The race to 2023 elections is building up! From all corners, the tempo of political activities is stirring. In the FCT, we recently had area council elections and the results were evenly split between the two main political parties, or what the late Chief Bola Ige would have described as the two fingers of a leprous hand.
There were no crumbs for any third party. It is becoming obvious that even on the national scene, there might just be scanty crumbs for any other party – not anything significant to give any of the big two a belly-ache. And that is essentially what the problem is.
At the last count, there are 18 registered political parties in Nigeria. Apart from Anambra State, the remaining 35 states are controlled by either the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), or All Progressives Congress (APC). On the average, therefore, more than 90 percent of politically active Nigerians are either voting for PDP or APC. The remaining less than 10 percent is for the 16 minority parties. It is really a case of the political monopoly of a duopoly.
It is of grave concern to many Nigerians that on the eve of an election year, the two major political parties in the country that will be presenting candidates for election to leadership positions are still not exemplary in leading themselves. And there are no other parties on the scene even if just for the purpose of giving the big two a big scare.
The ruling APC has been without a Board of Trustees since 2014. It has been unable to hold a national congress and continues to operate with an interim national chairman (now in acting capacity) since the sacking of s Adams Oshiomhole in 2020.
The opposition PDP fares no better, and doesn’t seem prepared to fill the yawning gaps the APC has left in many aspects of governance, or to seize the initiative and capitalize on the crises facing the APC.
Moves by sundry stakeholders and interest groups to clone a formidable political alliance, what some would like to call a Third Force, has been predictable, weak, and at best loquacious, but lacking in energy and conviction. This leaves Nigerians with either PDP, or APC – a mix of the same soup in different pots.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has been blamed for the culture of impunity and lack of internal democracy in the PDP. Obasanjo’s national and regional party chairmen were like garrison commanders and Obasanjo himself was the general officer commanding who brooked no nonsense.
The PDP changed chairmen like diapers because once the supreme commander felt the garrison was not sufficiently combat-ready for Obasanjo’s kind of politics, then it was time to move the dice. He left nothing to chance and left no one in doubt that he was in charge.
There were no niceties about procedure – only pretensions about being nice. Ultimately, Obasanjo got his way and got things done in the process. He was not just the President and Commander-in-Chief; he was the absolute leader of the party. But this is no endorsement of his brusque and forceful, or even crude politics.
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Fast forward to the present. In comparison, President Muhammadu Buhari is almost absolutely indifferent, even nonchalant, about the affairs of his party. The president’s seeming aloofness from the affairs of his party has created a vacuum which all manner of interest groups have filled with more intrigues than substance.
The shoving aside of Mai Mala Buni, the interim chairman of the APC by the President prior to his departure on a medical vacation, therefore, has been completely out of character. In just didn’t fit the mould of Buhari’s kind of politicking. The picture as it stands, is that Buni is ill and there is an acting chairman in his stead. It does seem that even the President finally thinks that Buni’s tenure has outlived its limits of elasticity,
It is to the discredit of the President, however, that despite the advantage of incumbency, his party is falling to bits and unable to manage different disparate tendencies within it. It is doubly unfortunate that the party machinery has failed to use the advantage of the President’s “free-hand” disposition to build the internal structures of the party and turn it into a credible institution with formidable and enduring political legacies.
Without prejudice to Buni, he is better known for his position as the interim chairman of his party than for his primary responsibility as elected Governor of Yobe State. Sitting among the cabal of governors and managing the party at the same time confers on Buni overarching advantages which his mates are beginning to get uncomfortable with as they position towards post 2023.
From disclosures emerging in the past few days, Buni seemed to have exploited the position of party chairman most brazenly. More like a miner stuffing his pockets with gold shavings while in the mine shaft. His pockets are bulging with precious stones and the APC governors outside of his cabal are saying he has spent more than enough time inside of the mine and it’s time he stepped out.
The party has itself to blame. The more things are supposed to have changed under APC, the more they have remained the same. The only enviable legacy the party still has is the fact that it successfully galvanized an alliance that wrested power from a PDP behemoth at a time PDP felt being an elephant meant it could eat a rock.
But now both the APC and PDP are in a mess. On the threshold of another general election, Nigerians are stuck with the same characters in the two dominant parties with little hope of deriving good leadership and the dividends of democracy.
Party democracy is supposed to provide a seamless platform for leadership recruitment. From 1999 up to 2007, the PDP practiced the politics of imposition. Former President Obasanjo popularized the lexicon of “do or die” – a legacy of his military background, on the party’s candidate-selection processes and extended this to the general elections where he ensured that the PDP won the popular suffrage by whatever means.
Today the PDP and APC are the only scrappy baskets in which we have stacked our eggs. Do we really have a choice? And as if to drive a nail into the coffin, the Independent National Electoral Commission has foreclosed the registration of new parties. So except by force, even the Third Force will not become a political party if and when it materializes – at least not before 2023.
Obj is quoted to have said most of those aspiring to lead now should be in jail. It is all well that most of those who have already led should also be in jail. Perhaps if all these politicians were behind bars, the political circuit might be free of charlatans.