Pushing Their Atrophied Visions, APC, PDP Court Implosion

IN THE ARENA

With consequential slip-ups and a grasping, fractured political elite, both the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party are courting imminent implosion, Louis Achi writes

Significantly, the world views Nigeria at times from the most puzzling prisms – crises, corruption, starvation, political regression and more. This is largely self-inflicted and with a history. But what clearly may not be disputed is that there is a dearth of statesmen and statesmanship in the nation’s political space. This reality has definitely impacted the political environment.

Political parties and electoral systems are the most important ingredients in every democracy. Political parties play a major role in democratic processes around the world. They are supposed to increase predictability and the transparency of policy outcomes. This, in turn, facilitates better accountability between voters and their representatives.

Parties save politics from becoming a dispersed and even possibly a contradictory set of actions. But in Nigeria today, this time-honoured traditions have apparently been flipped on their heads.

In 22 years of the Fourth Republic, two major political parties that have held power at the centre, controlling the presidency, are the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC). While the PDP has ruled for 16 years, the APC is in its sixth year. The hopes of transformative governance vested in both parties by Nigerians over the past 22 years have largely come to naught. With their atrophied visions, Nigeria still remains a transitional democracy.

Both have demonstrated puzzling incapacity or unwillingness to make the necessary effort to respond to the challenges encapsulated in the nation’s peculiar history. This scenario may have prodded the Economist of London to observe that: “One of the deepest mysteries of modern Nigeria is how so big a country, filled with so many well educated people manage to spend so much time getting nowhere…The military depredations….would matter less…but Nigerian democracy, when occasionally it surfaced, was never a shining example of the genre.”

The ruling APC is currently enmeshed in self-conjured crisis. The violent conversations among its leaders, legal grey areas and the physical violence that overshadowed its penultimate Saturday’s ward congresses considerably diminished the orderliness and peace expected of a progressives’ platform – so-called.

It could be recalled that following the successful power grab by the President Muhammadu Buhari-led Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), last year, the platform effectively centralised itself as key power block out of the four foundational political entities that joined forces to defeat the PDP in 2015. The Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Abubakar Malami and Governor Mai Mala Buni of Yobe State belong to the CPC block.

The current enervating internal dissonance apparently flows from this ‘coup,’ which the other coalition members are pushing back against, especially against the background of the cold calculations ahead of 2023 elections.

Last June, many APC governors prevailed on Buhari to sack the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) and install Buni as the interim chairman. Buni was mandated to lead a 13-member caretaker committee to conduct a national convention within six months for the election of a new leadership. Fifteen months on, Buni is still exercising that constitutionally disputed mandate which was extended.

Buni’s dual mandate as executive Yobe State governor and national party Caretaker Committee Chairman has further fuelled the party’s internal crisis. According to sources, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was mandated by Buhari to ensure the party benefits from what seems to be a legal warning from the recent Supreme Court ruling, which had a 4-3 verdict with the justices questioning the constitutional validity of a sitting governor holding an executive post such as national party caretaker chairmanship.

While a last-minute cancellation of the congresses was on the table penultimate Friday night, APC governors reportedly explained to Osinbajo that the majority of them would rather prefer to go on with the congresses. A few others felt an outright cancellation of the congresses would be inevitable if it went ahead. Eventually, what could pass for a patchy congress was held.

But the Supreme Court, in its written judgment on the Ondo State governorship election, has affirmed the leadership of Buni as Chairman, Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC) of APC, clarifying that it is legal and lawful. The apex court also held that Buni’s position as Acting Chairman of the CECPC is not contrary to the provision of Section 183 of the Constitution as same is on a temporary basis which is not akin to executive office or paid employment as envisaged by Section 183 of the Constitution.

While this represents some relief to the embattled party, it does not hide the internal indiscipline, extreme greed by many of its influential members their and puzzling lack of empathy for their poverty- stricken constituencies.

Today, the APC has become an all-comers sanctuary where ‘sinners become saints’. According to Solomon Dalong, an APC chieftain and former Minister of Sports, while speaking in a BBC Hausa programme, APC has failed Nigerians. “Our party, the APC is like a dying party because, as I am talking to you right now, they have dissolved the party completely, it has no members, even the President is not a member.”

Following its birth in 1998, the PDP held lots of promises. It could of course be recalled that the party metamorphosed from the G-34, a formidable political platform founded by some of Nigeria’s most respected politicians who fearlessly waged the war for the enthronement of democracy. The vision of its founding fathers was essentially to win political power through democratic means in order to institute a democratic government as well as deepen the democratic culture.

But after 16 years on the saddle, considerable hope was betrayed. The party became bedevilled by indiscipline and a compelling failure to exercise power to the benefit of Nigerians. Whereas the PDP was expected to mirror the ideals of the progressives who were its founding mentors, the party, in much of its 16 years, rather strangely chose a pathway at odds with strengthening democracy.

Though it could not be denied that the Yar’Adua/Jonathan phase lit a candle in the darkness of electoral and governance roguery that defined the party’s excursion in power.

Today, with so many defections by its governors, party executives and other elected members to the APC, it is a point of debate whether PDP can survive the current crisis that has pitted some of its NWC members against national chairman, Prince Uche Secondus whose circumspect supervision of the PDP as a potent, viable opposition party has become questionable.