By 2019, a plebiscite will decide just how well and how far the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has interpreted and approximated the yearnings of those who voted them into office. If the party has a foreboding of what that plebiscite would reveal, it has not let out that guarded secret. Instead, it has seemed to infuse its intra-party politics with energy of a different sort. The party’s vision of 2019, especially as indicated by the intrigues over the Kogi State governorship poll, is one of positioning and jostling for prominence and dominance. In 2015, the party was swept into office on the ashes of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In the next general elections, the electorate will judge the party on its policies, on its principles, on its ability to mobilise, inspire and empower the voters, and on the morality and character of its leaders.
The yardsticks by which the party will be judged will reflect its cohesiveness, ideology and purpose in a modern, complex, changing and challenging world. Here the party will be sorely taxed. It will have to convince the public that its basic assumptions and its inherent ability as a party are not only appropriate and well thought-out, but that its leading lights, its philosophers, and its prefects have an instinctive understanding of what the party represents and are able to translate that representation into the country’s national and geopolitical ambitions. At the time President Muhammadu Buhari made his statement of belonging to everybody and to nobody, a statement that delivered more literary effects than it spoke to logic or even rudimentary philosophy, it was worrisome that at the top echelon of the party, the connotative effect of the president’s seemingly innocuous play on words was lost on everyone.
Thus devoid of the right foundations, the immiscible coalition that gave the country the APC has tended to work at cross-purposes, its ideology representing nothing more than a pastiche of simple and pragmatic ideas of governance and administration, and a concoction of rigid and amateurish delineation of rights and wrongs. The manner of their coming together to form the APC and the road map they presented to Nigerians were initially thought to adequately represent the party’s foundations and ambition. The decay in the PDP may have made it possible for the APC to snatch power; but it is unlikely that the process of winning the presidency will in itself be sufficient for the party to sustain its hold on power, stabilise its disparate parts and expand its influence. The dissonance in the party over the Kogi governorship debacle, for instance, showed clearly that the party’s pretence to unity, purpose and ideology was insufficient to atone for its wobbly structure and unregulated internal dynamics, or to insulate it from the danger of imploding or fragmenting sometime in the future.
Without discipline and ideology, the party’s limitations and fault lines may become accentuated, and its hope of redemption through the social and ethical crusades embraced by its leadership may become a chimera. Rather than distill from the party’s road map a coherent and consistent progressive ideology on their assumption of office, party leaders turned on themselves in a complex and fierce struggle for the soul of the party. For a new party, this struggle may not necessarily be inimical to its journey of self-discovery; but there must be guarantees the final outcome would produce the relevant skills, ideas and methods necessary to solidify the party and sharpen its domestic and international ideologies. So far, the party has birthed more trouble than it can manage. Moreover, the president has not shown a clear understanding of the nuanced components of national greatness beyond his crusades against insurgency and corruption, and he has hidden behind these crusades to explain his lack of attention to the other urgent aspects of national life.
In addition, the president’s tactical flaws have spawned a brood of vipers within the party, ambitious politicians obsessed with 2019 and positioning themselves bitterly to take advantage of the existing vacuum. The vacuum was created by the indefensible idea that the president belonged to everybody and to nobody despite being a product of a political party who could not have won the presidency without the compromises and consensuses on culture and religion midwifed by his party. Repudiating the foundation that produced him merely created a vacuum that is being creatively and aggressively manipulated and exploited. To worsen an already fractious and rancid state of affairs, the president’s body language may indicate he is not altogether averse to encouraging and nurturing a new and amenable elite, especially in the Southwest, as this column remarked when the president finally assembled his cabinet. Such Machiavellian tactics didn’t work in the 1960s; it stands little chance of working even now for a number of historical and cultural reasons that those outside the Southwest may find somewhat puzzling.
As the life and times of Chief Awolowo showed, any mercurial leader the region produces may find it difficult to escape the resentment of those mentored by him, if not their covert or overt revolt. It is an attitude distinctly southwestern, perhaps rooted in their culture, educational attainments and worldview, notwithstanding the great and laudatory fundamentals of their ethos. With a history so open and unambiguous, it is surprising that Nigerian leaders, and in this instance those who control the APC in Abuja, often misread political developments in the Southwest to attempt either a reconfiguration of the ruling party (NPC/NNDP versus AG/NCNC/NEPU in 1964) or the nurturing of a new political elite in the Southwest, as some are anticipating before 2019. What is undeniable is that resentment, revolt and bitterness are festering around the APC, and party leaders are not showing the imagination and flexibility to manage the fissures. If the problem persists for the next year or two, the party will have reached the point of no return.
Those who would have imbued the APC with a life force, helped to fine-tune and concretise its inchoate ideology, and engineered a daring rescue of the economy as well as foist a new and futuristic social and political order, have been considerably weakened by internal suspicion, rivalry and short-term permutations. It will become increasingly costlier to rectify the problem in the APC as the party ossifies in the months ahead. The party knows what to do to reclaim lost grounds; but it is unlikely to take what it feels are a humiliating reversal of its newly adopted methods. They will believe that notwithstanding the president’s inability to define and aggregate the party’s raison d’être and ambition, the new ministers’ individual efforts would somehow coalesce into a unified and effervescent whole. Such grandiose hopes are misplaced, for the cart cannot lead the horse any more than the body can function optimally without vision.
NATION
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