MANY interpretations can attend Tuesday’s event at the National Assembly, when leadership of the Assembly went against choices of the All Progressives Congress, APC. Who power belongs to, after the elections, would remain a matter of speculations. APC is aghast, the opposition is celebrating.
Change, the buzzword APC delights in, could sweep further than the reaches of the binds on the strands of broom called APC, which cherishes regulated change. Some of its members without making any claims know the role their presence played in the formation of the fastest coalition to have swept to power in Nigeria’s history.
The only thing that is permanent in politics, demagogues say, is interest, but APC tends to think that number was more important than interest and the party’s is the only interest that matters. APC forgot that some on whose followership the party rode to victory, also have interests. Could it have forgotten that one of the major reasons some chieftains of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, turned to APC was PDP’s imposition of candidates for the 2015 elections?
“The party is supreme and its interest is superior to that of its individual members,” APC said in a statement that insisted that Saraki and Dogara were not the party’s candidates for the contested positions. Yet President Muhammadu Buhari had breakfast with them, the day after their elections. Is the President standing away from the party? How would APC handle this crack that is growing in its ranks?
At the conception of APC, ideology was a distant consideration. Anyone who could muster condemnations against the Goodluck Jonathan administration earned a place in APC. The phenomenal growth of the party and its race to power swept aside credentials of some of its members that it should have questioned. The most important thing was accessing power; those who helped in that process did not matter.
Who is the winner of the APC rebellion? Neither Senator Olubukola Abubakar Saraki nor Hon. Yakubu Dogara can claim victory. We do not know the deals that resulted in the “unexpected” face of the National Assembly leadership. We do not know the forces that delivered this strange marriage. What we know is that it could be a longer relationship that could put more strains on APC.
APC hurts over it loss. It watches as the power it has is being whittled down by internal crisis. It would have to learn fast that the era of impositions is ending. Democracy without freedom of choice is inchoate.
If the National Assembly focuses on the interest of the people, as President Buhari has advised, the unknown winner of change at the National Assembly, could be the people.
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