NO one was surprised by the acrimony that visited many of the ward congresses and Ekiti governorship primary organised by the All Progressives Congress (APC) last weekend. Under the scheming national chairman of the party, John Odigie-Oyegun, and the sometimes lugubrious President Buhari, party leaders have spent the better part of three years paying little or no attention to building and entrenching their party. Once they won the general elections, they threw away their party manifesto, dismantled the platform upon which they won the polls, fought like mad to grab whatever each leader could grab, and abandoned the party to nobody and to everybody, alias cabal. Having sowed the wind for three years, it is unlikely they are shocked to be reaping the whirlwind. Indeed, if anything, they must be shocked that they are still standing at all.
President Buhari is strictly and philosophically speaking not a politician. He remains at bottom a military man, going by his constant sulking about the limiting influence of democratic strictures, particularly the parliament and the rule of law. That he did not pay attention to building the APC and forging a united and impregnable party out of its skeletal framework was, therefore, expected. He reposed more faith in a narrow clique of kith and kin with whom he felt conversant and comfortable than look to the party in order to broaden its base and widen its appeal. Obsessed with percentages, he looked for ways to compensate, by ginger ratios, those he felt showed him more loyalty than even those who worked hardest for the party’s unexpected victory in 2015.
It is often said that the APC’s legacy parties are the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), and a faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). Little mention is normally made of the significant influence and role of the faction of the PDP that joined hands with others to wrest control from Dr Jonathan. Yet the nPDP played a major role in that election, but, as they complained last week in a letter they wrote in April, they were yet to receive commensurate compensation or attention. In the letter, which some APC leaders regard as nPDP’s casus belli, the complainants gave a week’s notice to the party to initiate dialogue and give assurances that the party would become more inclusive and operate like a real political party. They did not spell out what they would do if their warnings were left unheeded. In turn, schizoid party leaders have suggested that the nPDP was untrustworthy and had made destructive plans in anticipation of their migration to another party.
Some party leaders have suggested that the nPDP group should wait for ex-Edo State governor Adams Oshiomhole to assume the party leadership in June in order to get a redress for the injuries they claim to have suffered. It is not clear whether they will wait, or whether they think anything can come out of the effort. If the nPDP has not left by now, it is simply because they fear the punitive measures a government that exhibits contempt for the rule of law could bring upon them. They will stay for a little while, it seems, but they are unlikely to be in doubt about the party’s lack of capacity to remake itself and operate along inclusive lines. They know by experience that the president is the party’s lodestar, and everything virtually revolves around him. More, they know that his insularity would limit the flexibility of the next chairman and constrict the concessions they might get. They know that given the nature and capacity of the president and those he trusts, the party is unlikely ever to inspire anyone, let alone be remoulded into a great, modern party.
The acrimonious congresses, the aloofness demonstrated by the incumbent chairman, the dictatorship of antidemocratic governors widening the schisms in the party, and the strangulating control exercised by a shadowy group of individuals in Abuja, are not likely to bode well for the party. For a party that should have mastered the art of internal democracy, but whose leaders preferred to scheme for tenure elongation on the grounds that congresses would widen the schism in the party, there is nothing to indicate that sooner or later it would not implode. Indeed, that it has not imploded is perhaps due paradoxically to the influence and misplacement of priorities of President Buhari himself. Even if the party survives to win the 2019 polls, it already contains the seed of its own destruction far more poignantly than the PDP ever possessed in its crazy 16 years in power. Party leaders will prop up the APC for as long as they can; but in the end, except they can find a saviour, it will collapse. The signs were evident in their congresses; and though they may paper over the cracks, and even ensure a smooth transition to the Oshiomhole chairmanship, the party is too fractious, too undisciplined, too superficial, too callous to one another, and too badly led to endure for as long as some of their members fantasise.
