Its spectacular loss in the 2015 presidential election was a devastating blow to the solar plexus of the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). And despite its organizational fragility and lack of cohesion having been hurriedly cobbled together for the polls as an election-winning machine, the new APC administration moved with speed to put a seal of finality on PDP’s coffin of electoral mummification. The party found most handy in this regard the reckless looting of humongous amounts of public funds by assorted leaders of the PDP; salacious evidence of which it regaled the public with understandable relish.
In the titillating saga of the $2.1 billion arms procurement bazaar for which former National Security Adviser, Colonel Sambo Dasuki (rtd) has been in seemingly indefinite detention, for instance, top members of the military high command under Jonathan and chieftains of the PDP simply shared the money among themselves even as our ill-equipped and demoralized troops perished unaccountably on the Boko Haram battlefront. Many of them have refunded the loot even as their trials for corrupt enrichment proceed at snails speed through Nigeria’s ponderous judicial process.
But that was only the tip of the iceberg. At a press conference late last year, Acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Ibrahim Magu, for the umpteenth time reveled how much the ravenous vultures had feasted on Nigeria’s commonwealth during the PDP years of the locusts. In his words, “Following court orders which granted our prayers for interim and final forfeiture of looted funds, the recoveries under my watch between November, 2015, and today are as follows: Over N794 billion recovered. Over $261 million recovered. The pounds sterling recovered stands at 1, 115, 930.47 pounds. The Euros recovered in the period is 8,168,871.13 Euros. There is also the sum of 86,500 CFA”. He went on to list other looted physical assets recovered both within and outside the country.
There is no doubt that when he dared to name those PDP chieftains associated with these recovery of looted assets, Minster for Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, believed that he was permanently sealing the fate of the PDP, which seemed incapable of recovering from the seemingly fatal damage to its morale and image especially by the incurably corrupt toga foisted on it so mercilessly by the APC.
That is exactly why the performance of the PDP in the last general elections of February 23rd and March 9th is nothing short of a miraculous resurrection from the dead. In the presidential election, the PDP candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, polled 11,262, 978 votes representing 41.2% of votes cast to victorious President Muhammadu Buhari’s 15, 191, 847 votes scored constituting a 55.6% share of total votes cast. While Buhari won in 19 states, Atiku actually carried the day in 17 states. PDP’s outing in the governorship election was even more remarkable. The PDP won 13 governorship seats to the ruling party’s 15 and with the opposition party gaining grounds in Benue, Adamawa, Bauchi, Sokoto, Oyo and Imo states while only barely losing in Kano.
When he emerged as the presidential candidate of the PDP at the party’s Port Harcourt National Convention, his critics alleged that Atiku had procured the opposition party’s ticket through a stupefying deluge of Naira rain. This perception seems to have compounded the moral baggage of corruption, with which he had been tarred particularly by his erstwhile boss, General Olusegun Obasanjo even though no court had ever found the Turaki Adamawa guilty of any crime.
Rather than force Obasanjo to prove the truly damaging allegations against him in court, a task which would have proven quite daunting in my view, Atiku chose to beg and grovel before the vindictive old soldier who affected to have forgiven his former deputy on behalf of Nigerians even as he has steadfastly refused to withdraw the book in which he maligned Atiku’s character and integrity from circulation. Even then, the APC certainly has cause to ponder on the opposition party’s impressive outing at the polls despite the perceived wide gap between the integrity credentials of its candidate and that of the PDP.
Atiku most certainly brought some sharp ideological clarity to the PDP campaign in the 2019 elections. Hitherto, hardly anybody in the PDP hierarchy had ever discussed the party’s value orientation and policy agenda in any detailed, coherent or serious manner. Atiku changed that. His policy overview document running into nearly 200 carefully researched and well articulated pages touches on virtually every aspect of Nigeria’s social, political and economic problems providing detailed diagnoses of the problems and the candidate’s policy prescriptions. Of course, the document is rendered in largely technocratic terms with the ideological coloration only coming out vividly in snippets of policy prescriptions.
One thing that is clear is that, in contrast to the current substantially state-driven infrastructure provision and social inclusion welfare policies of the APC, Atiku commits the PDP to an essentially free market-led approach to economic recovery and ultimately sustainable development. He pointedly promises to “reduce the size of government and make it leaner and more efficient in service delivery”. This appears to tally with the neo-liberal perception of the state as an essentially necessary evil that must only be tolerated and its reach continuously curtailed. In contrast, the APC’s policies indicate its belief in the inevitable imperative of the extensive developmental state that actively intervenes with the processes of the market especially when these are likely to deepen inequalities and injustices in society.
The Atiku plan pledges a “firm commitment to the promotion of a private sector-driven, competitive and open economy supported by efficiently run public institutions”. It promises to lift at least 50 million people out of extreme poverty by 2025. Atiku intends to do this through the “provision of skill acquisition opportunities and enterprise development for job and wealth creation, rather than direct cash distribution”. But even if people are empowered with skills, can the operations of the free market as envisaged by the PDP candidate provide them with readily accessible credit on the scale being currently undertaken by the APC? It is doubtful.
Thus, the Atiku plan envisages “working with existing Micro Finance Banks (MFBs) in each local government area to administer a new N15.48 billion Community Micro Enterprise Fund (CMEF) to stimulate community enterprise development”. In the same vein, it promises that a PDP government will “work more closely with Non Governmental Organizations, the private sector and other developmental partners to mobilize resources for the effective implementation of our empowerment strategy”. And still with its focus on a private sector led economic recovery as well as poverty amelioration policies, the Atiku plan intends to “encourage bank expansion services to rural areas, providing easy banking with simple processes easily completed by people with low literacy”.
True, the APC also accords robust private sector partnership with the public sector a central place in the articulation and implementation of its economic agenda. Yet, it recognizes that the private sector in Nigeria is simply incapable of mobilizing resources on the same scale that government is able to do as demonstrated in its current intervention schemes targeted at reaching millions of vulnerable Nigerians that the free market is simply not designed to care about.
The Atiku market-led plan appears to assume that private sector actors including Non- Governmental Organizations and Micro Finance Banks are philanthropic outfits which can be persuaded to offer succor to the weak and poor segments of society. Nothing could be further from the truth. The free market model has the primary objective of enabling those individuals and groups in society capable of competing to maximize profit. It has no place for the weak and feeble as the Atiku plan assumes.
Atiku himself is a hard- nosed capitalist. He should know. Can he afford to play the philanthropist with his investment in the American University in Yola with its reportedly state of the art facilities and high quality staff that rank among the best globally? The answer is obvious. That is why the state must lead the drive to radically modernize infrastructure and alleviate poverty in parlous economies like Nigeria.
During the campaign, Atiku espoused neo-liberal right wing policy options such as privatizing the NNPC as the answer to its current undesirable opacity or floating the exchange rate and leaving the Naira at the mercy of market forces as advocated by some international financial institutions. But this kind of ideological dogmatism should ponder the words of the world renowned intellectual at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Noam Chomsky who argues that “How did Europe and those who escaped its control succeed in developing? Part of the answer again seems clear: by radically violating free market doctrine. That conclusion holds from England to the East Asian growth area today, surely including the United States, the leader in protectionism from its origins. Standard economic history recognizes that state intervention has played a central role in economic development”.
Whatever one thinks of Atiku’s politics, he has helped to redefine and refocus the PDP ideologically. Surely, the PDP is alive, well and kicking as an opposition party and this is certainly good for Nigerian politics.
