The press has an uncanny capacity for latching on to a word that captures socio-political tremors in a country. The word or phrase it chooses says something about the winners and the losers in an overt or covert power tussle. The unrestrained mass sack, dismissal and retirement of civil servants in 1975 by General Murtala Muhammed in his ill-advised zeal to rid the public services of the federation of dead woods gave the press one such suitable word that captured the seismic event: Axe.
The axe is a destructive instrument. All right, we know that village women use it to split fire wood. A positive use, right? But the axe has a long history of being used to split open the skulls of men who lost in the leadership struggle endemic in all kingdoms – human and animal. In reporting the event, the first step in the systematic destruction of the civil service by the generals after General Yakubu Gowon, the press did not report that people were retired, sacked or dismissed. No, it reported that the axe fell on them – as if by accident. It was an accident, given its suddenness and its destructive power.
There is something rather clinical in the metaphorical death of a man on whom the axe fell: the blame, like the ball, was pushed to his court. If he was a dead wood, no one was responsible for the fate that befell him; if he had passed the expiry date but remained in office, he invited his sudden retirement in the great purge. The government was not to blame. Do you see the point?
The choice of the axe as a metaphor for repositioning the civil service made another important point here. The great purge that effectively unsettled the civil services of the federation, was pointedly intended to be a revolution by the head of state. All revolutions are violent, even if no blood is spilled. This too was violent. Ask those who suddenly lost their jobs and the trauma the loss visited on them and their families. It was violent because nothing has remained the same in our civil or public services since then. The security of tenure, the main attraction in the service, was lost. And successive military administrations assumed the right to tamper with the structure of the public services to suit their personal or group purposes. The axe did not just fall on individuals; it fell on the entire 13 civil services in the federation.
I have, as indeed I must, followed the reporting of events in the political parties, now given a new tempo as the clock ticks, drawing us inexorably closer to many people’s date with their political destiny. You do not need me to tell you that all is not well with our political parties. They are in disarray and confusion. It seems the axe is at their roots. The crises began even before the party primaries. But like the virus it is, it continues to spread, destabilising every one of the 91 political parties we are saddled with.
And once more, we are confronted with the toing and froing of the politicians from one party to another and back again. It is symptomatic of our incurable political disease – the absence of an ideology that commits and binds members of one political party to stand with it and work for its opportunity to get into power and implement its policies and programmes.
The press has captured the dance of the power seekers, using an appropriate word in each segment of the dance. The first word was defection; a word that suggests an individual merely exercising his right to end his association with the members of his party. No offence intended and none, perhaps, was taken.
Then, as the crises deepened, the press found another word for it – desertion. This word captured the stage of the crises in which aggrieved members left their parties with an intent to destroy them. We have had two such cases in the current dispensation. In 2014/15, the PDP, the party that had ruled the country for 16 years as at then, helplessly witnessed the mass desertion of its members, some of whom had been president (Obasanjo), state governors and national and state legislators, ministers and other sundry men and women who realised their political ambitions under the umbrella.
It effectively crippled the party and led to its loss of the presidential election to APC, the new party that accommodated the deserters. But just to show that nothing is permanent in Nigerian politic, APC is now witnessing the desertion by the same men and women who flocked to it in 2014/15. It cannot escape the damage inflicted on it by the desertion.
And that brings us to the final stage in this macabre dance, the drum beats of which grate on the ears. And the press found a new operative word for it: Dump. Dump, dump, anybody home? People do not just leave their political parties in search of greener pastures else where any more. They dump them. Note the violence inherent in the word. A man who dumps his political party does not just turn his back on it, he consigns it to the refuse dump of his private political history. It is a violent action. On the face of it, it suggests that the dumper has burnt his bridge and, all things being equal, he would not return.
But that is not the way the business of politics is run. Politics, Nigerian politics, has the distinction of not being serious. Everything in that rarefied kingdom is fluid – and unstable. The politicians do not pride themselves on principles; they pride themselves on their capacity to capture opportunities. Why would a man who defected or dumped his party return to it, acting as if nothing shameful happened? Political actions do not invite shame. They invite plaudits. The man who dumps his political party today for lack of opportunities, can return tomorrow, attracted thereto by the opportunity he sees pushing through the dump. To borrow from the scriptures, it is called seeing the light. If you see the light you can always find your way through the dump.
Dump reminds us of heaps of uncleared refuse dumps on, say, Lagos streets. Dumps are unsightly but they are also sources of livelihood for scavengers who forage in them for disused but re-usable items dumped there by the haves. In politics, therefore, dump too creates opportunities wherever it occurs in a political party. Like the refuse dump scavengers, the politicians forage in the dumps of political opportunities. When one man dumps his political party, he forages in the dump of another political party. Dump. Dump. Dump. How did we get into this mess?
Dumping serves the political interests of the politicians but it puts our party politics and, therefore, our political development right there – in the dump. That is not the place for our party politics to be. But that is where it is. If you are minded to search for the reasons why our political parties are not agents of our national development, save yourself the bother because you now know why.
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