PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Party System: Between IBB and Balarabe Musa

kudugana@yahoo.com

On Tuesday July 22, an interesting but indirect exchange over what type of party system is best suited for Nigeria’s democracy took place in Minna, capital of Niger State. This exchange was between former military president, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, a.k.a. IBB, and Alhaji Balarabe Musa, former civilian governor of the old Kaduna State, famous as a veteran of left-wing radical politics.

On the day in question the former military president told a visiting delegation of the presidential electoral reform panel chaired by former Chief Justice of the Federation, Mohammed Uwais, that the country has too many political parties for its democratic good health. The country’s current “free flow of party formation”, he said, “could easily create chaos.” As such, the number of political parties in the country should, he said, be limited.

Newspaper reports of his meeting with members of the Uwais panel at his home did not say how many parties he thought were right for the country. However, he has been an advocate of the two-party system since he imposed same on the country during his longish eight year transition to civilian rule which came to grief in November 1993.

About the time that General Babangida was telling the Uwais panel that Nigeria has too many political parties for its own good, Alhaji Balarabe Musa was stating a contrary view during a courtesy visit he paid to the governor of the state, Dr. Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu. Musa’s visit was as the chairman of the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP), a coalition of most of the 50 opposition parties in the country, including his own Peoples’ Redemption Party.

For Musa, it was wrong for anyone to think that there can be too many political parties. “The number of political parties,” he told his host “cannot bring about instability in the country.” In any case to seek to limit the number of parties in the country, he said, will be contrary to the ruling of the Supreme Court several years ago that forbade the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from restricting the number of political parties it will register beyond the stipulations in Section 222 of the country’s Constitution.

In the run-up to the 2003 general elections, a number of organizations INEC had refused to register as political parties successfully sued the electoral body. Consequently the number of political parties exploded soon after the Supreme Court’s ruling. That year 30 contested in the general elections as against the existing three up till then. In the 2007 elections their number increased to 50.

Section 222 of the Constitution says no association shall function as a political party unless (1) its membership is open to all Nigerians regardless of birth, sex, faith or ethnicity; (2) the names of and addresses of its national officers are registered with INEC; (3) a copy of its Constitution, which must meet certain conditions set by INEC, is deposited at the commission’s headquarters; (4) it informs INEC of any change in its constitution within 30 days of the change; (5) its name, symbol or logo has no ethnic or religious connotation and that its activities are not confined to only a section of the country and (6) its headquarters is located in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

Nigeria has been through a variety of party systems since the colonial times. Britain, our colonial master, midwifed a party system for Nigeria after its own image. This meant that at independence in October 1960 Nigeria had a multi-party system in the mould of parliamentary democracy. In the 1959 general elections that led to independence, the country had at least 29 political parties, the most prominent of which were the NCNC which ruled the East, the Action Group (AG) which ruled the West and the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) which ruled the North. Nigeria comprised these three autonomous regions at the time of independence.

About four years after independence the 29 or so parties collapsed into two broad alliances, United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA) led by NCNC and AG and Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) led by the NPC. The first post independence general election in 1964 was contested along this divide.

Then the military struck in January 1966 and dissolved all the parties. A counter-coup followed in July which eventually led to a three-year civil war that started in 1967. In 1974 General Yakubu Gowon, who had been head of state since the July countercoup and who, at the end of the civil war in 1970, had pledged to return the military to the barracks in 1976, changed his mind. This date, he said, was no longer realistic. He then began a surreptitious move to transform himself into a civilian ruler effectively under a one party system similar to that of Egypt under General Gamal Abdul-Nasser and Libya under Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

Gowon’s breach of his own promise and allegations of widespread corruption against many of his military governors led a disenchanted group of officers to throw him out in August 1975. The officers then installed then Brigadier Murtala Mohammed as head of state and then Brigadier Olusegun Obasanjo as his deputy. Promptly Brigadier Mohammed announced a five-item, four-year programme to usher in the Second Republic in October 1979.

As part of the programme Mohammed raised a 50-man Constitution Drafting Committee to provide the country with a new constitution. Among its briefs was to look into the possibility of replacing our parliamentary model with an American-type presidential system. Another brief was to re-examine the party system of the First Republic and look at the possibility of establishing “genuine and truly national parties” and limiting their numbers “to avoid the harmful effects of the proliferation of national parties.” The committee was even given the writ to “discover some means by which Government can be formed without the involvement of political parties.”

In February 1976 Mohammed was assassinated in an attempted coup, but the new leadership under General Obasanjo kept faith with his transition programme. The CDC eventually recommended a presidential system and a multi-party system. The parties, however, must, it said, be national in composition and outlook.

The result was a five-party race in the general elections of 1979 which ushered in the Second Republic in October. This five-party system lasted till 1983 when a sixth was added to it in the run-up to the year’s general elections. Three months after the winners were sworn in the soldiers struck again and installed Major-General Muhammadu Buhari as head of state. This was on December 31, 1983. Again, they dissolved all six political parties.

In August 1985 Buhari’s army chief, then Major-General Ibrahim Babangida, overthrew him in a bloodless coup and quickly announced a five year transition programme. This eventually stretched into eight.

During the transition programme Babangida imposed a two-party system on the country after he rejected the recommendation of his own Political Bureau for a multi-party system. The parties he imposed were the Social Democratic Party and National Republican Convention.

At first everything went well with the staggered elections at local and state levels, first, under zero-party system and then under the two-party system. Then the transition programme hit the skids in June 1993 when Babangida inexplicably cancelled the results of the presidential elections that the candidate of the SDP, Chief M.K.O. Abiola, seemed set to win.

In August of the same year, Babangida “stepped aside” and cobbled together a transition government under the business mogul, Chief Ernest Shonekan, who coincidentally (?) came from the same Abeokuta constituency as Abiola. The military president left behind General Sani Abacha, his minister of defense, ostensibly to strengthen the backbone of Shonekan’s government whose legality was in doubt. Three months later, instead of strengthening its backbone, Abacha booted it out with a promise to be “brief”

Instead he tried, like Gowon before him, to civilianize himself. But first he set up a Constitutional Conference which recommended a multi party system. Five emerged and, in an innovation without any precedence anywhere in the world, they all nominated the general, virtually under the gun, as their presidential candidate for the elections he had fixed against late 1998.

God, they say, works in mysterious ways. Just when it looked like no one could stop Abacha from imposing what in effect was a one-party, indeed a one man rule, on Nigerians, he died a sudden and mysterious death in June 1998.

He was quickly succeeded by his Chief of Defense Staff, then Lt. General Abdulsalami Abubakar who promptly announced an eleven-month transition programme which he faithfully kept to.

The rest, as they say, is history. Currently Nigeria, as we all know, has 50 political parties. Babangida says they are too many while Balarabe Musa disagrees. Question is who between the two is right?

History and principle, I believe, are on Balarabe Musa’s side. Democracy means freedom of association and of choice. Freedom, of course, is not anarchy. Society by definition means restrictions on individual freedom. But care must always be taken to ensure that such restrictions do not amount to shackles.

Historically all successful democracies have been multi-party democracies. These include Britain, the longest running if not the oldest, the United States, the most successful, and India, the largest.

True, in all these, two parties tend to be dominant. But such parties have evolved through time not by fiat. And in all three cases, political parties have been free to contest for power at whatever level they chose. In other words they have never been forced to be national in composition, outlook and scope.

What all this proves is that Balarabe Musa’s liberal approach to party system is the right approach. As the Chinese say, let a thousand flours bloom. However, there is of course, a caveat. Any political party that fails to score a certain percentage of votes in any election should forfeit its right to existing funding – itself of dubious rationality - from government. What that threshold should be I cannot say, but there ought to be one.

Beyond this and beyond such reasonable guidelines like a ban on the use religion or ethnicity as a platform for seeking office, people should be free to form as many political parties as they wish. Indeed they should be free enough to even stand as independent candidates, something which our Constitution forbids by making membership of political parties a condition for contesting elections.