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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Race for PDP’s Chairmanship
It calls itself the biggest party in Africa. Given the fact that Nigeria is the most populous country on the continent and government is the biggest business in Nigeria and at the same time the biggest patron, the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party’s boast is hardly an empty one.
Indeed to the extent that there are any political parties in the proper sense of the word in Nigeria, the PDP appears to be the only one left standing. Mostly by the sleigh of hand of planting Trojan horses firmly in the leadership of its rival parties, PDP has managed to divide and kill the more viable ones, notably the Alliance for Democracy and the All Nigeria Peoples’ Parties. The remaining parties which sprung up after PDP, through the pliable Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), lost the legal battle to turn Nigeria into a PDP monopoly in the run up to the 2003 general elections, are no more effective than paper tigers.
One exception here is the Action Congress. However, as a breakaway faction of the PDP led by former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, it is merely a chip off the old block. Two other possible exceptions are the DPP of Alhaji Attahiru Bafarawa, former Sokoto State governor, and the DPA of the EFCC embattled Chief Orji Kalu, former Abia State governor. Each governor is widely believed to be the sole financier of his respective party. The chances, therefore, that the two can survive a day without their patrons are virtually nil.
In short, right now the only political game in town seems to be the PDP. Little wonder then that the contest for the membership of its national executive council, especially its chairmanship, has taken a feverish turn. Five months to the elections in December, interested candidates are already traversing the nooks and corners of the country trying to drum up support and using the mass media to spruce up their images.
That the PDP seems to be the only political game in town speaks volumes of the nature and quality of Nigeria’s democracy today. Until the Second Republic, political parties were open ended. They could be ethnic, sectional, and even religious. They could have national, sectional or even local ambitions. Then the soldiers struck in 1966 and apparently believed among the big lessons of the collapse of the First Republic was the open-ended nature of political parties. And so as they left in 1979 they gave Nigeria a Constitution which sought to narrow the borders of party formation and party activities. Among other things, the Constitution insisted that all parties must be national in outlook.
The most defining character of that Constitution was its departure from the British parliamentary model of democracy - with its notion of party supremacy - to the American presidential model of lose party discipline or indeed zero party existence in the sense that anyone could seek for election without being a member of any political party. As a matter of fact the American Constitution, and for that matter even the First Republic Constitution, contained not a single word about political parties as a means of seeking the peoples’ mandate.
Apparently the contradiction of prescribing party supremacy for the presidential model of democracy seemed to have been lost on the framers of the 1979 Constitution. Even then the contradiction did not become completely irreconcilable until twenty years later when those trusted with revisiting the 1979 Constitution decided to make political parties the only means of seeking for legislative and executive power. For example, the 1979 Constitution contained only two qualifications for election into the office of the president, namely, that a candidate must be a citizen of Nigeria by birth and that his age should be at least 35. In their collective wisdom the framers of the 1979 Constitution added two more qualifications, namely, that a candidate must be a member of a political party and sponsored by that party and that he must also have been educated up to school certificate level or its equivalent.
The effect of making political power the sole prerogative of political parties is obviously what has since turned their control into a do-or-die affair. Since then political parties seemed to have paid little or no attention to their other roles of recruiting members and educating and mobilizing them on public policy and programmes.
It is against this background of little or no internal party democracy that the PDP is heading towards the election of its new leadership in December.
As the ruling party, if not the only one left standing, its December elections should interest all Nigerians; they cannot hope to nurture the country’s fledgling democracy if nothing is done about the “garrison” democracy that has been imposed on it by President Obasanjo in his happily and mercifully failed bid to turn Nigeria into not just a one-party but a one-man dictatorship.
The damage done to Nigeria by Obasanjo’s garrison democracy is deep and wide but fortunately it is not irreparable. The first step on the long road to this repair is to end, or at least curb, the ex-president’s malevolent influence over the party. This can be done by revisiting his recent usurpation of the chairmanship of the party’s board of trustees and also by making sure the next chairman of the party is someone with a track record of standing up to the man’s dictatorship streak.
By its internal arrangement the chairmanship has now been zoned to the South-East. The leading candidates from that zone include former Senate presidents Anyim Pius Amyim and Ken Nnamani, former Ebonyi State governor and an Obasanjo acolyte, Sam Egwu, a somewhat obscure Abia political godfather, Benjamin Apugo, and Rochas Okorocha, the man who has shuttled among several political parties for as many times as anyone can remember since the coming of the Fourth Republic.
If the PDP is serious about shaking off Obasanjo’s deadening hand on the party, its members should zero in on Nnamani and Anyim. Between the two, however, my bet would be on Nnamani. Anyim was, on the whole, a good Senate president and he has age on his side. However, unlike Anyim, Nnamani became Senate president in spite of Obasanjo. That in itself is a credit. Second, he superintended over the Senate’s killing of Obasanjo’s diabolical Third Term agenda. Last but by no means the least he stood up to Obasanjo when he demanded for unqualified loyalty to the PDP from legislators. Nnamani’s unassailable argument was that legislators make laws for Nigerians as a whole and not just for members of the parties that gave them their electoral platforms.
A good PDP chairman is no guarantee that the biggest party in Africa will also learn to become well-organized and truly democratic. But without a good chairman, the party is guaranteed to remain a dead hand on Nigeria’s democracy.
The death of a journalism icon
Last Thursday, Nigerian journalism, more specifically Journalism in Hausa, lost one of its brightest stars at a ripe age of 47. I knew Adamu Yusuf who died about a week ago from my days in the New Nigerian in the seventies and early eighties. At the time he was one of the best reporters at Gaskiya Tafi Kwabo, the longest surviving (vernacular) newspaper in Nigeria.
I don’t remember when he left Gaskiya to string for the BBC Hausa Service, but it wasn’t long after he entered this phase of his carrier that he became a household name for the millions of Hausa listeners of the BBC who straddle the entire length and breadth of West Africa.
His secret was simple; building trust with those he interviewed in the course of reporting a story. It is a mark of the depth of this trust that even those who did not belong to his faith and those who took a dim view of his extensive social network were always willing to talk to him. This was in the firm knowledge that he will be objective, fair, balanced and accurate in his reports.
Name him, any one who is who in Nigerian politics and spoke even a smattering of Hausa – from President Obasanjo with his halting Hausa, through the Catholic Archbishop of Kaduna, Peter Jatau, for whom Hausa is a second language, to Alhaji Musa Musawa, arguably the most articulate living Hausa politician – they all granted Adamu interviews without any hesitation. Ditto ordinary folks.
Even as he strung for the BBC Hausa Service, Adamu chose to touch people’s lives not only through journalism but also by becoming perhaps the most effective philanthropist in Kaduna. He did this by single-handedly setting up an outfit that trained unemployed youths in various trades and set them up to be on their own. And he did so without the benefit of the kind of huge donations similar outfits initiated by the wives of State governors squeezed out of not-so-willing beneficiaries of government contracts.
It is a mark of his success in his philanthropy that his house on Gwamna Road, Kaduna, became one of most active beehives of activities in Kaduna.
May Allah reward him for all the good things he did and forgive him all his trespasses. |