Nigeria’s Political Abracadabra
BECAUSE of recent development in the nation’s milieu, the serialisation of Why Nations Fail is suspended for another fundamental matter, that is, Nigeria’s Political Abracadabra. We shall return to our serialisation next week. The various ‘magical’ happenings within the two major political parties should naturally be of concern to all those involved in the Nigerian project. It is confounding and befuddling that the two major parties in the country, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and People’s Democratic Party (PDP) have been our albatross, dilemma or/and paradox, since the country is currently not prepared or capable of jettisoning either of these two albatrosses. The loss of one is the gain of the other and vice versa despite more than the presence of more than sixty registered political parties in the country.
The tsunami that swept PDP out of power at the federal and most states’ levels in 2015 is replicating itself now in APC, unless there are some desperate remedial moves to stem the tide of self-destruction owing to the inability and lack of capacity to manage its success. Our political experience and indeed, development departed from seeing and relying on political parties as the main ways of channelling different views and securing a variety of interests in the political democratic systems. Rather, we see political parties as an avenue for securing power and perpetuating self-aggrandisement!
In other climes, political parties are known for their ideology and political disposition. Quite a disaster that what one has been reading and hearing since 1978 is that ‘there is no ideology in Nigerian politics; what we have is personal interests’. For how long this disdainful cliché would continue is anybody’s guess.
According to Thomas Carothers, the fundamental role of political parties in democracy and development include ‘aggregating citizens’ views and interest; providing structured political choices to citizens; engaging citizens in the democratic process; training and socialising political leaders; developing policies and taking responsibility for implementing them; advancing governmental accountability and serving as key players in promoting sustainable development and, facilitating co-ordination within legislatures and between other branches of government’.
The lamentations and shortcomings within the two main political parties have been a course to the country and have contributed to our retrogression, inchoate party structure, division, social inequity, environmental disequilibrium, opportunism, tribalism, ethnicity, emergence of power-hungry and self-serving elites, opportunistic power-grabbers, weak and unstainable institutions, weak rule of law, poverty, and the rise of ‘neo-patrimonial, clientelistic politics marked by high levels of political corruption and politically-passive citizens’. Also to be noted are the anti-party legacies from the first republic that have refused to go away, and the unwholesome adoption and distortion of the presidential system leading to top-down leader-centric parties and weak legislatures.
The bane of APC and PDP is the absence of party discipline. Top party officials and elected and/or appointed political office holders do not find common grounds to see to the development of the country. They are rather engaged in supremacy wars. Elected and appointed political office holders see themselves as superior to their party officials or executives. In the process of enforcing party discipline the structures are fractured and dismembered, since he who pays the piper dictates the tune. We had seen this with PDP and it is happening in APC now. If caution is not exercised, APC may be heading the way of PDP as we had it in 2014 and 2015.
The country’s political scene is largely characterised by godfatherism, money and power to the extent that these three issues have made the attainment of genuine democratic norms a mirage. In some cases, each political party manipulates its members to bring them under the control of a cabal perpetuating itself by co-optation. In other cases, we see those holding powerful elected or appointed offices asserting their influence and forming parallel party structures and alliances or attempting to torpedo their political leaders. What happens in each of these two scenarios is that the democratic process is not only compromised but endangered.
The abracadabra we see in APC and PDP points to only one thing- Inability to manage success. According to David Abioye, ‘success means obtaining outstanding results in succession’, ‘success is not a state but a process’, and ‘success is good but deceptive in the sense that it gives you a feeling of arrival and settlement if not well managed’. The hurriedly packaged 1998/99 military-supervised transition could be said to be responsible for the emergence of pseudo political parties and leaders without ideology and clear-cut leadership that could manage the success of each party.
Unless and until we are in a position to manage our political success, APC and PDP as the dominant political parties in the country are at a ‘greater risk of democratic breakdown and political instability’ and the loser is the country. Time and other resources that ought to be utilised in managing the fragile security and economy would be used to attend to petty but burdensome party issues. Yesterday, it was PDP; today it is APC; and who knows tomorrow?
