What happened last Tuesday is worse than mere carpet crossing; it is a coup d’etat against the ruling party, a relic of the old political culture that citizens voted against last April.
Many of regular readers of this column have bombarded me with questions and requests for comments on the recent election of principal officers of the two houses of legislature. Despite my efforts to wriggle out of discussing this matter until all the facts are in, many of such readers have insisted that my emphasis on the Manifesto of Change in the last few weeks should make it obligatory for me to comment on what appears to them as an assault on change.
By way of preliminary remarks, those who asked for votes on the promise of change did not include PDP members who eventually got elected on the platform of that party. It is thus pointless for citizens to lose sleep that current and former PDP governors and other representatives in the new National Assembly chose to assist in getting Saraki as President and a leading member of the PDP, Ike Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate President. PDP lawmakers have not done anything unusual. What is clear is that the PDP is still very strong in the Senate. Although this should not be an excuse for the leverage demonstrated a few days ago by PDP lawmakers in the new National Assembly, in view of the fact that the majority of the Republicans in the 113th Congress of the U.S. Senate was not any more significant at 53 Democrats to 45 Republicans than that of APC’s 64 to PDP’s 45 in Nigeria’s 8th National Assembly. Yet, it was easy for the Democrats to elect the principal officers of the Senate. The difference between the two contexts was party cohesiveness and discipline.
If what happened in the National Assembly had been in the days of “PDP Power,” it would not have created tension for many as it has now, given the number of emails I had received since Tuesday. In a period when the safest psychological state was not to expect so that one was not disappointed, nobody would have worried or been worried by what appeared as political tricksterism in the election of principal officers in the national assembly last Tuesday. But in a government – executive and legislature – that came to power on the manifesto of change, it is conceivable that the average newspaper reader would feel disappointed by the behaviour of APC members of the new legislature.
Citizens have no reason to feel despondent at this point. It is too soon to feel discouraged. Buhari and the APC promised change, and it is logical for citizens to expect clear departure from the political style of the past in the first major action of the APC-controlled legislature. President Buhari may be a reformed or born-again democrat as he was presented during the last campaign. It is not being realistic to expect that all the folks in the APC are democrats in the true sense of the word, given the mass migration of politicians seeking power and recognition to the party in the last one year.
Without any exaggeration, the APC is a political party that is still unfolding or evolving. As it is today, it is a mix of political views and ideas. And this should be understandable, given its history. It is obvious that the APC is a party that houses ideological factions. If this was not clear before the elections, the events of last Tuesday illustrates graphically that there is diversity of ideological perspectives in the APC, unlike what obtains in the PDP. From its inception, the PDP had shown no apology for being a party of the extreme right ideologically, a conservative political party, despite periodic rhetoric of progressive politics by individual members of the party. PDP was created largely to sustain the governance philosophy and style of the military dictators that midwifed the party. In a study of the governments of Nigeria from colonialism to now, Atul Kohli described in a book STATE-DIRECRED DEVELOPMENT: Political Power and Industrialisation in the Global Periphery those who had governed the country in the post-independence era as ‘personalistic and patrimonial.’ In the last sixteen years, ‘PDP Power’ whether under Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, or Jonathan, was deployed to confirm Kohli’s classification of Nigerian rulers by ensuring that each PDP government in the last sixteen years built on the culture of corruption that is generally the result of a governance driven solely by personalistic and patrimonial interests.
With respect to the APC, the party ideologically houses mainly centrists sandwiched by a thin layer of rightists and leftists. This amorphous situation was compounded by the migration of members of the New PDP to the APC shortly after the formation of the party. What played out as lack of cohesiveness or discipline with respect to the election of principal officers of the national assembly last Tuesday is the effect of the party’s ideological amorphousness. Those who came to the APC out of dissatisfaction with the culture of a political party besotted to power sharing should be expected to have as much interest in sharing of the plums of office, as those they met in the party. It is thus not bizarre that members of the party that lost out in the primaries to select the presidential ticket and others who believe they too had worked hard to bring victory to the party in their respective states became passionate about their desire for office in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Ambition in this instance is not a political crime or moral lapse.
What is absurd is the failure of the APC to prevent any of its members from negotiating the interest and right of the majority party away through an ugly form of horse trading with the PDP, to the extent that in the name of geopolitical balance a current PDP member was given the position of Deputy Senate President as a compensation for the PDP’s decision to give the position of Senate President to a visible member of the APC, regardless of the choice of majority of his colleagues in the APC. In a political culture that focuses on power, there is bound to be politicians that act solely in the interest of obtaining power from the electoral victory of their party. But invoking the principle of geopolitical balance to justify what happened on Tuesday is diversionary. There are many other more straightforward and respectable ways to achieve geopolitical balance.
On the question on the implications of this action for the manifesto of change, it is too late to tell. However, it signals the possibility of other conspiracies between a section of APC and the PDP to scuttle executive policies that may be in the interest of citizens but not to the advantage of ideologues of personalism and patrimonialism in both APC and PDP. It is unlikely that the new alliance between some APC members and the entire PDP lawmakers can threaten the president with frivolous impeachment. For that to happen, APC will have collapsed as a party. However, executive bills sent to the Assembly stand the risk of being delayed or deformed, should APC leadership fail to find strategies for containing its errant members.
As for whether this action can destroy the manifesto of change, especially from the executive side of the federal government, President Buhari himself will have to have changed his mind on his electoral pledge to end the politics of corruption and personal interests that endeared voters to him two months ago. Having promised the nation and the international community two months ago to move the country away from policies that promote the interest of the elite to those that address the problems of people at the grassroots, he should have nothing to fear about conspiracy between some members of the party on which he got elected and those of the party he defeated in the last presidential election. Once majority of citizens are solidly behind good policies of Buhari, regardless of how uncomfortable such policies make politicians beholden to self-promoting political practices, there is nothing to fear.
But there is a need for concerted efforts on the part of leadership of the APC to make the party more cohesive ideologically. What happened last Tuesday is worse than mere carpet crossing; it is a coup d’etat against the ruling party, a relic of the old political culture that citizens voted against last April. One lesson that nobody can miss is that the strategy employed to gain power from a non-performing political party may not be enough to sustain a new party in power. Party leaders need to remember a Yoruba proverb: Bi inako baa tan l’aso, ejekii tan l’eekan (for as long as lice hold on to or reside in its owner’s clothes, there will continue to be blood on the owner’s fingers resulting from the owner’s efforts to fight the lice). The political fabric of the country is still replete with lice and what happened last Tuesday in the National Assembly is a graphic illustration of this malaise.
