It was a victory party that turned into a funeral pyre.
Son of former Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa had his followers waltz to the PDP secretariat in Abuja. Dressed in colourful outfit, they pulsed with songs and dance. The man, Abudul-Jhalil Tafawa Balewa, swaggered into the office to pick his presidential nomination form. While the fiesta flared on, he slouched out of the office, his shoulder sagged and his buoyant face dropped to a scowl. He infected the crowd of followers with his dour look.
The party said there was no form. The man brandished his receipt. He had paid for it. It was a breach of contract. But the only form available, we learnt later, was for one Goodluck Jonathan who had been endorsed as the automatic candidate of the party. That was how the victory song dropped many decibels to a dirge. It was a comic resemblance to the play by Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca, titled Blood Wedding, where a wedding turns into a dreary lamentation and mourning,
Never mind that later, after President Jonathan had picked his ticket, some form of arrangement was made for Tafawa Balewa to pick his. Everybody knows that the son of the former prime minister is no great shakes in the party. He is a mere ant in the sweepstakes. When the Jonathan wind comes, no one would even see the ant go. It will vanish inside the dust bowl.
Tafawa Balewa’s complaint is the sort of tear we see in this season. The word in town now is imposition. Some might have asked Balewa how he acquired the so-called bona fides to run for an office. Was his father not imposed on the Northern People’s Congress by the Sardauna of Sokoto? It is the irony of the day that imposition has become the excuse among politicians of both parties to justify rebellion when the ticket goes elsewhere.
When the ticket is theirs, or falls in the hands of their cronies, it is democracy, or consensus. When it does not, it is an autocratic folly. Welcome to presidential system. Some have said it is the curse of the system we borrowed from the Americans. Yet we know that even when the parliamentary system thrived in this country, we still had complaints of imposition. The battle between Awolowo and Akintola arose from the crisis of imposition. We should not wake up today and start throwing accusation of which we are all guilty.
Some have attributed it to the hangover from the military era. I have trafficked in this belief in the past. But I think it oversimplifies it. The military thrived in this part in part because we were beholden to a system of command and control embedded with centuries-old reign of monarchy. The king syndrome has overwhelmed us. It is feudalism writ large. It is politics of kings and chiefs.
It permeates every part of culture. It is not only because of our monarchical roots. It percolates family with its extended system. So we have to crave patriarchs. There has to be a strong family person. We carry it into the offices, into the farm system, into the village group system. How do we expect the political party to be immune just because we call it democracy? We have become a society of the big man because we have not shed the monarchical baggage.
We decided to adopt democracy as a system, but we did not know that it came as a cover of our ancient penchant for control. Hence the First Republic collapsed. The idea of democracy is progress, but are we biting off more than we can chew?
When the Americans gave themselves the presidential system, they did not start with universal suffrage. Even the woman and poor did not vote. Their first President George Washington was not a product of popular election. He was selected by what we call consensus today. In fact, a good percentage of the founding fathers wanted him to have royal powers, like King George. They, like Nigeria, looked back to Europe, which was just beginning to shed the yoke of the divine rights of kings. They based their system on a culture that was evolving piecemeal. We have swallowed the whole bottle of beer in one swig.
That was at play when the senators of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) cried foul. They saw that the governors did not want them to return. In other words, they wanted to be imposed once again. They cried foul that governors had taken over the system and structure and they had no prayers. Hence, in a burst of the reckless, they abandoned their duty posts to the Nigerian people – not that they did much when they were working.
This trend is also all over the All Progressives Congress (APC) where some elements are crying over imposition. Presidentialism thrives on two things: money and influence. Influence is what we sometimes call party structure. Money, the mother’s milk of politics, plays a big role in it.
Those who recommended the presidential system for us thought it would be better than the parliamentary that gave us chaos, wetie and the civil war. Well, presidentialism has not fared better. The politicians who claim they expect it to fare better are hypocrites. They know the rules of the game going in. They know it is about who owns money and who exerts influence. It is a sort of Hobbesian mess.
So, when in Delta, Lagos, Akwa Ibom, etc, some of the candidates are shouting down a candidate, it is not because they want fairness. It is because it is not fair if they are not the anointed one. We are seeing it in both parties from the local government to senator to governor. It is clearly at play in the presidential sweepstakes in both parties. We also see it in the balance of forces, whether ethnic, dialectal, religious, geographic, in states. It is a numbers game in money count, delegates count, etc.
What we have is a sort of declaration of independence late in the day. Candidates are showing the streaks of princes who are fighting for the crown. They claim they belong to the right family and others are impostors. If I am anointed, I am not imposed but others are impostors. If I am excluded, the system has been subverted.
Even in the first Democratic Party primaries that Obama won, Hilary Clinton complained that the caucus system in states like Colorado gave the black man advantage. It cost money and endorsements. The recent off-year elections cost about $4 billion. Anywhere we cannot stop powerful people from exerting influence unless the system mounts a buffer against them. Ours does not. The richest founding father, John Hancock, wanted to be the first US president. His money failed him because money was not enough. Was he a threat? Yes.
Many people have said corruption is Nigeria’s problem. They are half right. The root problem is a culture in which we have to depend on somebody up there for things and direction, including money. It was fair in the past. Why are we complaining now when we have not changed the system?
We still run a feudal society in the guise of republicanism. Our federal system gives all the power to the centre. Even in states, all the power is in one man, as it is in a family. We fought a civil war because Ironsi gave us a unitary system. Since the war ended, we have not changed it. That is the only society we know. Unless we learn to change gradually into a system that all see to be fair, our politicians should stop complaining when it does not favour them. Hypocrisy is now the season.
Amuta writes the wrong
Columnist and literary critic Chidi Amuta unveils his collected journalism this week. Since he waded out of his professorial slough into the toga of a journalist, Amuta has written quite a few controversial pieces, especially as an avowed advocate of one of Nigeria’s flinty dictators, Ibrahim Babangida. He has received quite some flak for fuelling such a shameful flame. He never apologised for it. But other than that, his pieces have been quite progressive. He writes with clarity, insight and elegance of a man accustomed to the rigour of classroom debate and the concerns of the street. The book, Writing the Wrong, is welcome to the beehive of public debate.
