnant indeed. The turbulence and tempest suggest an abnormal gestation and birth. But in the end, nothing can come out of nothing. The post-colonial state, unlike the founding colonial imperium, is neither a creation nor an organic outgrowth of the post-colonial nation. The colonial state and the entire colonial project were not willed into existence to manage conflicts among elite factions but to suppress and brutalise them into compliance and conformity.
The organising principle of the post-colonial state is force and conquest and not elite conciliation and consensus. Every ascendant faction close off the state to their competitors and barricade themselves in. There is no attempt at compromise or conflict resolution. The arena of the state is a coliseum of contending gladiators; Androcles and lions in a Roman pit of industrial bloodletting.
In such circumstances, any African state-nation that must survive this originating curse of the colonial nation and its violence-prone state must witness a revolutionary rebirth or some radical surgery pioneered and spearheaded by a visionary political elite or a nationalist military officer-class. This is what has happened in Ghana through a lucky combination of both, in Tanzania, Senegal, Botswana and Zambia through messianic statesmanship and in South Africa and perhaps Benin Republic through a radicalised political class immensely aware of its historic mission.
Nigeria has not been lucky with such historic game-changers. Hence, its post-independence political culture has seen a grim oscillation between military despotism and civilian tyranny. It is a lineage of fascism and absolutism stretching back to colonial conquest. Rather than leading to genuine liberation and the exchange of colonial subjecthood with post-colonial citizenship, independence merely led to the Africanisation of the personnel of autocracy.
But this relay race between two or three varieties of tyranny cannot subsist forever. Civilians are not professional managers of violence. The ding-dong between contending autocracies can only eventuate in full blown military rule or a vicious armed critique of the state which may lead to dismemberment and dissolution such as we are witnessing with the Boko Haram insurrection.
It may be important to remind contending political gladiators irrespective of party affiliation or ideological inclination that since we are also dealing with a fundamental crisis of elite formation, what is required goes beyond the purview of partisanship and regular politics . The current elite formation in Nigeria ,whether at the national level or at the regional or local levels, faces grave pressures from the margins and from below. If the nation were to be overwhelmed by adversity or if the radical tremors were to become a full earthquake, it is the entire elite formation in Nigeria that will go under. This is why it is important for everyone to put on their thinking cap.
Central to the crisis of democratization in the post-colonial polity is the crisis of party formations. In a huge, chaotic and unwieldy political amalgam like Nigeria with its teeming spiritual, economic and cultural contraries, the crisis is bound to assume an urgent and critical dimension. From the run up to independence and thereafter, our parties have found it difficult to function as genuine agencies for the expansion of the democratic space or as popular platforms for advancing the political and economic empowerment of the populace.
The fault is not in their stars. You cannot plant maize and expect to harvest yam. Going by the constitutive logic of colonial conquest itself, their aim is to capture the state and share the booty of conquest. It is a harsh and merciless venture that leaves no room for political idealism or utopian fantasies. The sole object of power is power, as George Orwell will put it. The parties are organised cartels for the sole purpose of capturing power.
Whether you like it or not, it requires considerable financial outlay, political discipline and formidable psychological stamina. It can be very chummy and plumy when the going is good and the cards are stacked in your favour. Hence the absurd anomaly on the part of some followers screaming imposition in parties that are very much private liabilities companies entirely funded by individuals who put down men and material.
But going by the very same logic, the equally absurd anomaly on the part of leaders screaming betrayal and perfidy in parties that are not held together by deep ideological bonding or the umbilical cord of political kinship should be obvious. It is an engrossing game of double-digit deception. As Orwell again famously puts it, under the spreading chestnut tree, you sold me and I sold you. In the brutal casuistry of power calculus everything—and everybody—is game.
It is when the logic of certain developments is pushed to its ultimate possibility that it also becomes obvious why such developments cannot be sustained. Going by the Tambuwal affair and the obvious threat to both civil rule and national stability, the gale of defection, the epidemic of political infidelity and the open, porous nature of party borders have now reached a point where the system and the Fourth Republic are about to be overwhelmed. The crisis of party formation has become a major threat to the continued survival of the state as well as democratic experiment itself. We cannot proceed or progress without an urgent and radical reform.
Going forward, we may need to cast a retrospective glance at the past and to the origin of the crisis. If we view the First Republic and its iconic parties with a certain nostalgia, it is ironically because we are missing something about the dynamics of party formation in that fabled epoch. Virtually all the parties that were to play a major role in the post-independence politics of Nigeria began either as protest movements at the local and regional level or as cultural confraternities. In the case of the Northern People’s Congress before it transformed into the Nigerian People’s Congress, it began as a cultural platform for the protection of Arewa interests and never really wavered in its single-minded pursuit of Hausa-Fulani hegemony. In the case of NEPU, it was a protest movement of the talakawa against the northern feudal hegemony.
The Action Group had its origins in the cultural movement known as Egbe Omo Oduduwa which existed solely to advance and protect the interests of the Yoruba people. For the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons (NCNC) before it transformed into the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) it was a bi-national movement, and after its transformation, an Igbo imprimatur was writ large on its modus operandi.
In the circumstance and precisely because of their cultural solidity, none of these parties was able to transform into a genuine platform of national aspiration at the centre. Hence their reliance on mutually destructive alliances which eventually proved very fatal to democracy, civil rule and the nation itself. After the trauma of the civil war, the military sought to correct this ruinous political legacy by encouraging the formation of huge pan-Nigerian parties which would accommodate the interests of a large swathe of the political elite. Both the NPN and the PDP are products of this military political laboratory.
In the case of General Babangida, he sought a clever and creative variation by creating two huge political monopolies, one a little to the left and the other a little to the right. But like all political magicians, he did not reckon with concrete contradictions. MKO Abiola, a well-known conservative, became the flag bearer of the progressive platform and by bringing the rightwing resources of opulent wealth and vital connections to bear on what is essentially a leftwing project of demilitarisation ended up upending military calculations and the rule of the uniformed.
If an Abiola, a product of the military oligarchy, ended up being their nemesis, Jonathan, a product of civilianised military plutocracy, is proving to be their nemesis too. Like all people who seek to play god in the affairs of men, Obasanjo never reckoned with concrete contradictions. As a human with a limited knowledge of contending possibilities, there are many things you can never factor into these power games.
However that may be and despite some brilliant isolated performances against the run of play, it is now clear that these power cartels and political monopolies can only transit Nigeria back to the Stone Age of corruption and paralysed incompetence. Without a radical rebirth of the nation and its current party formations, the next few months will be trying indeed.
