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Towards A More Integrative Party System by Anthony Akinola
Referring to the political party that does not control the presidency as an “opposition party” is some kind of “hangover” from our experience with the parliamentary system of government. Under that system, a political party which has won the majority of seats in a parliamentary election forms the government, while the members of the one that has lost out are confined to the opposition benches. The parliamentary system is adversarial in approach and that in itself is deep-rooted in British political history.
Unlike the parliamentary system of government, the presidential alternative is a form of coalition government most suitable for a heterogeneous nation like ours. The responsibilities of government are shared between its three arms – the executive, legislative and judicial. The Americans who “invented” the presidential system we practise in Nigeria, refer to the Executive arm of government as the “administration” of whoever is President, their current one being the Barack Obama administration. They do not call it “the government of Barack Obama” as we sometimes misguidedly do in Nigeria.
The political party whose candidate is President – in theory an independent candidate can be one – may not necessarily be the one that has a majority of seats in the Legislature. Such a circumstance would have made the concepts of “government” and “opposition” further unexplainable . Assuming, for instance, that General Muhammadu Buhari of the Congress for Political Change (CPC) were the winner of the presidential election of April 2011, would the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have been regarded as an opposition party in spite of its control of the majority of seats in the Senate and House of Representatives?The CPC,not least because of its comparatively inferior representation in the Legislature, would hardly have qualified to be called the ruling party
The point one is trying to make here is that all political parties with elected members in the legislature constitute the government. Such political parties are best described as “rivals” for power rather than being opposing parties in the context of adversarial politics. In a more developed democratic culture there would be no need for the so-called Government of National Unity that we often assume should be in place before the Executive arm of government can function. The President-elect should have had the confidence or given a free-hand to appoint his own team of ministers and advisers with the diversity of our nation in his or her mind. The role of the political party as an agent of integration, rather than that of sharing loots, would be more appreciated when we have had competitive political parties that traverse regional divides. The essence of this essay is to re-state a constitutional design which could make such a development feasible in the very near future.
Regardless of our legendary dishonesty, the idea of “zoning” or “rotation" has been, for decades, an integral part of our political discussions and calculations. However, its positive implications for integration have not been fully digested. Most tend to look at it from the pedestrian level of sharing political offices but it is more than that. This writer has clung to the idea of a formalised zoning arrangement, particularly at the level of the presidency, not least because of its positive implications for the electoral behaviour of Nigerians and the development of the party system generally.
It is illustrated in my publication, The Search for a Nigerian Political System (1986) that a deliberate policy of choosing presidential contestants from a particular region or ethno-sectional constituency would produce two possible outcomes, each complimenting the other.
The first of such outcomes is the weakening of the bastion of ethnicity because of the intra-ethnic competition that has been introduced. The second outcome would be how the fact of the absence of an “ethnic” candidate in an election has reflected on voting behaviour in the national constituency. Voters are likely to be more objective and rational in making electoral choices than they would otherwise have been. The 2011 presidential election, if one must be honest, has been one in which divisive sentiments came to the fore.
In the 1999 presidential election when the choice was between Chief Olu Falae and General Olusegun Obasanjo, both Yoruba, there were those of us who assumed, for instance, that the latter might be more experienced in handling the issue of military involvement in politics. The military had constituted itself into a political nuissance and it was always assumed it would intervene in politics for selfish reasons. Of course there were also those who thought Falae might be a better manager of the economy. Chief Falae had previously been Minister of Finance and was not indicted of corruption, making such an assumption reasonable. There was, in short, some kind of rational thinking here that would hardly have been contemplated in a clash involving ethnic candidates.
Had we continued with that electoral approach, we would by now have had manageable political parties that traverse the divides. There would have been no place for the mushroom political parties whose leaders end up endorsing the candidates of other political parties! The so-called progressive political parties, previously constrained by the ethnic factor, would have had little or no problem in coalescing into a broad-based political party. Our choices at election time might have been better clarified, while the prospect of conducting a free and fair election might also have been better helped.
The Goodluck Jonathan administration is enjoined to make a review of the Constitution one of its priorities. It is suggested that this be embarked upon very early in its life in order to ensure its thoroughness and completion. We would need to transform our nation into a functioning federation as well as anchor our democracy on the rotation of leadership. The position one is re-stating here is that a nation of wise men and women can decide its own structure of democracy based on its historical experiences and peculiarities.It serves no useful purpose being myopically preoccupied with the political arrangements of nations whose origins and complexities. differ from ours. |