On the 2011 presidential election, I voted for Nuhu Ribadu, former Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) boss and candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), even though I knew he could not win. But I felt that more than any other candidate on offer at the time, including Gen Muhammadu Buhari, he was probably the most dynamic, charismatic, modern (both in depth of knowledge and cross-over appeal), and without ethnic, religious or ideological baggage. He in fact did not win, perhaps because everyone, including myself, knew he was young, impulsive, a work in progress, and a little somewhat idealistic, flighty and iconoclastic. Had he won, I would have been willing to offer my services to his government and the country in the assurance that my exertions would be both recognised and valuable.
I always knew, however, that the young man was capable of curious rashness, not necessarily harmful to the country he so passionately craves to serve, but always counterproductive to the principles and values he wishes to be ennobled by. His defection last week to the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after many months of speculations is not completely surprising. He was and still is a fine policeman and professional, but many of his admirers would wish him to be better anchored on the principles and values he adores but is unable to put into systematic thought and form. I am nonetheless unable to condemn Mallam Ribadu for the shocking political step he has taken, lured as he was by possible assurances from President Goodluck Jonathan or the PDP leadership to be made the PDP’s standard-bearer in October’s Adamawa governorship election.
I have absolutely no doubt that should he overcome the stiff internal opposition in the state chapter of the PDP and is elected governor, the state would enjoy far more inspiring and productive leadership than many other states in the country have witnessed since their creation. His stewardship in Adamawa could also prepare him, ceteris paribus, for a shot at the presidency on a fortuitous tomorrow, when he probably would have matured. He would be in the news, and it would be mostly for the right reasons. And when he visits the State House in Abuja or appear at any other national event, he would be the cynosure of all eyes. Who knows, perhaps it was the lure of these possibilities that attracted Mallam Ribadu into taking last week’s fateful step to defect to a party he had consistently excoriated in the most brutal and waspish manner.
Those who defend his defection, not to say Mallam Ribadu himself, have argued that his defection was not morally offensive, seeing that both the party he left and the one he has just joined have very few distinguishing features or redeeming virtues. In their opinion, the PDP and the All Progressives Congress (APC) are not far apart ideologically, have their fair measure of political follies and foibles, harbour as many political ragamuffins as the other, and subscribe unflatteringly to, or are burdened by, the same political appurtenances such as short-circuited internal democratic practices. Mallam Ribadu himself gave close hints he would be a good governor in the PDP as he would be in the APC had he remained in his former party and became a governor on its platform. I hope they let him become governor, for it is clear he joined the PDP for that reason. If he doesn’t, then he had better go to Siberia, for he would not be able to live down the humiliation.
However, the view is unfortunately widespread that both the APC and the PDP are virtually the same. This is a heresy promoted by those who still smart over the sanctimonious effusions of self-confessed progressive leaders. In repudiating the view that APC is ideologically different from the PDP, such troubled consciences have argued that there are governors in the PDP that perform as good as, if not better than, some governors in the APC. They also argue that the APC has nearly an equal share of odious personalities as the PDP, a reasoning underscored by the shocking and mortifying defections of personalities like Femi Fani-Kayode and Ali Modu Sheriff into the progressive fold, when in fact there was and still is nothing progressive about the two politicians. More importantly, many leading APC men have also defected to the PDP with so much pianissimo calmness and distinctive élan.
But perhaps the most vociferous proponents of the PDP/APC sameness theory are leaders of the Southwest factional elite opposed to the APC leadership. They argue, and have convinced themselves and others, that even if the APC is progressive, a fact they now dispute animatedly, it is after all not the only progressive party in the country. In fact, given the loathing which that factional elite nurse against the APC, they are more than prepared to dismiss the party as an impostor deserving of extirpation by the Jonathan forces. Recall that that factional elite lost the power struggle in the Southwest between 2003 and now, and have tried futilely to win back its position, if need be, in alliance with either the most odious characters in the region or the devil himself. The region’s, and by extrapolation, the national ideological conflict between progressivism and conservatism should be contextualised partly within the struggle for power and dominance in the Southwest.
Mallam Ribadu may therefore have been seduced by the foggy understanding and consideration of ideology in Nigeria’s contemporary politics, a fogginess helped by the blurring of ideological lines in political recruitment and policy enunciation in the Southwest. As Femi Falana argued in an interview published last Friday in The Punch when pressed to explain the APC victory in Osun vis-a-vis the party’s loss in Ekiti, the APC had failed to differentiate itself in the idiosyncratically progressive policies and politics of the Yoruba states as exemplified by the Obafemi Awolowo era. While this is a valid observation, Mr Falana himself recognised that this weakness does not fully account for the sometimes anomalous behaviour of the Southwest electorate, or any other electorate for that matter. It must be recognised that there will never be a time when the parties in Nigerian politics will be so differentiated that it would be a question of evil and good, right and wrong. That belongs to the realm of fiction and, to some extent, theory.
The fact is that whether we accept it or not, and in spite of the jarring presence of certain personalities in the APC who are at odds with the party’s ideology, the PDP is actually largely and essentially a conservative party. It has retained all the essential elements of conservatism since the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, and has under Dr Jonathan reinforced that conservatism to the point of being reactionary, if not dangerously fascist. Anyone who can’t appreciate the PDP’s predilection for fascism is either blind or out of his wits. On the whole, however, and though it cannot be affirmed with certainty how it would conduct itself should it form the government at the centre, the APC has proved in the states it governs that it is more democratic politically and more progressive in its developmental imperatives. That it concomitantly and sometimes undesirably imposes less sympathetic tax and other fiscal regimes on the people do not detract from its progressivism, but only speaks to the progressive states’ policy dissonance.
There may be nothing morally offensive about Mallam Ribadu’s defection, but there is nothing wise in it either. The former EFCC boss was not an ordinary member of the APC. He was the presidential candidate of the party’s precursor, the ACN. At that high level, policy and ideological summersaults are simply intolerable and inexcusable. No one could rise to a level where had he been elected president he would embody all that the party stood for ideationally, culturally, politically and socially, and yet saunter over to the enemy almost casually. By defecting, Mallam Ribadu gives the unsavoury indication he was neither persuaded about what his former party stood for nor convinced enough that the PDP he fought against in 2011 was the weak, banal and implacable organ his former party made it out to be. And though he retains our respect for his person and his ability, his defection nonetheless showed how tentative his principles and values appear to be, and especially that his often impressionable mind still needs a lot of work to refine and solidify it beyond the entrenched casuistry that vitiated his leadership of the EFCC.
