As the virus of stomach infrastructure infects everything in the land, the word materialist itself may appear incapable of meaning no more than an addiction to gross material consumption; an obsession with mundane materiality as opposed to the finer and more refined aspects of existence. Materialism has damaged our social life beyond recognition. Tragically enough, even some of our most revered spiritual leaders are not exempt from this addiction to irrational material acquisition and gross consumption.
But as students of advance philosophy will attest, to conduct a materialist investigation is to deploy the principles and methodology of Historical and Dialectical Materialism in order to deepen our understanding of a specific occurrence, particularly the historical and material circumstances in which it takes place. On the other hand, ideological suicide occurs when people kill off their self-advertised convictions in a way and manner that suggest a new identity and the complete erasure of their former self.
Moral outrage and fiery denunciation of those who betray their self-stated political ideals may satisfy our anger but they can hardly yield insight into the way forward, or provide a practical roadmap for immediate action. The classic statement of materialist interrogation of history is Karl Marx observation that men make history, but not under the circumstances of their choice.
There is commotion and crisis everywhere you turn to in the political landscape of Nigeria. The permanent carpet crossing, the eternal to and fro has reached an epidemic proportion. This perpetual shuttle of refugees and politically displaced persons suggest an ideological neutering of the polity. All politicians appear the same, like cats in the night. The collateral damage has been prohibitive. There is a collapse of public trust in politics and politicians.
People no longer perceive politics and politicians as the route to social redemption. So far the biggest casualty in this refractive mirror of public perception is Malam Nuhu Ribadu. While not doubting his political courage, his quaint and quixotic notions of patriotism , this column has already expressed profound reservations about Ribadu’s intellectual and ideological solidity even while he was the presidential flag bearer of the ACN. We need not be further delayed.
Yet in a curious way, this apparent collapse of ideology as a weapon of social engineering and as an instrument for fashioning out political action may well be indicative of a tectonic shift in our polity which could have been rumbling below the surface for quite some time. But the world has never existed in a vacuum of ideas. The end of ideology as a means of social engineering may well signal the arrival of a new vista of ideological struggle.
The politics of the Fourth Republic and the Nigerian post-military society cannot be divorced from the politics of its military progenitors and their end of ideology bravura and triumphalism. Although very much their military superior, General Obasanjo is very much an ideological heir of his professional subordinates in every material respect. Perhaps smarting from the trauma of the civil war, the principal aim of the post-civil war military hierarchy has been to create huge pan-Nigerian parties capable of holding the nation together at all costs even at the expense of national development and rapid transformation.
They seem to have succeeded beyond their wildest dream, except that it is becoming impossible to hold the country together without accelerated economic development and genuine political transformation. The mass ideological suicide of so called progressives in the current republic attests to the success of this military formula. Both the PDP and the NPN were conceived as huge Pan-Nigerian bazaars and millennial political monopolies. The problem is that like the NPN before it was stopped in its track, the PDP is set to consume both itself and the nation.
If we cast our mind back to pre-Independence politics and the struggle for decolonization, we would find that there was no room for mass defections and the Russian roulette such as we are currently witnessing. Although there were regional differences as to the actual departure date of the colonial masters, it would have been political taboo for anybody to establish a political platform based on the project of continued colonial rule.
This ideological solidity and political coherence remained very much the name of the game in the First Republic even within the context of widening inter-party animosities. Those who defected from their parties did not have the courage or the political heart to join the hegemonic party. In the case of deserters from the Action Group after its crisis erupted in 1962, they could only manage a tense and edgy alliance with the NPC till the bitter end. After a futile rebellion, K.O Mbadiwe, a popular and charismatic politician, returned to the NCNC with his tail between his legs.
Although anchored on a regional platform and later on clear ideological differentiation along Socialist Democratic line, the most outstanding avatar of this politics of principles in the First and Second Republic was Obafemi Awolowo. Even when and while he sought alliances at the centre, Awolowo stubbornly refused to surrender the principles of his party, the Action Group. Throughout his distinguished political life, Awolowo sought and fought to prevent the homogenisation of the Nigerian political class. His thinking was that unless the Nigerian populace was presented with a clear and well-articulated alternative blueprint, the polity was doomed.
After the death of the Ikenne titan, the road was clear for succeeding military autocrats to engineer the destruction of the old regional platform that was the basis of pre-military politics. Responding to what they might have honestly and genuinely thought was a national emergency particularly after a costly civil war, the military sought to demobilise the old regional project. In this respect, the dissolution of the old regions and their balkanization into unviable states came in very handy.
Thus was born in its post-independence incarnation the unitarist and harshly centralising state, a final product of the military imaginary which began life in the colonial incubator and which haunts the Nigerian post-military polity till date. But even before Awolowo’s death, the private wall had already fissured. The 1983 UPN gubernatorial primaries witnessed startling defections to the ruling party. Before then, one of UPN’s serving senators also deserted to the ruling party.
This was something hitherto unheard of in an Awolowo party. The old man would have been pained to no end seeing some of his beloved and trusted lieutenants absconding. One of these had even written a book on the principles “Awoism”. To show the extent to which the new military class had penetrated Awolowo’s fortress even while alive, Chief Bola Ige was almost summarily expelled from the party for inviting a pariah like General Obasanjo to mediate in the dispute between him and his estranged deputy, the late Sunday Afolabi.
Famously moved by Alhaji Lateef Jakande in what has been dubbed the infamous Night of the Long Knives in Yola, 1983, the motion of expulsion was a foretaste and forerunner of the tragedy that was to befall Awolowo’s surviving discipleship. Exactly 10 years after, Jakande himself was excommunicated for joining the Abacha government.
This was the beginning of the end of politics of principles based on clear ideological preference in Nigeria. The homogenization of the Nigerian political class which Awolowo feared and fought against seems to have come upon us with the force of a gale. In the dialectical maelstrom, what may warm the heart of certain Nigerian nationalists is the seeming collapse and death throes of the old regional politics. But it has come at a stiff nation-disabling price.
In a moment of sublime contempt, Anthony Enahoro, the departed great nationalist and foremost freedom fighter, once dismissed both the SDP and NRC as little better than government parastatals. As if to confirm the old man’s prescient hunch, the leadership of the SDP, acting out a military script, summarily traded away its party’s hard won presidential victory with enthusiasm and relish as if clear party lines existed only in the imagination of jaded Nigerians.
Five years and another military regime after, the late Chief Bola Ige caustically described Abacha’s five parties as the five fingers of the same leprous hand. Shortly before Abacha died in mysterious circumstances, the five parties were bandying together to proclaim the goggled one as their sole presidential candidate. It doesn’t get more politically homogenous and leprous to the bargain.
The current mass defections and borderless gallivanting among the political class may well signal the final death knell of ideological politics in contemporary Nigeria. To discerning Nigerians, there may not be much difference between the APC and the PDP. Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, the revered Afenifere patriarch, has dismissed both the PDP and APC as platforms of predation and primitive accumulation.
But given the flirtations of the Afenifere rump with the Labour Party which is nothing but the evil doppelganger of the PDP, and their covert complicity and collaboration with Jonathan’s statist agenda, we may well be witnessing the final working out of some ancient curse. When Chief Sunday Michael Afolabi famously told Chief Bola Ige to shut up and get on with the federal meal he had been invited to partake in, he might have thought he was making a brilliant point. For lending their talents to the statist chicanery so loathsome to their people’s federalist ambition, both men were later to give up the ghost in mysterious circumstances.
It is not surprising, then, that in all of this, it is the APC that is left clutching the wrong end of the stick. Already stuck at the zero ground level of low public esteem, the PDP has nothing to lose. The end of ideology is also an ideology of sorts and a viciously and virulently reactionary ideology at that. But it allows the ruling party to retain the initiative. In such circumstances, It will surely take the vigour and vibrancy of a mass movement allied with civil society groups and other professional organizations to unseat the PDP.
Like an overweight sprinter, the APC has been slow to get off the starting block. But in linking up at the centre, the party’s dominant old ACN faction might have left its western flank exposed. Huge internal fissures are showing up. With the tragic loss of Ekiti, its regionalist impetus is already in grave danger. If the party allows the PDP or any of its sleeping partners to poach another state in the old region, both the ideological and political planks of its regionalist agenda would have collapsed.
For a party that is hoping to distinguish itself with a genuinely transformational blueprint based on clearly differentiated principles, the current climate of mass defection and ideological suicide could not have been more ominous in terms of public and popular perception. Yet an even more cruel and tragic irony is playing out which portrays many of the party’s leading lights as unreconstructed products of military democracy. Rather than relying on mass recruitment of the electorate, the APC seems to be relying on the big men theory of African politics, a game that happens to be the founding template of the ruling party.
The likes of Nuhu Ribadu are nothing but small fry in this turbulent ocean of political betrayal. The hurricane of mass political suicide has finally berthed on our shores. The ideological neutering of a polity often results in the neutering of political strategy and methodology with all parties resorting to the same methods and measure. For a developing society, this is the real tragedy of the collapse of ideological politics. It is a one-party state by any other name with the parties no more than bickering factions of the same political monopoly.
But you cannot play poker with history for long, just as you cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. Should the opposition groups falter in their bid to present Nigerians with a clear and well-articulated alternative blueprint, and should the ruling party continue to hold the nation to ransom in its current strangulating stasis and paralyzed inertia, we might just wake up one day to find that we are truly at the mercy of a social earthquake. In the history of human society and its political evolution, no party or politician has been known to defect from that one.
