The All Progressives Congress (APC) has an uphill, but not insurmountable, task of keeping its states safe from predators and winning the 2015 presidential election. The party probably recognises the enormity of the task ahead, and may be planning an onslaught against it. But beyond recognising the obstacles, it will have to devise virtuoso ways of tackling the challenges that seem set to doom its efforts. As indicated in this place last week, some APC states are in turmoil, destabilised by internal dissension and plagued by powerful external enemies and neighbours. To retain its hold on its states, sustain unity within its ranks, and expand its suzerainty over hostile states and Aso Villa, the party will have to do almost the impossible, including wishing for a miracle, and looking for means of calming the tempest triggered by some of its radical and younger elements. Some of these younger elements camouflage self-promotion in altruistic, ideological and philosophical colours. And a few others have axes to grind with their party leaders, state and national. But even if the quarrels cannot be resolved outrightly, the overall success of the party in 2015 will depend somewhat on how successfully party leaders manage the rage within.
A few months before the June governorship poll in Ekiti, Opeyemi Bamidele (ACN/Labour, Ado-Ekiti/ Irepodun-Ifelodun), publicised his war with the APC and looked on imperturbably as the party drowned in the wake that followed the storm he unleashed. His grouse, analysts suggested, was not just the senatorial ticket that was coaxed from him, a loss some said he had reconciled himself to, but the rather uncomplimentary and disrespectful way he believed he was ostracised from the decision-making organ of the party and state government. He and his supporters believed party leaders and government officials played politics of exclusion. What was intriguing about the misunderstanding in pre-election Ekiti was the implacability of the combatants: Dr Fayemi gave no quarter; and Hon Bamidele, anticipating APC would come a cropper, eventually defected to the Labour Party.
Hon Bamidele signposted the coming of the Young Turks in the APC, a group of irreverent, sometimes irascible, but iconoclastic politicians unafraid of rocking the party’s boat or provoking its mercurial leaders. While the embers of the revolt triggered by Hon Bamidele was yet to die, Muiz Banire, the National Legal Adviser of the APC and many times commissioner in the Lagos government of former governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Governor Babatunde Fashola, stirred up a hornet’s nest, pockmarking the Lagos skyline with incendiary comments on his party leaders and, in particular, Asiwaju Tinubu. Where Hon Bamidele, the activist, had contrastingly restrained himself from dragging Asiwaju Tinubu into the Ekiti imbroglio, not even in snide remarks and insinuations, Dr Banire has shown less ruefulness, though as a legal practitioner he was expected to possess more conservative and diplomatic skills in polemics and discourse.
It should not matter to a party loyalist whether a candidate wins on his own merit or is helped by his party’s reputation and organisation, but Dr Banire, perhaps pursuing covert agenda against his party, surprisingly suggested that Governor Rauf Aregbesola won the August governorship election in Osun in spite of the APC. The August 9 win must be delinked from the party, he asserted. Why a party leader should gloat that his party had no significant input in helping candidate Aregbesola to win is hard to understand. It is a needless argument to make. But Dr Banire is a Young Turk, and from his imprecates against his leaders and sweeping dismissal of their relevance and proclivities, some of whom he deprecatingly described as a cabal, he creates the impression of a tough politician, one who can call his soul his own. Though his legal and political arguments fail to persuade completely, and his lexis a little rough-hewn in some aspects, he cuts the image of an intellectual deserving of respect.
The APC needs internal opposition in order to enable it hammer out better platforms and establish a solid, robust and cohesive party. The likes of Hon Bamidele and Dr Banire are in my opinion invaluable to the APC or any other party for that matter. Hon Bamidele cannot flourish in a somnolent party like Labour, and his organisational skills, not to say his ambition, would be wasted or diminished. And in the PDP, which his inexplicable and indescribable support for Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti makes him gravitate towards, his radical posture would both be repressed and absolutely misapplied. Dr Banire, on the other hand, is the perfect proponent of one eating his cake and having it. His intrepidity may not seem potent enough to lure him into defection, though I could be second-guessing him wrongly, and he seems precisely the sort of man to stay, fight and profit in his party, the APC. He even spent the better part of his stay in the party — a party he now casually lampoons — helped on every step of the way by mentors, some of them mentors of his own choosing. But now he is repudiating the methods by which he himself rose into prominence and by which he came to some comfort. His iconoclasm, sans his bad temper, obduracy and uncivil language, is not misplaced in a party desirous of sustaining its relevance and presenting itself as a change agent.
However, just like Hon Bamidele proved by his consequential defection from the APC to LP, Dr Banire’s beloved party can ill afford the ossification many party apparatchiks seem to be comfortable with, but which he and his fellow iconoclast have challenged and denounced. They want imposition to end, though they seemed to have profited from variants of its application before now, and are quite unable to appreciate and interpret its complex and adaptable nature and multiple nuances. While their ambition to end imposition and other undemocratic practices within their party is not misplaced, assuming their diagnoses are right, their unpolished style of fighting good causes within their party leaves much to be desired. Dr Banire, from his recent lecture and interviews, is predicting doom for his party if it failed to conduct itself in a manner he believes is unimpeachable. He leaves no room for any error on his part. In fact, he has unguardedly threatened worse consequences for even his party leaders, sparing no one.
There will be many more Young Turks like Hon Bamidele and Dr Banire, a few of them outrightly impertinent. The APC must learn how to deal with them and manage disaffection within the party. The party must also accept that its leaders are not infallible and can indeed be criticised or castigated by younger and radical elements in the party. But it is also imperative to understand that while they fought legitimately, Hon Bamidele and Dr Banire unfortunately fought blindly and unwisely. The logic behind their grievances may be right, but the methods of their fight, not to talk of the intended and unintended consequences of their battles, expose them as short on character and lacking in conceptual depth of what their party represents and envisions.
Judging from the actions and arguments of the two dissenters and perhaps other Young Turks within the party, I am afraid that even in the APC, whether among the leaders or followers, few really understand the visionary and aesthetic import of the party’s foundation and legacy. Many see the party as a vehicle for winning elections and self-promotion, which attributes easily become ends in themselves. But if my reading of the party is right, especially given its lofty promotion of Southwest integration when the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) held the reins, I think the party is an idea grander, loftier, and more sublime than its current methods, organisation and policies exhibit or match. Consumed by their sense of self-importance and distracted by their loathing for certain party practices that seemed targeted against their interests, neither Hon Bamidele nor Dr Banire apparently possesses the rich understanding of what the party is or stands for — an identity far greater and nobler than what is set down in the party’s constitution and manifesto. Had they understood this fact, both gentlemen would have fought differently, with reverence for the party’s grand ideas and great future, and with cultured civility towards party leaders who, though their methods may be shaky and even contradictory, best approximate the party’s spiritual essence.
Many of the causes fought for by Hon Bamidele and Dr Banire are sensible. Their resolve and courage should be admired and channeled, for their party needs men like them to midwife a greater, bigger, stronger and more relevant political organisation. However, their methods are unusually strident, and their manners suspiciously discordant, if not entirely objectionable. But party leaders, at least the few who can see beyond today and the chaotic manifestation of what the party represents, must find ways to reconcile the old and the new generation, and forge all of them into an exceeding strong army committed to truly transforming and renewing Nigeria. The party leaders’ vision must make them endure insults, be indifferent to mentee insolence, and enable them handle with perfect equanimity and fortitude the fractious tendency so common among the young and footloose radicals in the party, whether it be Hon Bamidele or Dr Banire, or any other Young Turk flushed with both the anger and unpredictable messianism that so often hobbles the young.
