Is the party over? It is necessary and even mandatory in the light of the current ruptures and eruptions in the dominant party structure in post-military Nigeria to take a closer look at the military origins of party formation in the post-military Fourth Republic. This is with a view to determining the origins of the current crisis of party formation in contemporary Nigerian politics and the possible ways out of the historic gridlock.
To be sure, this exercise has little or nothing to do with whether Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, the embattled chairman of the PDP, survives the throne of bayonets. Whatever his tragic illusions of grandeur, Tukur is a mere epiphenomenon in a consuming and engrossing dance of the political forest. If he is able to see himself as he truly is, or the situation as it really is, then there would be no need for what is known as dramatic irony.
Like President Jonathan, Tukur himself is a a product of a determinate historical process which must eventually unravel before our very eyes. The fate of the nation is far more important than the fate of two individuals however important or self-important. It is this process and the political occlusions as they violently unfurl that must be of concern to patriotic Nigerians.
Just as individuals suffer from what is known as post traumatic stress disorder, so do societies. Nigeria suffers and has continued to suffer from the stress and traumatic disorder of post-military rule. If the worst afflicted is the ruling party, the other party formations also suffer from the stress and roiling contradictions to a lesser degree.
A dispassionate analysis of the crisis must also take on board the current efforts of opposition parties, spearheaded by the ACN and the CPC, to form a broad-based alliance against the ruling party. The opposition must take more than a passing interest in developments in other African countries and the mixed results so far.
Whereas in Guinea, Senegal and the Benin Republic, the stitching together of various and seemingly incompatible political tendencies succeeded in upending the status quo and inaugurating a new social order, in Zimbabwe it led to an abominable compromise and tense power-sharing while in Kenya it eventuated in civil war and near genocide. The last presidential election in Kenya merely showcased the bitter ethnic divisions in the nation.
In Zimbabwe, the old wizard of Harare still continues to rule the roost even as the opposition has become a butt of joke and bitter derision. By the time the wily and obdurate Robert Mugabe was done with it, the opposition had lost so much ground and prestige that at the moment it is no longer in a position to mount a challenge in the name of freedom and democracy.. With the scion of Karamoja Odinga Oginga still sulking and with the son of Jomo Kenyatta a presidential fugitive from international justice, Kenya remains a seething volcano.
There are many who believe in retrospect that Nigeria would have been spared its current post-military trauma had the old opposition coalition that fought the military junta to a standstill remained steadfast in its insistence that nothing good could come out of a post-military Nigeria without a major restructuring and reconfiguration of its top-heavy and lopsided political structure.
By jettisoning its original demand for a national conference before meaningful elections could be held, the opposition fell for a military sucker punch which made it a willing tool and accomplice in a power game for which it was particularly ill-suited and ill-equipped. The old masters simply overran and overpowered it. The result is a military ordained party in perpetual power with all its democracy threatening toxic side effects.
The hardnosed and hard-headed pragmatists dismiss this rosy view as touching in its idyllic naivete. One, it ignores the realities on ground. Second, it overlooks the balance of power even as the military shambled away in disorderly and disorganised retreat having exhausted its political and historic possibilities. It was not the civilian agitators that got rid of General Sani Abacha. It was the military themselves. It was not the NADECO insurgents that summarily eliminated Abiola. It was the culmination of the original move to clear the political deck of its human cobwebs.
NADECO and its allies merely panicked and pressurised the military establishment to come up with a fresh initiative. In other words, the departing military still retained the initiative. Hobbled by struggle-fatigue, riven by internal divisions and dissensions and with its international source of funding about to dramatically evaporate since the global donor community were aware of its limits and limitations, the opposition could only meekly comply.
It was not cut in the mould of an ANC which had the cohesion, the capacity and the superior organisational ability to wage a long-distance struggle. In any case, the strength and disposition of the enemy often crystallises the strength and disposition of the adversary. Unlike the apartheid monstrosity which had the ideological solidity, the political clarity and institutionalised memory about the kind of society it was creating, the Nigerian military never came up with a set of coherent ideas about a new type of society with the military as its arrowhead beyond its reliance on sheer brute force.
Both the Babangida and the Abacha Transition Programmes were exercises in sustained brutal duplicity unleavened by neither redeeming vision nor intellectual sagacity. Once the vice grip of each on the levers of power and brute force was prised apart, it was easy for either to briskly unravel.
But what the military echelons lacked in intellectual sophistication and ideological subtlety, they made up for in raw political cunning. Despite its loss of prestige and authority and the sudden death of its leader, the military after Abacha remained the dominant political party in the nation. Babangida, Abacha and Abubakar to a lesser extent knew the Nigerian political class and had them solidly within their rifle sight, so to say.
It is useful to recall that in his maiden broadcast to the nation, General Abubakar had pledged to continue with the Abacha Transition Programme. It was a remarkable howler. But the Minna-born soldier quickly changed his mind once the master puppeteer behind the veil ticked him off. Without Abacha’s savage repression, his transition programme was dead on arrival. So were the league of elected charlatans.
But you cannot bequeath what you don’t have. What the military was looking for were not visionary idealists or transformative leaders who could take Nigeria to the next level but politically correct journeymen sworn to protect the status quo. People who could be relied upon to indemnify the retreating army against loss and loss of face. It is to be noted that it was not NADECO leaders who began immediately crisscrossing the country to identify and plot with the pair of safe hands but members of the old military aristocracy.
Thus was born the PDP and by extension the Obasanjo presidency as a protective shield for the retreating military and as a grand cartel for the protection and furtherance of the interests of the monied plutocracy thrown up by military rule as well as the old oligarchy. It is to be noted that 20 years earlier, the NPN was born in chillingly similar circumstances and very much for the same purpose.
It is to be noted that in the run up to the presidential election of 1999, General Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma famously noted that that although the Yoruba people had been asked to produce the next king, they could not be kingmakers in their own cause, Thus a strange king was procured for the Yoruba people even as the king lost in his own ward. Twenty years earlier, Obasanjo himself as military head of state had even more famously observed that the best person would not always win a contest.
In contrast, when Chief Obafemi Awolowo was told about the ambition of a former military ruler of the old west to join the partisan political fray, the old man had tersely responded that while he was not interested in probing the military as an institution, individual members who chose to join partisan politics would have their background subjected to searching scrutiny. Obasanjo would have chuckled to himself. The old man still didn’t get it. It was the shortest and sharpest political suicide note in Nigerian history.
So it is then that we are faced with the conundrum of a party which was not founded on the premises of national development or rapid transformation but on the platform of sheer racketeering and privilege pimping. Can the PDP give what it doesn’t have? Can it take Nigeria to the next level? While the PDP must be commended for its policy of demilitarisation through cooptation, it has also re-militarised the polity through its politics of harsh regimentation and its garrison mentality.
This is what is currently playing out with seismic reverberations across the length and breadth of the country. It is not a revolutionary upheaval but the volcanic implosion of a party that has come face to face with the fatal contradictions of its origins, roots and foundation in military autocracy and the transformative, politically redemptive yearnings of most Nigerians.
The nation-threatening explosions will go on for quite some time until the PDP is put out of its misery by a pan-Nigerian ensemble. Obasanjo who drove away the original founders has himself been driven to the outer margins of the party. This last week, in a futile show of sterile impotence, the party’s South West caucus endorsed Jonathan’s re-election bid without the former president’s input. It doesn’t get more bitterly ironic. And it is morning yet on the day of traumatic transition from military despotism to true democracy. It didn’t start raining yesterday.
