PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The PDP Crisis and the Rest of Us

kudugana@yahoo.com 

           

 

As President Olusegun Obasanjo intensified his war against his deputy following the outing of their feud over 2007, there must be many Nigerians who are having a big chuckle at the expense of the Vice-President. Prominent among them is probably Alhaji Attahiru Bafarawa, the politically sagacious governor of Sokoto State. For several years he had consistently cautioned Atiku Abubakar against tying his political fortune too closely to that of his boss, more so as it looked like the deeper the vice-president’s personal loyalty to his boss went, the further he seemed alienated from his immediate Northern constituency.

           

Not only had the president proved himself an unreliable ally from the way he had repudiated a deal he had apparently struck with the Northern leadership in the Peoples Democratic Party prior to its emergence as the ruling party, Bafarawa often said, the president’s strategy of dividing the North to rule Nigeria could hardly advance Atiku Abubakar’s career. On the contrary, it was more likely than not to prove fatal, Bafarawa often argued.

           

The clearest sign that the Sokoto State governor is probably enjoying a good laugh at Atiku Abubakar’s expense surfaced the other day when he told the BBC or the VOA Hausa Service – I don’t remember which – that his Kano State counterpart, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, had no business intervening in the feud between the Vice-President and his boss. First, he said, the feud is a PDP affair, whereas Shekarau belongs to the opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party. Second the Vice-President, he said, had not, in any case, invited anyone to intercede in his quarrel with his boss.

           

Atiku Abubukar may indeed be getting his comeuppance for his blind loyalty to his boss – there are, of course, many including apparently the boss, who would question this loyalty, but no one can deny that at critical moments in Obasanjo’s six years plus as president, notably over the plan by a rump of the PDP governors to ditch him in the primaries for the 2003 presidential elections and over the alleged plan by some disaffected soldiers to shoot down his aircraft on a domestic flight in December 2003, the Vice-President stood by his boss – but I am not sure it is helpful to gloat over the Vice-President’s current predicament. This is simply because, whether Atiku Abubakar deserves his comeuppance or not, what is at stake is not just his political fortune but the very survival of Nigeria’s fledging democracy.

           

As the ruling party, it is pretty obvious that if the PDP goes down, it is more likely than not to take our new democracy down with it. And this would be due in no small measure to the public’s seeming acquiescence to President Obasanjo’s determination to impose his will, if not himself, on the country all the way to 2007 and beyond.

           

Some of his apologists have denied that the president has any plans to extend his tenure. Probably the most credible sounding denial has come from my good friend, Malam Lawal Batagarawa, his adviser on Intra-Party Affairs. In a recent press interview (Daily Trust and Nigerian Tribune, August 1), Batagarawa gave at least five reasons why the president has no intention of perpetuating himself in office. First, according to Batagarawa, Nelson Mandela had, long ago, tipped Obasanjo to succeed him as Africa’s foremost statesman, contingent upon his departure from the Aso Villa in 2007.

           

Second, Algeria’s President, Abdulaziz Bouteflika, said the presidential adviser, is due here next year for Africa’s Peer Review Mechanism to assess Nigeria’s respect for human rights and democracy. No sensible leader, said Batagarawa, would jeopardize a positive review by wanting to sit tight in office. Third, he said, Obasanjo opposed the decision of the Togolese military early this year to impose Faure on the country upon the death of his father, the venal and brutal Gnassingbe Eyadema. Fourth, he said, the president as party leader, had embarked upon its reform, and fifth, it is, in any case, up to the people and not any single individual, no mater how powerful, to decide who should rule Nigeria.

           

Batagarawa’s rationalizations may sound credible, but they collapse upon even the most casual examination. First, Mandela has nobody’s mandate to tip anyone as his successor as Africa’s foremost statesman. When he departs to the great beyond, it is the deeds of his potential successors, and not anybody’s say-so, that will determine who, if any, will fill his shoes.

           

Second, Bouteflika is hardly qualified to judge anyone’s human rights and democratic credentials. Certainly not when he is a principal beneficiary of one of the most brutal and long running military suppression of the will of the Algerians to choose a government of their own liking.

           

Third, Obasanjo’s opposition to the Togolese army’s nepotism was more apparent than real. The fact that Faure still succeeded his father showed that the election that followed the international community’s noisy objection to the army’s method was exactly that - all noise and no substance.

           

Fourth, it is laughable to talk about party reform in a situation where, as in the PDP, a party’s principal officers are handpicked for acclamation, contrary to its own constitution, and even more seriously, contrary to the country’s Constitution. Last, but by no means the least, to say it is up to the people, and not any individual, no matter how powerful, to determine who rules a country, is to state the obvious. This, however, is easier said than done. As the experience of 2003 alone has shown, it is not all that difficult, and certainly it is not impossible, for powerful people to stand between the people and their wishes.

           

Batagarawa and all the other Obasanjo apologists can rationalize all they can, but the fact is that we have a president who preaches one thing and does the opposite. This is a president who preached against the manipulation of the electoral process at a presidential retreat on the subject of electoral process and violence in February 2002, but went ahead to preside over the most fraudulent election in Nigeria, if not in Africa. “We all” the president had said in his opening speech at the retreat on February 7, “can predict the behaviour of a person who gets into an elected office through manipulation of the electoral process and related democratic rules: he will proceed to dig himself into office with further manipulation of the political system through the instrument of power at his disposal. The scenario rapidly deteriorates when we remember that anyone who abuses the rules encourages everyone else to do the same, and, with political violence in particular, no one can claim exclusivity or monopoly.”

           

Given the level of political violence Nigerians have witnessed since before 2003, the principal source of which has been the blind pursuit of power by your average politician, including the president himself, the president couldn’t have been more dead on target in his diagnosis and prognosis of Nigeria’s politics. The big irony, of course, is that the president apparently believes what he said is true of every one else but himself.

           

Nearly two years ago, I said on these pages that he posed the greatest danger to our democracy. “This president, I dare say”, I said on October 13, 2003, “represents the most dangerous threat to our young democracy.” Without boring you with the reasons I gave then, it is clear from the PDP’s descent into despotism, that my warning was far from exaggerated. If anything, the danger he poses to our democracy today, especially given his messianic psyche – “The good Lord,” he once said, “who has given me the assignment to lead Nigeria also by Himself provides the wherewithal for the assignment to be accomplished.” (Villascope September/October 2002) - demands that no one, but absolutely no one, must remain indifferent to what is going on in the PDP. To rephrase President George W. Bush’s rather cocky demand of the rest of the world in the wake of 9/11, you are either with democracy or you are against it.

           

For me the first and foremost test of anyone’s fidelity to democracy is his readiness to sacrifice his political ambition for a genuine reform of the political system. Obasanjo may pose the greatest danger to our democracy as an individual, but there is a fundamental flaw in the framework of our political system that goes beyond any individual. Remedying this flaw cannot, of course, be a substitute for a change in our attitude to public service and public trust, but such a remedy would help a great deal.

           

This fundamental flaw has flowed out of the military’s patent dislike of political parties as a principal instrument of politics. This dislike manifested itself in their decision back in 1979 to make them a constitutional matter and at the same time make them the sole vehicle for aspiring for political office. However well-intentioned they may have been at the time in changing the old premise of free and unfettered political association, the consequence has been to make political parties susceptible to manipulation by incumbents. This is obvious from the way the electoral commission has been used by the ruling party not only to suppress dissident opinion within it, but to also divide and rule the opposition political parties..

 

Therefore until this new premise is reversed to what it was during the First Republic when political parties did not have to get anyone’s registration certificate, we will continue to slide down the slippery slope to despotism. Obasanjo’s case may be a bad one, but there is a despotic streak in each and every one of us waiting for an opportunity to take over our minds. Not many of us can fight that streak and the chances of even the most self-willed among us overcoming the weakness, diminishes in direct proportion to the size of the temptation we face.

           

A key step towards averting the danger that Obasanjo poses to our democracy is that all those interested in elective office come 2007, from the Vice-President to the local government councilor, must be prepared to sacrifice their ambitions and do everything possible to remove political parties from the Constitution. I believe one of the secrets of the success of democracy in countries like the United States, Britain and India lies in the fact that their constitutions contain not a single word about how a political party should exist. The fact that a similar arrangement collapsed during our First Republic may mean that it is not fool-proof, but its record elsewhere is proof enough that any fears that it leads inevitably to anarchy is grossly exaggerated.

           

Whatever the case, PDP’s descent into despotism as we approach 2007, inspite of, some would say, because of, our constitutional framework, is not a “family affair,” as the party is wont to say each time it inflicts a crisis upon itself, and by extension, upon the rest of the country. The matter goes well beyond the personal feud between the president and his deputy. If we wish our democracy to survive beyond 2007 we cannot leave the fight for the soul of the ruling party alone to those we think are the immediate and obvious victims of its slide into despotism. In the end all of us a re potential victims of the truncation of our democracy.