The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) rode to power in 2015 on the heroic, almost superhuman feats of its doting, fanatical supporters, and on the unprecedented seismic political and electoral shifts never before felt in these parts. Now, the seismic shifts seem fated to unravel via similar but destructive superhuman feats of its spurned and disillusioned supporters. The party achieved a miracle in 2015 barely two remarkable years after its formation; it has spent fewer dramatic months to wilt. Neither its extraordinary achievement nor its dreadful wilting, following hard after each other, complied with the normal punditry of politics. It does in fact now seem that both its friends and enemies are alike dismayed by the unusual trajectories the party has followed since February 2013. The party’s enemies will be unsparing, as indeed they have been in the past few months, despite battling their own private demons. Its friends and supporters, on the other hand, will remain sullen.
It is necessary for the APC to remind itself why its supporters fawned over the party so fanatically in the build-up to the last general elections. Perhaps, then, it can profit from its own cautionary tale. Quite apart from being generally tired of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which had then ruled for some 12 exhausting and theatrical years, the public had become suspicious of both the party’s ideology and ex-president Goodluck Jonathan’s ability. The former ruling party exaggerated its strengths and denied its weaknesses. Not only was it capable of the worst mendacities, it spoke arrogantly of ruling for six more decades and of extirpating the opposition. And those it could not hope to extirpate, it boasted it would try to compromise.
But the APC faithful spread a different gospel. They propagated the private and public morals of their candidates, particularly candidate Muhammadu Buhari, denounced Dr Jonathan’s lethargic approach to fighting insurgency in the Northeast, railed at his seeming indifference in rescuing the 219 abducted Chibok schoolgirls in the face of frightening stories of Boko Haram’s ill-treatment of the girls, and chafed at his inability to rein in the brigades of larcenous public officers roaming the corridors of power in borrowed majesties. Convinced that the lethal combination of incompetence and treasury looting would doom the country, the APC faithful went to town assured their message would resonate powerfully in the ears of the unconvinced whose number was shrinking in direct proportion to Dr Jonathan’s failing style and measures.
It seemed to the APC and the country that Dr Jonathan’s government was divisive. Campaigners therefore suggested that the rainbow coalition, which the APC had instantly become, was the perfect antidote to any fear of fragmentation and political and social alienation. Their candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, an ex military head of state, was not perfect and had a history of dictatorship, they admitted; but his decades out of power and the mollifying attributes of age had both tempered and transformed him into a benign and unifying democratic force. There was little proof of the purity of the goods they tried to sell, but the failings of the Jonathan government had amplified public hopes of a new beginning and shredded whatever doubts they had about the gangling but hesitant APC presidential standard-bearer.
The margin and solidity of the APC victory in 2015 was beyond cavil. For the party faithful who had burnt their bridges and thrown in their lot with the lanky and taciturn former army general, there was nowhere else to return or turn to. Their metaphoric Newfoundland must willy-nilly be transformed into El-Dorado. Nothing else would do. But barely a year into their ascendancy, the party began to face revolt within its ranks. Power sharing formulae, it turned out, had not really been agreed on before they went to war. And party ideology, if indeed party leaders and supporters knew what that was, suddenly became an arcanum no one had a semblance of nor was willing to embrace. But their troubles were just beginning.
In addition to its internecine battles, the now divided party became itself an agent of division. It had promised a magic wand in governance; but it soon became obvious the party was as befuddled as the nitwits they derided in the PDP. It groaned over the plummeting economy, blamed the Jonathan government for everything, and offered no concise or coherent measures to extricate the poor and unemployed from the stranglehold of disease and want. Worse, there were seemingly no future plans for anything, whether economic, social or political. Its cabinet choices, whether kitchen or general, were questioned, and no one seems clear what the party’s bona fides were any longer. Party supporters who a few years ago spoke glowingly of their party and exuberantly proclaimed the sterling attributes of their leaders began to speak in whispers, their voices enfeebled by anxiety and disappointment, their confidence shaken by the realisation that the dilemmas they confront would test their resolve to the limit.
A worse nightmare however lies ahead for party supporters in all its menacing ugliness. The party has less than two years to prepare for the next elections. Except the Northeast where the ruling party’s militaristic measures have successfully stanched the flow of blood, and the Northwest which has gained tremendously from prominent appointments, no other part of the country seems so far willing to fall into a swoon over the Buhari presidency. After many months of denouncing the calls for restructuring, the party cannot suddenly turn around to sell that programme in 2018 and 2019. Indeed, given the apparent polarisation of the country into two broad, antagonistic camps, it will be difficult to get a consensus among APC supporters to back party leaders in their opposition to political and structural transformation of the country.
More damagingly, since the APC assumed office, virtually all economic indicators have fallen. The country is not richer, but poorer; not more democratic, but more authoritarian; not safer overall, but enduring a widening gyre of insecurity; not more cohesive, but more divisive. Unlike early and middle 2015, when APC supporters were clearly excited and giddy about life and politics, and had the whole world before them, they are now less boisterous and more nervous. How to rekindle their confident pose and verve, and turn them into the fearsome army capable of achieving the impossible, will occupy party leaders in the coming months. Success in that endevour will depend on how successfully the party turns the economy around and heals the wounds that have festered for months.
The APC is already discovering how unnerving it is for the shoe to be on the other foot. The party is in fact also assailed on all sides for its poor response to the unfavourable economic climate. Unable to summon the imagination and daring needed to repair the damage inflicted on the country by the PDP, the APC has instead succumbed to grumbling about the past. This approach has neither endeared the party to critics nor even to its supporters, many of whom are groaning under the harsh economic conditions. If the party is not to be limited to only one term in office, the worst nightmare its supporters now fear, it will have to display a more productive sense of urgency than it has shown so far, even far more than when it schemed adventurously for electoral victory. So far, sadly, there is nothing the party or its leaders have done to show that they still possess that urgent sense of resolve.
