Tag: APC

The All Progressives Congress (APC) boasts an incredibly lofty political and social ethos it wants to midwife for the country. But if care is not taken, it could find itself entangled in pitfalls and traps of its own doing. The problem, it will be discovered, is not that the party has set goals too high to be accomplished. No, the problem is that it has so far been unable to structure its operations and ideas in such a way that the gap between its ideals and its identity is narrowed substantially for the electorate to embrace the party overwhelmingly. Unfortunately for the party, it has very little time to do the almost impossible; very little time to, as it were, shuffle the galaxies, tweak the earth’s magnetic force, and prevent any of the planets from spiralling out of orbit.

If Nigeria is to be saved, if the black race is to be redeemed – forgive the hyperbole – the APC must do the impossible in the next few months to save itself and the country. For if it fails, not only will the mega coalition it has cobbled together so gingerly be endangered, even the very notion of country which we have struggled over the years to sustain will itself be gravely imperilled. As for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its leaders, particularly those in power in Abuja today, I have long written them off as a total disaster, notwithstanding what jobholders and sycophants worming their ways around in Abuja say.

A good place to start in admonishing the APC – they should forgive my imperiousness – is the recent order they gave to their legislators in Abuja to stall President Goodluck Jonathan’s policies, bills, budget, and confirmation of service chiefs. Is the party justified in linking its cooperation to the president’s attitude and presumptions? I think it is, for if some pressure is not brought to bear on a president and party that have actually and irreverently spun out of control, that political lassitude could unwittingly encourage the ruling party and the president to entrench themselves in their anti-democratic misconduct. But is the APC wise to condition its legislative cooperation upon the president’s good behaviour? I seriously doubt it.

The first problem is that the party obviously misjudges the Nigerian voter to be highly enlightened and even somewhat idealistic. If he were enlightened, he would effortlessly appreciate that something drastic ought to be done about the creeping disaster and recklessness manifesting in Rivers State, a disaster given fillip by the president’s own lack of private and public scruples, and by the opportunistic alliances of Dame Patience, the meddlesome first lady, Nyesom Wike, the superficial and ingratiating Minister of State for Education, and Mbu Joseph Mbu, the conniving and servile police commissioner for Rivers. And if the voter were idealistic, he would understand that it was imperative to sacrifice a few legislative bills relating to our existential comfort in order to achieve the pristine and much higher goals of sustaining and nurturing the country’s infant democracy.

The APC must not forget that even in the United States, a point many commentators alluded to in newspapers in the past few days, the fairly well-educated voters in that developed democracy still spurned any attempt to play politics with their meal tickets. I wager that in any society, no matter what lofty principle is imperilled, issues of meal ticket will always predominate. The APC should, therefore, stop insisting on its legislators’ defiance in the National Assembly. It should also stop rationalising the orders it gave its lawmakers. The voter will not buy it, period. Nor does the party even need that tactics.

It is not certain that the party can even enforce its directive to its national lawmakers. But if it can, it will have to look for ways of surmounting a distressing backlash certain to follow the order. Does the party not appreciate that Dr Jonathan has thoroughly misruled the country, and his budgets, even when they seem to make some sense, have become worthless pieces of documents that fail every objective test of practicability, consistency and coherence? Dr Jonathan’s budgets have impoverished the country, and they do not work. Why would the APC want to be blamed for a budget designed to fail anyway? The party should publicly rescind its directives and let the lawmakers do their jobs dispassionately and professionally. Had the APC not intervened with its hasty directive, the budget would have naturally suffered searing and merciless reviews from the lawmakers. Now the legislators will have to be more accommodating so as not to be seen to be implementing APC’s order.

More crucially, it is now more urgent than ever for the APC to set up think tanks for the 2015 elections if the humongous goodwill it has accumulated with the electorate is not to be frittered away. I do not have the impression, for instance, that the party thoroughly debated its visit to former president Olusegun Obasanjo, let alone the decision to flatter the imperturbable aurochs. The ex-president is the most reviled politician in the country, hated by his enemies and friends alike, and in equal measure. It was completely needless visiting and coaxing someone so incorrigible and so absolutely unessential to the wellbeing of the country and its fledgling democracy. The party must resist the temptation to play emotive politics. It must encourage debate, seek out devil’s advocates when a position appears unanimous, and sleep over its decisions before making them public.

But perhaps the most difficult issue the APC will grapple with in the coming months is its presidential standard-bearer. If it gets it wrong, the campaign will at best be a huge struggle, and at worst be completely doomed. In electing its candidates, no matter what methods it prefers, whether open primaries or caucuses or a combination, it must not pretend to be ignorant of what and how the voters are thinking. Nigeria has changed, and with it, its politics too, perhaps in ways so frightening and threatening that it sometimes seems pointless for any principled man to offer himself for the thankless job of leadership. One of those changes concerns religion. The PDP, it is clear, has seized on religion as a campaign tool, and Dr Jonathan has already embarked on that dangerous journey with incomparable carefreeness and adroitness. The APC must not just condemn that dangerous folly, it must counter it, not defy it.

Without being told, the APC knows its aspirants who have been rightly or wrongly stigmatised as either fairly or completely bigoted. No matter how valiantly those stigmatised have worked for the mega coalition, no matter how popular they are, and no matter how electable they are in certain parts of the country, the party must resist the temptation to elect them as standard-bearers, not even on point of honour. There are younger, fairly accomplished and more connected politicians in the party, perhaps some of them not yet fully APC. The party must be flexible enough and ready to accommodate them. For, in the end, what matters most is not how honourably the APC has structured its politics, or how principled it has kept faith with its political and ideological views. Indeed, what matters most is winning the elections, regardless of the suspicions about the order of elections and the horrifying chicaneries of the ruling party.

The APC is on the threshold of a great and uplifting experience. It cannot afford to be careless, and its leaders must not allow themselves to be distracted by abuse, envious politicians mouthing strange historical heresies and inaccuracies, and political foes luring the party to commit blunders. They should go out there and make history, for history beckons to them.