Considering how difficult it has been for them to come up with a zoning formula to share the spoils of war, the still exulting All Progressives Congress (APC) is beginning to discover that the easiest part of what they achieved a few weeks ago is fighting the electoral war that castrated the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Their nightmare may have just begun, however. Even after surmounting the difficult task of sharing the legislative and top cabinet and presidency posts available, APC leaders, many of them set in their ways and defined by their rigid and unsparing outlook, will find themselves engaging in fresh supremacy battles. By Thursday, the party’s leaders were yet to agree on who gets what, particularly in the legislative branch. After failing to agree, they excused their tardiness on the fact that neither their National Executive Committee (NEC) nor their National Working Committee (NWC) had met over the sharing formula.
The eminent gentlemen who met on Thursday in Abuja, however, constitute the real movers and shakers of the party, personalities behind whom no great decisions could be taken nor binding agreements reached. Yet they floundered in their very first post-war task. They probably see their failure to agree on the spoils as one of those political things; for after all, everyone predicted apocalypse in 2012 when the party was formed and teething, and more virulently again last year when the party’s juggernauts arrayed themselves in battle to elect party candidates. But they are still standing, not keeling, and are even winning battles and wars, and garnering trophies. Perhaps after testing themselves sorely to their elastic limits, they will surprise us with a stupefyingly easy agreement. If they do, their long-suffering supporters must hope that the injuries from the internecine battles will not aggravate the lacerations from past intra-party squabbles.
There is a chance the party will get so complacent and feel so invincible that its leaders will stoically see every internal battle as indispensable for sharpening party philosophy and strengthening party cords. There is also a chance that they may even become so battle-hardened that they will intentionally furnish themselves wars in order to sustain excitement and purpose. However, it is also possible that the party’s elders are conscious of the fact that these struggles are necessary in the party’s early years to enable it define itself, its worldview, and its philosophy. But it is no use second-guessing them. What is important is that they must not overrate their strength or internal cohesion, nor pretend they do not know a bitter and defeated opposition waits threateningly and even treacherously on the sidelines to pounce on them.
From experience, the victorious party must have understood during the poll war that other than two or three print media establishments, and one or two electronic media houses, the party is encompassed by very hostile media sworn to undermining and crippling it using the artifices of misinformation and disinformation. The party has few media friends. Their media enemies will seize upon every mistake by the party to emphasise and prolong its discomfort. President Goodluck Jonathan put that hostile media to good use in the Southwest to reduce the APC’s advantage and very nearly created an upset in Lagos. That same hostile media are still deeply upset by the Buhari victory and are willing to be deployed in battle against a party they deem sanctimonious, unbearable and meddlesome.
The PDP fractured badly in the last months of the campaigns, so badly and unexpectedly that it never recovered. The APC must know that whatever unity it lays claim to now is tenuous and skin deep. If the PDP did not survive its divisions, despite having the resources and time to construct a party to its own taste, it would be presumptuous of the APC to imagine it can withstand a major early test when it has not demonstrated the kind of cohesiveness and ideological clarity capable of sustaining the new party through thick and thin. There are indeed already visible factional lines within the victorious party —factional lines engendered by powerful and sometimes resentful blocs — and a few other tendencies showing their disturbing and dangerous silhouettes.
APC leaders must start to ask themselves whether their talents transcend, as they hope, fighting electoral wars, and whether truly they even understand themselves and the various tendencies and interest groups within the country it is now their privilege to govern. Surely they must appreciate that if five zones came together to deliver the presidency and a majority of state governorships to the APC, a few factors must have been responsible for that unity of purpose. The agreement is not eternal; it is tentative. Subtract, for instance, the North-Central or the Northeast from the victory equation, and the APC could not achieve the success it recorded in the last polls. Similarly, take either the Northwest or the Southwest from the equation, and the victory could have gone to the PDP.
In the end, the APC will agree to a zoning arrangement. Whether that arrangement will satisfy every tendency within the party is a different thing. Whether that arrangement will not also create more troubles for the party than it can manage is another thing. So far, however, the ongoing disagreements show that the party is still evolving, perhaps just as the country itself is evolving. It is evident that the party, like the PDP it defeated, still does not have a centralising idea, something much bigger and ennobling than the mere acts of merging parties, winning electoral battles, and sharing war booty. Even if they manage to overcome the present squabbles, the APC must still develop an idea of itself and its mission, as well as an idea of the country. Then they will have to market these ideas to the rest of the country, and hope that the ideas would be bought and embraced.
If the PDP, with all the resources it could muster to placate aggrieved party members and leaders, still unravelled months before the polls, the APC must not feel so sanguine. If the zoning arrangement is not properly managed, the victorious party could lose its leadership of either or both chambers of the National Assembly. The party’s enemies would help exacerbate the divisions, even as aggrieved zones dictate what directions their national lawmakers would go. The Northeast, for instance, is campaigning for either the Senate presidency or Speaker of the lower house. And it argues that the Southwest, which is also reportedly angling for the Speaker’s post, should be contented with the vice presidential position and Deputy Speaker. It is not impossible the Southwest probably reasons that it needs greater influence in the legislature to advance great constitutional changes and other ideas, but after championing the huge change the country is about to enjoy, the Southwest needs to calculate the cost of party disunity which regional disaffections are bound to make prohibitive.
Rather than expend energy squabbling over positions, the APC should more appropriately prepare for the daunting task of ruling the country and extricating it from the tragic decay the outgoing government had consigned it. The outgoing government has laced the country with booby traps and other potentially destructive and divisive policies, cultures and practices. Countering these problems and dissipating them will not be easy for the APC, especially if the countermeasures are complicated by aggrieved zones mischievously seeking their pound of flesh. It is, therefore, important that the zoning arrangement must be fair and inclusive, not presumptuous, not insensitive. The party will not be helped by the incoming opposition, nor by a hostile media, nor yet by an impatient, oppressed and angry electorate. The APC will in fact again need the talisman that gave it great primaries, credible convention and a great and stupendous victory in the polls.
Neither the electorate nor this column has great confidence in the party’s elders to manage the internal crisis unfolding in the party and on the nation. There is a certain rapacity for posts and influence going on in the party, and there are too many young hot heads who have overstated and overrated their contributions to the party, some of them governors accustomed to unquestioning loyalty and obedience in their states. Thrown into this mix is a potpourri of fanatical jobholders, ethnic champions, and ambitious persons with an eye on the future. It took extraordinary efforts to rein them in before and during the primaries and convention, and especially when the Buhari Campaign Organisation was being constituted. With the presidency safe in their pockets, and fearing that whatever happens early in the life of the new government would likely be sustained hereafter, the jostling for positions and influence may take a more deathly tenor.
If squabbling APC leaders manage to overcome their divisions and take effective hold of the Senate and Reps leadership without serious consequences for party unity, then perhaps they have more mettle and wisdom than Nigerians are prepared to acknowledge. From experience elsewhere, conservatives do much better at sustaining party unity than progressives. But if gold rust, as the PDP showed in its fractiousness and loss of the presidency, what then will iron do in the case of squabbling APC? APC leaders must be told indeed that their supporters and Nigerians who have a favourable opinion of their party are embarrassed by their squabbles and manoeuvres. They must summon the maturity and wisdom required to rule, far in excess of the brawn and reckless daring with which they applied themselves to warring for the coveted presidency.
