There is probably no one left in Nigeria who thinks President Goodluck Jonathan will not be running for president in 2015. Not only will he run with flourish irrespective of the rigmarole enacted by the sycophantic Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN), he will do so with damnable indifference to the devastations caused by the Islamic sect, Boko Haram, and with complete contempt for the manner the sect exhibits his leadership failings. There will be no contest for the PDP’s presidential ticket, at least not a contest properly describable as a dignified joust. If anyone would be courageous enough to compete against Dr Jonathan for the coveted party ticket, it would be mimic jousting designed to create the false impression of internal democracy within the self-styled biggest party in Africa.
With TAN rallies in full swing all over the country, signing up millions of people whom the organizers describe extravagantly as converts to the Jonathan cause, it is already taken for granted that within the PDP, Dr Jonathan is unassailable, and his campaign already in full blast. No one will dare oppose him except to mimic democratic reality, and no one in civil society, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) or Nigeria’s servile law enforcement agencies will dare caution him or draw his magisterial attention to how ignobly he subverts the law. The country, in other words, quiescently acknowledges Dr Jonathan as the PDP presidential candidate and his campaign a trifling, inconsequential infraction.
In the next few weeks, however, all attention will be focused on the main opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) as it begins its complex permutations to produce a winning presidential ticket. Given Dr Jonathan’s head start, not to say Nigerians’ sniveling propensity to venerate a sitting president, the APC will have the most unenviable task in the world to demolish the cultural strictures that promote sycophantic adulation of those in office. The party will be challenged to hammer out a platform that resonates with hostile or undecided voters, to outfox subservient and compromised law enforcement agencies determined to thwart common sense and humiliate the constitution, and to rein in rebellious regional political warlords whose regicidal instincts lead them to the most atrocious murder of principles and values ever. The APC will not find its task easy at all, nor, given their tendency to fight to the death whenever they disagree, do I envy the short, brutal and merciless uphill journey they must make in less than five months before the next polls.
Compared with the conservative PDP, which appeared to have been born into power, and whose leading apparatchiks seem to think it is born to rule, the less obsequious APC, now increasingly looking like an outsider in the national political war, will want to ride upon a revolutionary manifesto to overthrow the old order. The party will not be discomfited by the discordance with which of many of its conservative but leading lights uncharacteristically flaunt a radical manifesto, nor will it allow the fratricide going on within its ranks to slow it down. It will expect that its hope of achieving victory in any coming encounter with the ruling party will triumph over its feeling of massive political incapacitation. The PDP is united by its long stay in office, and the spoils of office that cement that unity. On the other hand, the APC’s long stay out of office has become demoralizing, causing its leaders to fret endlessly and to fritter away its strength in meaningless, persistent and debilitating quarrels.
Indeed, the most pressing task before the APC will be how to select a winning ticket from a political milieu that has morphed considerably into an unrecognizable form. Tom Ikimi, the chairmanship aspirant who recently left the opposition party, reveals that the APC anchors its hope of taking the presidency on winning the Southwest and Northwest votes in 2015. But contrary to his sinister and cynical tone, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that calculation, especially if the party thinks the votes from those zones are sufficient for victory. However, the calculation may be based on a wrong assessment of the character and cultures of the country’s geopolitical zones. The Southwest, for instance, used to be single-mindedly progressive, and its definition of progressivism not contentious. Today, the Southwest’s political culture, which used to be fairly distinguishable from the rest of the country both for its idiosyncratic progressivism and the firm values and principles that sustain it, has moved much closer to the national mean of general and enervating pragmatism.
Worse, even the Southwest political elite is now fractured into contentious parts by internal schisms, some of them caused by nothing more than an insular struggle for regional dominance. Shorn of the principles and ennobling values that had defined its politics, religion and culture, nay its very existence, for more than a century, the region has become distressingly susceptible to the riotous application of religious parochialism. More alarmingly, a sizable faction of the region’s power elite, as demonstrated by Olu Falae, Yinka Odumakin, Ayo Adebanjo, among others, remains dangerously trapped in the bitter, vengeful and anachronistic politics of the past, especially their dichotomous view of northern feudalism versus southern liberalism. Yet, the iconic Obafemi Awolowo made a last ditch attempt in the closing years of his political life to bridge the so-called ideological divide between the North and the Southwest, to find a common ground between the so-called northern feudalism and south western liberalism.
If the APC is to make progress and unite the Southwest behind the opposition party’s worldview, it will have to appeal to the voters directly, over the heads of the scaremongering and parochial factional elite that now holds the region in thrall. The party will also have to draw attention to the region’s culture of accommodation, its liberal spirit of tolerating other perspectives — be it religious, political or cultural — and then advertise the existence of a richer, better future outside the dogmas and insularity of the past. There are indeed shared affinities between the Northwest and the Southwest, and these affinities are not only shared with other regions; they in fact do not preclude either accommodation or rapprochement with those other regions. Going by the outcome of the national conference, and the insistence of some members of the Southwest elite that the recommendations be peremptorily implemented without recourse to either an enabling law or the National Assembly, it is feared that even the jurisprudential legacy .of the region has been corroded by emotions and long interactions with the lawless propensity of the Jonathan government.
In picking Dr Jonathan’s opponent, the APC will have to ensure it carries along a sizable part of the Southwest, almost the entire Northeast and Northwest, in spite of the ongoing insurgency in parts of the North, and a healthy share of the North-Central. The South-South is largely out of reach, except a part of the ticket comes from there, and the Southeast seems all but lost on account of its emotive commitment to the patronizing Dr Jonathan. These permutations, as well as a clear appreciation of the changing political culture of the Southwest and an accurate sense of what needs to be done, will closely influence the APC’s choice of presidential candidate and running mate.
Indeed, by now, the APC must have realized that it cannot hope to fight the ineffective but paradoxically entrenched Dr Jonathan without a more than disproportionate application of unorthodox politics. Its choice of standard-bearer must be revolutionary, unexpected, forward-looking, and transcendental. The party has only a few weeks to do this, and correspondingly fewer weeks to sell him. That candidate must, therefore, have no baggage to tie down the party’s resources, and must suffer no handicap to make the party fritter away its time and goodwill. The APC may have a few leaders enamoured of brinkmanship; now they must draw upon that facility in a chess move certain to determine whether the party survives or dies, whether it succeeds or fails, whether it has a future or is crushed by the weight of its incandescent past. Now more than ever, it must take a bold and radical step, perhaps the most remarkable ever, to make a solid political statement. Will it? Can it?
I think the party is faced with two main choices: to play safe by hugging the past, or to take a gamble with futuristic daring. Either choice is certain to have implications for Nigeria’s political future: whether we would slip into one-party rule and fascism projected deliberately or inadvertently by the Jonathan government; or whether we would begin the process of national renewal. The choice, I believe, lies between former military head of state, Muhammadu Buhari, the taciturn, principled and doughty retired army general, who is sadly misperceived and misunderstood by a large swathe of the South and North-Central; and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, who is not even yet a member of the party, but could, should he join the party, represent its future and hope. If the APC honestly recognizes that most of the factors expected to shape national politics and influence the electorate’s voting pattern in 2015 have been concocted by Dr Jonathan and the PDP, such as religion and ethnicity, then it will have no illusion what its responses must be. Gen Buhari is probably the best man for these trying times, but best men seldom win elections anywhere except in dire, unusual circumstances. In Nigeria, where voters lack the competence to read the signs of the times, it is even worse. The APC will have to gauge whether the fanatical support Gen Buhari attracts from parts of the North is worth the risk of alienating the untrusting remainder of the country.
On the other hand, everyone knows Hon Tambuwal’s heart and soul are in the APC. If he can overcome the frightful parliamentary fallout of defecting to the opposition, he will probably open the eyes of the APC to more tantalizing political possibilities. Not only is he unencumbered by ethnic and religious baggage, he is modern, intelligent, a consensus builder with cross-over appeal, has a mind of his own, and is principled and loyal to causes, and much more. For its sake and the sake of the country, I hope the APC does not rule out Hon Tambuwal. This is the time for the party to do a strategic rethinking of its methods and ideas; a time to abandon the staid and stultifying formalism of the past; a time to let former Vice President Abubakar Atiku exit the presidential race with all the maturity and dignity commensurate with his political stature; and a time to let Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso of Kano bide his time for a future when his stature and exposure would stand him in good stead.
This indeed is time for a miracle; APC had better furnish the country one. For every democrat, every Nigerian, every patriot who has the instinctive feel of the danger Nigeria faces with a government heading towards tyranny, one-party rule and unexampled impotence and incompetence knows it is of capital importance to deny Dr Jonathan four more years of misrule.
