Barely one week into their presidential campaigns, the leading contenders for the presidency, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC), have given indications of the perspectives of their candidates and parties, as well as, strangely, the deep and fundamental intangibles of their worldview as they relate to the concepts of leadership, vision and philosophy, either real or abstract. It is not certain that the limited time available for campaigning is enough to make the PDP persuade Nigeria’s distraught, cynical and skeptical electorate to re-elect President Goodluck Jonathan, to overlook the many problems he has been unable to grapple with in a coherent, consistent and courageous manner, and to sympathise with his emotive responses to allegations of illiberal approach to politics and shocking lack of intuitive appreciation of the elementary challenges facing the country he has ruled for more than five years.
Nor is it also certain that the limited campaign time will permit Muhammadu Buhari, the APC presidential candidate, room to sell his candidature and virtues, and also to dispel the many criticisms validly leveled against his less than two years in power as military head of state in the early 1980s. Many of those criticisms, in spite of the long intervening years — nearly all of 30 years — still retain their potency and validity. There are doubts he has really transformed from a rigid, abrasive, ruthless and imperceptive ruler he once was. He is accused of jadedness, sectarianism, tribalism, lack of rigour or intellectual depth, and an unforgivable lack of empathy. His opponents will try to put him on the defensive and make the time very short for him to prove his bona fides.
Indeed, the dynamics of both campaigns will be influenced by the considerations above, some of them extraneous, others misplaced and specious, and yet others simply deliberately mischievous. The more adept of the two campaigns will, however, utilise the limited time fairly effectively, if not to completely prove their competence to present the next president, at least to make their candidate the lesser of two evils. Given the constricted choices the country faces, the electorate will have to choose one way or the other, for choose they must. So far, as a matter of fact, both campaigns have emitted sublime signals, some of them quite portentous, of what their parties are, who their candidates are at bottom, how limited their vistas are, and what they mean to Nigeria. It is not quite clear whether a consideration of these intangibles, these so-called sublime signals, will influence the direction of voting, for the voters are themselves quite limited in horizon and are sentimental. But these signals will doubtless determine the direction, health and sustainability of the country in the medium to long run.
Take the kick-off of the Jonathan re-election campaign in Lagos for instance. It was symptomatic of the partisan malaise that has turned the PDP into a fearsome behemoth with no internal moral core and absolutely no regard for other political parties and democratic fundamentals. The kick-off also showed in disturbingly bold relief Dr Jonathan’s intellectual weakness, questionable historicism and perverse logic, limited worldview, malignant extemporaneousness, sweeping and unpardonable generalisations and conclusions. “Those of my age and above are finished; we are gone,” moaned the president puzzlingly. “That is why I am addressing those of you that are voting for the first time. We believe it is you that will take us to the moon. My generation has failed, we couldn’t take Nigeria to the moon.”
The problem is not just that this questionable reading and understanding of history and contemporary events expose the president’s inadequacies, especially his lack of logical reasoning, but that they indicate a far more disturbing manifestation of the low quality of leadership in Nigeria, a lack of mastery of the existential and geopolitical threats facing the country, and an infatuation with boyish utopia.
The highlights of the president’s Lagos campaign, especially his tendentious rationalisation of his failing counterinsurgency war, his justification of his slow anti-corruption campaign, his defence of inept arms procurement methods, and his shocking inurement to his self-incriminating statements over MEND’s 2010 Abuja bombing, shocked and perplexed the thinking members of his audience, some of whom exclaimed in gasps behind him on the dais. Nonetheless, some of the facts mentioned by the president were incontestable, such as the neglect suffered by the military over the decades. But his suppositions, his inferences, and his conclusions were astonishingly unpresidential, not to say inimical to the growth, stability and good fortunes of the country. There is nothing he said in his Lagos campaign that entitles him to victory, or gives indication he had the subtlety and philosophical depth needed to rule a complex country in the 21st century. When he was right, which was seldom, he did not cut the figure of a president, or present the facade of a noble or of a philosophical-king. And when he was wrong, which was often, such as when he guilefully and gleefully promoted sectarianism and ethnic divisions, he did not surprise.
Dr Jonathan, alas, displayed none of the composure associated with the high office of the presidency. In the Lagos campaign, as he sadly did elsewhere in recent times, he quiveringly and emotionally fulminated against his opponents, endorsed the anti-democratic tendencies of state security agencies, preoccupied himself and his presidency with elemental things, and propounded none of the salient and uplifting ideas a complex society like Nigeria should embrace. None whatsoever. In the Lagos campaign, he tried to defend himself as much as possible, though he made a hash of it. And almost as an afterthought, he tried to sell a policy or two, but was unable to persuade either by logic or by force of his personality. The past few decades have been ideationally barren for Nigeria. Under Dr Jonathan, the sterility has grown incomparably. Four more years of him would not regenerate the country, as his campaign seeks to convince the electorate, or reposition it in line with the modernising ideas and infinitely changing complexities of the 21st century.
Conversely, the dynamics of the APC campaign exhibit a different hue. The opposition party, poised as it seems on the edge of victory, has about three weeks or four to prove the capacity of its presidential candidate and his advertised transformation into a modern, if unaccustomed, democrat and liberal. In Lagos, a hysterical Dr Jonathan said that that transformation was not possible, and a vote for Gen Buhari would ineluctably return Nigeria to the dark days of atavistic prosecution of the anti-corruption war, where suspects were crated and jailed without regard to the law. But compared to Dr Jonathan’s campaign volubility, Gen Buhari, not the most eloquent of men, has always spoken laconically, often with a terseness that belies his political and leadership experience and hunger for office. His gaffes and indiscretions are thus few and far between. Beyond seemingly partitioning the campaign between himself and his running mate, Yemi Osinbajo, a law professor, to achieve maximum impact, the general’s taciturnity and the silent and subterranean jostling for power and influence in the APC appear to cause dreadful unease in campaign and political circles.
Unlike the PDP whose power structure had earlier been defined and shaped, perhaps disapprovingly, under the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, with occasional eruptions between governors and the presidency, the APC has the onerous and compelling burden of campaigning for the highest office in the land at the same time as embarking on a difficult journey of self-discovery, self-definition, and self-actualisation. The ongoing internal jostling may have no significant effect on the party’s electoral chances if well managed, but in more ways than party apparatchiks think, the future of the party and its performance as a ruling party, should it attain the highest office, could be considerably stymied by that burden.
A faint trichotomy is thus visible in the APC. On one hand is the powerful and inspiring arm of the party responsible for the formation of the APC, an amalgam of parties many but that powerful and inspiring few at first believed impossible. On the other hand is the northern caucus desperate to regain the presidency, a desperation fuelled by the incontestably poor performance of the Jonathan government. And on the third hand is a coalition of forces made up principally of governors and other party leaders determined to gain the upper hand in the power struggle, an upper hand they hinge on what they describe as the political altruism of checkmating any domination within the party. The battle for supremacy in the PDP was brutally and peremptorily settled by Chief Obasanjo. It will take a little while for that battle to be settled in the APC, whether they win the presidency or not.
Though the APC is doing its best to conceal that jostling, a perceptive observer will notice the fault lines, as faint and imperceptible as they may appear. But what cannot be hidden is that if care is not taken, and irrespective of whether the party wins the presidency or not, the internal struggle may be won by an arm of the party that does not have the passion, drive, depth and conviction that inspired its formation. On the surface, there may be nothing wrong with having many tendencies within a party, as some developed democracies have shown. But for a party still in formation, and one which seems close to winning the presidency on the strength of the appalling incompetence and failures of the ruling party, it would indeed be cynical for the jostling within the APC to be settled in favour of an arm more desirous of dominating and moulding it into a typical party, almost indistinguishable from the PDP, than imbuing it with the kind of substance and character both the party and country need to survive and flourish.
But perhaps this observation is an exaggeration. Perhaps the internal struggles in the APC are rather inconsequential. If that is so, the party is lucky. However, all indications show that there is a mild tremor within the party, even if that tremor may not hamstring both its campaign and battle to win February’s presidential poll. What is clear overall is that both the PDP and its candidate, Dr Jonathan, are “spent and finished,” a Freudian slip the president himself made in Lagos at his campaign kick-off. The dynamics of the PDP campaign are such that the party seems fated to lose the elections because of the president’s off-putting personality and general incapacity. The dynamics of the APC campaign, on the other hand, are such that the party seems poised to outperform its expectations in spite of Gen Buhari’s inability to generate excitement by his speech and campaign style, and the dredging up of many of his past objectionable statements and policies by the ruling party.
