Tag: APC

In the annals of political engagement, only in the rarest of circumstances does it happen that persons elected to high office on the platform of the ruling party and wielding the enormous powers of that office defect in large numbers to the Opposition.

Nigeria may be the country of “anything goes.” But even there, that kind of migration was inconceivable — until last week, when five PDP governors defected to the APC.

It is already one for the history books even if the PDP manages to stanch the widely anticipated migration in the weeks ahead of more governors, a raft of senators, and members of the House of Representatives, and of local government councils.

No admirer of the self-styled largest political party in Africa, I confess to being smitten with schadenfreude. For, even at its least repellent, the PDP was more concerned with sharing the spoils of office than advancing the public welfare. Not even its most devoted followers have ever accused it of being imaginative. It has bred mass discontent and mass disillusionment

It conducted itself as if it was an extension of the Presidency, wielding the wide powers of that institution without correlative restraint and responsibility. In relating to the rank and file, its senior officials behaved like schoolyard bullies. Having held power by hook or crook virtually unchallenged for 14 years, it had grown supinely complacent and developed an overweening sense of entitlement – the classic symptoms of regime fatigue.

When key elected officials desert the protective ambience of The Umbrella and risk the petulant vindictiveness of the ruling party and its opulent agent, the Federal Government, for uncertain prospects in the Opposition, you know that a tectonic shift has occurred in the political landscape.

Where it will lead is yet unclear. The new Opposition is an amalgam of political formations whose orientations span the entire ideological spectrum. Taking the situation in Kwara as an example, the amount of house-cleaning that it will first have to undertake will put it to the severest test.

There, some two months ago, elements of the old PDP, with the active connivance of the state’s electoral commission, brazenly stole the re-rerun local government election in Offa, the state’s second-largest city and a stronghold of the APC. Several weeks later, it went on to stage state-wide local council elections, despite a subsisting court petition. The APC boycotted the poll, and the old PDP celebrated the outcome as yet another landslide victory.

What is going to happen, now that those same elements of the old PDP have migrated en mass to the APC as decreed by the former governor and now Senator Bukola Saraki who, as chair of the Nigerian Governors Forum, had unsuccessfully sought the PDP’s presidential ticket?

Before the grand defection, Dele Belgore, the senior attorney, was widely perceived as Kwara’s governor-in- waiting. As candidate of the now defunct Action Congress of Nigeria, he made a strong showing in the last gubernatorial election in Kwara. To this day, a substantial body of opinion in the state believes that he was robbed. If he secured the APC’s ticket for the next round, the election would be his to lose.

Now, that calculus has become more complicated. With Bukola Saraki personally leading the mass migration of PDP members into the APC, and with his hand-picked successor Abdudlfatah Mohammed sure to seek a second term as governor, what awaits Belgore and his associates who had nurtured the ACN/APC and had been persecuted for their exertions?

The situation in Kwara applies in other states, to a greater or lesser extent. Resolving it without rancour is not beyond the ingenuity of all those who fashioned the new coalition, but it is going to be a severe test.

I was also concerned about how former Osun State governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola, the embattled secretary of the PDP and secretary, until its dissolution, of its breakaway faction, the new PDP, would fit into the latest arrangement.

Apparently sensing the incongruity, he declared that he had not defected to the APC. With the merger, his post as national secretary of the new PDP no longer existed. But he remained national secretary of what is left of the PDP, he said. For his pains, the PDP, ramped up his suspension into expulsion.

A war of words reminiscent of politics in the Second Republic – and indeed of the election at Eatanswill, recorded for the ages in all its hilarity by Charles Dickens in the Pickwick Papers –has since broken out between Oyinlola and his estranged protégé, Professor Wale Oladipo, who replaced him as PDP national secretary.

I cannot repeat what Oladipo has said about Oyinlola’s mental state, or what Oyinlola said about Oladipo’s groveling ways without courting a writ of libel, especially from Oyinlola who is a qualified lawyer and has a partiality for litigation. If there are any adults still left in the room, would they kindly arrange an armistice? Where have you been, Tony “The Fixer” Anenih?

Meanwhile, the grand coalition is gathering momentum. If this grand coalition coheres and endures, and if it is not just a vehicle for wresting power from the PDP and thereafter carrying on business as usual, it has the potential to set Nigeria on the path of real transformation. Even if it does not supplant what remains of the PDP as the ruling party, it will at least have positioned itself as a credible alternative. The enthusiasm with which it has been welcomed in many parts of Nigeria is a good augury.

The chief architects of the grand coalition, Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, deserve high praise for their vision, leadership, commitment, and tenacity, not forgetting their associates who toiled and are toiling even now behind the cameras and the headlines to hammer out the details of the historic merger.

It must be accounted a mark of Nigeria’s growing political maturity that the coalescence of the groups making up the Opposition has not been portrayed by the news media as a “gang –up” and that the seven state governors who pitched their tents in the breakaway faction of the PDP were called the G7—the Group of Seven – rather than the Gang of Seven.

In the Shagari era, the national television and radio networks and the NPN’s client newspapers would have pilloried the defectors and called them the most censorious names. Only Chris Ngige is receiving that treatment at this time, for the atrocious crime of seeking on the platform of the APC to be governor of Anambra State – the state in which he was elected senator under the banner of the ACN, and of which he was once PDP governor.

Now, in his latest foray, some ethnic warriors enjoying privileged media access are casting him as an “agent” of Fulani/Yoruba elements bent on invading Anambra and lording it over the Igbo in their own homestead, with yet another allusion to the “deportation” of their kinsmen from Lagos as proof, were any still required, of the perfidy of the new coalition.

In the wake of the “deportation” saga, they berated Yoruba indigenes of Lagos, which they impudently called “no man’s land,” for sticking with their traditional “oro” rites against the demands of “modernity,” and to the great inconvenience of the diverse elements that make up the population.

The two positions — APC gubernatorial candidate Chris Nigige, an authentic Igbo, as an “agent” of rank outsiders and hence unworthy of election, and the subsistence of “oro” rites in the “no man’s land” called Lagos as an inconvenience to the non-native residents that must be discontinued – are all too emblematic of a political mindset summed up by the phrase: “What is mine is mine but what is yours is ours.”

They do not bode well for building bridges of understanding and mutual respect.