It is no longer news that our major political parties are in active disarray, featuring rival factions which work against one another at elections. The divisions in the Peoples Democratic Party, which have defied several reconciliatory meetings, are of course well-known, and were the subject of a comment by this columnist in September (PDP’s self-destructive quarrels and growing irrelevance, The PUNCH, September 2, 2016). That unending conflict played out in the recent governorship election in Ondo State, where Mr. Jimoh Ibrahim, whose candidature was temporarily upheld by the Independent National Electoral Commission came out to say in effect that he was not so much running for governor, as running against the dominant faction of the PDP in Ondo State.
In the All Progressives Congress, a similar scenario played out though less vociferously than was the case in the PDP. Official denials notwithstanding, it is clear that what is now known as the “Tinubu faction” of the APC worked for the victory of the Alliance for Democracy candidate, Mr. Olusola Oke, and was ostentatiously indifferent to the fortunes of the party’s candidate, Rotimi Akeredolu. This much is evident from a report in the Sunday PUNCH, December 3, 2016, entitled, “APC leaders divided over Tinubu’s role”. Although both factions are trying to put a good face on the divisions which surfaced during the election, reports about the formation of a mega party by factions within both the PDP and the APC suggest that the incoherence in the parties is graduating into an open divorce and plans for new wedding mates. Will the proposed mega party, if it gets off the ground, do better than either the PDP or the APC? There is no easy answer, but raising the question leads us to consider the current state of the parties and why they are so bound to factionalisation and endless feuds.
Let me point out that the crisis of the parties is also the crisis of the Nigerian democracy, aptly described as a democracy without democrats. In no particular order, Nigerian democracy is beset by the challenge of the national question, ironically downplayed by the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, only for it to be continuously haunted by that issue; the social question which speaks to the bizarre gap between a few affluent Nigerians and a harshly deprived majority, a portion of which vegetates on the brink of starvation; the organisational challenge which refers to the crisis of institutions and the failure to translate policies into welfare deliverables, and related to the last point, a crisis of underperformance currently manifesting in the several fiascos on several policy fronts, the most conspicuous being the power sector and the economy generally.
To give an instance of how these infirmities affect the parties, several people have argued that the palavers boiling over in the APC are partly a result of a northernisation policy, which prefers to create alternate power centres in the South-West and elsewhere as a way of mainstreaming northern hegemony. This may be a bald and bold way of narrating it, but it can hardly be debated that this is one of the themes to take along.
Furthermore, to the extent that INEC, a supposedly neutral institution, is joined as a party in the emerging controversy, with its impartiality increasingly called to question, this can be related to the violation of the emergent norm of a President from one geographical zone appointing the chairman from a different geographical zone. That is another way of saying that, we are perhaps paying a heavy price for dispensing with the inclusive and consociational safeguards of our federalism.
There is the point too, that in a recession, where the size of the proverbial national cake has considerably diminished, contentions are bound to be rife over the politics of allocation and distribution. Then, of course, the social question comes into play to the extent that parties in general have become an intramural elite affair, divorced from the tormenting existential realities of the majority of Nigerians who are so preoccupied with making it to the next day, to care about the quarrels of fat cats. This dimension, underlined by the economic downturn, increases an already latent presidential swagger, with the result that it becomes easy, though ultimately counterproductive, for the centre to initiate schemes and play political games at the expense of other centres of influence.
To be sure, we are not the only country mourning the decline and decay of parties. Globally, political parties, especially, among the younger strata of the population, are in retreat, evoke distrust and are being intently rivalled by social movements, civic organisations and independent candidates. The Donald Trump phenomenon and quandary, in the United States, mirror this revolt against established parties and institutions, increasingly perceived as a theatre of corruption and cronyism.
Broadly, the same story, in greater or lesser degree, applies across Europe, where as opinion polls increasingly show, declining voter-turnouts at elections as well as indifference towards parties, set in their own crooked ways, dominate the horizon. In Nigeria and other emerging democracies, political parties have not had enough time to take root and the problem of voter indifference towards them is overlaid by such issues as their lack of firm identities, the rapid and cynical movements of politicians in search of spoils across parties, the failure of government and opposition parties to make a difference in the lives of the people. There are also the capital intensity of the political process, which economically disenfranchises the lower and middle classes as well as the non-moneyed elite, the tendencies of ruling parties to dismember opposition parties through intimidation and political sleights of hand , and the lack of ideological or policy coloration.
To elaborate on one of these disabling factors, a colleague who aspired to be a governor in one of the South-West states confirmed to me that in all the meetings of one of the parties he attended, he does not recall anyone in which there was any discussion or debate about policy or policy alternatives. “It was money, money all the way”, he emphasised with barely concealed disgust.
It is confounding too, that while Nigerians bemoan their worsening lot, politicians are crisscrossing the country, dramatically preparing for 2019, which in political terms, is light years away. Almost every political question, we are told, revolves around 2019, forgetting the maxim that in politics, 24 hours is a long time.
If our political parties will not continue to be a theatre of the absurd, then they must reduce the disconnect between them and the rest of the people by immersing themselves more in questions of policy, and by, at least flashing prospects of redemptive governance. That will not be enough. Considering that they so bound to fracture, they must develop adjudicatory and conciliatory institutions which have the capacity to authoritatively mediate snowballing conflicts.
The health of our parties is very much bound up with the ill-health of our democracy, as previously suggested, but in the interim, the parties should become more accountable and transparent, evoke better citizen participation while, the National Assembly should consider a bill that will seek to reduce to the minimum, switching of politicians across parties.
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