A school of political analysis adumbrates the interesting thesis of party decay. As Professors Rod Hague et al put it in their book on comparative politics, “This theory suggests that parties will eventually outlive their usefulness. They arise in response to important problems – integrating the mass electorate into politics, say, or hastening the departure of colonial rulers. Once successful in overcoming the problem, the party loses its purpose”.
The scholars cite the example of defunct communist parties of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which successfully industrialized and modernized the countries under their jurisdiction. However, “with this mission largely accomplished, ruling communist parties lost heart and drive. Instead of leading society, they became a brake on its further development. Once the prop of support from the Soviet military was removed, they fell down dead”.
Does the party decay thesis offer us some insight into the trajectory of political parties in Nigeria’s post-colonial political evolution and particularly the pathetic position in which the hitherto invincible People’s Democratic Party (PDP) currently finds itself?
The mass parties of the First Republic, the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), Action Group (AG) and Northern People’s Congress (NPC) in particular, were key constituent elements of the anti-colonial nationalist movement. They succeeded splendidly in achieving nominal ‘flag independence’ for the country in 1960. In the first six years of independence, these parties were at the vanguard of impressive developmental strides under a genuine federal arrangement that fostered competitive transformational dynamism.
However, the primordial ethno-regional fissures masked by the pro-independence euphoric illusions of a common nationhood soon bubbled to the surface and incrementally undermined both stability and development. The party system began to decay rapidly with corrosive implications for democracy and political order. The first republic parties had apparently fulfilled their historic purpose as they became too organisationally and ethically exhausted to stem the country’s slide to anarchy.
In January 1996, the military intervened. It was the historic mission of the military to keep Nigeria one and seek to engineer her transformation from a mere ‘geographical expression’ to genuine nationhood. In pursuit of this objective, the military fashioned Nigeria’s federal structure in the mirror image of its unitary, hierarchical organisational configuration.
After over three decades in power, it was obvious that the military had largely failed in its self-imposed historic mission of the socio-political and economic modernisation of Nigeria. The assumption that it possessed the organisational attributes of discipline, efficiency, focus and patriotism that could foster unity and rapid national development proved illusory. National cohesion and progress cannot be decreed ‘with military alacrity’.
The military had become horrendously infected with the corruption virus it had promised to extinguish. Its organisational cohesion had been badly fragmented by divisive intra-organisational politics as well as primal ethno-regional, religious and partisan influences. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the military had become too morally, psychologically and professionally famished to effectively and sustainably resist protracted civil society agitations for its return to the barracks. Organisational decay had set in. it had fulfilled its historic purpose on the political terrain and withdrew in disarray in 1999.
Enter the PDP. Its historic mission was to provide a transition from military dictatorship to democratic governance in Nigeria. Fashioned in the organisational image of the military, the PDP established an emphatic dominance of the polity by winning not just the presidential election but 21 of the 36 state governorship elections in 1999.
It was certainly not fortuitous that a retired General and former military Head of State, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, emerged as President in 1999 on the platform of the PDP. But then, in the bowels of the PDP’s electoral supremacy lay the seeds of the incipient and insidious decay that culminated in its electoral implosion in last year’s general elections and its continuing organisational, moral and psychological unravelling today.
First, the PDP had a unitary organisational structure, which was quite incongruous within the context of a complex plural and federal society like Nigeria. Just like the deformed Nigerian federal polity, the PDP had an excessively centralist structure that stultified its internal flexibility and dynamism. Second, the PDP was subsumed under the asphyxiating grip of the Obasanjo imperial presidency. Intra-party democratic structures and processes were thus undermined resulting in enervating organisational sclerosis.
Third was the PDP’s active attempt to transform the party system from a one party-dominant to an absolute one party state in which it exercised a totalising control of the polity. The resultant destabilization and decimation of the opposition compounded the complacency and lethargy within the former ruling party engendered by the lack of internal intra-party opposition. It also accelerated the process of the party’s organizational desensitization that worsened steadily climaxing in the electoral rout of April 28 last year.
Today, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) sits atop the country’s political structure. Its historic mission is to preside over the transition from mere civilian rule of the last 16 years to a genuine democracy. Ironically, to achieve the feat of ousting an incumbent government from power at the centre, key opposition parties – ACN, CPC, ANPP and a faction of APGA – had to come together to fashion themselves in the centralist organizational image of the PDP!
Thus, the APC’s essentially unitary organizing ethos is not reflective enough of the country’s federal diversity. Furthermore, the new ruling party seems to be following the PDP pattern of subordinating party to government in a way that immobilises and incapacitates the latter. Again, the National Assembly leadership election fiasco, the on-going Kogi governorship election debacle and its unimpressive management of the economy thus far suggest a paralyzing policy ambivalence as well as philosophical and ideological dissonance capable of hobbling the APC’s change agenda.
Has the APC begun the process of decay even before settling down to govern effectively? Will the APC, like the monstrous child in the novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah’s ‘The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born?”, vault straight from childhood to old age without experiencing the invigorating and exhilarating intervention of youth? We are watching.
HURRICANE OBY EZEKWESILI
She is fiery. She is feisty. She takes no prisoners. Former Federal Minister and Vice President of the World Bank, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, this week in a widely published article, aimed missiles against the economic policies of President Muhammadu Buhari and the APC. As far as she is concerned, Buhari is trapped in a time warp dating back to his first coming as military Head of State when he resolutely but wrongly (in her view) refused to devalue the Naira or throw the economy to the invisible hands of the market.
Ezekwesili does not consider that it was the succeeding Babangida regime that adopted the IMF/World Bank imposed Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), massively devalued the Naira and enthusiastically embraced free market doctrines that did incalculable and enduring harm to the economy. The Naira has ever since never regained its pre-SAP vibrancy and the economy has remained inextricably prostrate.
For some strange reason, Mrs Ezekwesili believes that a so obviously conservative President Buhari is a socialist or communist ideologue of sorts! She is also under the illusion that the received neo-liberal economic nostrums she espouses are not ideological after all but embody what she characterises as ‘economic pragmatism’. Nothing can be more untrue. It does not occur to her that the communist parties of China, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which she so contemptuously deride, laid the industrial and infrastructural foundation that facilitated their countries’ latter transition to market economies on a viable and sustainable basis.
Ezekwesili wants Buhari to devalue the Naira and subordinate the economy to market forces. But as Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has noted, “At least since the work of Alexander Gerschenkron in the 1950s, it has been widely recognised by economic historians that “late development” has been critically dependent on state intervention. Japan and the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) on its periphery are standard contemporary examples”.
Commenting on the role that strong state intervention played in the “early development” of the United States, Chomsky writes “High tariffs and other forms of state intervention may have raised costs to American consumers, but they allowed domestic industry to develop, from textiles to steel to computers, barring cheaper British products in earlier years, providing a state-guaranteed market and public subsidy for research and development in advanced sectors, creating and maintaining capital-intensive agribusiness, and so on”.
It is certainly not for nothing, for instance, that Donald Trump, the leading American Republican presidential candidate promises if elected to compel Apple to produce its computers in America rather than China to safeguard American jobs. As far as he is concerned, national interest must take precedence over market forces. That should tell Mrs Ezekwesili something.
Ambode silent as Lagos pupils abducted?
Was Governor Akinwunmi Ambode ‘silent’ and by implication insensitive to the news of the abduction on Monday of three girls from Babington Macaulay Junior Seminary (BMJS) in Ikorodu as reported by a national newspaper? Luckily, a media colleague (name withheld) is a Minister of the Anglican Communion and his child attends BMJS. He told me: “When I got wind of the incident, I naturally rushed down to the school. I got in touch with my Bishop and I am aware he called Governor Ambode. The governor immediately called the Commissioner of Police and security agents were swiftly deployed to the school”. Well, governance is not showbiz. It would have been most cynical for Ambode to seek media mileage out of the sad and unfortunate occurrence. Let us pray that the girls return safely to their families.
