PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

El-Rufai and the Lesson of the Politics of Expediency

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

Last Thursday’s edition of The Guardian reported the Minister of the Federal Capital, Malam Nasir el-Rufai, as declaring on December 4 in far away Washington DC, United States, that the presidential candidate of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party will be under 55 years. More specifically the newspaper reported el-Rufai as saying the party’s candidate would be between the age of 44 and 55. Significantly, el-Rusai, whose interest in the nation’s top job has been widely speculated upon, is well within this age bracket.

           

If The Guardian has accurately reported his words, then it can be said that he has joined the rank of several prominent Nigerians who seem to equate youth with competence and character. Arguably the most prominent of these Nigerians is former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida. Readers may recall that it was he who gave impetus to the idea that the salvation of Nigeria lied in banning so-called old politicians and giving power to the young. This was as part of his socio-political re-engineering of Nigeria some 20 odd years ago.

 

Babangida is of course not the first to subscribe to the idea that competence and character are functions of age. Historically we have had, and still have, societies that believe in gerontocracy, which, in contrast to Babangida’s newbreedism, equates old age with competence and character. Perhaps the most obvious example of this here in Nigeria is the traditional rulership of Ibadan where, as far as I know, no one below the age of 60 has ever ascended that city’s Olubadanship.

 

As with all things human each of these two ideas has its pros and cons, but because effective leadership requires both the wisdom of age and the vigor of youth, it should be obvious that the dichotomy of Oldbreed/Newbreed politics is a foolish dichotomy. Yet many people, most of them otherwise intelligent and experienced, continue to believe in the idea. Or at least seem to.

 

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, I see only one explanation for such a belief. And this, in one word, is expediency. When Babangida started or more accurately, gave impetus, to this Newbreed thing, I suspected it had more to do with a desire to perpetuate himself in power than with his faith in the young. My suspicion seems to have been justified by the fact that today at 65, the general has decided to throw his hat into the ring of presidential contest, when he should have given way to the young.

 

Here, however, I must point out that Babangida is not alone in engaging in political expediency. The voice in far-away Washington DC that said no one above the age of 55 may get the presidential ticket of the PDP may be that of el-Rufai, but many people will suspect, with good reason, that the hand was that of his boss, President Olusegun Obasanjo. Not that the FCT minister does not have his own opinion. However, on a weighty matter like that of who becomes the next president of Nigeria, it is highly unlikely that el-Rufai would have ventured out on his own.

 

If one’s suspicion that el-Rufai was merely speaking the mind of his boss in Washington DC is correct, then it is obvious that Obasanjo has merely traded places with Babangida in this business of political expediency. For, back in his days as military head of state in the ‘70s when some members of the 1977 Constituent Assembly tried to ban old politicians from Second Republic politics through the sleigh of hand of using reports of dubious tribunals of enquiries, he, quite rightly, rejected those moves. Many readers will recall the controversy that surrounded Section 207 of the draft of the 1979 Constitution which sought to ban any politician found guilty of one thing or the other by any tribunal of enquiry going back to October 1, 1960. The effect of this would have been to ban many First Republic politicians, most notably Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, both of whom were subjects of tribunals of enquiries, from politics. Obasanjo, quite rightly, deleted the section from the draft constitution.

 

That in now trying to impose the young on Nigerians, Obasanjo is more concerned with himself than with the country’s fate should be obvious from the many and varied barriers he has been putting in the way of presidential aspirants he is not so sure he can control, such aspirants like Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and Babangida. In erecting these barriers, the president seems to have missed the lesson of the fact that today Babangida is a victim of his own politics of expediency whereby he attempted to ban the so-called Oldbreed from the politics of the Third Republic which he midwifed.

 

If any further evidence is needed that the chickens will always return to roost for those who practice the politics of expediency rather than that of principles, that evidence was amply provided most recently by no other than Professor Jerry Gana, arguably the most voluble minister of information Nigeria has ever had.

 

As minister of information and later as political adviser to President Obasanjo, Gana talked and acted as if his principal could do no wrong. He defended every action of his boss even when they were indefensible.

 

Take, for example, the central issue of the internal democracy of the PDP. Over five years ago when the president apparently concluded, for whatever reason, that he had had enough of Chief Barnabas Gemade as the party’s chairman, he threw him out almost literally and replaced him with Chief Audu Ogbe as the party’s so-called consensus candidate.

 

To those who protested the president’s disregard for the party’s internal democracy, Gana, as Obasanjo’s Minister of Information, had only one answer; those protesting had little or no grasp of the workings of democracy.

 

In an interview in the New Nigerian of November 13, 2001, Gana said, among other things, “Democracy does not mean merely elections. Election is just one form of expression. Consensus is the highest form of democratic agreement. If people now look at the issue, this particular option is best for the party. We agree with it, that is consensus.”(Emphasis mine).

 

Barely five years on  Gana, as a presidential aspirant, has been singing a completely different tune. In its edition of last Saturday December 9, Thisday published a story in which Gana vehemently protested the plan by the party leadership to impose a consensus presidential candidate on the party.

According to the newspaper, Gana in effect told reporters shortly after addressing a youth group in Kaduna that he would reject such a plan. “Democracy”, an apparently chastened Gana said, “is about choice. It is one of the key things about democracy and we shouldn’t be afraid of. There are about three or four freedoms in democracy; the freedom of choice is the most primary, that I should choose whomever I want. That is why free, fair and credible elections are important. Some people are afraid of elections? Why? Let the people choose!”

 

Gemade, wherever he is, must be having a good laugh at Gana over his predicament now that he himself is a potential victim of the “garrison democracy” within the PDP that he used to defend with so much passion.

The point of all this, needless to say, is that the politics of expediency never pays in the long run. It is a lesson I hope all politicians, including our youthful el-Rufai, ought to learn. They should know, not least because of the incompetence and corruption which the vast majority of the mainly youthful state governors have demonstrated in the last eight years or so, that competence and character are not necessarily functions of age. This is more so when the prescribed age bracket is as arbitrary as el-Rufai’s 44 to 55 years. For, the question can be asked, why 44 to 55? Why not 40 to 50 or for that matter 30 to 40, or whatever?

 

Those who wish el-Rufai well – and I certainly do not wish him ill – can only pray that like Babangida, Gana and Obasanjo, the FCT minister would not, one day, come to rue the day that he allowed the politics of expediency to get the better of his wisdom.