Tag: PDP

n this concluding piece in a series that began in this column last week, perhaps I should start by admitting that the idea of tolerable impunities of elite misrule is a pessimistic, despairingly ironic notion. For ordinarily, there should never be talk of a “tolerable” or benign form of impunity in the misgovernment of any nation, any region of our world. This is because impunity of bad or mediocre elite governance is “tolerable” only to the rulers and even then only to that segment of the ruling class that occupies the seat of power, incumbency and patronage. For the overwhelming majority of the population, impunity of misrule is extremely intolerable. This is because it exerts a terrible toll on the lives of millions of the citizenry of any country whose unhappy fate it is to be subjected to such form of misrule.

In our country, we are only too familiar with the lineaments of impunities of misgovernment. The underlying structural feature is the fact that a very tiny fraction of the populace lives in untold, squandered and unproductive wealth while the great majority live below the absolute poverty line. Consequently and more alarmingly, millions of our peoples have greatly inadequate access to the amenities and benefits of modern, civilized and dignified existence. The list of such basic aspects of life in modern societies of the world that we sorely lack in our country is well known: potable and drinkable water for the vast majority of the populace; regular generation and distribution of electricity, as much in the cities and towns as in the rural communities; hospitals and health clinics that are clean, serviceable and actually do save lives; roads and highways in a nation-wide or territorial transportation grid in which travel is relatively safe, comfortable and free of imaginable and unimaginable hazards; security of life, properties and personal possessions; ever-widening expansion of communities of enlightened, progressive and civic-minded people adequately attuned to both the challenges and the opportunities of life in the 21st century of the Common Era.

As if the profile above is not bad enough, impunity of elite misgovernment also traps any people unlucky to be so misruled into becoming either willing or unwitting accomplices in their own subjection as the values, the practices and the norms of the rulers become those of the ruled as well. The corruption, the rot, the dog-eat-dog heartlessness of the political class is reproduced prodigiously in the populace. And it may come to be, heaven help us, that for the younger generations, this is all that they know of their country as knowledge of times when things were different becomes increasingly erased until it dies out with the last set of those old enough to have known relatively better and more humane times. No compatriots, “tolerable” impunities of elite misrule is a barbarous notion, a contradiction in terms, a sardonic yielding of discursive and ethical ground to a form of misrule that should never be accorded even the slightest space of legitimacy, talk less of sovereignty.

These opening observations and thoughts are further clarified by the fact that even the perpetrators of impunities of elite misrule never admit to being rulers of this kind. With the possible exception of the Nazis and the openly fascist, right-wing dictators of South America in intermittent periods throughout the 20th century, no governments, no ruling class parties in modern political history have ever admitted to being perpetrators of “tolerable” or benign forms of impunity of misrule. This is partly because it is extremely dangerous to the perpetuation of this kind of misrule to admit openly and cynically to its peculiar form of governance. For any government, any regime of military or civilian governance to do so would be to admit that it is undemocratic and therefore itself liable to being undemocratically removed from office or power. Moreover, to admit that a political order or a governmental administration is a “tolerable” form of misrule is to raise the risky, dangerous question of “tolerable” for or to whom? For surely, unless one has a very low opinion of human beings and their capacity for good, just and humane governance, one must necessarily accept the fact that impunity of elite misrule cannot be “tolerable” for the vast majority of those condemned to suffer or put up with it. As a matter of fact, for our purposes in this series, this is the bottom line, the discursive or investigative fundament: for whom, for which groups and classes of Nigerians, have impunities of elite misgovernment since the return to “democracy” in 1999 been “tolerable”?

Compatriots, in responding to this all-important question, I now intend to leave all abstract and speculative issues aside and address the question very concretely, very pointedly. This I wish to do by returning to the questions with which I concluded the discussion in last week’s piece. Let me remind the reader of the questions. From the time when Jonathan became Acting President in 2010, unprecedented sums have disappeared from the national treasury and the nation’s savings account, the Excess Crude Account: where did all this money go? Why, in spite of this – or precisely because of it – is the PDP fast breaking up and disappearing as the ruling party that was destined, as the boast went, to rule Nigeria for the foreseeable future in this 21st century? And what connection does all this have to the probability of the end of “tolerable” forms of elite misgovernment as the APC positions itself to become the new, post-PDP ruling party?

The roiling fragmentation of the ruling party into two factions, the PDP and the New-PDP, together with mass defections into the APC are not taking place because corruption, waste and squandermania have become too big, too unprecedented in its scale and therefore too unsustainable – which of course is the case. The basic cause of the unfolding implosion of the ruling party and the defections into the APC is the question of whether the Presidency will remain after the 2015 elections with Jonathan, the first “Minority” civilian Head of State in the country’s political history or go to a candidate from the North, most likely from the so-called “core” North. The oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011 in which 2.58 trillion naira – which is two and half times the annual budget for the whole country – was blatantly misappropriated was used primarily to fund Jonathan’s election in 2011. It has neither drawn sustained criticism nor has it afforded much ideological and moral firepower to the other political parties. Ditto with the 21 billion dollars that was the balance in the nation’s savings account, the ECA, when Jonathan became Acting President in 2010; in less than four years, it has dwindled massively to well below 2 billion dollars without any accounting provided to explain the disappearance of such a vast sum from our national coffers. But it too has neither been the target of principled and unrelenting criticism by the other parties nor the cause of the mass defections from the PDP to the APC.

I do not mean to suggest that the extraordinary levels of corruption, aimlessness and mediocrity in the Jonathan presidency is of no consequence in what is happening to and within the PDP now. For by even the abysmally low levels of performance in office of all the PDP federal administrations since the return to civilian “democracy” in 1999, the Jonathan presidency is extraordinarily mediocre and lackluster. However, even though this fact is being used vigorously and opportunistically by the other ruling class parties and especially the APC in their aspirations and efforts to dethrone the PDP as the ruling party in 2015, this is not the main reason why the PDP is imploding and is on the verge of ceding ground to the APC. The main reason is that Jonathan’s presidency and the PDP under his leadership have far exceeded the “tolerable” limits of elite misrule and all the ruling class parties and politicians are fearful that if the PDP is not stopped, they will all lose as the other ruling party – the army – steps in to “save” the country and the ruling class.

It remains for the other ruling class parties – and the APC especially – to demonstrate in theory and in practice, in ideology and policies, that their accession to power will be more than a mere reconfiguration of the PDP into new power blocs and alliances that will restore governance in our country to “tolerable” forms of impunities of elite misgovernment. If this does not happen, it will be business as usual, with only a few cosmetic changes to legitimize the new status quo. In such a reconstitution of the political order after 2015 in which we might say the king is dead but long live the king, nothing significant will change. The Southwest and the “core” North will still be the dominant power blocs in the country. The Presidency will still have the largest concentration of power, authority and patronage in any Head of State in the world. The Southeast will still feel permanently excluded from entitlement to producing an incumbent for our unreconstructed presidency. The Executive Governorships will still function basically as mini heads of state whose maintenance costs are financially crippling and morally deleterious for the country and the citizenry. And the people, the multitudes in every part of the country will still continue to endure the ravages of “tolerable” impunities of elite misrule.

This is not a forgone conclusion, an inevitable happenstance looming on the horizon of the present. But we need another series to explore this non-concluding conclusion on a note of hope, faith and optimism based on a firm and unshakeable belief in the capabilities of the masses of our peoples to take their destinies into their own hands.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu