It is campaign time again and the nation shall soon be inundated with promises and counter-promises, realistic and unrealistic, but as we have consistently demonstrated on this page, no Nigerian political party has the obligation to do more than the Constitution prescribes for it with respect to their aims and objective because as clearly enunciated in section 224 of the Constitution, “The programme as well as the aims and objects of a political party shall conform with the provisions of Chapter 11 of this Constitution”. In other words, once a political party subscribes to the contents of Chapter 2 of the Constitution dealing with the Fundamental Objective and Directive Principles of State Policy, which is like a permanent national manifesto, it would have at least textually met the constitutional requirements for its registration and operations.
The next question would be: What does Chapter 2 which is being set out as the primary barometer for determining the qualification or otherwise of political associations to do political business in Nigeria contains? In this connection, the constitutionally established umpire for all political operations in the country, INEC, has the primary power, subject to a possible judicial review of the matter, to say whether or not a political party is in conformity with that Chapter. That has meant that our political parties can simply “cut and paste” the provisions of Chapter 2 of the Constitution onto their documents with some embellishments and present same as their manifestoes and INEC may not have the power to ask for more. Accordingly, political parties can do without the headache or necessity of actually articulating and selling serious political programmes of action to the electorate and, to a great extent, they have been doing just so quite successfully.
It remains a source of wonderment that we have a Constitution that alludes to a multi-party-political system but at the same time shuts out independent candidates from the political process, thus: “No association, other than a political party, shall canvass for votes for any candidate at election or contribute to the funds of any party or to the election of any candidate at an election” (Section 221). I would have thought that a truly pluralistic and all-embracing constitutional order would go the whole hog to incorporate independent views that are not necessarily in synch with the mainstream or the establishment political parties.
Under such a condition, it is futile to want to hold any particular political party accountable for its promises as contained its manifestoes, if any. That has meant that all the political parties in the country, to the extent that they must all source the fundamentals of their political programmes from the Constitution, would almost invariably perform the same way in order to be acceptable to the umpire. The only critical point of departure would be the moral character and intellectual energy of the individual candidates as their political orientations are more less the same due to this strange prescription of the Constitution that is traceable to its strong military ancestry aka, “a little to the left and a little to the right of the centre”. That is why politicians are able to crisscross the various parties, decamping and re-camping at will, without any qualms or questions of ideological compatibility ever raised.
Those who complain about the absence of true federalism in the obviously variegated polyglot that is Nigeria should then go further to query why would a federal constitution prescribes a single ideological superstructure for all the political party to follow while at the same time prohibiting independent candidacy which would have been a true manifestation of our diversity or true federalism?
With INEC formally lifting the ban on open campaigns on last Sunday the 18th of November 2018, the various political parties have been releasing documents containing their peculiar “Covenant with Nigerians”. Of particular interest to most Nigerians, not so much for their credibility but for their relative electability status, are those of PDP and APC. For a start, can we honestly say that political campaigning, actually started only last Sunday? The incumbent government, the APC, has switched gear to what it calls the “Next Level” while the main opposition, the PDP, has produced what it generally calls the “Atiku Plan”. As far as party membership is concerned Atiku can be rightly described as a man with “multi-party citizenship”. The PDP probably knows that and it has therefore shifted emphasis to the candidate, i.e., the “Atiku Plan” instead of the “PDP Plan”. Smart guys.
Reading through the “Atiku Plan” I noticed that it has seriously downplayed the principal plank of its nomination campaign slogan which was “Restructure”. He has tactically backed off from “I will restructure Nigerian within 6 months of my election” to the watered down “My plan to restructure Nigeria will lead to a vast increase in the Internally Generated Revenue both for the Federal Government and the states via the matching grants that we will provide to state governments that increase their own revenue.” It sounds contradictory for a party desirous of growing the economy to also be thinking of raising taxes at the same time. If you over-tax an economy which is not growing, then you will be inflicting more hardship on the poor. We want to hear about how he will grow the stagnant Nigerian economy not just how to “share” the little available – a subtle restoration of the corruption-fueled “National Cake” sharing mentality that had bankrupted the nation.
It is interesting to note that even before election Atiku has already ideologically placed under the bus all those who have been rooting for him because of their expectation of an eminent restructure of the polity. The restructure bogey, as loud as it sounds, is a huge red-herring being deployed by politicians to hoodwink the frustrated voters who are seeking for redemption from anywhere including from the wrong places. As I have always advised and strictly from a constitutional point of view, the idea of “restructure” is a controversial one with different meaning to different people; but when used in the specific context of our federalism, it is even more complicated.
Since the infamous Unification Decree (No. 34) of 1966, under which the Ironsi military junta abolished federalism in Nigeria, no government has been able to convincingly alter the fiat accompli which that ill-thought out act brought upon the nation ever since. Unless there is a revolutionary development that would upstage the present arrangement extra-constitutionally or a government that can muster the requisite political will to push through a constitutional amendment, it is going to remain a favorite vote-catching slogan but devoid of constitutional or practical viability. The least Nigerian would have expected from Atiku is a determination to restructure the country in line with the 2014 Confab Report which is what actually attracted so many people to his camp but that is not going to happen became he knows that such would immediately ostracise him in the whole of the north, being their no-go area.
As far as the APC is concerned, it is baffling to see that nothing about education which itself has recently acknowledged requires a “national emergency” is audaciously mentioned in its “Next Level” proposals. As a ‘progressive-inclined’ party, such an omission constitutes a fundamental mistake that is strong enough to vitiate its entire programme. All what these shows is that, at the end of the day, these sweet and lofty political programmes do not really matter, instead, convenience and self-interests tend to supersede everything.
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