Former Kaduna State governor, Balarabe Musa, recently used piquant phrases to describe the character and operations of Nigeria’s two leading parties, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Mallam Musa, who is and also the chairman of the almost forgotten Peoples Redemption Party (PRP), is undoubtedly an agitated and impatient idealist, but his characterisation of the two bungling and bumbling parties is unimpeachable. The progressive politician had mercilessly skewered the two parties last week while responding to reporters’ questions last week in Abuja. The PDP, he summed up, was incompetent; and the APC, he growled, was fascistic. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo had delivered a similar judgement on the two parties not too long ago; but Mallam Musa possessed better and ethical justification to reach the salient conclusions the entire country seems to be coming round to.
“I will tell you they are complete failures,” said Mallam Musa of the parties. “If PDP was incompetent, APC is even worse. In the case of the PDP government, it was just incompetence, and you can negotiate with incompetents. But in the case of the APC, it is fascism and you know that you have no stand with a fascist who clears the obstacle by any means. This is what we are experiencing now. We have replaced incompetence with fascism.” The divisions between the two parties may however not be as neat as the former governor painted it. While the PDP was truly incompetent in office, especially judging from the reckless wastage of the country’s resources and the mindless stealing that undermined the economy under its 16 years leadership, the APC, on the other hand, is not just fascistic, it has managed so far to have combined that singular vice with a multiplicity of dubieties and incompetence.
To dwell on the PDP, despite the telling effects of its incompetence and the bold relief in which that ineptitude is increasingly etched, is to flog a dead horse. It is sufficient to say that the party, which had boasted it would rule Nigeria for 60 years without explaining why it chose that silly and arbitrary figure, had no system in place to govern well, nor the men to champion its cause and promote the modest values it managed to conceive. It suffered a humiliating defeat in 2015, a consequence of its lack of discipline, dearth of values, and partisan pride. Unlike shortly after it lost the general elections, when some people wondered whether the country was not too hasty and sentimental in repudiating the PDP, only a few people now view the exposure of the kleptocracy that hobbled the nation without concluding that keeping the inept PDP in power for 16 years was both excessive and indefensibly generous.
Mallam Musa was neutral in judging the two parties, though he will of course be unable to supplant any of them with his own fairly untested and nearly forgotten party should that thought ever cross his mind. There is nothing to show he thinks of any supplantation, however, for like every other Nigerian, he is realistic enough to know that to nurse a party to national prominence, if not invincibility, requires both financial and human resources of grandiose and intimidating proportions. His current frustrations in running the PRP, including getting justice for the party when it is assailed by conspiratorial busybodies and conniving jurists (see box below), is a testament to the abominable course politics has taken in the country.
No one will question why Mallam Musa dismissed the PDP as incompetent. But given the unrestrained national excitement over President Muhammadu Buhari’s rejection of avarice, some Nigerians may cavil at the former Kaduna governor’s disparaging conclusions. But Mallam Musa is neither given to histrionics nor has he ever been accused of been flighty, irrational and tempestuous. His point of view may be disagreeable, and his ideological conviction considered inflexible, anachronistic and unworkable. But he is a logician of great accomplishment, an ethical politician of high standing, not by persuasion but by deep and genuine conviction. Such men rarely exaggerate or say something out of spite. If Mallam Musa says APC is fascistic, he is probably, if not unimpeachably, right.
The former Kaduna governor did not elaborate on the fascism label; but he needn’t. The facts are clear for everyone to see, even to those mesmerised by the president’s unconvincing rationalisation of many of his draconian actions. Section 1 (1) of the 1999 constitution says: “This Constitution is supreme and its provisions shall have binding force on the authorities and persons throughout the Federal Republic of Nigeria.” But repeatedly, the president and his cabinet have placed themselves above the constitution. Suspects are routinely detained for longer than the constitution mandates; and when regardless of the government’s umbrage the courts summon the courage to grant bail, sometimes as many times as possible for effect, the Buhari presidency ignores the courts, and accuses them of colluding with saboteurs and conniving at corruption. In the opinion of President Buhari, the outrage caused by the malfeasance of the suspects far outweigh the government’s disobedience of the courts.
In other instances, the Buhari presidency goes beyond pursuing the media trial of suspects to outrightly disobeying the constitution by detaining suspects ad infinitum. In the popular case of the Shiite leader, Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, the government not only approved of the massacre of more than 300 of his followers — men, women and children — and their hasty burial in two mass graves, the injured and almost blinded leader and his wife have had their constitutional rights suspended or even abrogated. There are many other cases, sometimes during security operations and anti-corruption war, when the government has backed its campaigns with autocratic, poorly conceived and unconstitutional measures. The country shudders to think what would happen to the liberties guaranteed the people by the constitution had the ruling APC been a united, pacesetting and ideological party fascinated by its own repressive tendencies.
Mallam Musa does not of course indicate whether he thought the disunity in the APC significant enough as a factor in the party’s fascistic approach to governance. Nor is it clear to anyone whether the disunity had anything to do with any ideological struggle within the party. What seems clear is that a faction of the party has hijacked power, not on ideological grounds, but probably on sectional, cabalistic or even sectarian grounds. It is that faction’s brutal use of power, its abhorrent deployment of Machiavellian tactics, and its camorra-like methods that gall the judicious and emit the fascistic signals picked up by Mallam Musa and every Nigerian sensitive about the concepts of freedom and justice.
The former Kaduna governor is right to say that Nigerians can indeed negotiate with an incompetent leader, for an incompetent leader is sometimes amenable to other views; but not so a fascist. A fascist is obsessed with his own point of view, believes himself to be infallible, is paranoid about other people’s objections and observations, hates to be proved wrong, and is overall messianic about his role and objectives in leadership. There is indeed no negotiating with a fascist. Mallam Musa sees the APC as a fascist party; it is unlikely he exaggerates. He must however hope that he does not become a Cassandra whose warnings are fated to be disbelieved, and that the current factionalism in the party does not give way to one supreme, fanatical faction with which neither man nor gods can reason.
