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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA The Lesson of the PDP Crisis
The fiasco that has trailed penultimate week’s “re-registration” exercise of the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party, once again highlights how artificial our political parties and our party system have been since that tragic morning in January 1966 when the soldiers first disrupted our politics. Naturally the soldiers and the politicians came to dislike each other as they both hankered after the same thing – power.
For 13 years after they first struck, the soldiers managed, by and large, to bungle our political-economy and, in between, to fight a war that kept the country from breaking. By the time they were pressured to return power where it belonged – that is to elected politicians – the soldiers, ever suspicious of their rivals, decided to dictate to the politicians how to construct, compose and finance a political party. The result today is the artificiality of political parties that has been the main source of the deep crisis of our democracy.
When General Yakubu Gowon ended the civil war in 1970, he announced a six year programme to end military rule. Then power apparently got into his head, aided and abetted by the civil servants and some politicians who benefited from the status quo; in 1974 he announced that 1976 was no longer realistic for handing power back to the civilians. Not long after that some smart civil servants and even otherwise accomplished politicians like Nnamdi Azikiwe and S. G. Ikoku started peddling a funny political concoction called diarchy, whereby soldiers were incorporated into an elected government and, worse, were given veto over such a government.
Not surprisingly the concoction was soon laughed out of court. Still Gowon remained undeterred. Then some patriotic soldiers who believed an officer’s word is his honour kicked out the general in July 1976 and promised to finally return soldiers to the barracks in October 1979. Along the way, some rogue elements who, didn’t like what the new officers on the block, led by General Murtala Mohammed, were doing, attempted to stage a coup in February 1976. They failed but tragically assassinated Murtala Mohammed. To their collective credit the officers he left behind felt obliged to keep his word.
And so it was that they returned power to elected politicians in October 1979. This, however, was not before they had tied the hands of politicians on how they should form political parties. The late Billy Dudley has provided one of the best accounts of how the soldiers virtually made it impossible for politicians to form really organic political parties in his 1982 seminal book, An Introduction to Nigerian Government and Politics. In this book Dudley chronicled how the 50-man Constitutional Drafting Committee set up by Murtala Mohammed under the legendary lawyer, FRA Williams, tackled its brief to provide a constitution for Nigeria.
One very prominent member, Chief Obafemi Awolowo declined to serve, and another, Malam Aminu Kano, famously accused the soldiers of trying subterraneously to influence the outcome of the CDC. Williams, those old enough would recall, rejected Malam Aminu’s charge, threatened to sue the good Malam if he did not withdrew his charge but failed to carry through his threat when Malam called his bluff.
That the soldiers tried to create our parties in their own militaristic imagine was hardly in doubt. For example, as Dudley pointed out, among General Mohammed’s briefs to the CDC, was to find ways of establishing “genuine and truly national parties” whose numbers must be restricted “to avoid the harmful effects of proliferation of national parties or even discover some means by which government can be formed without the involvement of political parties.”
While the first leg of the brief proved fairly easy, the second proved a tall order. According to Dudley, of the 350 memoranda the CDC received, 28 referred to parties and party systems. Out of the 28 only five proposed a “no-party” system, one was in favour of a one-party system while the remaining 22 favoured the multi-party system.
In the end the soldiers created, or rather approved, only five parties out of tens of associations that applied. This clearly was in sharp contrast to what we had up to January 1966 when there were no less than 26 parties, most of them local or regional, some even ethnic. But whatever any one may say about those parties, the one thing they could not be accused of was being artificial. Because they were not cobbled together to satisfy a misguided, though understandable, criterion of being national, their members shared common policy preferences and a general ideological position. Whatever you may say, for example, of the Action Group, you knew where it stood and what it stood for. Ditto the Northern Peoples Congress. Ditto the Northern Elements Progressive Union. Ditto the National Council of Nigerian Citizens. Ditto the United Middle Belt Congress. And so on and so on.
Since the soldiers changed the framework of our parties and party system in 1979, nothing has been the same again. When the politicians conducted their first elections since the 1966 coup – this was in 1983 – they added one more party to the five the soldiers gave them before returning to the barracks but retained the soldiers’ paradigm.
Then the soldiers struck again barely three months into the second term of the Second Republic. Six years later General Ibrahim Babangida, who had staged a palace coup against his somewhat harsh boss, General Muhammadu Buhari, created arguably the most artificial parties in the country, namely the Social Democratic Party(“a little to the left”) and the National Republican Convention(“a little to the right”). The biggest irony of his creation was that the intellectual justification for it came from Professor Omo Omoruyi, who, until his informal job as a prominent member of Babangida’s kitchen cabinet and his formal job as the Director-General of the governmental Centre for Democratic Studies, Abuja, was the loudest and most consistent critic of inorganic political parties and party systems.
After Babangida, the tradition of artificial political parties continued. In 1998, General Sani Abacha, who had sacked the interim government Babangida had left behind under Chief Ernest Shonekan when he “stepped aside” in August 1993, created five equally artificial parties. Then he made political history by being the only presidential candidate to be fielded by all the five. Predictably all five died with the sudden and mysterious death of the dictator.
Finally - or almost finally - General Abdussalami Abubakar came along and gave provisional approval to nine political associations out of many that had applied to register as parties. Eventually, only three were said to have qualified to contest the general elections of 1999, with, strange as it was, the two smaller parties combining to present one presidential candidate.
Finally, finally, when in 2003 the politicians conducted their second elections in 20 years, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, using the Independent National Electoral Commission as proxy, tried to reduce even this number. Fortunately the Supreme Court stood up to it and allowed a record thirty to contest. The problem, this time however, was that unlike back in the First Republic, they all had to pretend they were national parties. And, of course, they all had to register with the electoral commission, which, far from being independent as stipulated by the Constitution, had consistently been a handmaid of the ruling party in neutralizing opposition parties through means more foul than fair.
And so today we are saddled with a monstrous ruling party that has behaved with impunity because it is not rooted in the people. Today we have a ruling party that, because of its artificiality, has an un-elected, possibly un-electable, leadership, imposed on it by a president who apparently believes his word is law. To make matters worse, this president is surrounded by people who encourage him in his believe that he indeed is the law, if not a god.
People like Senator Ibrahim Mantu, the deputy Senate president, who told Punch the other day that “The Chairman of the party in any presidential system, especially the American system which we are copying is virtually handpicked by the president. He has the right to do so … If the president knows what he is doing, what I expect of him to do is to pick whoever he wants and present him to the convention for ratification.” (Punch, November 17, 2001).
Or someone like Chief Ojo Maduekwe, the handpicked PDP Secretary-General who said in the Saturday Vanguard of May 10, 2003 that “one wants to believe that they (members of the House of Representatives) will learn the lesson of some of their former colleagues who could not come back to the National Assembly because they had to pay an electoral price for challenging a man (President Obasanjo) placed by God to lead this country to the promised land.”
Or others like Brigadier-General Muhammad Buba Marwa, Professor Jerry Gana, Wartange Paul Unongo and Alhaji Sule Lamido, all of who apparently believe that in the face-off between President Obasanjo and his deputy, Atiku Abubakar, it is the boss who is right, even though the president’s attempt at recreating the ruling party in his own image as a military dictator is in flagrant breach of both the party’s own Constitution and the country’s Constitution. But then isn’t the boss always right? Unfortunately it is doubtful if things would have been any different if the vice-president were the top dog. After all had he not played along with his boss until he saw his ambition being threatened by the boss? Hopefully now that he is fighting the battle of his political life, he has learnt the simple lesson that the chickens will always come home to roost.
Unfortunately also what you see in the ruling party is what obtains in virtually all the opposition parties, the only difference being the amount of patronage at the disposal of the leadership of the various parties.
This, I am afraid, is the inevitable outcome of the decision 26 years ago to impose parties and a party system on the country rather than allow them to evolve through time and through associations that are completely voluntary.
This is the lesson of the durability and the stability, at least relatively speaking, of the politics of United States as the world’s wealthiest, Britain as the oldest and India as the largest democracy. Until we are prepared to learn this lesson, we will continue to be saddled with parties whose affairs are run with absolutely no regard for the feelings of ordinary members, and who in turn run the affairs of the country with the same impunity.
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