The many battles within the Labour Party (LP) and between the party and its surrogate mother, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), have exposed the timidity of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and law enforcement agencies, particularly the police, in their handling of political discord. INEC registers and delists political parties based on constitutional provisions. Strangely, on the long-running skirmishes within the LP, the latest of which came to the fore last week between NLC and LP leaderships, INEC has remained impassive. The police have over the years been swift in tackling intraparty rascality, in many instances shutting down party secretariats until the courts decided; but in the case of the LP, for reasons not clearly stated, they have been flatfooted, allowing crimes and malfeasance to be committed at will. No one is sure what scale of conflict must occur in the LP before the relevant agencies put their foot down.
In managing an economy driven to ruin over the past one decade or two, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has appeared beleaguered. It runs the federal administration, and through the attorney general’s office, everything involving party conflicts that border on breakdown of law and order or self-help falls within its remit. But it has seemed content to watch the LP pulverise itself into a coma. Why help an enemy intent on destroying itself, especially after that enemy exhibited vacuity and total lack of ideology and principles? Intervening, the APC probably fears, might shift the focus away from the brigandage happening in the LP to the supposed meddlesomeness of an intolerant and discourteous ruling party. It probably reasoned that if it had intervened when the NLC/LP condominium was up in arms against the Lamidi Apapa faction, it would have robbed the country of the current spectacle contaminating the party in its entirety and deprived citizens of the ringside seats they covet to behold the weaknesses and vacillations of the party’s former presidential candidate, Peter Obi. But perhaps the various agencies empowered by law to intervene in intraparty conflicts are holding their peace because the constitution and Electoral Act already made provisions for the resolution of such conflicts. At what point then do these agencies deem the affected parties, in this case the LP, to have lost control?
The LP is split into three ungainly and paradoxical factions. The NLC component remains the mafia don, the godfather and surrogate mother wrapped into one faction. It would stop at nothing and does not respect any law or convention in maintaining its stranglehold on the party. It boasts of no ideology other than the promotion of workers’ welfare, but it feigns to run a national party committed to regenerating and reforming the country. How it hopes to carry out that inspiring task without structured and coherent ideas is not spelt out in clear terms. The second faction is the Mr Apapa/Abayomi Arabambi faction whose casus belli are the alleged crass ethnicisation of the leadership of the party by Mr Obi and the NLC president, Joe Ajaero, allegations of illegal substitution of candidates in the last polls for which more than N2bn was reportedly deployed, and the NLC president’s undue militancy and disrespect for the rule of law. With the LP national chairman, Julius Abure, now crossing swords with the cantankerous Mr Ajaero, a third faction has now been formed headed by Mr Abure himself, an incredibly wily, obstinate and hugely underestimated politician. In summary, the LP is now balkanised into three factions, and its disputed leadership comprises one meddlesome NLC president and an ineffective and unideological former presidential candidate, Mr Obi. Can they resolve the logjam?
In nearly every piece on the LP in the past nine months, this column had suggested that the party would implode sooner or later, and that Mr Obi, who is been framed as the next political messiah on account of essentially his parsimoniousness and nothing more, was clearly punching above his weight. The column insisted that Mr Obi had always been a political joiner, never a founder of any party; and that when he joined any party, even his loyalty could not be taken for granted. Worse, said this column, Mr Obi had no administrative acumen to run any party, let alone a political party formed by deeply fractious and unprincipled unionists unfortunately led today by a militant opportunist. Even if the LP is sustained into the next polls, concluded this column, the diminution of ethnic and religious politics, and the probable resolution of the country’s economic crisis, would rob Mr Obi of any campaign leg to stand on. In the event, the economy is responding to treatment, and the LP, because of its lack of a steely core, is being subjected to implosive legal, administrative and ethnic triggers. More alarmingly, if Mr Ajaero does not restrain himself, the NLC might suffer collateral damage from his noisome forays into the LP.
The NLC president, in strict disregard to the law and the constitution, argues that the LP is owned by, rather than formed by, the NLC. As a result of that faulty premise, and perhaps because NLC leaders and workers won’t abdicate the prospect of building a formidable political machine and enjoying its perks, he led the NLC into taking the law into their hands when he went after the Lamidi Apapa faction last year. Last week, he again inspired the NLC into another insurrection to take over the offices of the LP. The police and INEC are predictably mute. In the fight he is leading against Mr Abure, his former ally, the NLC president has made the Freudian slip of accepting that the NLC is politicised. They were not content with forming a party, they are also deeply involved in running it; and if push comes to shove, they would gladly dethrone and enthrone party chairmen and leaders. Last week, in the heat of the battle with Mr Abure, the NLC president said he had no political ambition, and had not filled any form to so indicate. But he indeed has political ambition to the extent of using all the resources of the NLC to promote the interest of the LP. In his fight against the Bola Tinubu administration, he has clearly been unable to draw a line between his interests in the LP as an opposition party and the deployment of NLC instruments to fight both intraparty and inter-party wars.
Mr Ajaero constantly overreaches himself. By flagrantly deploying NLC instruments to wage war against opponents, he risks fracturing the trade union and provoking leadership rebellion. He thought nothing of deploying NLC instruments to lend a helping hand to the LP candidate in last year’s Imo State governorship poll, until he was brutalised and humiliated by a throng of roughnecks. For months, he has also employed the same abhorrent tactics to fight the Tinubu administration over workers’ welfare. In his daily harangue to the administration, it was all too clear he had become incapable of differentiating LP from NLC, and union matters from partisan politics. No matter the setback he encounters in his many internal and external wars, Mr Ajaero will still be incapable of the moderation and finesse many have insinuated into his cause. There will be no one to restrain him, not the NLC leadership, and not Mr Obi. Instead, the former LP presidential candidate will watch carefully which way the cats are jumping before taking the partisan plunge. Judging from his statements so far, many of them bland and noncommittal, he thinks Mr Ajaero and the bellicose NLC will have the upper hand.
Yet, regardless of the constitutionality of the NLC president’s position, Mr Obi appears very likely to distance himself from Mr Abure who served him dutifully during the last polls. In any case, the former presidential candidate has little patience for legal and administrative niceties. Once he sees which way the cats are jumping, he will align. And if the ship is sinking, he will follow the rats. It is dangerous opportunism; but he sees it as impeccable optimism and expediency. Mr Ajaero’s men have now taken over NLC offices and left Mr Abure with the short end of the stick. Why would anyone back the leprous Abure horse? When expediency rather than principles determine the course of action, there is no telling just what depths of infamy the LP would plumb in the months ahead as the neophyte which presumptuously prides itself as the main opposition party continues to unravel.
The siege of Okuama and controversial questions
Since militants murdered four military officers and 13 soldiers in Okuama, a sleepy Urhobo, Ughelli South LGA community in Delta State of perhaps hundreds of residents, neither they nor the army has slept. The community is deserted, according to Governor Sheriff Oborevwori, and much of the surrounding settlements, down to Igbomoturu in Bayelsa State, are in lockdown. Surrounding communities have declared Okuama indigenes, many of whom are stranded in swamps and nearby forests, persona non grata for fear of military reprisal. The military, however, said it would deliver ‘measured response and injurious consequences to the perpetrators’ of the gruesome killings, insisting that stories of burning villages and military reprisals were mere propaganda. Perhaps concluding that the crime scene was still an active military operational area, the governor has not visited Okuama, but has ordered the affected communities to give up the suspects.
There are too many conclusions already on the Okuama tragedy. The Defence Headquarters insists the murders were a communal conspiracy. The governor insinuates that there could be some attempts to shield the perpetrators of the violence. And most commentators, citing the sacking of Odi, Bayelsa State, and Zaki Biam, Benue State, during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, as examples have reconciled themselves to the logic, if not legitimacy, of military reprisals. And nearly all analysts, including advertorials by Urhobo and Ijaw groups, not to say the feuding Okuama and Ikoloba communities whose boundary conflict triggered the murder of 17 military personnel, have struggled to distance themselves from the murders, condemned the killings in very strong terms, and prayed for the successful apprehension of the killers. In fact, it has been difficult for anyone to counsel the military to be restrained in its response, given the increasingly gory manner in which the army is framing the brutal killings. The federal government said the murders were an affront to Nigeria’s sovereignty, while the National Assembly charged the military ‘to smoke out the outlaws’ who perpetrated the barbaric killings. Given the mood of the country, it is difficult for anyone to talk of on the one hand and on the other hand. The scale of the killings and the barbaric mutilation of the bodies of the slain soldiers make it even much more difficult for anyone to be objective. But a few commentators have tried to swim against the tide.
The scale of the military reprisals is not yet fully chronicled. Whether the manner in which the troops are executing their mission is provocative or not is not clear, but it is already established that the soldiers were ambushed and wiped out. The country’s official response was likely to start from that ugly and tragic premise, and as expected, it did. But like Odi and Zaki Biam where troops and policemen lost their lives by the dozens, the military reprisal unfortunately overshadowed the tragedy, solved nothing, could not even instill fear in the hearts of those tempted to take on the army, as banditry and Boko Haram have shown, and no lessons were learnt and no attitudinal changes were effected either among the increasingly militant populace or among troops themselves. The Okuama murders are truly and monstrously tragic. But it was another chance for the military to adopt a different template of combating this kind of provocation. There are no indications that it even contemplated a different template, preferring instead to ride on the instinctive wave of popular sentiments that condemn and damn the insolence and audacity of civilians and militants.
Regardless of whatever template the military uses or does not use, whether diligent and painstaking law enforcement sleuthing or brute deployment of force, the killers will be apprehend. Someone will always snitch. Putting the suspect communities on lockdown is, however, not the problem; the problem is the reluctance or inability of soldiers to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, an indication of the ongoing polemical contest between the democratic norm of being considered innocent until proven guilty and the military norm of being deemed guilty until proven innocent. Then there is of course the allegation of military high-handedness, which the army hopes would be expiated by either the shocking scale of the crime or the inevitable success of apprehending the suspects. That method has been used over and over again, in Plateau State when a retired major-general, Idris Alkali, was brutally murdered in 2018, and elsewhere. The problem is that after all is said and done, the military’s image is often sullied. For whether they accept it or not, or whether it makes sense or not, how a crime is solved is as important as the solution itself. The tactics of militants and brutal, sadistic killers, such as the Okuama militants, whether they were local youths allegedly led by Endurance Okodeh, aka ‘Gen.’ Amagbein who has denied the charge, or mercenaries from elsewhere, must always be objurgated. The military has a responsibility, even in their justifiable anger, to be inured to the tactics of the beasts that perpetrated the Okuama killings. This is not just nicety; it is the surest way of dealing with crimes and provocations while retaining the love, admiration and respect of the civil populace. The police are being compelled by the law and the proficient actions of the civil society to abjure torture; that abjuration must be nationwide, institutional, unapologetic and total.
The loss of 17 officers and men of the Nigerian Army is truly disheartening. The slain men will never return to their families. Those who survive them in the army, including the rest of the country, have a responsibility to avenge them lawfully. But the military has an even greater responsibility of inquiring into why and how their men were deployed in Okuama, and why to secure the release of one abducted Okoloba man or placate boundary dispute between the Ijaw and Urhobo, a battalion commander, two majors, and a captain had to lead 13 soldiers into a fray quite beneath the status, and far removed from the training, of the Nigerian military. The military must inquire into the cheapness of their death, whether they were ambushed or not, and learn lasting lessons. Wiping out such a highly trained contingent in peacetime does no credit to the nation. The slain officers and men will not return, and as the authorities said, would be buried as heroes. Many more soldiers are deployed in almost all the 36 states of the nation, especially in the face of mounting insecurity. The Okuama deaths must, therefore, be investigated from the military point of view in order to ensure that next time, in more defensible deployments, no contingent dies so cheaply. The military owes their men that much, and the country a sophisticated precedent in interdicting a beastly enemy.
