ADC’S DAUNTING RESPONSIBILITY
MONDAY PHILIPS EKPE writes that Nigeria’s current flagbearer of opposition politics should stay on course and safeguard multiparty democracy
Latin as a language of general communication is technically dead and discarded long ago. Even its place of origin, Italy, has since adapted to Italian. Yet, as a testimony to its enduring influence on the etymologies and morphologies of many living languages, Latin has continued to make its presence felt, especially in the legalese and ‘religionese’ registers. Most notably, courtrooms around the world and the Catholic Church owe their mystiques in part to this language that has refused to be interred many centuries after it ceased to be any location’s functional lingua franca. When its words or phrases are spoken in various situations, unseen lines are often drawn between initiates and non-initiates. And sometimes, as in law, between the learned and educated.
One of such expressions, though not strange to Nigerians, has been thrust into the nation’s trending lexicon afresh. “Status quo ante bellum” resurfaced the other day and has taken on a life of its own. Its interpretation by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has inflicted wounds on the African Democratic Congress (ADC), especially the faction led by Senator David Mark, arguably Nigeria’s most promising rival party at the moment. Believed by many people to be a spoiler, Alhaji Nafiu Bala Gombe, former ADC Deputy National Chairman had gone to court to challenge the validity of Senator Mark’s leadership of the Congress.
But Mark’s prayer to the Court of Appeal to stop Gombe’s suit resulted in an order to return the case to the trial court, with a ruling that all the parties in the matter should maintain the Latinate verbalism, translated as, “before the start of hostilities”. Curiously, INEC didn’t act promptly on the appellate court’s command. It probably did not see any compelling rationale to do so. When its National Chairman, Joash Amupitan, finally did, however, it was to announce the Commission’s official de-recognition of Mark and ADC’s National Secretary, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola.
Party members and political watchers didn’t fail to link that action to the growing status of ADC as a potential opposing force against the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). That heart-breaking declaration actually came barely hours after the former Presidential Candidate of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, joined ADC. The aggrieved ADC functionaries didn’t expect INEC’s boss, a senior advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and professor of law, to simply work with his own private understanding and explanation of “status quo ante bellum”. The anger and frustrations which flow from the camp of ADC and elsewhere can boil yam.
One could hear badly damaged terms like “anti bello” from persons struggling on television to pour out their disappointment at the election umpire, an organisation that has descended even lower in the estimation of a large section of the citizens, and dismissed as a willing tool in the hands of the government in power. Equally troubled are people who have been anxious about the likelihood of the country’s democracy degenerating to a one-party show, a prospect made more feasible by the emptying of many bigwigs of opposition parties into APC.
In reacting to Amupitan two weeks ago at a world press conference in Abuja, Mark put his pain thus: “It is not the ADC that is under attack. This is a direct assault on Nigeria’s democracy and the right of Nigerians to choose, participate, and exercise their rights as free citizens. We have witnessed how the APC-led Federal Government has undermined, compromised, and coerced other opposition political parties. The ADC has risen as the last bastion between Nigeria’s democracy and full-blown dictatorship. And this is what worries them. What is now unfolding is a concerted effort to dismantle that last bulwark. If we allow this to happen, it could signal the end of our democracy as we know it. If we yield to it, we would have become complicit by our inaction. We therefore hold it a duty to our democracy and the Nigerian people to say ‘no’.
“Right now, I speak to Nigerians at home and in diaspora. I also speak directly to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.… INEC should have waited for the Court of Appeal to decide this matter. Instead, INEC went ahead to do the bidding of the ruling party. The role of INEC over political parties is not administrative. It is not managerial. It is simply supervisory”. He also sought to drive those points home at the party’s national convention earlier in the week.
To be clear, most Nigerians don’t have valid reasons to think that their politicians are in any significant way different from one another. The integrity of the names of the political parties isn’t anything more elevated than the face caps upon which they’re embossed. Yes, the parallel has become this distressing. Nigeria is now saddled with a political class whose overriding goal is to grab power and convert it to personal use. Many people truly feel stuck with this system of government which parades juicy promises but fall abysmally flat on deliverables. The Nigerian people have been living with this disillusionment for decades, with each new administration doing little or nothing to assuage the concerns passed down by its predecessors.
There is quantum disenchantment, scepticism and cynicism on ground, unfortunately. ADC’s front-liners and spokespersons should, please, not present themselves as messiahs. The need to sell their Congress to the electorate shouldn’t drive them into fantasies and outright falsehood. Nigerians are still grappling with the actual meaning of “Renewed Hope” sold like ice cream by President Bola Tinubu in the runup to the last presidential poll.
I sympathise with Mark and his co-travellers in their battle to stay afloat. How they navigate the key legal hurdles before them as they march towards the primaries will, of course, determine their chances of survival. INEC has clearly put a questionable foot forward but seeking to remove its high echelon as they have done is herculean, as that can only be executed by the senate in conjunction with the president. For ADC, it’s not too late to forge some internal cohesion. That’ll require plenty of compromises and ego management. Having the three top contenders behind Tinubu in the 2023 general election namely, Wazirin Atiku Abubakar, Mr Peter Obi and Kwankwaso in ADC should be enough incentive for them to move on by all means. The possibilities are endless.
If for any reason President Tinubu emerges as the only strong option on the ballot next year, the country will unwittingly lay a foundation for its democracy’s Nunc Dimittis. Neither the genuine fighters for the representative governance we practise nor the constitution framers anticipated the sort of illiberal democracy (euphemism for civilian authoritarianism) ravaging some other countries now. Even with the rape and dilution of the present democratic dispensation by the political class, the populace mustn’t be denied the right to decide who among their oppressors should lead them. Undermining the opposition is as old as our political history in various degrees. So, against every odd placed on its path, ADC mustn’t drop the ball now. Posterity beckons.
Dr Ekpe is a member of THISDAY Editorial Board
X: @monday_ekpe2
